Sean Kelly: Existentialism, Nihilism, and the Search for Meaning #227

Transcript

00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Sean Kelly, a philosopher at Harvard specializing

00:00:05 in existentialism and the philosophy of mind.

00:00:09 This is the Lex Friedman podcast, to support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

00:00:15 And now, here’s my conversation with Sean Kelly.

00:00:20 Your interests are in postcontinent European philosophy, especially phenomenology and existentialism.

00:00:28 So let me ask, what to you is existentialism?

00:00:34 So it’s a hard question.

00:00:36 I’m teaching a course on existentialism right now.

00:00:38 You are.

00:00:39 I am, yeah.

00:00:40 Existentialism in literature and film, which is fun.

00:00:43 I mean, the traditional thing to say about what existentialism is, is that it’s a movement

00:00:50 in mid 20th century, mostly French, some German philosophy, and some of the major figures

00:00:58 associated with it are people like Jean Paul Sartre and Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, maybe

00:01:05 Martin Heidegger, but that’s a weird thing to say about it because most of those people

00:01:10 denied that they were existentialists.

00:01:14 And in fact, I think of it as a movement that has a much longer history.

00:01:19 So when I try to describe what the core idea of existentialism is, it’s an idea that you

00:01:26 find expressed in different ways in a bunch of these people.

00:01:29 One of the ways that it’s expressed is that Sartre will say that existentialism is the

00:01:37 view that there is no God, at least his form of existentialism, he calls it atheistic existentialism.

00:01:44 There is no God.

00:01:46 And since there’s no God, there must be some other being around who does something like

00:01:52 what God does, otherwise there wouldn’t be any possibility for significance in a life.

00:01:59 And that being is us and the feature of us according to Sartre and the other existentialists

00:02:06 that puts us in the position to be able to play that role is that we’re the beings for

00:02:11 whom as Sartre says it, existence precedes essence.

00:02:18 That’s the catchphrase for existentialism and then you have to try to figure out what

00:02:21 it means.

00:02:23 What is existence?

00:02:24 What is presence?

00:02:25 And what does precedes mean?

00:02:26 Yeah, exactly.

00:02:27 What is existence?

00:02:28 What is essence?

00:02:29 And what is precedes?

00:02:30 And in fact, precedes is Sartre’s way of talking about it and other people will talk about

00:02:34 it differently.

00:02:35 But here’s the way Sartre thinks about it.

00:02:38 This is not, I think, the most interesting way to think about it, but it gets you started.

00:02:42 Sartre says there’s nothing true about what it is to be you until you start existing and

00:02:52 still use until you start living.

00:02:54 And for Sartre, the core feature of what it is to be existing the way we do is to be making

00:03:01 decisions, to be making choices in your life, to be sort of taking a stand on what it is

00:03:07 to be you by deciding to do this or that.

00:03:11 And the key feature of how to do that right for Sartre is to do it in the full recognition

00:03:18 of the fact that when you make that choice, nobody is responsible for it other than you.

00:03:25 So you don’t make the choice because God tells you to.

00:03:28 You don’t make the choice because some utilitarian calculus about what it’s right to do tells

00:03:35 you to do.

00:03:36 You don’t make the choice because some other philosophical theory tells you to do it.

00:03:41 There’s literally nothing on the basis of which you make the choice other than the fact

00:03:46 that in that moment, you are the one making it.

00:03:50 You are a conscious thinking being that made a decision.

00:03:54 So all of the questions about physics and free will are out the window.

00:03:59 Yeah, that’s right.

00:04:00 If you were a determinist about the mind, if you were a physicalist about the mind,

00:04:05 if you thought there was nothing to your choices other than the activity of the brain that’s

00:04:11 governed by physical laws, then there’s some sense in which it would seem at any rate like

00:04:19 you are not the ground of that choice.

00:04:21 The ground of that choice was the physical universe and the laws that govern it, and

00:04:24 then you’d have no responsibility.

00:04:26 And so Sartre’s view is that the thing that’s special about us used to be special about

00:04:31 God is that we’re responsible for becoming the being that makes the choices that we do.

00:04:39 And Sartre thinks that that’s simultaneously empowering, I mean, it practically puts us

00:04:44 in the place of God, and also terrifying because what responsibility?

00:04:50 How can you possibly take on that responsibility?

00:04:54 And he thinks it’s worse than that.

00:04:55 He thinks that it’s always happening, everything that you do is the result of some choice that

00:05:03 you’ve made, the posture that you sit in, the way you hold someone’s gaze when you’re

00:05:09 having a conversation with them or not, the choice to make a note when someone says something

00:05:16 or not make a note.

00:05:19 Everything that you do presents you as a being who makes decisions and you’re responsible

00:05:23 for all of them.

00:05:24 So it’s constantly happening.

00:05:27 And furthermore, there’s no fact about you independent of the choices and actions you’ve

00:05:35 performed.

00:05:36 So you don’t get to say, Sartre’s example, I really am a great writer, just haven’t written

00:05:41 my great book yet.

00:05:42 If you haven’t written your great book, you’re not a great writer.

00:05:46 And so it’s terrifying, it puts a huge burden on us, and that’s why Sartre says on his view

00:05:53 of existentialism, human beings are the beings that are condemned to be free.

00:05:59 Our freedom consists in our ability and our responsibility to make these choices and to

00:06:04 become someone through making them.

00:06:06 And we can’t get away from that.

00:06:08 But to him, it’s terrifying not liberating in the positive meaning of the word liberating.

00:06:14 Well, so he thinks it should be liberating, but he thinks that it takes a very courageous

00:06:19 individual to be liberated by it.

00:06:22 Nietzsche, I think, thought something similar.

00:06:24 I think Sartre is really coming out of a Nietzschean sort of tradition.

00:06:29 But what’s liberating about it, if it is, is also terrifying because it means in a certain

00:06:36 way, you’re the ground of your own being.

00:06:39 You become what you do through existing.

00:06:43 So that’s one form of existentialism, that’s a stark atheistic version of it.

00:06:47 There’s lots of other versions, but it’s somehow organized around the idea that it’s through

00:06:53 living your life that you become who you are.

00:06:56 It’s not facts that are sort of true about you independent of your living your life.

00:07:01 But then there’s no God in that view.

00:07:07 Does any of the decisions matter?

00:07:10 So how does existentialism differ from nihilism?

00:07:14 Good.

00:07:15 Okay.

00:07:16 Great question.

00:07:17 So it’s two different ways that you’re asking it.

00:07:20 Let me leave nihilism to the side for just a second and think about mattering or is there

00:07:26 any way that you can criticize someone for living the way they do if you’re in existentialism?

00:07:32 Including yourself.

00:07:34 Including yourself.

00:07:35 Yeah.

00:07:36 Sartre addresses that and he says, yes, he says, there is a criticism that you can make

00:07:42 of yourself or of others and it’s the criticism of living in such a way as to fail to take

00:07:47 responsibility for your choices.

00:07:50 He gives these two sort of amazing examples.

00:07:54 One doesn’t…

00:07:55 I don’t know if it reads as well for us as it did in sort of mid 20th century Paris,

00:08:02 but it’s about a waiter.

00:08:04 He gives this in his big book, Being and Nothingness.

00:08:07 And he says, so waiters played, still do I think in a certain way in Paris, a big role

00:08:14 in Parisian society.

00:08:15 To be a waiter involved having a certain kind of identity, being a certain way, taking control

00:08:22 of and charge of the experience of the people that you’re waiting on, but also really being

00:08:28 the authority, knowing that this is the way it’s supposed to go.

00:08:33 And so Sartre imagines a waiter who does everything that a waiter is supposed to do, the perfect

00:08:40 form of the waiter, except that you can somehow see in the way he’s doing it that he’s doing

00:08:48 it because he believes that’s the way a waiter should act.

00:08:54 So there’s some sense in which he’s passing off the responsibility for his actions onto

00:09:00 some idea of what those actions should be.

00:09:03 He’s not taking responsibility for it.

00:09:05 He’s sort of playing a role and the contours of the role are predetermined by someone other

00:09:11 than him.

00:09:12 So he starts as acting in bad faith and that’s criticizable because it’s acting in such a

00:09:20 way as to fail to take responsibility for the kind of being Sartre thinks you are.

00:09:25 So you’re not taking responsibility.

00:09:26 So that’s one example.

00:09:28 And I think any teenager, if you’ve ever met a teenager, you’ve known someone who does

00:09:34 that.

00:09:35 Teenagers try on roles.

00:09:36 They think, if I dressed like this, I would be cool.

00:09:41 So I’ll dress like this, or if I spoke like this, or acted like this.

00:09:46 And it’s natural for a teenager who’s trying to figure out what their identity is to go

00:09:51 through a phase like that.

00:09:52 But if you continue to do that, then you’re really passing it.

00:09:55 So that’s one example.

00:09:56 And the other example he gives is an example not of passing off responsibility by pretending

00:10:06 that someone else is the ground of your choice, but passing off responsibility by pretending

00:10:12 that you might be able to get away with not making a choice at all.

00:10:16 So he says, everything you do is a result of your choices.

00:10:21 And so he gives this other example.

00:10:22 Where you are on the first date, first date.

00:10:28 And the date, the evening reaches moments when it might be appropriate for one person

00:10:37 to hold the hand of the other.

00:10:40 That’s the moment in the date where you are.

00:10:43 And so you make a choice.

00:10:45 You decide, I think it’s that time, and you hold the hand.

00:10:50 And what should happen is that the other person also makes a choice on Sartre’s view.

00:10:54 Either they reject the hand, not that time, and I’m taking responsibility for that, or

00:11:00 they grasp the hand back.

00:11:02 That’s a choice.

00:11:03 But there’s a thing that sometimes happens, which is that the other person leaves the

00:11:08 hand there cold, dead, and clammy, neither rejecting it nor embracing it.

00:11:15 And Sartre says, that’s also bad faith, that’s also acting as if we’re a kind of being that

00:11:21 we’re not, because it pretends that it’s possible not to make a choice.

00:11:27 And we’re the beings who are always making choices.

00:11:29 That was a choice.

00:11:31 And you’re pretending as if it’s the kind of thing that you don’t have to take responsibility

00:11:35 for.

00:11:36 So both of the examples you’ve given, there’s some sense in which the social interactions

00:11:41 between humans is a kind of moving away from the full responsibility that you as a human

00:11:49 in the view of existentialism should take on.

00:11:52 So isn’t the basic conversation, a delegation of responsibility, just holding a hand there,

00:11:59 you’re putting some of the responsibility into the court of the other person.

00:12:04 And for the waiter, if you exist in a society, you are generally trying on a role.

00:12:12 I mean, all of us are trying on a role.

00:12:15 Me wearing clothes is me trying on a role that I was told to try, as opposed to walking

00:12:21 around naked all the time.

00:12:23 There’s standards of how you operate, and that’s a decision that’s not my own.

00:12:31 It’s me seeing what everyone else is doing and copying them.

00:12:34 Yeah, exactly.

00:12:35 So Sartre thinks that in the ideal, you should try to resist that.

00:12:43 Other existentialists think that that’s actually a clue to how you should live well.

00:12:51 So Sartre says somewhere else, hell is other people.

00:12:56 Why is hell other people for Sartre?

00:12:57 Well, because other people are making choices also.

00:13:01 And when other people make choices, they put some pressure on me to think that the choice

00:13:09 they made is one that I should copy or one that I should promote.

00:13:17 But if I do it because they did it, then I’m in bad faith for Sartre.

00:13:21 So it is as if Sartre’s view is like, we would be better if we were all alone.

00:13:27 I mean, this is really simplifying Sartre’s position, and this is really just mostly Sartre

00:13:32 in a certain period of his formation.

00:13:36 But anyhow, we can imagine that view.

00:13:39 And I think there’s something to the idea that Sartre is attracted to it, at least in

00:13:43 the mid 40s.

00:13:44 Can you dig into hell as other people?

00:13:46 Is there some, obviously, it’s kind of almost like a literary, like you push the point strongly

00:13:53 to really explore that point.

00:13:56 But is there some sense in that other people ruin the experience of what it means to be

00:14:01 human?

00:14:03 I think for Sartre, the phenomenon is this, like, it’s not just that you wear clothes

00:14:08 because people wear clothes in our society, like you have a particular style, you wear

00:14:13 a particular kind of clothes.

00:14:15 And for Sartre, like to have that style authentically, in good faith, rather than in bad faith, it

00:14:22 has to come from you, you have to make the choice.

00:14:25 But other people are making choices also, and like, you’re looking at their choices

00:14:30 and you’re thinking, that guy looks good, maybe I could try that one on.

00:14:35 And if you try it on because you were influenced by the fact that you thought that guy was

00:14:41 doing it well, then there’s some important sense in which, although that’s a resource

00:14:45 for a choice for you, it’s also acting in bad faith.

00:14:50 And God wouldn’t do that, right?

00:14:53 God wouldn’t be influenced by other’s decisions, and if that’s the model, then I think that’s

00:14:58 the sense in which he thinks hell is other people.

00:15:00 What do you think parenting is then?

00:15:02 It’s like, what, because God doesn’t have a parent, so aren’t we significantly influenced,

00:15:08 first of all, in the first few years of life, and even the teenager is resisting, like,

00:15:16 learning through resistance.

00:15:18 Absolutely.

00:15:19 I mean, I think what you’re pushing on is the intuition that the ideal that Sartre’s

00:15:28 aiming at is a kind of inhuman ideal.

00:15:31 I mean, there’s many ways in which we’re not like the traditional view of what God was.

00:15:37 One is that we’re not self generating, we have parents, we were raised into traditions

00:15:46 and social norms, and we’re raised into an understanding of what’s appropriate and inappropriate

00:15:53 to do.

00:15:55 And I think that’s a deep intuition.

00:15:58 I think that’s exactly right.

00:16:01 Martin Heidegger, who’s the philosopher that Sartre thinks he’s sort of taking this from,

00:16:06 but I think Sartre’s a kind of brilliant French misinterpretation of Heidegger’s German phenomenological

00:16:13 view, Heidegger says, a crucial aspect of what it is to be us is our thrownness.

00:16:20 We’re thrown into a situation, we’re thrown into history, we’re thrown into our parental

00:16:27 lineage, and we don’t choose it.

00:16:30 That’s stuff that we don’t choose, we couldn’t choose.

00:16:33 If we were God and we existed outside of time, maybe, but we’re not.

00:16:37 We’re finite in the sense that we have a beginning that we never chose.

00:16:42 We have an end that we’re often trying to resist or put off or something, and in between

00:16:50 there’s a whole bunch of stuff that organizes us without our ever having made the choice

00:16:55 and without the kind of being that could make the choice to allow it to organize us.

00:17:00 We have a complicated relationship to that stuff, and I think we should talk about that

00:17:05 at a certain point.

00:17:06 But the first move is to say, Sartre’s just got a sort of descriptive problem.

00:17:12 He’s missed this basic fact that there has to be an awful lot about us that’s settled

00:17:22 without our having made the choice to settle it that way.

00:17:25 Right, the thrownness of life.

00:17:29 That’s a fundamental part of life, you can’t just escape it.

00:17:32 Exactly.

00:17:33 You can’t escape it altogether.

00:17:34 Altogether.

00:17:35 Yeah, exactly.

00:17:36 You can’t escape it altogether.

00:17:37 But nevertheless, you are riding a wave and you make a decision in the riding of the wave.

00:17:42 You can’t control the wave, but you should be, as you ride it, you should be making certain

00:17:49 kinds of decisions and take responsibility for it.

00:17:53 So why does this matter at all, the chain of decisions you make?

00:17:59 Good.

00:18:00 Well, because they constitute you.

00:18:01 They make you the person that you are.

00:18:03 So what’s the opposite view?

00:18:06 What’s this view against?

00:18:08 This view is against most of philosophy from Plato forward.

00:18:14 Plato says in the Republic, it’s a kind of myth, but he says, people will understand

00:18:21 their condition well if we tell them this myth.

00:18:24 He says, look, when you’re born, there’s just a fact about you.

00:18:28 Your soul is either gold, silver, or bronze.

00:18:33 Those are the three kinds of people there are, and you’re born that way.

00:18:36 And if your soul is gold, then we should identify that and make you a philosopher king.

00:18:42 And if your soul is silver, well, you’re not gonna be a philosopher king.

00:18:45 You’re not capable of it, but you could be a good warrior and we should make you that.

00:18:49 And if your soul is bronze, then you should be a farmer, laborer, something like that.

00:18:53 And that’s a fact about you that identifies you forever and for always, independent of

00:19:00 anything you do about it.

00:19:03 And so that’s the alternative view.

00:19:05 And you could have modern versions of it.

00:19:07 You could say the thing that identifies you is your IQ or your genetic makeup or the percentage

00:19:15 of fast switch muscle fibers you’ve got or whatever, it could be something totally independent

00:19:21 of any choice that you’ve made, independent of the kind of thing about which you could

00:19:25 make a choice and it categorizes you.

00:19:29 It makes you the person that you are.

00:19:31 That’s the thing that Sartre and the existentialists are against.

00:19:35 So this idea that something about you is forever limiting the space of possible decisions you

00:19:41 can make.

00:19:42 Sartre says, no, the space is unlimited.

00:19:46 Sartre is the philosopher of radical freedom.

00:19:49 Radical freedom.

00:19:50 Yeah, radical freedom.

