Intensity

Overthink

Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 13 August 2024

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What do skydiving, guitar-playing teenagers, and deep-seated psychic states have in common? They're all intense! In episode 110 of Overthink, Ellie and David untangle the role of intensity in shaping our aspirations, cultural tropes, and political goals. They trace the concept’s history from its tricky roots in Aristotle's theory of change, passing through medieval science and princely romanticism, to the thrills of skydiving and breathwork today. They turn to Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze’s accounts of consciousness and emotion to explore how intensity looks beyond the scientistic impulse to categorize and quantify, and question if intensity is of any help in addressing capitalist acceleration today.

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Works Discussed
Aristotle, Categories
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Life
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Gustav Theodor Fechner, Elements of Psychophysics
Tristan Garcia, The Life Intense: A Modern Obsession
Mary Beth Mader, “Whence Intensity? Deleuze and the Revival of a Concept”
Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative
Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, “#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics”
The Bachelorette
Inside Out 2 (2024)

Mentioned Overthink episodes
61 - Self Knowledge
32 - Paradox
107 - Organisms

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Overthink.
0:17.0	The podcast that gives you an intellectual adrenaline rush.
0:21.5	I'm Ellie Anderson.
0:22.8	And I'm David Peña Guzman.
0:25.0	Ellie, I went skydiving recently.
0:28.6	So intense.
0:30.9	Yeah, it was for my 10th year anniversary.
0:33.3	My partner surprised me, which was shocking because he's afraid of heights.
0:37.2	Few things scare me more than the idea of skydiving.
0:40.6	They just had a skydiving episode recently on The Bachelorette, and my palms are sweating,
0:45.9	literally just even remembering the scene from the Bachelorette in which they went skydiving.
0:50.4	So I can't imagine actually skydiving.
0:52.2	What was that like?
0:53.5	I mean, it was intensity
0:55.2	in itself, I would say, you know, blood pressure rising, adrenaline rushing, feeling of danger
1:03.4	to the max because you're literally jumping out of a plane at 9,000 feet. And these are all feelings
1:09.9	that are really hard to quantify, right? You feel them swelling up
1:14.9	inside you, but how do you talk about how afraid you were or how much vertigo do you have?
1:21.2	Oh, my God. All I know is just even thinking about it. There's the palm sweating, but then there's
1:25.6	also just like a swelling of the chest.
1:28.0	And like, I'm somebody who literally blacked out on an amusement park ride in Copenhagen.
1:32.8	Really? Yeah, it was just like literally one of those rides that just goes up in the air and comes back down.
	...

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