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Interview
Neil Stokes - 4 September 2016 2.00 h

Asking the right questions

Bernat Dedéu Every Monday evening after 7pm, El Punt Avui TV's English Hour airs the interview series Going Native. This month, Neil talks to writer, philosopher, teacher and musician, Bernat Dedéu.
- Neil Stokes
How would you de­scribe your­self?
I'm a philoso­pher and I also play music. I play clas­si­cal gui­tar. I'm a writer, too. Ba­si­cally I write a blog every day and also teach In­ter­na­tional Re­la­tions at the Blan­querna Uni­ver­sity in Barcelona. So, writer sounds good to me. When­ever you in­tro­duce your­self as a philoso­pher, peo­ple tend to un­der­value it.
Where did you learn your Eng­lish?
I'm ba­si­cally a New Yorker, so I don't speak Eng­lish; I speak New Yorker. I began learn­ing Eng­lish at school, and it's a lan­guage that I love. Since I was re­ally young I've been read­ing Amer­i­can nov­els; I es­pe­cially love 20th cen­tury Amer­i­can nov­els. I also started read­ing phi­los­o­phy in Eng­lish at a very young age. Then I went to Amer­ica on a typ­i­cal stu­dent pro­gramme, in Ne­braska. As some friends told me there, Ne­braska is the only bor­ing album Bruce Spring­steen ever made. It was a fan­tas­tic time; Amer­i­cans are super wel­com­ing peo­ple. After this, I ap­plied for a schol­ar­ship in the US and stud­ied there from 2004 to 2009. Gram­mat­i­cally it's an easy lan­guage but for speak­ing, it's re­ally com­plex. You know when you are re­ally start­ing to learn Eng­lish, when you are in the US and you can un­der­stand the voice on the sub­way, telling you not to stay too close to the doors. Nowa­days, I'm happy to teach in Eng­lish.
Are your stu­dents in Blan­querna from dif­fer­ent coun­tries?
Yes, but al­though we've got stu­dents from Japan, China, Colom­bia, and so on, some of the stu­dents are still Cata­lan. The In­ter­na­tional De­gree is a very young de­gree. In fact, we're cele-
ebrat­ing the first grad­u­a­tion this year. I think it's a very nice de­gree be­cause it touches on as re­lated to hu­man­ism, diplo­macy and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. That's also why it's fas­ci­nat­ing teach­ing it, as well. More­over, it broad­ens your in­ter­ests and job pos­si­bil­i­ties.
What's the role of a philoso­pher in the 21st cen­tury?
What hap­pens is that when you study phi­los­o­phy or when you think of phi­los­o­phy, you just think of old ques­tions, of what the great philoso­phers such as Plato were talk­ing about, which has noth­ing to do with our wor­ries nowa­days. They were big philoso­phers and all great peo­ple of course, I kneel in front of them; they are the mas­ters, but they wrote about spe­cific things that have noth­ing to do with our real wor­ries today. That's why I think that nowa­days a philoso­pher is just some­one who asks the right ques­tions. And usu­ally it's not some­one who pro­vides spe­cific an­swers. It's about the spon­ta­neous ques­tions we have re­gard­ing what's going on. For in­stance, the new media and how so­cial media changes the way we com­mu­ni­cate. That's a very hot philo­soph­i­cal topic. The way Twit­ter and Face­book are af­fect­ing the way we talk to each other. These are con­tem­po­rary is­sues, and we have a bunch of philoso­phers teach­ing us how these things are chang­ing. And we also have to study how, for ex­am­ple, Face­book has changed the con­cept of friend­ship in a such rad­i­cal man­ner.
Is that why some peo­ple feel un­com­fort­able get­ting their head around these ideas? Be­cause they don't have an­swers and what we want are so­lu­tions.
I's like cook­ing for your friends. You don't just want to put the meal on the table, but you also want to ex­plain what you've cooked for them. Re­gard­ing life, so­lu­tions and ex­is­ten­tial prob­lems, we will have to force our­selves to be more pa­tient. Be­cause we have com­plex prob­lems but we want easy so­lu­tions, but that's not pos­si­ble. When peo­ple talk to philoso­phers, they say that they want, for ex­am­ple, four rules on how to be happy. If there were just for rules to be happy, you would al­ready be happy, and a lot of peo­ple would be happy just hav­ing money, but it's not that sim­ple. We have to start by ask­ing the right ques­tions. And that is what a philoso­pher does, they con­tex­tu­al­ize the prob­lem and ask the right ques­tions.
One of the things I like about the in­ter­net is that nowa­days peo­ple can say ex­actly what they think.
The dy­namism of jour­nal­ism, es­pe­cially Cata­lan jour­nal­ism, is that we have re­ally in­tel­li­gent peo­ple writ­ing in the pa­pers and speak­ing on the radio, but every­thing is so bi­ased that they have to be re­ally cor­rect be­cause there's that spon­sor that pre­vents you from say­ing cer­tain things. I think there's a lot of tal­ent out there but they're ab­solutely ter­ri­fied. For me, the first thing you have to do to write freely is to open your mind, to make it your busi­ness. You have to say: “maybe I'm not going to write for a news­pa­per but I'm going to do what I want. It's going to be MY space.” And the reader re­ally ap­pre­ci­ates that.
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