00:19:52 And then you could have other existentialists who say, look, we are free, but we gotta understand

00:19:58 the way in which our freedom is limited by certain aspects of the kind of being that

00:20:02 we are.

00:20:03 If we were radically free, we really would be like God in the traditional medieval sense.

00:20:09 And sort of these folks start with the idea that whatever we are, that’s a kind of limit

00:20:15 point that we’re not gonna reach.

00:20:17 So what are the ways in which we’re constrained that that being the way the medieval’s understood

00:20:24 him wasn’t constrained?

00:20:26 So can you maybe comment on what is nihilism and is it at all a useful other sort of group

00:20:33 of ideas that you resist against in defining existentialism?

00:20:37 Yes.

00:20:38 Good.

00:20:39 Excellent.

00:20:40 So nihilism, the philosopher who made the term popular, although it was used before

00:20:45 him as Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s writing in the end of the 19th century, in various places

00:20:51 where he published things, but largely in his unpublished works, he identifies the condition

00:21:00 of the modern world as nihilistic, and that’s a descriptive claim.

00:21:06 He’s looking around him, trying to figure out what it’s like to be us now, and he says

00:21:14 it’s a lot different from what it was like to be human in 1300 or in the 5th century

00:21:21 BCE.

00:21:22 In 1300, like what people believed, the way they lived their lives was in the understanding

00:21:34 that to be human was to be created in the image and likeness of God.

00:21:38 That’s the way they understood themselves.

00:21:40 And also to be created sinful because of Adam and Eve’s transgression in the Garden of Eden,

00:21:48 and to have the project of trying to understand how, as a sinful being, you could nevertheless

00:21:54 live a virtuous life.

00:21:56 How could you do that?

00:21:57 And it had to do with, for them, getting in the right relation to God.

00:22:01 Nietzsche says that doesn’t make sense to us anymore in the end of the 19th century.

00:22:07 God is dead, says Nietzsche famously.

00:22:10 And what does that mean?

00:22:11 Well, it means something like the role that God used to play in our understanding of ourselves

00:22:16 as a culture isn’t a role that God can play anymore.

00:22:21 And so Nietzsche says the role that God used to play was the role of grounding our existence.

00:22:27 He was what it is in virtue of which we are who we are.

00:22:31 And Nietzsche says the idea that there is a being that makes us what we are doesn’t

00:22:37 make sense anymore.

00:22:38 It’s like Sartre’s atheism, Sartre is taking that from Nietzsche.

00:22:41 And so the question is, what does ground our existence?

00:22:46 And the answer is Nihil, nothing.

00:22:49 And so nihilism is the idea that there’s nothing outside of us that grounds our existence.

00:22:55 And then Nietzsche asked the question, well, what are we supposed to do about that?

00:22:59 How do we live?

00:23:02 And I think Nietzsche has a different story than Sartre about that.

00:23:07 Nietzsche doesn’t emphasize this notion of radical freedom.

00:23:12 Nietzsche emphasizes something else.

00:23:15 He says, we’re artists of life.

00:23:19 And artists are interesting because the natural way of thinking about artists is that they’re

00:23:25 responding to something.

00:23:28 They find themselves in a situation and they say, this is what’s going to make sense of

00:23:32 the situation.

00:23:33 This is what I have to write.

00:23:34 This is the way I have to dance.

00:23:36 This is the way I’ve got to play the music.

00:23:39 And Nietzsche says, we should live like that.

00:23:41 There are constraints, but understanding what they are is a complicated aspect of living

00:23:48 itself.

00:23:49 And there’s a great story, I think, from music that maybe helps to understand this.

00:23:56 I think Nietzsche, of course, jazz didn’t exist when Nietzsche was writing, but I think

00:24:01 Nietzsche really is thinking of something like jazz improvisation.

00:24:06 He talks about improvisation, there’s classical improvisation.

00:24:09 Nietzsche was, by the way, a musician.

00:24:11 He was a composer and a pianist, not a great one, really, to be fair, but he loved music.

00:24:19 And Herbie Hancock, who’s a pianist, a jazz pianist, who played with Miles Davis for quite

00:24:26 a while in the 60s, tells this kind of incredible story that I think exemplifies Nietzsche’s

00:24:34 view about the way in which we bear some responsibility for being creative and that gives us a certain

00:24:44 kind of freedom, but we don’t have the radical freedom that Sartre thinks.

00:24:50 So what’s the story?

00:24:52 Herbie Hancock says, I think they were in Stuttgart, he says, playing a show and things

00:25:00 were great, he says.

00:25:03 He’s a young pianist and Miles Davis is the master.

00:25:08 And he says, I’m back in the solo and I’m playing these chords.

00:25:14 And he says, I played this chord and it was the wrong chord.

00:25:22 He’s like, that’s what you got to say, it didn’t work right there.

00:25:27 And I thought, holy mackerel, I screwed up, I screwed up.

00:25:30 We were tight, everything was working and I blew it for Miles, who’s doing his solo.

00:25:35 And he said, Miles paused for a moment and then all of a sudden he went on in a way that

00:25:46 made my chord right.

00:25:51 And I think that idea that you could be an artist who responds to what’s thrown at you

00:25:58 in such a way as to make it right, by what measure?

00:26:05 Everyone could hear it, is all you can say, right?

00:26:08 Everyone knew, wow, that really works.

00:26:11 And I think that’s not like, there are constraints, not anything would have worked there.

00:26:16 He couldn’t have just played anything.

00:26:19 Most of what anyone would have played would have sounded terrible.

00:26:23 But the constraints aren’t preexisting, they’re what’s happening now in the moment for these

00:26:30 listeners and these performers.

00:26:32 And I think that’s what Nietzsche thinks the right response to nihilism is, we’re involved,

00:26:37 but we’re not radically free to make any choice and just stand behind it the way Sartre thinks.

00:26:42 Our choices have to be responsive to our situation and they have to make the situation work.

00:26:47 They have to make it right.

00:26:50 And there’s something about music too, so you basically have to make music of all the

00:26:55 moments of life.

00:26:57 And there is something about music, why is music so compelling?

00:27:01 And when you listen to it, something about certain kinds of music, it connects with you.

00:27:06 It doesn’t make any sense.

00:27:07 But in that same way, for Nietzsche, you should be a creative force that creates a musical

00:27:14 masterpiece.

00:27:15 Exactly.

00:27:16 And I think what’s interesting is the question, what does it mean to be a creative force there?

00:27:19 There’s a traditional notion of creation that we associate with God.

00:27:26 God creates ex nihilo, out of nothing.

00:27:31 And you might think that nihilism thinks that we should do that, create ex nihilo, because

00:27:36 it’s about how there’s nothing at our ground.

00:27:38 But I think the right way to read Nietzsche is to recognize that we don’t create out of

00:27:43 nothing.

00:27:44 Miles Davis wasn’t nothing, that situation preexisted him, it was given to him.

00:27:49 Maybe by accident, maybe it was a mistake, whatever, but he was responding to that situation

00:27:55 in a way that made it right.

00:27:57 He wasn’t just creating out of nothing, he was creating out of what was already there.

00:28:01 So that makes that first date with the climbing hand even more complicated because you’re

00:28:06 given a climbing hand, you’re going to have to make art and music out of that.

00:28:10 Exactly.

00:28:11 That’s the responsibility for both of them.

00:28:13 Wow, that’s a lot of responsibility for a first date because you have to create.

00:28:19 The emphasis isn’t just on making decisions, it’s on creating.

00:28:26 But also on listening, right?

00:28:28 I mean, Miles Davis was listening.

00:28:30 He heard that.

00:28:31 He knew it was wrong.

00:28:32 And the question was, what do I play that makes it right?

00:28:37 So let me ask about Nietzsche, is God dead?

00:28:42 What did he mean by that statement?

00:28:43 In your sense, the truth behind the question and the possible set of answers that our world

00:28:50 today provides?

00:28:51 Good.

00:28:52 So, I mean, I think that there’s something super perceptive about Nietzsche’s diagnosis

00:28:59 of the condition at the end of the 19th century.

00:29:02 So not so far from the condition that I think we’re currently in.

00:29:08 And I think there’s an interesting question what we’re supposed to do in response.

00:29:12 But what is the condition that we’re currently in?

00:29:14 When Nietzsche says God is dead, I think, like I was saying before, he means something

00:29:20 like the role that God used to play in grounding our existence is not a role that works for

00:29:26 us anymore as a culture.

00:29:29 And when people talk about a view like that nowadays, they use a different terminology,

00:29:34 but I think it’s roughly what Nietzsche was aiming at.

00:29:37 They say we live in a secular age.

00:29:40 Our age is a secular age.

00:29:42 And so what do people mean when they say that?

00:29:44 I think, first of all, it’s a descriptive claim.

00:29:47 It could be wrong.

00:29:48 The question is, does this really describe the way we experience ourselves as a culture

00:29:53 or as a culture in the West or wherever it is that we are?

00:29:57 So what does it mean to say that we live in a secular age, an age in which God is dead?

00:30:01 Well, the first thing is it doesn’t mean there are no religious believers because there are

00:30:05 plenty.

00:30:06 There are people who go to church or synagogue or mosque every week or more, and there are

00:30:12 people who really find that to be an important aspect of the way they live their lives.

00:30:19 But it does mean that for those people, the role that their religious belief plays in

00:30:28 their life isn’t the same as it used to be in previous ages.

00:30:32 So what’s that role?

00:30:34 We’ll go back to the high middle ages.

00:30:35 That was clearly not a secular age.

00:30:38 That was a religious age.

00:30:40 And so there we are in 1300, Dante is writing The Divine Comedy or something.

00:30:46 And what did it mean then to live in a sacred age?

00:30:50 Well, it meant not just that the default was that you were a Christian in the West, but

00:30:58 that your Christianity, your religious belief, your religious affiliation justified certain

00:31:06 assumptions about people who didn’t share that religious belief.

00:31:11 So you’re a Christian in the West in 1300, and you meet someone who’s a Muslim, and the

00:31:19 fact that they don’t share your religious belief justifies the conclusion that they’re

00:31:24 less than human.

00:31:27 And that was the ground of the Crusades.

00:31:30 That was the religious wars of the high middle ages.

00:31:35 To say that we live in a secular age is to say that, not that there aren’t a lot of people

00:31:40 who have religious belief, there are, but it’s to say that their religious belief doesn’t

00:31:45 justify that conclusion.

00:31:49 If you’re a religious believer and you meet me and suppose I’m not a religious believer,

00:31:57 concerning that about me doesn’t justify your concluding that I’m less than human.

00:32:02 And that’s the kind of liberalism of the modern age.

00:32:06 Most of the time we think that’s a good thing.

00:32:08 We let a thousand flowers bloom.

00:32:10 There are lots of ways to live a good life.

00:32:13 And there’s some way in which that is a nice progressive kind of liberal thought.

00:32:18 But it’s also true that it’s an undermining thought because it means if you’re a religious

00:32:24 believer now, your belief can’t ground your understanding of what you ought to be aiming

00:32:32 at in the life in the way it used to be able to.

00:32:35 You can’t say, as a religious believer, I know it’s right to do this.

00:32:40 Because you also know that if you meet someone who doesn’t share that religious belief and

00:32:44 so doesn’t think it’s right to do that necessarily or does, but for different reasons, you can’t

00:32:50 conclude that they’ve got it wrong.

00:32:52 So there’s this sort of unsettling aspect to it.

00:32:55 Well, isn’t it true that you can’t conclude as a public statement to others, but within

00:33:03 your own mind, it’s almost like an existentialist version of belief, which is like you create

00:33:12 the world and around you, like it doesn’t matter what others believe.

00:33:19 It’s actually almost like empowering thought.

00:33:23 So as opposed to the more traditional view of religion, where it’s like a tribal idea,

00:33:31 like where you share that idea together.

00:33:33 Here you have the full, back to Sartre, full responsibility of your beliefs as well.

00:33:38 Good, good.

00:33:39 But what you’re describing is not a religious believer, right?

00:33:44 You’re describing someone who’s found in themselves the ground of their existence rather than

00:33:49 in something outside of themselves.

00:33:51 So the religious belief, I mean, if you go full Sartrean, then, well, you’re not in a

00:33:57 position to criticize others for the choices that they make, but you are in a position

00:34:03 to criticize them for the way in which they make them, either taking responsibility or

00:34:08 not taking responsibility.

00:34:10 But the religious believer used to be able to say, look, the choices that I make are

00:34:15 right because God demands that I make them.

00:34:19 And nowadays, and so it would be wrong to make any others.

00:34:25 And nowadays, to say that we live in a secular age, say, well, you can’t quite do that and

00:34:32 be a religious believer.

00:34:34 Your religious belief can’t justify that move, and so it can’t ground your life in the way

00:34:40 it does.

00:34:41 So it’s sort of unsettling.

00:34:42 I think that’s one of the interpretations of what Nietzsche might have meant when he

00:34:46 said God is dead.

00:34:47 God can’t play the role for religious believers in our world that he used to.

00:34:52 But we nevertheless find meaning.

00:34:54 I mean, you don’t see nihilism as a prevalent set of ideas that are overtaken in modern

00:35:00 culture.

00:35:01 So a secular world is still full of meaning.

00:35:03 Good.

00:35:04 Well, I think that’s the interesting question.

00:35:07 I think it’s certainly possible for a secular world to be a world in which we live meaningful

00:35:12 lives, worthwhile lives, lives that are worthy of respect and that we can be proud of aiming

00:35:22 to live.

00:35:24 But I think it is a hard question what we’re doing when we do that.

00:35:28 And that is the question of existence.

00:35:31 What does it mean to exist in a way that brings us out at our best as the beings that we are?

00:35:37 That’s the question for existentialism.

00:35:40 So besides Sartre, who to you is the most important existentialist to understand for

00:35:49 others?

00:35:50 What ideas in particular of theirs do you like?

00:35:52 Maybe other existentialists, not just one.

00:35:54 Yeah.

00:35:55 So Sartre is the grounding, strong atheistic existentialism statement.

00:36:00 Who else is there?

00:36:02 So I’m teaching an existentialism course now, and I think the tradition goes back at least

00:36:08 to the 17th century.

00:36:10 And I’ll just tell you some of the figures that I’m teaching there.

00:36:13 We can talk about any of them that you like.

00:36:16 The figure I start with is Pascal.

00:36:19 Pascal, French mathematician from 17th century.

00:36:24 He died, I’m terrible with dates, but I think 1661 or something like that, middle of the

00:36:29 17th century.

00:36:31 Brilliant polymath, we have computer languages named after him.

00:36:34 He built the first mechanical calculating machine.

00:36:39 But he was also deeply invested in his understanding of what Christianity was.

00:36:46 And he thought that everyone before him had really misunderstood what Christianity was,

00:36:54 that they’d really attempted to think about it, not as a way of living a life, but as

00:37:01 a set of beliefs that you can have and which you can justify.

00:37:06 And I think that’s the first move that’s really pretty interesting.

00:37:11 And then figures like Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky developed that move.

00:37:17 All of those take themselves to be defending an interpretation of a certain kind of Christianity,

00:37:23 an existential interpretation of Christianity.

00:37:27 And then I think there are other figures, other theistic figures, figures like Camus

00:37:32 and Fanon, who are mid 20th century figures.

00:37:38 And then I’ll just mention the figure who I think is the most interesting is Martin

00:37:41 Heidegger.

00:37:42 He’s a complicated figure because…

00:37:45 By the way, when you said, sorry to interrupt, that when you said Camus, you meant atheistic?

00:37:51 I think that Camus is an atheistic existentialist, yeah, I’m happy to talk about that.

00:37:56 So okay, so we got, it’s like sports cards, we have the different existentialists.

00:38:00 So maybe let’s go to…

00:38:04 You know what?

00:38:05 Let’s go to Dostoevsky.

00:38:06 All right.

00:38:07 Okay, let’s do it.

00:38:08 So my favorite novel of his is The Idiot.

00:38:11 First of all, I see myself as the idiot and an idiot.

00:38:15 And I love the optimism and the love the main character has for the world.

00:38:22 So that just deeply connects with me as a novel.

00:38:25 It comes from underground as well, but what ideas of Dostoevsky’s do you think are existentialists?

00:38:33 What ideas are formative to the whole existentialist movement?

00:38:36 Excellent.

00:38:37 So let me talk about The Brothers Karamazov.

00:38:40 Partly because that’s the last novel that Dostoevsky wrote.

00:38:43 I think it’s certainly one of the greatest novels of the 19th century, maybe the best.

00:38:48 And I’m about to teach it in a few weeks.

00:38:50 So I’m super excited about it.

00:38:53 What is The Brothers Karamazov about?

00:38:54 I mean, without spoiling the ending for anyone.

00:38:58 Spoiler alert.

00:38:59 Yeah.

00:39:00 I mean, look, it’s a murder mystery, right?

00:39:02 I mean, the father gets murdered.

00:39:06 And the question is, who did it?

00:39:08 Who’s responsible for it?

00:39:09 So there’s a notion of responsibility here, like in Sartre.

00:39:12 But it’s responsibility for a murder, that’s what we’re talking about.

00:39:17 And there’s a bunch of brothers, each of whom has pretty good motivation for having murdered

00:39:25 the father.

00:39:26 The father’s a jerk.

00:39:28 I mean, if anybody is worthy of being murdered, he’s the guy.

