Deadbeat Digest #1
A New Way to Share the Deadbeat Experience
Dear Fellow Deadbeats,
Many, many thanks for your subscription and your support. It has been an exciting and rewarding past few months, getting this whole project up off the ground. Whether it will stay in the air is another question! But one thing is for sure: I would not have been able to launch this endeavor without you. So thank you!
A few housekeeping items. I continue to experiment with different formats for “doing philosophy” under the Deadbeat Philosophy umbrella, and I’d now like to blend things together a bit more. Here are the main streams I have been working on:
The Deadbeat Philosophy Podcast (now on episode 10, with at least 8 more already scheduled)
The Deadbeat Philosophy YouTube Channel (where one hears mostly crickets, but a slowly increasing number of them!)
The thematically diverse, eclectic philosophical writing projects here on the SubStack/email newsletter.
Going forward into the summer, I have the following planned:
Posting 1 podcast episode per week, every Thursday
Posting 1 YouTube video per week, every Tuesday
Sending 1 newsletter per week (like this one) every Tuesday
In this weekly newsletter (which I’ll call the “Deadbeat Digest”), I will include one or more new contributions to any of the three “Deadbeat Books in Progress” that are under construction and/or some other miscellaneous writing PLUS embedded versions of any new YouTube videos published since the last digest.
This way, things will be streamlined into two weekly messages to your inbox: the digest on Tuesday and the podcast on Thursday.
Hope that this keeps things enjoyable/interesting/amusing/diverting/whathaveyou for you, dearest reader whose outstretched hand I now kiss in my deadbeat imagination.
Let me know if you have any input/feedback/comments/ideas for me, and I wish you a fantastic continuation of Spring!
With gratitude,
Dave
DEADBEAT DIGEST #1 (May 13, 2025)
Animality and Finitude #5/#6/#7
In praise of the reptilian
That age-old part of our brains. Whether or not there is something reptilian in us (or in all mammals), this idea has long shaped human kind (from the serpent of genesis to Aristotle and Kant—all having the lowly serpent as the abject incarnation of animality as animal evil (one of the deep denialist views of animality embedded in our worldview today).
Reptiles ought in fact, especially today, be praised as highly efficient energy users. There is something we can learn from this way or form of life today. If a part of ourselves, there is something in this that we ought to activate or actualize within us and in our own way or form of life.
Are We Animals?
The evidence that we are animals is incontrovertible.
And yet, the fact of human animality is rejected in human society.
This suggests that evidence does not have the power that that the (evidentiary) sciences think it does.
What is it about about the logic of human society that generates this outcome?
Human society is grounded in paradox, in what from the social perspective may be straight and steady, but from the perspective of nature (our word for the non-human) is crooked and bent. But why should we fear or avoid the crooked or bent? Why not rather lean into this? For in this leaning lies a danger—the danger of complicity in one’s own undoing.
Human:Nature
Human : nature and reason : animality. Two dyads. Linked, but also distinct.
Human : nature is general, perhaps even universal for creatures like us. All humans (today and throughout history) have thought about their place in the natural environment in a coordinated way. Human : nature is a question: where does the human belong?
Reason : animality is narrow and, we will argue, pernicious. It is the overriding environmental ideology of the modern age. It is a specific answer to (or specification of) the question human : nature. We hold: this answer must be replaced with another.
This other is still to be sketched. We still lack the vocabulary to make it explicit. But it stands to reason that a necessary bridge to that answer is a critique of the currently prevailing answer, which has spread sporelike, as all such successful answers can do, into the very fundamental of contemporary ideology: reason : animality.
Reason : animality emerged in the eighteenth century enlightenment and has only intensified its grip since then. But the environmental movement (which has in fact existed as the antithesis of reason : animality since the start) has in recent decades swelled in social gravity so as to have spurred a new revolution in human thinking.
The reason:animality answer, which has become the unquestioned orthodoxy across the political spectrum, is losing its grip. It is disintegrating in our hands. It needs only a bit disintegration still before it is dust in our hands and can be shaken off.
I propose animal rationalism as a means of more directly and more quickly reducing this answer to dust. It is a tool of transition from this answer we and the planet suffer under now to the answer that must replace it.
In this, it is a tool of destruction as well as construction. For until our hands are entirely clean of reason:animality, any new answer we construct may remain overly contaminated by it. A degree of this is of course inevitable (and has taken place in all previous great transitions between answers to the question), but, given the gravity of what’s at stake, it should be minimized as much as possible. With sufficiently clean hands, the original question, human : nature, can again become a question for us.