00:39:34 He’s a force of chaos and he’s nasty in all sorts of ways.

00:39:38 But still, it’s not good to murder people.

00:39:44 So what’s the view of Dostoevsky?

00:39:46 I mean, it’s this intense exploration of what it means to be involved in various ways with

00:39:54 an activity that everyone can recognize as atrocious.

00:40:00 And what the right way is to take responsibility for that?

00:40:05 What the right way is to relate to others in the face of it?

00:40:10 And how, even through this kind of action, you can achieve some kind of salvation.

00:40:16 That’s Dostoevsky’s word for it.

00:40:19 But salvation here and now, not like you live some afterlife where you’re paradise for eternity.

00:40:27 Who cares about that, says one of the characters.

00:40:31 That doesn’t make my life now any good and it doesn’t justify any of the bad things that

00:40:35 happen in my life now.

00:40:37 What matters is can we live well in the face of these things that we do and have to take

00:40:42 responsibility for?

00:40:43 So it’s this intense exploration of notions and gradations of guilt and responsibility

00:40:52 and the possibility of love and salvation in the face of those.

00:40:56 It is incredibly human work.

00:40:59 But I think Dostoevsky is the opposite of Sartre.

00:41:03 And let me just…

00:41:04 I think it’s so fascinating.

00:41:05 I don’t know anybody else who notices this.

00:41:07 But Sartre actually quotes a passage from Dostoevsky when he’s developing his view.

00:41:14 It’s close to a passage.

00:41:15 It doesn’t appear quite in this way.

00:41:18 But the passage that Sartre quotes is this.

00:41:21 It’s in the form of an argument.

00:41:23 Sartre puts it in the form of argument.

00:41:24 He says, look, there’s a conditional statement is true.

00:41:29 If there is no God, then everything is permitted.

00:41:34 And then there’s a second premise.

00:41:36 There is no God.

00:41:37 That’s Sartre’s view.

00:41:38 I mean, he’s an atheist.

00:41:39 There is no God.

00:41:41 Conclusion, everything is permitted.

00:41:45 And that’s Sartre’s radical freedom.

00:41:47 And if you think about the structure of the Brothers Karamazov, I think Dostoevsky, though

00:41:52 he never says it this way, would run the argument differently.

00:41:56 It’s a modus tollens instead of a modus ponens.

00:41:59 The argument for Dostoevsky would go like this.

00:42:02 Yeah, conditional statement, if there is no God, then everything is permitted.

00:42:07 But look at your life.

00:42:09 Not everything is permitted.

00:42:11 You do horrible, atrocious things like be involved in the death of your father.

00:42:17 And there is a price to pay.

00:42:19 That’s not a livable moment to have to take responsibility, to have to recognize that

00:42:27 you’re at fault or you’re somehow guilty for having been involved in whatever way you were

00:42:33 in letting that happen or bringing it about that it does happen, is to pay a price.

00:42:38 So we’re not beings that are constituted in such a way that everything is permitted.

00:42:44 Look at the facts of your existence.

00:42:47 So not everything is permitted.

00:42:50 Therefore there is a God.

00:42:55 And the presence of a God for Dostoevsky, I think, is just found in this fact that when

00:43:00 we do bad things, we feel guilty for them, that we find ourselves to be responsible for

00:43:05 things even when we didn’t intend to do them, but we just allowed ourselves to be involved

00:43:09 in them.

00:43:10 And the nature of God for Dostoevsky is, I mean, unclear.

00:43:13 I mean, it’s a very complex exploration in itself.

00:43:17 And he basically, God speaks through several of his characters in complicated ways.

00:43:22 So it’s not like a trivial version of God.

00:43:26 It’s totally not trivial.

00:43:27 And it’s not a being that exists outside of time.

00:43:31 None of that is sort of relevant for Dostoevsky.

00:43:33 For him, it’s a question about how we live our lives.

00:43:36 Do we live our lives in the mood that Christianity says it makes available to us, which is the

00:43:40 mood of joy?

00:43:42 Is there, maybe this is a bit of a tangent, but so I’m a Russian speaker and one of the,

00:43:50 I kind of listen to my heart and what my heart says is I need to take on this project.

00:43:55 So there’s a couple of famous translators of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy that live in Paris

00:44:03 currently.

00:44:04 So I’m going to take the journey.

00:44:06 We agreed to have a full conversation about Dostoevsky, about Tolstoy and like a series

00:44:12 of conversations.

00:44:14 And the reason I fell in love with this idea is I just realized in translating from Russian

00:44:20 to English how deep philosophical, how much deep philosophical thinking is required.

00:44:29 Just like single sentences.

00:44:31 They spent like weeks debating single sentences.

00:44:35 So and all of that is part of a journey to Russia for several reasons.

00:44:40 But I just, I want to explore something in me that longs to understand and to connect

00:44:48 with the roots where I come from.

00:44:51 So maybe can you comment, whether it’s on the Russian side or the German side or other

00:44:59 French side, is there something in your own explorations of these philosophies that you

00:45:06 find that you miss because you don’t deeply know the language?

00:45:11 Or like how important is it to understand the language?

00:45:14 Good.

00:45:15 I think it’s super important and I’m always embarrassed that I don’t know more languages

00:45:19 and don’t know the languages I know as well as I would like to.

00:45:23 But there’s a way in.

00:45:26 So I do think different languages allow you to think in different ways and that there’s

00:45:30 a sort of a mode of existence, a way of being that’s captured by a language that it makes

00:45:38 certain ways of thinking about yourself or others more natural and it closes off other

00:45:43 ways of thinking about yourself and others.

00:45:46 And so I think languages are fascinating in that way.

00:45:51 The Heidegger who is this philosopher that I’m interested in says at one point, language

00:45:56 is the house of being.

00:45:58 And I think that means something like it’s by living in a language that you come to understand

00:46:07 or that possibilities for understanding what it is to be you and others and anything are

00:46:13 opened up.

00:46:14 And different languages open up different possibilities.

00:46:16 And we had that discussion offline about James Joyce, how I took a course in James Joyce

00:46:21 and how I don’t think I understood anything besides the dead and the short stories.

00:46:27 And you suggested that it might be helpful to actually visit Ireland, visit Dublin to

00:46:33 truly to help you understand, maybe fall in love with the words.

00:46:37 And so that presumably is not purely about the understanding of the actual words of the

00:46:43 language.

00:46:44 It’s understanding something much deeper, the music of the language or something, music

00:46:50 of the ideas.

00:46:52 Absolutely.

00:46:53 Something like that.

00:46:54 It’s very hard to say exactly what that is.

00:46:56 But when you hear an Irish person who really understands Joyce read some sentences, they

00:47:02 have a different cadence, they have a different tonality, they have different music to use

00:47:06 your word.

00:47:07 And all of a sudden you think about them differently and the sentences sort of draw different thoughts

00:47:13 out of you when they’re read in certain ways.

00:47:15 That’s what great actors can do.

00:47:18 But I think language is rich like that.

00:47:22 And the idea which philosophers tend to have that we’re really studying the crucial aspects

00:47:29 of language when we think about its logical form, when we think about the sort of claims

00:47:35 of philosophical logic that you can make or how do you translate this proposition into

00:47:39 some symbolic form, I think that’s part of what goes on in language.

00:47:44 But I think that when language affects us in the deep way that it can when great poets

00:47:51 or great writers or great thinkers use it to great effect, it’s way more than that.

00:47:58 And that’s the interesting form of language that I’m interested in.

00:48:01 It’s kind of a challenge I’m hoping to take on is I feel like some of the ideas that are

00:48:07 conveyed through language are actually can be put outside of language.

00:48:11 So one of the challenges I have to do is to have a conversation with people in Russian,

00:48:17 but for an English audience and not rely purely on translators.

00:48:22 There would of course be translators there that help me dance through this mess of language,

00:48:28 but also like my goal, my hope is to dance from Russian to English back and forth for

00:48:36 an English speaking audience and for a Russian speaking audience.

00:48:39 So not this pure, this is Russian, it’s going to be translated to English or this is English,

00:48:44 it’s going to be translated to Russian, but dance back and forth and try to share with

00:48:49 people who don’t speak one of the languages, the music that they’re missing and sort of

00:48:54 almost hear that music as if you’re sitting in another room and you hear the music through

00:48:59 the wall.

00:49:00 I get a sense of it.

00:49:01 I think that would be a waste if I don’t try to pursue this being a bilingual human being.

00:49:08 And I wonder whether it’s possible to capture some of the magic of the ideas in a way that

00:49:14 can be conveyed to people who don’t speak that particular language.

00:49:18 I think it’s a super exciting project.

00:49:20 I look forward to following it.

00:49:23 I’ll tell you one thing that does happen.

00:49:25 So we read Dostoevsky in translation.

00:49:28 Occasionally I do have Russian speakers in the room, which is super helpful, but I also

00:49:32 encourage my students to, some of them will have different translations than others.

00:49:39 And that can be really helpful for the non native speaker because by paying attention

00:49:45 to the places where translators diverge in their translations of a given word or a phrase

00:49:52 or something like that, you can start to get the idea that somehow the words that we have

00:49:57 in English, they don’t have the same contours as the word in Russian that’s being translated.

00:50:02 And then you can start to ask about what those differences are.

00:50:07 And I think there’s a kind of magic to it.

00:50:11 I mean, it’s astonishing how rich and affecting these languages can be for people who grew

00:50:18 up in them, especially who speak them as native speakers.

00:50:20 And that’s a really powerful thing that actually doesn’t exist enough of is, for example, for

00:50:26 Dostoevsky, most novels have been translated by two or three famous translators.

00:50:33 And there’s a lot of discussion about who did it better and so on.

00:50:37 But I would love to, I’m a computer science person, I would love to do a diff where you

00:50:43 automatically detect all the differences in the translation just as you’re saying and

00:50:48 use that, like somebody needs to publish literally just books describing the differences.

00:50:55 In fact, I’ll probably do a little bit of this.

00:50:57 I heard the individual translators in interviews and in blog posts and articles discuss particular

00:51:04 phrases that they differ on, but like to do that for an entire book, that’s a fascinating

00:51:09 exploration as an English speaker, just to read the differences in the translations.

00:51:15 You probably can get some deep understanding of ideas in those books by seeing the struggle

00:51:23 of the translators to capture that idea.

00:51:26 That’s a really interesting idea.

00:51:28 Absolutely.

00:51:29 And you can do that for other projects and other languages too.

00:51:32 I mean, one of the, I don’t know, I have this weird, huge range of interests and some days

00:51:38 I’ll find myself reading about something.

00:51:40 At one point I was interested in 14th century German mysticism.

00:51:46 Okay.

00:51:47 Turns out there’s somebody who’s written like volumes and volumes about this.

00:51:50 He’s fantastic.

00:51:51 And I was interested in reading Meister Eckhart.

00:51:55 I wanted to know what was interesting about him.

00:51:58 And the sort of move that this guy Bernard McGinn, who’s the great scholar of this period

00:52:04 made, was to say what Eckhart did, and everybody knows this, he translated Christianity into

00:52:11 the vernacular.

00:52:12 He started giving sermons in German to the peasants, sermons used to be in Latin and

00:52:17 nobody could speak Latin.

00:52:18 Can you imagine sitting there for a two hour sermon in a language that you don’t know?

00:52:22 So he translated it into German, but in doing it, the resources of the German language are

00:52:27 different from the resources of the Latin language.

00:52:30 Then there’s a word in middle high German, Grund, which we translated as ground.

00:52:38 And it’s got this earthy feel to it.

00:52:41 It sort of invokes the notion of soil and what you stand on and what things grow out

00:52:46 of and sort of what you could run your fingers through that would have a kind of honesty

00:52:52 to it.

00:52:54 And there’s no Latin word for that.

00:52:57 But in Eckhart’s interpretation of Christianity, Grund, that’s like the fundamental thing.

00:53:02 You don’t understand God until you understand the way in which he is our ground.

00:53:07 And all of a sudden, this mysticism gets a kind of German cant that makes sense to the

00:53:14 people who speak German and that reveals something totally different about what you could think

00:53:21 that form of existence was that was covered over by the fact that it had always been done

00:53:25 in Latin.

00:53:27 Yeah, that’s fascinating.

00:53:29 So we talked about Dostoevsky and the use of murder to explore human nature.

00:53:36 Let’s go to Camus, who is maybe less concerned with murder, more concerned with suicide as

00:53:42 a way to explore human nature.

00:53:44 So he is probably my favorite existentialist, probably one of the more accessible existentialists.

00:53:52 And like you said, one of the people who didn’t like to call himself an existentialist.

00:53:58 So what are your thoughts about Camus?

00:54:01 What role does he play in the story of existentialism?

00:54:03 So I find Camus totally fascinating.

00:54:06 I really do.

00:54:07 And for years, I didn’t teach Camus because the famous thing that you’re referring to,

00:54:14 The Myth of Sisyphus, which is a sort of essay, it’s published as a book, super accessible,

00:54:19 really fascinating.

00:54:20 He’s a great writer, really engaging.

00:54:23 The opening line is something like, there is but one truly significant philosophical

00:54:30 question, and that is the question of suicide.

00:54:34 And I thought, I can’t teach my 18 year olds.

00:54:39 I just thought that’s terrible.

00:54:41 How can I…

00:54:42 I mean, it’s not wrong, but do I want to bring that into the classroom?

00:54:47 And so I read it, I read the essay, I avoided it for a long time just because of that line.

00:54:54 And I thought, I’m not going to be able to make sense of this in a way that will be helpful

00:54:58 for anyone.

00:54:59 But finally, one year, maybe seven or eight years ago, I sat down to read it.

00:55:03 I thought, I’ve got to really confront it.

00:55:07 And I read it and it’s incredibly engaging.

00:55:10 I mean, it’s really, really beautiful.

00:55:12 And Camus was against suicide, which just turns out to be good.

00:55:17 I was happy about that, but he has a bit of a bleak understanding of what human existence

00:55:24 amounts to.

00:55:26 And so in the end, he thinks that human existence is absurd.

00:55:32 And absurd is a kind of technical term for him.

00:55:36 And it means that the episodes in your life and your life as a whole presents itself to

00:55:45 you as if it’s got a meaning, but really it doesn’t.

00:55:51 So there’s this tension between the way things seem to be on their surface and what really

00:55:59 turns out to be true about them.

00:56:03 And he gives these great examples.

00:56:05 You probably remember these.

00:56:06 He says, there you are, you’re walking along the street and there’s a plate glass window

00:56:13 in a building and through the window you see somebody talking on a telephone.

00:56:18 I mean, I imagined it as a cell phone, but Camus didn’t, but you see somebody talking

00:56:24 on a cell phone and he’s animated.

00:56:26 He’s talking a lot as if things really meant something.

00:56:31 And yet Camus says, it’s a dumb show.

00:56:36 And it’s not dumb just in the sense that it’s stupid.

00:56:39 It’s dumb in the sense that it’s silent.

00:56:41 It presents itself as if it’s got some significance and yet its significance is withheld from

00:56:46 you.

00:56:47 And he says, that’s what our lives are like.

00:56:50 Everything in our lives presents themselves to us as if it’s got a significance, but it

00:56:54 doesn’t, it’s absurd.

00:56:56 And then he says, really what our lives are like, they’re like the lives of Sisyphus.

00:57:01 Just day after day, you do the same thing.

00:57:07 You wake up at a certain time, you get on the bus, you go to work, you take your lunch

00:57:11 break, you get off.

00:57:13 I have a colleague who once said to me something like this, it was about October or so in the

00:57:19 fall semester.

00:57:20 I said, how’s it going, Dick?

00:57:22 He said, well, you know how it is.

00:57:24 I got on the conveyor belt at the beginning of the semester and I’m just going through

00:57:29 and that’s the way my life is.

00:57:32 And Camus thinks that experience, which you can sometimes have, reveals something true

00:57:38 about what human lives are like.

00:57:41 Our lives really just are like the life of Sisyphus who rolls this boulder up the hill

00:57:46 from morning till night.

00:57:48 And then at night he gets to the top and it rolls back down to the bottom.

00:57:53 Over the course of the night, he walks back down and then he starts it all over again.

00:57:57 And he says, Sisyphus is condemned to this life like we’re condemned to our lives.

00:58:03 But we do have one bit of freedom and it’s the only thing that we can hang on to.

00:58:10 It’s the freedom to stick it to the gods who put us in this position by embracing this

00:58:18 existence rather than giving up and committing suicide.

00:58:21 And I thought, well, it’s kind of a happy ending.

00:58:26 But I also thought it’s a dim view of what our existence amounts to.

00:58:33 So I think there’s something fascinating about that.

00:58:37 But what I came to believe, and I tried to write about this once, I know you read the

00:58:42 thing about aliveness that I published once, that’s secretly a criticism of Camus.

00:58:47 I don’t think I mentioned Camus in there.

00:58:50 But I think Camus has got the phenomenon wrong or he’s missed some important aspect of it.

00:58:56 Because in Camus view, when you experience your day as sort of going on in this deadening

00:59:02 way and you’re just doing the things that you always do the way you always do them,

00:59:07 for Camus, that reveals the truth about what our lives are.

00:59:11 But I think there’s some aspect, at least for me, and maybe he just didn’t feel this

00:59:16 or didn’t have access to it, maybe others don’t.

00:59:20 But for me, there’s an extra part to it, which is somehow that, yes, that’s the way

00:59:25 things are and it’s inadequate.

00:59:30 And there’s something that’s missing from that aspect of our existence that could be

00:59:36 there.

00:59:38 And it feels like our lives are not about just putting up with that and sticking it

00:59:43 to the gods by embracing it, but seeking that absence part of it, the part that’s recognizable

00:59:50 in its absence in your experience of that.

00:59:54 And that’s what I think.

00:59:56 I think we do have the experience of the presence of that in moments when you feel truly alive.

01:00:04 And that’s what you mean by the word aliveness, which is a fascinating and a powerful word.

01:00:08 Yeah, that’s what I mean by it.

01:00:10 I think most people can recognize moments in their lives when they really felt alive.

01:00:17 And it could happen in a moment when, I don’t know, maybe Miles Davis felt it in that moment

01:00:23 when he was responding to Herbie Hancock’s chord, or maybe you feel it in that moment

01:00:29 where you grab for the hand on the first date and the gesture is reciprocated, or maybe

01:00:34 you feel it in some moment when you are doing a kind of peak athletic thing or watching

01:00:41 somebody else do a peak athletic thing.

01:00:45 But I think there are moments when it feels like it’s not like the way Camus is describing

01:00:52 things.

01:00:54 And it’s better because of that.

01:00:56 So I think one really powerful way for me to understand aliveness is to think about

01:01:04 going to a darker territory, is to think about suicide.

01:01:07 And I’ve known people in my life who suffer from clinical depression.

01:01:12 And whatever the chemistry is in our brain, there is a certain kind of feeling that is

01:01:21 to be depressed, where you look in the mirror and ask, do I want to kill myself today?

01:01:30 This is the question that Camus asks, this question, this philosophical question.

01:01:36 And there is people who, when they’re depressed, say, not only do they say, I want to kill

01:01:44 myself or I don’t, they say, it doesn’t matter.

01:01:49 And that’s chemistry, that’s whatever that is, that’s chemistry in our mind.

01:01:54 And then on the flip side of that, for me, I’ve had some low points, but I’ve been very

01:01:59 fortunate to not suffer from that kind of depression.

01:02:03 I am the opposite, which is not only moments of peak performance in athletics or great

01:02:11 music or any of that, I’m just deeply joyful often by mundane things.

01:02:19 As you were saying it, I was drinking this thing and it’s cold, and for some reason the

01:02:22 coldness of that was like, oh, great, like refrigeration.

01:02:27 I don’t know.

01:02:28 There was a joy in that, like, I can’t put it into words, but it just felt great.

01:02:32 And then just so many things, you look out in nature, there’s a nice breeze and just

01:02:37 like, it’s amazing.

01:02:40 So that doesn’t feel like I’m embracing the absurd.

01:02:46 That seems like I’m getting some nice like dopamine hits in whatever the chemistry is

01:02:51 from just the basics of life, and that is the source of aliveness.

01:02:56 However my brain is built, it’s gotten a natural sort of mechanism for aliveness.

01:03:05 And so one nice way to see the absence of aliveness is to look at the chemical, the

01:03:12 clinical depression.

01:03:14 And so that Camus doesn’t seem to contend with that at all in asking the question of

01:03:19 suicide because when you look in the mirror and ask, like, if I ask myself, do I want

01:03:23 to kill myself today, I ask that question in a different way, more like a stoic way

01:03:28 often, like basically every day is, you know, what if I die today?

01:03:33 It’s more like contemplating your mortality every single day.

01:03:37 You know, that excites me, the possibility that this is my last day, that, you know,

01:03:44 it just reminds me how amazing life is.

01:03:47 And that’s chemistry, I don’t know what that is, but that’s not, that’s certainly not some

01:03:53 kind of philosophical decision I made.

01:03:57 I am a little bit riding a wave of the chemistry of the genetics I’ve been given, of the dopamine.

01:04:04 So that question of suicide, by the way, do you find that formulation of the question

01:04:10 of existentialism, I know you didn’t want to teach it because obviously suicide is a

01:04:17 very difficult word, especially for young minds, but do you think that’s a useful formulation

01:04:22 of the question of existentialism?

01:04:25 Like him saying, this is the most important question of suicide.

01:04:29 I think there is something to it, if you read the question as the question, what is it in

01:04:35 virtue of which it ought to be desirable to live the lives that we’re capable of living?

01:04:43 That’s a deep question.

01:04:44 Yeah, that’s a question that gets focused when someone asks themselves whether they

01:04:49 ought to continue to live that life.

01:04:53 The famous line, nothing focuses the mind more than one’s impending execution.

01:05:01 I think there’s something important about that, that recognizing the riskiness and the

01:05:06 vulnerability of one’s existence is super important.

01:05:13 And I think that if we didn’t have that, our lives wouldn’t be capable of being meaningful.

01:05:20 If they weren’t risky and vulnerable, there would be nothing to lose.

01:05:25 And it’s only because there are things to lose that they can come to have the significance

01:05:28 that they do.

01:05:29 So yeah, I think I’m not against the idea that that’s a deep way of approaching the

01:05:34 questions at the core of existentialism.

01:05:38 But as you said, I was worried for a while about how I was going to teach it.

01:05:42 Well, I think there’s a difference between suicide and not living because suicide is

01:05:48 an action.

01:05:50 So it feels like to me, like suicide doesn’t make sense because, you know, imagine you’re

01:05:58 in like a hotel and you’re saying the room I’m in sucks, but like there’s other rooms.

01:06:04 So like maybe explore those other rooms.

01:06:08 Maybe you’ll find meaning in those other rooms, like basically embracing the fact that you

01:06:15 don’t know everything and there’s a, you need time to explore everything.

01:06:20 It’s like once you’ve explored everything, then maybe you can make a full decision.

01:06:25 But it’s unfair to make a decision.

01:06:30 It’s I would say unethical to make a decision until you’ve explored all the rooms in the

01:06:35 hotel.

01:06:36 Yeah.

01:06:37 And this gets focused in the brothers Karamazov, of course.

01:06:40 There’s one brother who is really asking that question, is asking the question of suicide.

01:06:47 He’s asking the question whether the world that we live in is a world that’s worth living

01:06:53 in.

01:06:54 And I think that character is, as you say, very ill.

01:06:59 And it’s possible and often because, as you say, of, you know, brain chemistry, physiology,

01:07:08 there’s certainly a physical ground to that situation, to that condition.

01:07:15 But I think it is possible for someone to be in that situation.

01:07:20 I think that Ivan Karamazov, who’s the character who’s asking this question, is, you know,

01:07:28 maybe let’s say chemically depressed or something like that.

01:07:31 But I think there’s more to it too.

01:07:33 And I think that Dostoevsky’s real view is that the brain chemistry doesn’t exist on

01:07:39 its own.

01:07:40 Like the way we interact with one another, the way we care about or isolate ourselves

01:07:45 from others, the way we care for the lives that we lead, affects the chemistry of our

01:07:54 brain, which goes on and changes the mood that we’re in.

01:07:57 So I think Dostoevsky does think that Ivan’s salvation, if he’s capable of being saved,

01:08:06 is gonna come through the love of his brother Alyosha.

01:08:09 Let me spring maybe a bit of a tangent on you.

01:08:13 Do you ever, one of my other favorite authors is Herman Hesse.

01:08:17 Do you ever include him in our deck of sport cards that represent existentialism?

01:08:24 I haven’t.

01:08:25 Maybe I should.

01:08:26 What should I read?

01:08:27 What should I think about including?

01:08:28 Oh no, there’s some kind of embrace of absurdism.

01:08:35 Like there’s a existentialist kind of ideal pervading most of his work.

01:08:42 But there’s more of a, like with Siddhartha, there’s more almost like a Buddhist sort of

01:08:49 like watch the river and like become the river.

01:08:53 Like this kind of idea that what it means to truly experience the moment.

01:08:59 So there is an experiential part of existentialism where you want to, it’s not just about, we’ve

01:09:05 been talking about kind of decisions and actions, but also what it means to listen, like you

01:09:10 said from Nietzsche, like what it means to really take in the world and experience the

01:09:15 moment.

01:09:16 So he’s very good at writing about what it means to experience the moment and experience

01:09:20 the full absurdity of the moment.

01:09:23 And for him, I’m starting to forget, Steppenwolf, I think, is humor.

01:09:30 It’s part of the absurdity, which I think modern day internet explores very well with

01:09:35 memes and so on.

01:09:37 Humor is a fundamental part of the existentialist ethic that’s able to deal with absurdity.

01:09:45 You got to like laugh at it.

01:09:48 I think there is some, let me just say something about humor because I think you’re absolutely

01:09:52 right.

01:09:53 Richard Bard, who is Danish and most people think deeply depressed and so on, is actually

01:09:59 an incredibly funny writer.

01:10:02 And someone who was a classmate of mine in graduate school who left philosophy to become

01:10:07 a Hollywood comedy writer, he’s a very successful guy.

01:10:11 And then he came back 25 years later and finished his dissertation.

01:10:15 And I was the reader on the dissertation, there may be a conflict of interest, I’m not

01:10:21 quite sure.

01:10:22 But his dissertation was about, he called it Kierkegaard and the Funny, which is a kind

01:10:27 of a funny title, yeah.

01:10:29 But Kierkegaard, according to Eric Kaplan’s reading, Kierkegaard does have this idea that

01:10:36 there’s something destabilizing about humor that’s crucial to the important possibilities

01:10:47 for us.

01:10:48 And so there’s the idea that there’s a moment when a joke is being set up, when you’re sort

01:10:55 of proceeding as if you’re on stable ground, and then the punchline comes and the rug is

01:11:02 pulled out from under you.

01:11:04 And for a moment, it’s like you’re falling.

01:11:08 There’s nothing supporting you until you’re captured by your totally new understanding

01:11:15 of what was going on, and that humor necessarily has that kind of destabilizing feature to

01:11:22 it.

01:11:23 And that’s like the riskiness, that’s like the riskiness that you were pointing to.

01:11:28 If there aren’t risks in your life, if your life is totally safe, then there’s no possibility

01:11:33 of significance.

01:11:35 And so I think on Eric’s reading, Kierkegaard sort of wants to line up the importance of

01:11:41 the riskiness and vulnerability in your life to its having meaning with the experience

01:11:47 of destabilization that you get in jokes and comedy, which then becomes significant, right?

01:11:55 When you remember having heard a joke for the first time, it’s got a kind of salience

01:11:59 for you.

01:12:00 Speaking of jokes, and speaking of, you mentioned film and literature, so existentialism in

01:12:07 film and literature.

01:12:08 I think for a lot of people, especially nihilism, was experienced in the great modern work of

01:12:18 art called Big Lebowski.

01:12:19 I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that film, but there’s a group of nihilists in that film.

01:12:26 They’re just like, they don’t care about anything.

01:12:27 I think they happen to be German, at least they have German accents.

01:12:31 So maybe can you talk about notable appearances of existentialism in film, and if you at all

01:12:40 ever bring up Big Lebowski, if that ever comes into play?

01:12:45 So I know that people think about the Big Lebowski in this context, and I did actually

01:12:49 rewatch it not so long ago.

01:12:51 We have kids, and I thought, maybe it’s time.

01:12:54 It wasn’t really time for the 11 year old, so somewhat inappropriate.

01:13:00 I have never taught that film, so I’d have to think more.

01:13:02 We could talk about it.

01:13:03 I’d be happy to try to think on the fly about it.

01:13:06 Okay, so I would love to, because there is a, feels like there’s a philosophical depth

01:13:11 to that film.

01:13:12 So there’s a person that just, the main character.

01:13:17 The Jeff Bridges character.

01:13:18 Jeff Bridges character, yeah.

01:13:20 He kind of, he drinks like these white Russians, and he just kind of walks around in a very

01:13:26 relaxed way, and irradiates both a love for life, but also just an acceptance of like,

01:13:37 it is what it is kind of philosophy.

01:13:41 And then there’s a bunch of characters that have very busy lives trying to do some big

01:13:49 projects that are dramatic in some way, make some huge amounts of money.

01:13:54 So it kind of actually reminds me of The Idiot by Dostoevsky in a certain kind of sense.

01:13:58 And then there’s these players, I mean, they’re phrased as nihilists, but they kind of don’t

01:14:05 care to enjoy life.

01:14:07 They want to mess with life in some kind of way.

01:14:09 And of course there’s interesting personalities that, what is it, Jesus, the bowler.

01:14:18 And then there’s like Donnie, who is a bit clueless, and then there’s the John Goodman

01:14:26 character that’s talking about Vietnam and just takes life way too seriously, too intensely

01:14:32 and so on.

01:14:33 So it just paints a full sort of spectrum of characters that are operating in this world.

01:14:38 And perhaps most importantly for existentialism are thrown into absurdity and hence the humor.

01:14:45 Okay.

01:14:46 All right, good.

01:14:47 Well, that’s helpful.

01:14:48 Yeah.

01:14:49 Reminding me of all that.

01:14:50 And I think…

01:14:51 So one thing to say is that the nihilists, the group of nihilists who call themselves

01:14:55 nihilists, I think they’ve got a bad misinterpretation of what nihilism is supposed to be.

01:15:03 And this happened actually in the 20s.

01:15:07 There was a famous case of a couple of German students, Leopold and Loeb, who’d read a lot

01:15:14 of Nietzsche, Nietzsche was a kind of hero for the Nazis even, I think based on a pretty

01:15:23 bad misunderstanding of what he was up to.

01:15:26 But Leopold and Loeb had the bad understanding first and they were students, they’d read

01:15:31 a lot of Nietzsche and they thought, okay, nothing means anything.

01:15:35 The only way that there’s any significance in life is through our will to sort of powerfully

01:15:42 bring something about.

01:15:44 And if we’re gonna do that in a way that reflects the fact that nothing means anything, then

01:15:50 what we should do is take these things, these actions that people always thought were bad

01:15:58 and do them and show that there’s nothing wrong with doing them.

01:16:02 And so they decided they would murder someone.

01:16:05 Not because they were angry at them, just someone they’d never met.

01:16:08 It was important that it was someone they’d never met.

01:16:10 It was totally unmotivated act.

01:16:13 And they thought, we’ll embrace nihilism by showing that we can act in such a way as to

01:16:20 do something that morality thinks is bad and through our will bring it about that we desire

01:16:27 to do it for no reason that has anything to do with its potentially being interpretable

01:16:32 as good.

01:16:34 And I think that’s a terrible misreading of what Nietzsche thinks the response to nihilism

01:16:40 is.

01:16:41 I mean, I think, read that against the Miles Davis thing.

01:16:44 Miles Davis aim is to creatively bring it about that something works well in a situation

01:16:51 where he is kind of constrained.

01:16:53 So they thought two things, one, there are no constraints at all, not even the constraints

01:16:58 of the situation that we find ourselves in.

01:17:00 And two, we only become the beings that we really are when we act against what you might

01:17:08 have thought the constraints were.

01:17:10 And I just think that’s a bad misreading of what that kind of nihilism is up to.

01:17:14 And I think maybe that group in the Big Lebowski has got that kind of bad misreading.

01:17:20 But then the major characters are much more interesting.

01:17:23 Go ahead and say something.

01:17:24 So there’s some kind of apathy to that particular nihilism.

01:17:29 Could you comment on whether you see sort of apathy as a philosophy part of that nihilism?

01:17:37 Sort of like from an existentialist perspective, how important is it to care about stuff?

01:17:45 Like really take on life?

01:17:48 What does existentialism have to say about just sitting back and just not caring?

01:17:56 Excellent.

01:17:57 So apathy is like a really important word.

01:18:01 The Greek word is apathe, it means without passions.

01:18:05 And the Stoics, who you mentioned earlier, really thought that passions are what get

01:18:10 in the way if you’re living well.

01:18:14 Because to live well, you have to think clearly about what you should do and you shouldn’t

01:18:18 let your resentments and your angers and your petty animosities direct your behavior.

01:18:24 You should release yourself from those kinds of passions.

01:18:28 So Stoicism, again, huge caricature, but it’s an aim not to care because caring is bad.

01:18:37 And there’s certain forms of existentialism, certainly in Pascal and Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky

01:18:44 and Heidegger and Sartre in his own way.

01:18:49 So it’s not just a theistic or atheistic thing.

01:18:53 What’s crucial about us is that we do care.

01:18:57 Heidegger says, care is the being of Dasein, Dasein is his name for us.

01:19:02 What it is to be us is to be the being that already cares.

01:19:06 And you can’t not do that.

01:19:09 You can pretend you’re not doing it, but you’re just caring in a different way.

01:19:13 It’s like Sartre saying, you can pretend you’re not taking responsibility.

01:19:18 You can pretend that you don’t have to make a decision, that is making a decision.

01:19:23 Not caring is a way of caring.

01:19:25 And so I think the existentialists that I’m interested in think that we do care.

01:19:31 That’s constitutive of what it is to be us.

01:19:34 And so they’ll think that the Stoics got it wrong.

01:19:37 But that leaves open a huge range of moves about how we inhabit that existence well.

01:19:49 Let me ask about Ayn Rand.

01:19:53 So it just so happens that she’s entered a few conversations in this podcast, and just

01:20:01 looking at academic philosophy or just philosophers in general, they seem to ignore Ayn Rand.

01:20:07 Do you have a sense of why that is?

01:20:10 Did she ever come into play her ideas of objectivism, come into play of discussions of a good life

01:20:20 from the perspective of existentialism in how you teach it and how you think about it?

01:20:26 Is she somebody who you find at all interesting?

01:20:30 So no, I don’t think she is, but it’s been a long time since I’ve read her stuff.

01:20:36 I read it in high school.

01:20:37 I read The Fountainhead in high school and Atlas Shrugged, but that’s at this point a

01:20:41 very long time ago.

01:20:42 I think I read something about objective epistemology or something too.

01:20:46 So my view about her could be based on a total misunderstanding of what she’s up to.

01:20:53 But sort of my caricature of her and tell me if I’ve got it wrong is that she’s sort

01:21:02 of motivated by a kind of, I think maybe sometimes you call it libertarianism, but maybe let’s

01:21:11 in the context of our discussion tie it back to Sartre, a kind of view according to which

01:21:17 we’re the being who has to contend with the fact that we’re radically free to do stuff

01:21:21 and we’re just not being courageous or brave enough when we don’t do that.

01:21:27 And the people to admire are the people who make stuff out of nothing.

01:21:33 So maybe that’s a bad caricature.

01:21:34 No, no, no.

01:21:35 I think, no, I think that’s pretty accurate.

01:21:38 I’m not again, very knowledgeable about the full depth of her philosophy, but I think

01:21:43 she takes a view of the world that’s similar to Sartre in the conclusions, but makes stronger

01:21:53 statements about epistemology that first of all, everything is knowable and there’s some,

01:22:00 you should always operate through reason.

01:22:03 Like reason is very important.

01:22:05 Like it’s like you start with a few axioms and you build on top of that and the axioms

01:22:13 that everybody should operate on are the same.

01:22:16 Again, reality is objective, it’s not subjective.

01:22:21 So from that you can derive the entirety of how humans should behave at the individual

01:22:27 level and at the societal level.

01:22:30 And there’s a few conclusions, she would talk about virtue of selfishness and sort of a

01:22:35 lot of people use that to dismiss her, look, she’s very selfish and so on.

01:22:39 She actually meant something very different is like, it’s more like the Sartre thing,

01:22:44 take responsibility for yourself, understand what forces you’re operating under and make

01:22:51 the best of this life.

01:22:52 And that’s how you can be the best member of societies by making the best life you can

01:22:58 and just focusing yourself, like fix your own problems first and then that will make

01:23:03 you the best member of society, of your family, of loved ones, of friends and so on.

01:23:10 I think the reason she’s disliked, obviously on the philosophy side, she’s disliked because

01:23:16 a little bit like Nietzsche, she’s literary.

01:23:22 I think the reason she’s publicly disliked in sort of public conversations is because

01:23:28 of how sure she is of herself, which is some of the philosophers have been known to do

01:23:33 like make very strong statements like hell is other people, but she was making very strong

01:23:39 statements about basically everything.

01:23:42 But the reason I bring her up is she is an influential thinker that is not for some reason

01:23:52 often brought up as such, it’s not acknowledged how influential she is.

01:23:57 I was recently looking at like a list of the most important women of the 20th century in

01:24:05 terms of thought, not science, but like thought and she wasn’t in that list.

01:24:12 And I see this time and time again and it doesn’t make sense to me why she’s so kind

01:24:18 of dismissed because clearly she’s an author of some of the most read books like ever and

01:24:26 she clearly had very strong ideas that she’d be contented with.

01:24:34 That’s why it kind of didn’t make sense to me because she’s also a creature of her time

01:24:39 and an important one, she’s a creation of the Soviet Union, somebody who left because

01:24:44 of that and so some of the strength of her ideas has to do with how much she dislikes

01:24:50 that particular philosophy and way of life.

01:24:56 But also she’s a creature of Sartre and that whole Nietzsche and so on.

01:25:02 Now one of the other criticisms is she doesn’t integrate herself into this history.

01:25:07 She keeps basically kind of implying that she’s purely original in all her thoughts

01:25:14 even though she’s kind of citing a lot of other people.

01:25:18 But again, many philosophers do this kind of thing as if they are truly original and

01:25:23 they’re not.

01:25:24 It is interesting and also what’s interesting about her is she is a woman, she is a strong

01:25:29 feminist and it feels like with Simone de Beauvoir, it seems like she’s a very important

01:25:38 person in this moment of history that shouldn’t be fully forgotten.

01:25:42 Interesting.

01:25:43 Yeah.

01:25:44 Well, so I mean I don’t have a lot to add.

01:25:46 I will just say this, I mean the way she and Beauvoir seem to me from your description

01:25:54 of her and remembering what I remember from 35 years ago, they seem pretty opposite from

01:26:00 one another.

01:26:02 One of the things I find interesting about Beauvoir is that she takes seriously the thing

01:26:08 that Sartre didn’t, which is our throwness, which is the sense in which we’re born into

01:26:16 a situation that’s already got a significance.

01:26:21 I think it was easier for her to recognize that than Sartre because she was a woman.

01:26:26 And Sartre seems to act as if there are no constraints or at least there shouldn’t be.

01:26:32 We’re pretty close as privileged white males and if we could just get rid of the last bits

01:26:38 of them, we would be God like we’re supposed to be.

01:26:41 And I think Beauvoir sort of sees things differently.

01:26:44 I think she recognizes one’s not born but becomes a woman, she says.

01:26:50 So how does that happen?

01:26:51 Well you’re thrown into your culture and your culture starts treating you in a certain way

01:26:56 because of your gender and that starts to form your understanding and your experience

01:27:00 of things.

01:27:01 By the time you’re grown up, well you’re pretty well formed by that.

01:27:07 That seems a fact.

01:27:08 It’s a fact about Sartre too though, it was harder for him to notice it because he was

01:27:14 formed into his privilege.

01:27:17 But the world reminds us of our throwness for some more than others.

01:27:22 Yes, absolutely.

01:27:23 And for people who have to contend on a daily basis with the fact that the social position

01:27:31 they’re thrown into is one that negates them or one that oppresses them or one that sort

01:27:39 of pushes them to the side in some way or another, I mean the black experience is interesting

01:27:44 in this respect too.

01:27:46 Frantz Fanon who’s a contemporary of Sartre and Beauvoir writes about it and it’s very

01:27:51 familiar the things that he’s saying now but he writes back in the 50s about being a black

01:27:57 man in Paris and getting on an elevator with a woman alone and how her reaction to him,

01:28:07 not knowing him, not having any views about any reason to have any views about him sort

01:28:12 of puts him in a particular social position with respect to her.

01:28:17 And if you don’t have that experience, it’s much harder to recognize the way in which

01:28:25 what we’re thrown into is something we might not have chosen.

01:28:29 So the idea that that’s not an aspect of our existence, which as you describe Ayn Rand’s

01:28:37 views, she sounds more like Sartre, she sounds more like either it’s not an aspect of our

01:28:44 existence or at least we ought to sort of aim at it’s not being an aspect of our existence.

01:28:47 Yeah, almost act as if it’s not.

01:28:49 Yeah, exactly.

01:28:50 Act as if it’s not.

01:28:51 And so I think from my point of view, I don’t pretend that I’m explaining the public reception

01:28:57 of her, I’m just sort of trying to say how I understand her in this intellectual context.

01:29:03 From my point of view, that’s something big to miss and the ambition to think that really

01:29:09 what’s happening is that we’re all the same, we’re all rational beings.

01:29:13 We’re all beings who if we just got the axioms of our existence right and made good judgments

01:29:19 and reasoned in an appropriate way, would optimize ourselves.

01:29:25 That feels to me like a kind of natural end point of the philosophical tradition.

01:29:33 I mean, sort of Plato starts off with a view that helps us in that direction and the enlightenment

01:29:38 moves us further in that direction.

01:29:41 But from my point of view, that movement has led us astray because it’s missed something

01:29:47 really important that’s crucial to the kind of being that we are.

01:29:52 Yeah, it misses the music.

01:29:55 Exactly, it misses the music.

01:29:58 Let’s talk about thrownness and I think you mentioned that in the context of Heidegger.

01:30:02 Yeah.

01:30:03 So can we talk about Heidegger?

01:30:04 Okay.

01:30:05 Who is this philosopher?

01:30:08 What are some fascinating ideas that he brought to the world?

01:30:12 Okay.

01:30:13 So Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher.

01:30:15 I do know when he was born, 1889, but I know that only by accident.

01:30:20 It’s because it’s the same year that Wittgenstein, an Austrian philosopher, was born and the

01:30:24 same year that Hitler was born.

01:30:26 So if I’ve remembered my dates right and someone will call in and correct me otherwise.

01:30:31 But that’s the way it sort of sits in my memory bank.

01:30:35 And it’s interesting that the three of them were born at the same time.

01:30:39 Wittgenstein and Heidegger share some similarities, but then it’s also interesting that Heidegger

01:30:46 was a Nazi.

01:30:47 I mean, this is a very disturbing fact about his personal political background.

01:30:53 And so it’s something that anyone who thinks that things that he said might be interesting

01:30:57 has got to contend with.

01:30:59 Heidegger was born in Germany, Hitler in Austria.

01:31:04 Wittgenstein is Austria also.

01:31:06 But so you have to, when you call Heidegger a Nazi, you have to remember, I mean, there

01:31:12 was millions of Nazis too.

01:31:14 So like there are parts of their, that’s the history of the world.

01:31:19 There’s a lot of communists, Marxists and Nazis in that part of history.

01:31:26 Absolutely.

01:31:27 And one of the discussion points is, well, was he just a kind of social Nazi?

01:31:32 I mean, you know, he went to parties with them and stuff, or was he like, did he really

01:31:38 believe in the ideology?

01:31:40 And that’s a choice point.

01:31:42 And we could talk about it if you want.

01:31:44 He held a political position.

01:31:46 That’s one of the relevant parts.

01:31:48 In 1933, he was made rector of the University of Freiburg.

01:31:52 That’s like the president of the university.

01:31:56 And that was in Germany, all the universities are state universities.

01:32:00 And so that’s a political appointment.

01:32:03 Can we just pause on this point?

01:32:06 From an existentialist perspective, what’s the role for standing up to evil?

01:32:13 So I mean, I think Camus probably had something to say about these things because he was a

01:32:19 bit of a political figure.

01:32:21 Like do you have a responsibility, not just for your decisions, but you know, if the world

01:32:28 you see around you is going against what you believe somewhere deep inside is ethical,

01:32:38 do you have a responsibility to stand up to that, even if it costs you your life or your

01:32:43 wellbeing?

01:32:44 Well, you ask from an existential perspective and there’s lots of different positions that

01:32:49 you could have.

01:32:50 So let me tell you something in the area of what I think I might believe, which comes

01:32:53 out of this tradition.

01:32:57 And it’s this, if you live in a community where people are being dragged down by the

01:33:05 norms of the community rather than elevated, then there’s two things that you have to recognize.

01:33:13 One is that you bear some responsibility for that.

01:33:17 Not necessarily because you chose it, maybe you reviled it, maybe you were against it.

01:33:23 But there’s some way in which we all act in accordance with the norms of our culture.

01:33:29 We all give in to them in some way or another.

01:33:31 And if those norms are broken, then there’s some way in which we’ve allowed ourselves

01:33:37 to be responsible for broken norms.

01:33:41 We’ve become responsible for broken norms.

01:33:42 And I do think you have to face up to that.

01:33:45 I think that, let’s just take gender norms.

01:33:49 Maybe the gender norms are broken.

01:33:51 Maybe the way men and women treat one another or the way men treat women is broken.

01:33:57 Maybe it is.

01:33:59 I’m not making a substantive claim, I’m just saying lots of people say it is.

01:34:03 And if you’re in a culture where those norms take roots, you don’t get to just isolate

01:34:13 yourself and pull yourself out of the culture and think, I don’t have any responsibility.

01:34:19 You’re already a part of the culture.

01:34:21 Even if you’re isolating yourself from it, that’s a way of rejecting the sort of part

01:34:28 you play in the culture, but it’s not a way of getting behind it.

01:34:32 Now you’re playing that role differently.

01:34:35 You’re saying, I don’t want to take responsibility for what’s going on around me.

01:34:41 And that’s a way of taking responsibility by refusing to do it.

01:34:45 I think we’re implicated in whatever’s going on around us.

01:34:50 And if we’re going to do anything in our lives, we ought to recognize that, recognize that

01:34:57 even in situations where you maybe didn’t decide to do it, you could be part of bringing

01:35:03 other people down and then devote yourself to trying to figure out how to act differently

01:35:09 so that the norms update themselves.

01:35:12 And I think this is not a criticism of people.

01:35:16 Alyosha, who we mentioned in The Brothers Karamazov, he’s a character, he’s a kind of

01:35:20 saintly character in The Brothers Karamazov.

01:35:24 But that one crucial moment in that story is when he realizes how awful he’s been being

01:35:33 to someone without ever even intending to do that.

01:35:36 It’s Grushenka, who’s this sort of fascinating woman, and she’s a very erotic woman.

01:35:43 She’s sort of sexual.

01:35:45 And Alyosha, in my reading of it, is kind of attracted to her.

01:35:51 But he’s a young kid, he’s 20 or whatever, and he’s kind of embarrassed about it.

01:35:56 And he lives in the monastery and he’s thinking maybe he wants to be a priest and he’s kind

01:36:00 of embarrassed by it.

01:36:01 So what does he do?

01:36:02 Every time they run across one another in the street, he averts his gaze.

01:36:08 And why is he doing that?

01:36:10 Because he’s kind of embarrassed.

01:36:12 But how does Grushenka experience it?

01:36:14 Well, she knows she’s a fallen woman and she knows that Alyosha has this other position

01:36:18 in society.

01:36:20 So her read on it is, he’s passing judgment on me.

01:36:24 He can see that he doesn’t want to be associated with me.

01:36:27 He can see that I’m a fallen woman.

01:36:29 He knows that in order to maintain his purity, he’s got to avoid me.

01:36:34 That’s not what Alyosha intended to do, but that’s the way it’s experienced.

01:36:39 And so there’s this way he comes to recognize, oh my God, what I’m supposed to do is love

01:36:45 people in Dostoevsky’s view of things.

01:36:48 And what I’m doing instead is dragging this poor woman down.

01:36:51 I’m making her life worse.

01:36:53 I’m making her feel terrible about herself.

01:36:55 And if I actually came to know her, I’d recognize her condition is difficult.

01:36:59 She’s living a difficult life.

01:37:01 She’s making hard choices.

01:37:03 And why don’t I see that in her face instead of this other thing that’s making me want

01:37:09 to avoid her?

01:37:10 And that’s a huge moment.

01:37:11 So, but the idea is that we’re implicated in bringing other people down, whether we

01:37:15 want to be or not, and that’s our condition.

01:37:19 The requirement to understand that is to be almost to a radical degree, be empathetic

01:37:26 and to listen to the world.

01:37:30 And I mean, you brought up sort of gender roles.

01:37:33 It’s not so simple.

01:37:35 All of this is messy.

01:37:37 For example, this is me talking.

01:37:39 It’s clear to me that, for example, the woke culture has bullying built into it, has some

01:37:47 elements of the same kind of evil built into it.

01:37:51 And when you’re part of the wave of wokeness standing up for social rights, you also have

01:37:56 to listen and think, are we going too far?

01:38:00 Are we hurting people?

01:38:02 Are we doing the same things that others that we’re fighting against, that others were doing

01:38:09 in the past?

01:38:10 So it’s not simple once you see that there’s evil being done that is easy to fix.

01:38:19 No, in our society, there’s something about our human nature that just too easily stops

01:38:30 listening to the world, to empathizing with the world.

01:38:33 And we label things as evil.

01:38:35 This is through human history.

01:38:37 This is evil.

01:38:38 You mentioned tribes.

01:38:40 This religious belief is evil.

01:38:42 And so we have to fight it and we become certain and dogmatic about it.

01:38:45 And then in so doing, commit evil onto the world.

01:38:49 It seems like a life that accepts and responsibility for the norms we’re in has to constantly be

01:38:59 sort of questioning yourself and questioning, like listening to the world fully and richly

01:39:05 without being weighed down by any one sort of realization.

01:39:13 You just always constantly have to be thinking about the world.

01:39:16 Am I wrong?

01:39:17 Am I wrong in seeing the world this way?

01:39:18 I mean, the very last thing you said, you’ve constantly got to be thinking about the world.

01:39:23 You’ve constantly got to be listening.

01:39:25 You’ve constantly got to be attending.

01:39:26 And it’s not simple.

01:39:28 All that sounds exactly right to me.

01:39:30 The phrase that rings through my head is another one from the Brothers Karamazov.

01:39:34 Demetri, this passionate sort of sometimes violent brother who is also sort of deeply

01:39:44 cares.

01:39:45 I mean, because he’s passionate, he’s sort of got care through and through, but it’s

01:39:49 breaking him apart.

01:39:51 He says at one point, God and the devil are fighting and the battlefield is the heart

01:39:57 of man.

01:39:58 And I just think, yeah, it’s not simple.

01:40:02 And the idea that there might be a purely good way of doing things is just not our condition.

01:40:08 That everything we do is going to be sort of undermined by some aspect of it.

01:40:13 There’s not going to be a kind of pure good in human existence.

01:40:18 And so it’s sort of required that we’re going to have to be empathetic, that we’re going

01:40:25 to have to recognize that others are dealing with that just as we are.

01:40:32 So I apologize for distracting us.

01:40:33 We were talking about Heidegger and the reason we were distracted is he happened to also

01:40:40 be a Nazi, but he nevertheless has a lot of powerful ideas.

01:40:45 What are the ideas he’s brought to the world?

01:40:47 Okay.

01:40:48 So that’s a big, huge question.

01:40:49 So let me see how much of it I can get on the table.

01:40:54 I mean, the big picture is that Heidegger thinks, and he’s not really wrong to think

01:40:59 this, that the whole history of philosophy from Plato forward, maybe even from the pre

01:41:07 Socratics forward, from like the sixth century BC to now has been grounded on a certain kind

01:41:17 of assumption that it didn’t have the right to make and that it’s led us astray.

01:41:25 And that until we understand the way in which it’s led us astray, we’re not going to be

01:41:30 able to get to grips with the condition we now find ourselves in.

01:41:34 So let me start with what he thinks the condition we now find ourselves in is.

01:41:39 Lots of periods to Heidegger’s views.

01:41:42 I’m just going to sort of mush it all together for the purposes of today.

01:41:46 Heidegger thinks that one of the crucial things that we need to contend with when we think

01:41:52 about what it is to be us now is that the right name for our age is a technological

01:41:59 age.

01:42:00 And what does it mean for our age to be a technological age?

01:42:04 Well, it means that we have an understanding of what it is for anything at all to be at

01:42:11 all that we never really chose, that sort of animating the way we live our lives, that’s

01:42:19 animating our understanding of ourselves and everything else that is quite limited.

01:42:26 And it’s organized around the idea that to be something is to be what’s sitting there

01:42:35 as an infinitely flexible reserve to be optimized and made efficient.

01:42:45 And Heidegger thinks that’s not just the way we think of silicon circuits or the river

01:42:57 when we put a hydroelectric power plant on it, we’re optimizing the flow of the river

01:43:02 so that it makes energy which is infinitely flexible and we can use in any way at all.

01:43:07 It’s the way we understand ourselves too.

01:43:11 We think of ourselves as this reserve of potential that needs to be made efficient and optimized.

01:43:19 And when I talk with my students about it, I ask them, what’s your calendar look like?

01:43:28 What’s the goal of your day?

01:43:30 Is it to get as many things into it as possible?

01:43:32 Is it to feel like I’ve failed unless I’ve made my life so efficient that I’m doing this

01:43:41 and this and this and this and this that I can’t let things go by?

01:43:45 The feeling that I think we all have that there’s some pressure to do that, to relate

01:43:52 to ourselves that way is a clue to what Heidegger thinks the technological age is about.

01:44:00 And he thinks that’s different from every other age in history.

01:44:04 We used to think of ourselves in the 17th century at the beginning of the Enlightenment

01:44:09 as subjects who represent objects, Descartes thought that a subject is something, some

01:44:17 mental sort of realm that represents the world in a certain way.

01:44:23 And we are closed in on ourselves in the sense that we have a special relation to our representations

01:44:30 and that’s what the realm of the subject is.

01:44:32 But others, in the Middle Ages, we were created in the image and likeness of God.

01:44:37 In the pre Socratic age, to be was to be what whooshes up and lingers for a while and fades

01:44:44 away.

01:44:45 The paradigm of what is were thunderstorms and the anger of the gods, Achilles battle

01:44:52 fury and it overtakes everything and stays for a while and then leaves, the flowers blooming

01:44:59 in spring.

01:45:00 And that’s very different from the way we experience ourselves.

01:45:04 And so the question is, what are we supposed to do in the face of that?

01:45:09 And Heidegger thinks that the presupposition that’s motivated everything from the pre Socratics

01:45:17 forward is that there is some entity that’s the ground of the way we understand everything

01:45:28 to be. For the Middle Ages, it was God.

01:45:31 That was the entity that made things be the things that they are.

01:45:35 For the Enlightenment, it was us.

01:45:38 Maybe for Sartre, it’s us.

01:45:40 And Heidegger thinks whatever it is that stands at the ground of what we are, it’s not another

01:45:47 thing.

01:45:48 It’s not another entity.

01:45:49 And we’re relating to it in the wrong way if we think of it like that.

01:45:54 This is partly why I was interested in Meister Eckhart.

01:45:58 He says, what there is is there’s giving going on in the world, and we’re the grateful recipient

01:46:06 of it.

01:46:08 And the giving is like whatever it is, it’s the social norms that we’re thrown into.

01:46:13 We didn’t choose them.

01:46:14 They were given to us.

01:46:15 And that’s the ground.

01:46:16 That is what makes it possible for anything to be intelligible at all.

01:46:20 If we lived outside of communities, if we lived in a world where there were no social

01:46:24 norms at all, nothing would mean anything.

01:46:28 Nothing would have any significance.

01:46:29 Nothing would be regular in the way that things need to be regular in order for there to be

01:46:34 departures or manifestations of that regularity.

01:46:39 So community norms are crucial, but they’re also always updating.

01:46:46 We have some responsibility for what they are and the way in which they’re updating

01:46:52 themselves.

01:46:53 And yet we didn’t ever choose it to be that way.

01:46:57 So those norms are somehow giving significance to us in a way that we’re implicated in,

01:47:05 we have some relation to, and all that gets covered over if you think of us as efficient

01:47:11 resources to be optimized.

01:47:13 Is that a conflicting view that we are resources to be optimized?

01:47:18 Is that somehow deeply conflicting with the fact that there’s a ground that we stand on?

01:47:23 Absolutely.

01:47:24 So what Heidegger thinks is that this is, he calls this the supreme danger of the technological

01:47:30 age is that without ever having chosen it, without ever having decided it, this is the

01:47:36 way we understand what it is to be us.

01:47:39 But he thinks that it’s also, he says, quoting Holderlin, this 18th century German poet,

01:47:46 he says, in the supreme danger lies the saving possibility.

01:47:51 So what does that mean?

01:47:52 It means that this is the understanding that we’ve been thrown into, that we’ve been given.

01:47:58 It’s the gift that was given to us.

01:48:00 It’s supremely dangerous.

01:48:01 If we let ourselves live that way, we’ll destroy ourselves.

01:48:06 But it’s also the saving possibility because if we recognize that we never chose that,

01:48:14 that it was given to us, but also we were implicated in its being given and we could

01:48:20 find a way to supersede it, that it’s the ground, but it’s also updatable.

01:48:26 He calls the ground, the groundless ground.

01:48:30 It’s not like an entity, which is there, solid, stable, like God, who’s eternal and nonchanging.

01:48:38 It’s always updating itself and we’re always involved in its being updated, but we’re only

01:48:43 involved in it in the right way if we listen, like Miles Davis.

01:48:49 So optimization is not a good way to live life.

01:48:55 If you thought that it was obviously clear that that was the relevant value, so obviously

01:49:02 clear that it never even occurred to you to ask whether it was right to think that, then

01:49:07 you would be in danger.

01:49:08 Yeah.

01:49:09 Got it.

01:49:10 So yeah, there is some in this modern technological age, in the full meaning of the word technology,

01:49:16 that’s updated to actual modern age with a lot more technology going on.

01:49:23 It does feel like colleagues of mine in the tech space actually are somehow drawn to that

01:49:29 optimization as if that’s going to save us, as if the thing that truly weighs us down

01:49:35 is the inefficiencies.

01:49:38 Exactly.

01:49:40 And I think if you think about other contexts, like what are the moments when, I mean, we’re

01:49:45 unique in this respect.

01:49:47 This period in history is unlike any previous period.

01:49:51 Nobody ever felt that way.

01:49:53 But think about, but it’s also true that no previous period in history was nihilistic.

01:49:58 So our condition is tied up, that sort of thing is meant to be a response to the felt

01:50:03 lack of a ground.

01:50:05 And so no previous epoch in history felt that way.

01:50:11 They didn’t have our problem.

01:50:14 So it was much more natural to them to experience moments in ways that feel unachievable for

01:50:22 us, what we were calling moments of aliveness before.

01:50:26 Think about the context in which they felt them.

01:50:28 They weren’t efficient, optimized contexts.

01:50:31 Think about the Greeks.

01:50:33 If you ever read Homer, it is a bizarre world back there.

01:50:37 But one of the things that’s bizarre is that they’re so unmotivated by efficiency and optimizing

01:50:45 that the only thing that seems to run through all of the different Greek cultures is the

01:50:52 idea that if some stranger comes by, you better take care of them because Zeus is the god

01:51:02 of strangers and Zeus will be angry.

01:51:04 That’s what they say, right?

01:51:05 But how does it manifest itself?

01:51:07 Odysseus, he’s trying to get home and he gets shipwrecked on an island and he’s trying

01:51:13 to figure out, he’s been at sea for 10 days, he’s starving, he’s bedraggled and he sees

01:51:20 now Sissa, the princess who’s beautiful and he’s like, boy, I better, I don’t know, get

01:51:26 some clothes or something.

01:51:28 I don’t want them to beat me up and kill me.

01:51:31 And so she takes him to the palace.

01:51:34 They have three days of banquets and festivals before they even ask his name.

01:51:41 It’s like, here’s a stranger.

01:51:43 Our job is to celebrate the presence of a stranger because this is where significance

01:51:48 lies.

01:51:49 Now we don’t have to feel that way, but the idea that that’s one of the places where significance

01:51:54 could lie is pretty strongly at odds with the idea that our salvation is going to come

01:51:59 from optimization and efficiency.

01:52:02 Maybe something about the way we live our lives will have that integrated into it.

01:52:08 But it’s at odds with other moments.

01:52:12 Let me ask you a question about Hubert Burt Dreyfus.

01:52:16 He is a friend, a colleague, a mentor of yours, unfortunately no longer with us.

01:52:24 You wrote with him the book titled All Things Shining, Reading the Western Classics to Find

01:52:30 Meaning in a Secular Age.

01:52:33 First, can you maybe speak about who that man was, what you learned from him?

01:52:39 And then we can maybe ask, how do we find through the classics meaning in a secular

01:52:45 age?

01:52:46 Okay.

01:52:47 So, Burt Dreyfus was a very important philosopher of the late 20th, early 21st century.

01:52:58 He died in 2017, about a little over four years ago.

01:53:03 He was my teacher.

01:53:04 I met him in 1989 when I went away to graduate school in Berkeley, that’s where he taught.

01:53:10 He plays an interesting and important role in the history of philosophy in America because

01:53:18 in a period when most philosophers in America and in the English speaking world were not

01:53:26 taking seriously 20th century French and German philosophy, he was.

01:53:31 And he was really probably the most important English speaking interpreter of Heidegger,

01:53:37 the German philosopher that we’re talking about, we’ve been talking about.

01:53:41 He was an incredible teacher, a lot of his influence came through his teaching.

01:53:47 And one of the amazing things about him as a teacher was his sort of mix of intellectual

01:53:59 humility with sort of deep insightful authority.

01:54:05 And he would stand up in front of a class of 300 students, he taught huge classes because

01:54:11 people love to go see him and I taught for him for many years and say, I’ve been reading

01:54:18 this text for 40 years, but the question you asked is one I’ve never asked.

01:54:23 And it would be true.

01:54:26 He would find in what people said, things that were surprising and new to him.

01:54:32 And that’s humility actually.

01:54:33 That is.

01:54:34 Listening to the world.

01:54:36 Absolutely, absolutely.

01:54:38 He was always ready to be surprised by something that someone said and there’s something astonishing

01:54:46 about that.

01:54:47 So his influence was, for people who didn’t know him through his interpretations of these

01:54:52 texts, he wrote about a huge range of stuff.

01:54:55 But for people who did know him, it was through his presence, it was through the way he carried

01:54:59 himself in his life.

01:55:02 And so in any case, that’s who he was.

01:55:05 I graduated after many years as a graduate student.

01:55:10 I didn’t start in philosophy, I started in math, math and computer science, actually.

01:55:14 And then I did a lot of work in computational neuroscience for a few years.

01:55:17 That’s a fascinating journey.

01:55:20 We’ll get to it through our friendly conversation about artificial intelligence, I’m sure.

01:55:26 Because you’re basically fascinated with the philosophy of mind, of the human mind, but

01:55:32 rooted in a curiosity of mind through the, it’s artificial, through the engineering of

01:55:39 mind.

01:55:40 Yeah.

01:55:41 Yeah, that’s right.

01:55:42 So Bert, I mean, the reason I was attracted to him actually is because of his, to begin

01:55:47 with, was because of his criticisms of what was called traditional symbolic AI in the

01:55:52 70s and 80s.

01:55:54 So I came to Berkeley as a graduate student who’d done a lot of math and a lot of computer

01:55:58 science, a lot of computational neuroscience.

01:56:01 I noticed that you interview a lot of people in this world.

01:56:07 And I had a teacher at Brown as an undergraduate, Jim Anderson, who wrote with Jeff Hinton a

01:56:13 big book on neural networks.

01:56:16 So I was interested in that, not so interested in traditional AI, like sort of Lisp programming,

01:56:24 things that went on in the 80s, because it felt sort of, when you made a system do something,

01:56:31 all of a sudden it was an interesting thing to have done.

01:56:34 The fact that you’d solved the problem then made it clear that the problem wasn’t an interesting

01:56:38 one to solve.

01:56:39 That’s right.

01:56:40 And I had that experience.

01:56:42 And Bert had criticisms of symbolic AI, what he called good old fashioned AI, GoFi.

01:56:51 And I was attracted to those criticisms because it felt to me that there was something lacking

01:56:57 in that project.

01:56:58 And I didn’t know what it was.

01:57:00 I just felt its absence.

01:57:03 And then I learned that all his arguments came from his reading of this phenomenological

01:57:10 and existential tradition.

01:57:12 And so I had to try to figure out what those folks were saying.

01:57:15 And it was a long road, let me tell you.

01:57:18 It took me a long time.

01:57:19 But it was because of Bert that I was able to do that.

01:57:21 So I owe him that huge debt of gratitude.

01:57:23 And eventually we went on to write a book together, which was a great experience.

01:57:28 And yes, we published All Things Shining in 2011.

01:57:31 And that’s a book that I definitely would not have had the chutzpah to try to write

01:57:37 if it weren’t for Bert because it was really about great literature in the history of the

01:57:43 West from Homer and Virgil and Dante to Melville.

01:57:47 There’s a huge chapter on Melville, a big chapter on David Foster Wallace who Bert didn’t

01:57:53 care about at all, but I was fascinated by.

01:57:56 And so learning to think that way while writing that book with him was an amazing experience.

01:58:04 So I have to admit, as one of my failings in life, one of many failings is I’ve never

01:58:10 gotten through Moby Dick or any of Melville’s works.

01:58:15 So maybe can you comment on, before we talk about David Foster Wallace, who I have gotten

01:58:21 through, what are some of the sources of meaning in these classics?

01:58:28 Good.

01:58:29 So Moby Dick, I think, is the other great novel of the 19th century.

01:58:33 So the Brothers Karamazov and Moby Dick, and they’re diametrically opposed, which is one

01:58:38 of the really interesting things.

01:58:40 So Dostoyev, the Brothers Karamazov is a kind of existential interpretation of Russian Orthodox

01:58:47 Christianity.

01:58:48 How do you live that way and find joy in your existence?

01:58:52 Moby Dick is not at all about Christianity.

01:58:55 It sort of starts with the observation that the form of Christianity that Ishmael is familiar

01:59:06 with is broken, it’s not gonna work in his living his life.

01:59:11 He has to leave it, he has to go to sea in order to find what needs to happen.

01:59:18 And Ishmael is the boating captain, the whaling boat captain.

01:59:23 So he’s not the captain, that’s Ahab.

01:59:25 Ahab is the captain.

01:59:26 Yeah, right.

01:59:27 Let me back up.

01:59:28 The famous opening line to the book is, call me Ishmael.

01:59:32 And Ishmael is the main character in the book.

01:59:35 He’s a nobody.

01:59:36 He’s you and me.

01:59:37 He’s the everyday guy.

01:59:39 He’s like a nobody on the ship.

01:59:41 He’s like, not the lowest, but certainly not the highest.

01:59:44 He’s right in the middle.

01:59:47 And he’s named Ishmael, which is interesting, because Ishmael is the illegitimate son of

01:59:52 Abraham in the Old Testament.

01:59:55 He is the, I think if I have it right, again, someone will correct me.

02:00:01 I think he’s the one that Islam traces its genesis to.

02:00:08 And so Islam is an Abrahamic religion like Judaism and Christianity, but Judaism and

02:00:15 Christianity trace their lineage through Isaac, the quote, unquote, legitimate son of Abraham.

02:00:22 And Ishmael is the other son of Abraham, who he had with a girlfriend.

02:00:28 And so he’s clearly outside of Christianity in some way.

02:00:33 He’s named after the non Christian sort of son of Abraham.

02:00:39 And the book starts out with this, what does he call it, something like a dark and misty

02:00:46 November mood.

02:00:50 He’s walking along the street and he’s overcome by his, I can’t remember what the word is,

02:00:55 but his hypos.

02:00:56 That’s what he calls them.

02:00:58 He’s in a mood.

02:00:59 He’s depressed.

02:01:00 He’s down.

02:01:01 Things are not going well.

02:01:02 And that’s where he starts.

02:01:05 And he signs up to go on this whaling voyage with this captain Ahab, who is this incredibly

02:01:14 charismatic, deeply disturbing character, who is a captain who’s got lots of history

02:01:22 and wants to go whaling, wants to get whales.

02:01:25 That’s what they do.

02:01:26 They harpoon these whales and bring them back and sell the blubber and the oil and so on.

02:01:31 So he’s kind of rich and he’s famous and he’s powerful, he’s an authority figure.

02:01:37 And he is megalomaniacally obsessed with getting one particular whale, which is called Moby

02:01:44 Dick.

02:01:45 And Moby Dick is like the largest, the whitest, the sort of most terrifying of all the whales.

02:01:51 And Ahab wants to get him because a number of years earlier, he had an encounter with

02:01:56 Moby Dick where Moby Dick bit off his leg.

02:02:00 And he survived, but he had this deeply religious experience in the wake of it.

02:02:08 And he needed to find out what the meaning of that was.

02:02:12 What is the meaning of my suffering?

02:02:14 Who am I such that the world and Moby Dick, this leviathan at the center of it should

02:02:20 treat me this way.

02:02:22 And so his task is not just to go whaling, it’s to figure out the meaning of the universe

02:02:29 through going whaling and having a confrontation with his tormentor, this whale, Moby Dick.

02:02:36 And the confrontation is so weird because Melville points out that whales, their faces

02:02:41 are so huge, their foreheads are so huge, and their eyes are on the side of them that

02:02:49 you can never actually look them in the eye.

02:02:52 And it’s kind of a metaphor for God, like you can’t ever look God in the face.

02:02:57 That’s the sort of traditional thing to say about God.

02:03:00 You can’t find the ultimate meaning of the universe by looking God in the face.

02:03:05 But Ahab wants to.

02:03:07 He says he’s got a pasteboard mask of a face, but I’ll strike through the mask and find

02:03:13 out what’s behind.

02:03:15 And so Ishmael is sort of caught up in this thing, and he’s like going whaling because

02:03:19 he’s in a bad mood, and maybe this will make things better.

02:03:24 And he makes friends with this guy Queequeg.

02:03:28 And Queequeg is a pagan.

02:03:30 He’s from an island in the South Pacific.

02:03:33 And he’s got tattoos all over his body, head to toe.

02:03:38 He’s party colored, like every different color, says Ishmael, is these tattoos.

02:03:45 And they are the writing on his body, he says, of the immutable mysteries of the universe

02:03:54 as understood through his culture.

02:03:58 And so somehow Queequeg is this character who is like not Christian at all.

02:04:06 And he’s powerful in a very different way than Ahab is.

02:04:09 He’s supposed to be the king, he’s the son of the king, and probably his father’s died

02:04:13 by now.

02:04:14 If he was home, he’d be the king.

02:04:15 But he’s off on a voyage too, trying to understand who he is before he goes back and leads his

02:04:19 people.

02:04:21 And he’s a harpooner, the bravest of the people on the ship.

02:04:25 And he’s got the mystery of the universe tattooed on his body, but nobody can understand it.

02:04:32 And it’s through his relation with Queequeg that Ishmael comes to get a different understanding

02:04:39 of what we might be about.

02:04:40 So that’s Moby Dick in a nutshell.

02:04:45 And connected to a book I have read, which is funny, there’s probably echoes that represent

02:04:51 the 20th century now in Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway that also has similar, I guess,

02:05:01 themes, but more personal, more focused on the, I mean, I guess it’s less about God.

02:05:09 It’s almost more like the existentialist version of Moby Dick.

02:05:13 And hence shorter.

02:05:14 And a lot shorter.

02:05:15 Yeah.

02:05:16 Well, Hemingway was brilliant that way.

02:05:18 But do you see echoes and do you find Old Man and the Sea interesting?

02:05:23 It’s been since ninth grade that I read Old Man and the Sea even longer ago than The Fountainhead.

02:05:29 So I didn’t know we were going to go there.

02:05:31 I mean, I find Hemingway interesting, but Hemingway, my general sort of picture of him

02:05:37 is that we have to confront the dangers and the difficulties of our life.

02:05:44 We have to develop in ourselves a certain kind of courage and manliness.

02:05:48 And I think there’s something interesting about that.

02:05:50 He’s for risk in a certain way.

02:05:54 And I think that’s important.

02:05:56 But now I don’t have any right to say this since it’s been so long since I read it.

02:06:02 I do feel like there’s, I don’t remember a sense for quite the tragedy of it.

02:06:11 Maybe there is.

02:06:12 Is it a melancholy novel?

02:06:14 I don’t even remember.

02:06:15 No, it’s, I mean, it has a sense like The Stranger by Camus.

02:06:20 It has a sense of like, this is how life is.

02:06:25 And it has more about old age and that you’re not quite the man you used to be feeling of

02:06:34 like, this is how time passes.

02:06:36 And then the passing of time and how you get older and this is one last fish.

02:06:44 It’s less about this is the fish.

02:06:46 It’s more like this is one last fish.

02:06:49 And asking, who was I as a man, as a human being in this world?

02:06:56 And this one fish helps you ask that question fully.

02:07:00 Wonderful.

02:07:01 But it’s one fish, which is just sort of all the other fish too.

02:07:06 And that is a big difference because for Ahab, no other fish will do than Moby Dick.

02:07:13 It’s gotta be the biggest, the most powerful, the most tormenting.

02:07:18 It’s gotta be the one that you’ve got history with that has defiled you.

02:07:22 And it’s a raucous ride, Moby Dick.

02:07:28 What about David Foster Wallace?

02:07:29 So why is he important to you in the search of meaning in a secular age?

02:07:36 Good.

02:07:37 So I’ll just, just to finish the Moby Dick thing, I think what’s interesting about Melville

02:07:41 is that he thinks our salvation comes not if we get in the right relation to monotheism

02:07:47 or Christianity, but if we get in the right relation to polytheism, to the idea that there’s

02:07:52 not a unity to our existence, but there are lots of little meanings and they don’t cohere.

02:07:59 Sometimes like in Homer, sometimes you’re in love.

02:08:05 Helen’s in love with Paris and they do crazy things.

02:08:09 They go off and run away and the Trojan war begins.

02:08:12 And sometimes you’re in a battle fury.

02:08:15 Love is Aphrodite’s realm.

02:08:16 And the battle fury, that’s Aries realm and that’s a totally different world.

02:08:20 And they’re not even, I mean, they’re related.

02:08:22 There’s a kind of family resemblance, but not much.

02:08:25 Mostly you’re just in different sort of local meaningful worlds.

02:08:30 And Melville seems to think that that’s a thing that we could aim to bring back.

02:08:36 He says we have to lure back the Merry May Day gods of old and lovingly enthrone them

02:08:43 in the now egotistical sky, the now unhaunted hill.

02:08:48 That’s what we live in this world where hills aren’t haunted with significance anymore.

02:08:52 And the sky is just a bunch of stuff that we’re studying with physics and astrophysics

02:08:57 and stuff.

02:08:58 But they used to be awe inspiring and we have to figure out how to get in that relation

02:09:04 to them, but not by trying to give a unity to our existence through developing habits

02:09:09 and practices that get written on our body.

02:09:12 And so his is about the end of Judeo Christianity and the sort of Roman appropriation of it.

02:09:19 In Wallace, one of the things I think is so interesting about him is that I think he is

02:09:25 a great observer of the contemporary world.

02:09:29 And he’s a very funny writer, he’s really funny.

02:09:33 But he’s a great observer of the contemporary world and what he thought was at the core

02:09:38 of the contemporary world was this constant temptation to diversion through entertainment.

02:09:44 That’s a different story than Heidegger’s story about efficiency and optimization, but

02:09:49 it’s the other side of it.

02:09:51 What is this temptation sort of diverting us from?

02:09:55 The ability to be more efficient.

02:09:58 So you’re tempted to go watch some stupid film or television show or something that’s

02:10:05 dumb and not really very interesting, but you read that temptation as a temptation precisely

02:10:11 in virtue of it’s taking you away from your optimizing your existence.

02:10:16 And so I think there are two sides of the same coin.

02:10:18 I think he’s brilliant at describing it.

02:10:20 I think he thought it was a desperate position to be in, that it was something that we needed

02:10:26 to confront and find a way out of and his characters are trying to do that.

02:10:33 And I think there’s two different David Foster Wallace’s, one, I mean, David Foster Wallace

02:10:39 committed suicide and it’s very sad.

02:10:42 And he clearly did have sort of, there was a physiological basis to his condition.

02:10:49 He knew it, he was treating it for decades with medication, he had electroshock therapy

02:10:55 a number of times, it’s just very, very sad story.

02:11:00 When I decided that we were going to write about David Foster Wallace, the first thing

02:11:04 I was worried about is can you, like obviously a motivating factor, maybe the motivating

02:11:12 factor in his committing suicide was his physiological condition.

02:11:17 But there was a question, could you think, I mean, he’s obsessed with the condition with

02:11:25 what we need to do to achieve our salvation, to live well, to make our lives worth living.

02:11:32 And he clearly in the end felt like he couldn’t do that.

02:11:37 So in addition to the physiological thing, which probably most of it, the question for

02:11:41 me was, could you find in his writing what he was identifying as the thing we needed

02:11:49 to be doing that he nevertheless felt we couldn’t be doing?

02:11:54 And he talks as if that’s the difficulty for him.

02:12:00 So that’s one side of him and I did want to find that.

02:12:03 I think there’s another side of him that’s very different, but you were going to ask

02:12:06 something.

02:12:07 No, please, what’s the other side?

02:12:08 I mean, what I write about in the chapter mostly is what I think he’s got as our saving

02:12:19 possibility.

02:12:21 He thinks our saving possibility, he says this in a graduation speech that he gave to

02:12:25 Kenyon, is that we have the freedom to interpret situations however we like.

02:12:33 So what’s the problem case for him?

02:12:36 He says, look, the problem case, we have it all the time.

02:12:40 You get pissed off at the world.

02:12:44 Some big SUV cuts you off on the highway and you’re pissed off and you might express your

02:12:50 anger with one finger or another directed at that person.

02:12:56 And he says, but actually, you’re being pissed off as the result of your having made an assumption.

02:13:05 And the assumption is that that action was directed at you.

02:13:08 Like the assumption is that you’re the center of the universe and you shouldn’t assume that.

02:13:14 And the way to talk yourself out of it, he says, is to recognize the possibility that

02:13:21 maybe that wasn’t an action directed at you.

02:13:25 Maybe that guy is racing to the hospital to take care of his dying spouse who’s been there

02:13:34 suffering from cancer, or maybe he’s on the way to pick up a sick child, or maybe he’s…

02:13:43 And it’s not an action directed, that was your assumption, not something that was inherent

02:13:47 in the situation.

02:13:49 And I think there’s something interesting about that.

02:13:52 I think there’s something right about that.

02:13:55 At the same time, I don’t think he speaks as if we can just spin out these stories and

02:14:04 whether they’re true or not doesn’t matter.

02:14:07 What matters is that they free us from this assumption.

02:14:11 And I think they only free us from this assumption if they’re true.

02:14:15 Like sometimes the guy really did direct it at you and that’s part of the situation.

02:14:20 And you can’t pretend that it’s not part of the situation.

02:14:23 You have to find the right way of dealing with that situation.

02:14:25 So you have to listen to what’s actually happening and then you have to figure out how to make

02:14:31 it right.

02:14:32 And I think he thinks that we have too much freedom.

02:14:35 He thinks that you don’t have to listen to the situation, you can just tell whatever

02:14:38 story you like about it.

02:14:40 And I think that’s actually too tough.

02:14:43 I don’t think we have that kind of freedom.

02:14:47 And he writes these sort of incredibly moving letters when he’s trying to write The Pale

02:14:51 King, which is the unfinished novel that really sort of drove him to distraction.

02:14:58 At the center of the novel is this character who…

02:15:03 One of the characters at the center of the novel is a guy who’s doing the most boring

02:15:08 thing you could possibly imagine.

02:15:11 He is an IRS tax examiner.

02:15:14 He’s going over other people’s tax returns, trying to figure out whether they followed

02:15:19 the rules or not.

02:15:21 And just the idea of doing that for eight hours a day is just terrifying.

02:15:27 And he puts this guy in a enormous warehouse that extends for miles where person after

02:15:34 person after person is in rows of desks, sort of nameless, each of them doing this task.

02:15:42 So he’s in nowhere doing nothing and it’s got to be intensely boring.

02:15:48 And now the main character is trying to teach himself to do that.

02:15:53 And the question is, how do you put up with the boredom?

02:15:56 How do you put up with this onslaught of meaninglessness?

02:16:01 And the main character is able to confront that condition with such bliss that he literally

02:16:11 levitates from happiness while he’s going over other people’s tax returns.

02:16:17 And that’s my metaphor for what I think Wallace must have imagined we have to try to aspire

02:16:22 to.

02:16:24 And I think that’s unlivable.

02:16:25 I think that’s not an ambition that we could achieve.

02:16:29 I think there’s something else we could achieve.

02:16:31 And the other thing that we can achieve that I think is something that he also is onto

02:16:38 but doesn’t write about as often is something more like achieving peak moments of significance

02:16:47 in a situation when something great happens.

02:16:50 And he writes about this in an article about Roger Federer.

02:16:54 He loved tennis.

02:16:55 Are you a tennis lover?

02:16:57 I’m not a lover of tennis, but I played tennis for 15 years and so on.

02:17:01 I don’t love it the way people love baseball, for example, I see the beauty in it, the artistry.

02:17:07 I just liked it as a sport.

02:17:09 Good.

02:17:10 Okay.

02:17:11 Well, I didn’t play much tennis, but I hit a ball around every once in a while as a kid.

02:17:14 And I always thought it was boring to watch.

02:17:17 But reading David Foster Wallace on Roger Federer, you’re like, wow, I’ve been missing

02:17:22 something.

02:17:23 And the article which appeared in the New York Times Magazine was called Roger Federer

02:17:27 as Religious Experience.

02:17:28 Oh, wow.

02:17:29 There you go.

02:17:30 And he says, look, there’s something astonishing about watching someone who’s got a body like

02:17:36 us and having a body as a limitation.

02:17:40 It’s like the sight of sores and pains and agony and exhaustion.

02:17:47 And it’s the thing that dies in the end.

02:17:51 And so it’s what we have to confront.

02:17:53 I mean, there’s also joys that go along with having a body.

02:17:56 Like if you didn’t have a body, there’d be no sex.

02:17:58 If you didn’t have a body, there’d be no sort of physical excitement and so on.

02:18:04 But somehow having a body is essentially a limitation that when you watch someone who’s

02:18:11 got one and is extraordinary at the way they use it, you can recognize how that limitation

02:18:17 can be to some degree transcended.

02:18:20 And that’s what we can get when we watch Federer or some other great athlete sort of doing

02:18:26 these things that transcend the limitations of their bodies.

02:18:31 And that that’s the kind of peak experience that we’re capable of that could be a kind

02:18:37 of salvation.

02:18:38 That’s a very different story.

02:18:40 And I think that’s a livable story.

02:18:42 And I don’t know if it would have saved him, but I feel like I wish he’d developed that

02:18:48 side of the story more.

02:18:50 Can we talk about…

02:18:51 And first of all, let me just comment that I deeply appreciate that you said you were

02:18:57 going to say something.

02:18:59 The fact that you’re listening to me is amazing.

02:19:01 Like that you care about other humans and I really appreciate that.

02:19:05 We should be in this way listening to the world.

02:19:07 So that’s a meta comment about many of the things we’re talking about.

02:19:14 But you mentioned something about levitating and a task that is infinitely boring and contrasting

02:19:20 that with essentially levitating on a task that is great, like the highest achievement

02:19:28 of this physical limiting body in playing tennis.

02:19:33 Now I often say this, I don’t know where I heard David Foster Wallace say this, but he

02:19:38 said that the key to life is to be unborable, that is the embodiment of this philosophy.

02:19:44 And when people ask me for advice, young students, I don’t find this interesting, I don’t find

02:19:52 this interesting, how do I find the thing I’m passionate for?

02:19:55 This would be very interesting to explore because you kind of say that that may not

02:19:59 be a realizable thing to do, which is to be unborable.

02:20:04 So my advice usually is life is amazing, like you should be able to, you should strive to

02:20:11 discover the joy, the levitation in everything.

02:20:17 And the thing you get stuck on for a longer period of time, that might be the thing you

02:20:22 should stick to, but everything should be full of joy.

02:20:26 So that kind of cynicism of saying life is boring is a thing that will prevent you from

02:20:33 discovering the thing that will give you deep meaning and joy, but you’re saying being unborable

02:20:42 is not actionable for a human being.

02:20:45 So okay, excellent question, deep question.

02:20:49 And you might think because of the title of the book that Bert and I wrote, All Things

02:20:56 Shining, that I think all things are shining.

02:21:02 But actually, I think it’s an unachievable goal to be unborable.

02:21:07 I do believe that you’re right, that a lot of times when people are bored with something,

02:21:14 it’s because they haven’t tried hard enough.

02:21:16 And I do think quite a lot of what makes people bored with something is that they haven’t

02:21:21 paid attention well enough and that they haven’t listened, as you were saying.

02:21:27 So I do think there’s something to that.

02:21:30 I think that’s a deep insight.

02:21:32 On the other hand, the perfection of that insight is that nothing is ever anything less

02:21:40 than joyful.

02:21:42 And I actually think that Dostoevsky and Melville both agree, but in very different ways, that

02:21:52 life involves a wide range of moods and that all of them are important.

02:21:59 It involves grief.

02:22:01 I think when someone dies, it’s appropriate to grieve.

02:22:05 And it’s not in the first instance joyful.

02:22:09 It’s related to joy because it makes the joys you feel when you feel them more intense.

02:22:17 But it makes them more intense by putting you in the position of experiencing the opposite.

02:22:24 And it’s only because we’re capable of a wide range of passionate responses to situations

02:22:31 that I think the significances can be as meaningful as they are.

02:22:36 So Melville, again, has this sort of interest.

02:22:41 Let’s just say the guilt and the grief in the brothers Karamazov.

02:22:45 Alyosha loses his mentor, Father Zosima.

02:22:49 He’s grieving.

02:22:50 It’s super important that he’s grieving.

02:22:52 He has a religious conversion on the basis of grieving where he sees the deep beauty

02:22:59 of everything that is, but it comes through the grief, not by avoiding the grief.

02:23:04 And Melville says something like, Ishmael says something like, he says, I’m like a Catskill

02:23:10 mountain eagle, the Catskills mountains nearby.

02:23:13 He says, who’s flying high above the earth, going over the peaks and down into the valleys.

02:23:20 I have these ups and these downs, but they’re all invested with a kind of significance.

02:23:26 They all happen at an enormously high height because it’s through the mountains that I’m

02:23:31 flying.

02:23:32 And even when I’m down, it’s a way of being up.

02:23:35 But it’s really down.

02:23:37 It’s just that it’s a way of being up because it makes the ups even upper.

02:23:40 Well, I guess then the perfectionism of that can be destructive.

02:23:46 I tend to see, for example, grief, a loss of love as part of love in that it’s a celebration

02:23:56 of the richness of feelings you had when you had the love.

02:24:02 So it’s all part of the same experience, but if you turn it into an optimization problem

02:24:07 where everything can be unboreable, then that can in itself be destructive.

02:24:13 I heard this interview with David Foster Wallace on the internet where it’s a video of him

02:24:20 and there is like a foreign sounding reporter asking him questions.

02:24:24 I think there’s an accent of some sort, German, I think, something like that.

02:24:29 And I don’t know, it just painted a picture of such a human person.

02:24:32 We were talking about listening.

02:24:35 The interviewer, if I may say, wasn’t a very good one in the beginning.

02:24:41 So she kind of walked in doing the usual journalistic things of just kind of generic questions and

02:24:47 just kind of asking very basic questions.

02:24:50 But he brought out something in her over time.

02:24:53 And he was so sensitive and so sensitive to her and also sensitive to being a thinking

02:25:00 and acting human in this world that just painted such a beautiful picture that people should

02:25:05 go definitely check out.

02:25:07 It made me really sad that we don’t get this kind of picture of other thinkers, all of

02:25:14 the ones we’ve been talking about, just that almost this little accidental view of this

02:25:19 human being.

02:25:20 I don’t know.

02:25:21 It was a beautiful one and I guess there’s not many like that even of him.

02:25:25 Yeah.

02:25:26 Yeah.

02:25:27 No, I think he was more than his writing ability, which was extraordinary.

02:25:33 He had developed a style that was, I think, unlike anyone else’s style, was his sensitivity

02:25:42 to other people and to sort of what he was there to pay attention to.

02:25:51 In one of his essays, I think it’s the one called An Incredibly Fun Thing I’ll Never

02:25:57 Do Again.

02:25:58 Do you know that one about cruise ships?

02:26:00 I think he describes himself as this sort of roving eyeball that just sort of walks

02:26:07 around the ship noticing things and he was incredibly good at that.

02:26:14 But I also worry that that reflects something that you find in Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov.

02:26:20 Ivan, I don’t know if you remember this part, when he’s away at school, at college as a

02:26:27 young boy, he makes money by going around town to where tragic events have occurred.

02:26:35 Someone just got run over by a carriage or something just happened.

02:26:40 Being the first one there, he always knows somehow where these things are going to happen

02:26:45 and writing about it, giving this really good description and then signing it eyewitness.

02:26:54 It’s as if Ivan’s understanding of his life is that he was supposed to be a witness to

02:27:01 it.

02:27:02 He was supposed to see others but not get involved.

02:27:05 He never is interested in trying to keep the bad things from happening.

02:27:09 He just wants to report on them when he sees them.

02:27:12 And I think that he’s an incredibly isolated person, character, and it’s his isolation

02:27:19 from others, from the love of others and his inability, his desire not to love others because

02:27:27 that attaches him to someone that I think is really at the ground of his condition.

02:27:34 And I think that aim to be isolated, which many people have nowadays.

02:27:39 You see it in The Underground Man too, just sort of taking yourself out of the world because

02:27:45 you don’t wanna have to take responsibility for being involved with others.

02:27:50 I think that’s a bad move and I do worry that maybe, I mean, I never knew David Foster Wallace,

02:27:57 I have no right to comment on his life.

02:28:01 But he portrays himself in that one episode as a person who does that and I think that’s

02:28:08 dangerous.

02:28:09 Yeah, there’s some sense in which being sensitive to the world, like I find myself, the source

02:28:13 of joy for me is just being really sensitive to the world, to experience.

02:28:19 There’s some way, it’s quite brilliant what you’re saying that that could be isolating.

02:28:25 It’s like Darwin studying a new kind of species on an island you don’t want to interfere with.

02:28:32 You find it so beautiful that you don’t want to interfere with its beauty.

02:28:36 So there is some sense in which that isolates you and then you find yourself deeply alone,

02:28:45 away from the experiences that bring you joy.

02:28:49 And that could be destructive.

02:28:52 That’s fascinating how that works and in his case, of course, some of it is just chemicals

02:29:00 in his brain, but some of it is the path, his philosophy of life let him down.

02:29:09 And that’s the danger with Nietzsche too and gazing into the abyss.

02:29:16 Your job is a difficult one because doing philosophy changes you and you may not know

02:29:25 how it changes you until you’re changed and you look in the mirror.

02:29:32 You wrote a piece in MIT Tech Review saying that AI can’t be an artist.

02:29:39 Creativity is and always will be a human endeavor.

02:29:44 You mentioned BERT and criticism of symbolic AI.

02:29:49 Can you explain your view of criticizing the possible, the capacity for artistry and creativity

02:29:55 in our robot friends?

02:29:59 Yeah, I can try.

02:30:03 So to make the argument, you have to have in mind what counts as art, what counts as

02:30:13 a creative artistic act.

02:30:17 I take it that just doing something new isn’t sufficient.

02:30:24 We say that good art is original, but not everything that’s never been done before is

02:30:29 good art.

02:30:31 So there has to be more than just doing something new.

02:30:36 It has to be somehow doing something new in a way that speaks to the audience or speaks

02:30:44 to some portion of the audience at least.

02:30:47 It has to be doing something new in such a way that some people who see or interact with

02:30:55 it can see themselves anew in it.

02:31:00 So I think that art is inherently a creative act, sorry, a kind of communicative act that

02:31:09 it involves a relation with other people.

02:31:13 So think about the conditions for that working.

02:31:19 I talk in that article, I can’t remember, something about new music.

02:31:23 I think I don’t talk about Stravinsky, but let’s say Stravinsky.

02:31:28 Stravinsky performs the Rite of Spring and there’s riots.

02:31:34 It is new and people hate it.

02:31:39 People can’t…

02:31:40 It sounds like a cacophony.

02:31:42 It sounds awful.

02:31:44 It’s written according to principles that are not like the principles of music composition

02:31:48 that people are familiar with.

02:31:51 So in some ways it’s a failed communicative act.

02:31:55 But as Nietzsche says about his own stuff, we now can recognize that it wasn’t a failed

02:32:02 communicative act, it just hadn’t reached its time yet.

02:32:09 And now that way of composing music is like it’s in Disney movies.

02:32:16 It’s so part of our musical palette that we don’t have that response.

02:32:22 It changed us.

02:32:23 It changed the way we understand what counts as good music.

02:32:27 So that’s a deep communicative act.

02:32:29 It didn’t perform its communication in that opening moment, but it did ultimately establish

02:32:38 a new understanding for all of us of what counts as good art.

02:32:42 And that’s the kind of deep communication that I think good art can do.

02:32:47 It can change our understanding of ourselves and of what a good manifestation of something

02:32:55 of ourselves in a certain domain is.

02:32:57 And you use the term socially embedded, that art is fundamentally socially embedded.

02:33:04 And I really liked that term because I see like my love for artificial intelligence and

02:33:10 the kind of system that we can bring to the world that could make for an interesting and

02:33:16 more lively world and one that enriches human beings is one where the AI systems are deeply

02:33:22 socially embedded.

02:33:26 And that actually is in contrast to the way artificial intelligence have been talked about

02:33:31 throughout its history and certainly now, both on the robotic side and the AI side,

02:33:36 it’s especially on the tech sector where the businesses around AI, they kind of want to

02:33:42 create systems that are like servants to humans.

02:33:48 And then humans do all the beautiful human messiness of where art will be part.

02:33:55 I think that there is no reason why you can’t integrate AI systems in the way you integrate

02:34:02 new humans to the picture.

02:34:04 There are just the full diversity and the flaws, all of that adds to the thing.

02:34:12 Some people might say that AlphaZero is this system from DeepMind that was able to solve

02:34:22 the game, it beat the best people in the world at the game of Go with no supervision from

02:34:26 humans.

02:34:28 But more interestingly to me on the side of creativity, it was able to surprise a lot

02:34:32 of grandmasters with the kind of moves that came up with.

02:34:37 To me, that’s not the creativity, the magic that’s socially embedded that we’re talking

02:34:42 about.

02:34:43 That is merely revealing the limitations of humans to discover.

02:34:51 It’s like to solve a particular aspect of a math problem.

02:34:55 I think creativity is not just even socially embedded, it’s the way you’re saying is part

02:35:05 of the communicative act, it’s the interactive, it’s the dance with the culture.

02:35:11 And so it has to be like for AlphaZero to be creative, truly creative, it would have

02:35:18 to be integrated in a way where it has a Twitter account and it becomes aware of the impact

02:35:26 it has on the other grandmasters with the moves that’s coming up.

02:35:30 And one of the fascinating things about AlphaZero, which I just love so much is, I don’t know

02:35:37 if you’re familiar with chess.

02:35:38 I am, yeah.

02:35:39 Okay, okay.

02:35:40 So it does certain things that most chess players, even at the highest level don’t do,

02:35:47 which is it sacrifices pieces, it gives pieces away and then waits like 10 moves before it

02:35:54 pays you back.

02:35:55 So it does, to me, that’s beautiful.

02:35:58 That’s art if only AlphaZero understood the artistry of that, which is I’m going to mess

02:36:05 with you psychologically because I’m going to do two things.

02:36:10 One make you feel overconfident that you’re doing well, but actually also once you realize

02:36:16 you are playing AlphaZero that is much better than you, you’re going to feel really nervous

02:36:21 about what’s on the way, like this is the calm before the storm.

02:36:24 And that creates a beautiful psychological masterpiece of this chess game.

02:36:30 If only AlphaZero was then messing with you additionally to that, like and was cognizant

02:36:36 of us doing that, then it becomes art.

02:36:39 And then it’s integrated into society in that way.

02:36:42 And I believe it doesn’t have to actually have an understanding of the world in the

02:36:50 way that humans have.

02:36:51 It can have a different one.

02:36:52 It can be like a child is clueless about so many aspects of the world and it’s okay.

02:36:58 And that’s part of the magic of it, just being flawed, lacking understanding in all interesting

02:37:04 kinds of ways, but interacting.

02:37:06 And so to me it’s possible to create art for AI, but exactly as you’re saying in a deeply

02:37:14 socially embedded way.

02:37:16 Good.

02:37:17 Well, I think we agree, but let me just highlight the thing that makes me think that we agree,

02:37:23 which is that I think for people, for a community to allow themselves to recognize in a certain

02:37:34 kind of creative act, I’m thinking of Stravinsky here, but we could think of a chess thing,

02:37:40 to recognize in a certain kind of creative act a new and admirable worthy way of thinking

02:37:47 about what’s significant in the situation, you have to believe that it wasn’t random.

02:37:54 You have to believe that Stravinsky wrote that way because he was receptive to what

02:38:01 needed to be said now.

02:38:05 And so you said, if only AlphaZero could do all this by virtue of recognizing that this

02:38:14 was the thing that needed to be done, then it would be socially embedded in the right

02:38:18 way.

02:38:19 And I think I agree with that.

02:38:21 First of all, it’s possible to do in a constrained domain, a game playing domain, go or chess,

02:38:29 go is more complicated than chess, but either one of them, because there really are only

02:38:33 a finite range of possibilities if you make the game end at a certain point, it’s a combinatorial

02:38:42 problem in the end.

02:38:43 Now, obviously, AlphaZero doesn’t solve the problem in a combinatorial way.

02:38:50 That would be take too much energy, you couldn’t do it, it explodes the problem.

02:38:58 So it does it in this other way that’s interesting, this pattern recognition way, roughly.

02:39:03 And in that context, it may well be that it can see, having had lots and lots of experience

02:39:12 in the training stuff against itself or against another version of itself, it can see that

02:39:17 the sacrifice here is gonna pay dividends down the road.

02:39:21 See, I put that in quotation marks, that’s to say it’s got a high weight to this move

02:39:29 here as a result of experience in the past where that move down the line led to this

02:39:36 improvement.

02:39:38 So in that finite context, I think the game players can trust it and they talk that way.

02:39:46 It’s got a kind of authority.

02:39:49 They say, I’ve read some people who said about AlphaZero when it played Go, it’s like it’s

02:39:55 playing from the future.

02:39:58 It’s making these moves that are just outlandish and there’s a kind of brilliance to them that

02:40:06 we can’t really understand, we’ll be catching up to it forever.

02:40:09 I think in that context, it’s mapped the domain and the domain is mappable because it’s a

02:40:15 combinatorial problem roughly.

02:40:18 But in something like music or art of a nonfinite form, it feels to me like it’s a little harder

02:40:30 for me to understand what the analog of our trusting that Stravinsky has recognized something

02:40:37 about us that demands that he write this way, that doesn’t seem like a finite thing in quite

02:40:44 the same way.

02:40:45 So now we could ask the system, why did you do it?

02:40:48 We could ask Stravinsky, why did you do it?

02:40:52 And maybe it will have answers, but then it’s involved in a kind of communicative act.

02:40:59 And I think lots of times artists will often say, look, I can’t communicate better than

02:41:05 what I’ve done in the piece of work.

02:41:07 That is the statement.

02:41:08 Yeah, we humans aren’t able to answer the why either, but I do think the question here

02:41:15 is, well, first of all, language is finite, certainly when expressed through a tweet.

02:41:23 So it is also a combinatorial problem.

02:41:25 The question is how much more difficult it is than chess.

02:41:29 And I think all the same ways that we see the solutions to chess is deeply surprising

02:41:38 when it was first addressed with IBM D Blue and then with AlphaGo and AlphaGo Zero, AlphaZero.

02:41:46 I think in that same way, language can be addressed and communication can be addressed.

02:41:53 I don’t see, having done this podcast, many reasons why everything I’m doing, especially

02:42:00 as a digital being on the internet, can’t be done by an AI system eventually.

02:42:06 So I think we’re being very human centric in thinking we’re special.

02:42:11 I think one of the hardest things is the physical space, actually operating touch and the magic

02:42:19 of body language and the music of all of that, because it’s so deeply integrated through

02:42:24 the long evolutionary process of what it’s like to be on earth.

02:42:29 What is fundamentally different and AI can catch up on is the way we apply our evolutionary

02:42:38 history on the way we act on the internet, on the way we act online.

02:42:44 And as more and more of the world becomes digital, you’re now operating in a space where

02:42:48 AI is behind much less so, like we’re both starting at zero.

02:42:56 I think that’s super interesting.

02:42:58 Do you know this, do you know this author, Brian Christian, is that someone you’ve ever

02:43:02 heard of?

02:43:03 That sounds familiar.

02:43:04 He’s a guy who competed in the, what is it called?

02:43:08 The Loebner Competition.

02:43:09 The Loebner Prize.

02:43:10 Yeah.

02:43:11 Yeah, the Turing Test thing.

02:43:13 And I’ll just tell you the story, but I think it’s directly related to the last thing you

02:43:17 said about where we’re starting in the same place.

02:43:21 He competed in this competition, but not, he didn’t enter a program that was supposed

02:43:27 to try to pass the Turing Test.

02:43:30 The Turing Test, there’s three people, there’s the judge, there’s the program, and then there’s

02:43:36 someone who’s a human, the way they do it.

02:43:38 And the judge has got to figure out by asking questions, which is the computer and which

02:43:42 is the human.

02:43:43 So little known fact, there’s two prizes in that competition.

02:43:47 There’s the most human computer prize, that’s the computer that wins the most.

02:43:51 And then there’s the most human human prize.

02:43:54 And he competed for the most human human prize, and he won it, he kept winning it.

02:44:00 And so he tried to think about what it is that you have to be able to do in order to

02:44:07 convince judges that you’re human instead of a computer.

02:44:11 And that’s an interesting question, I think.

02:44:14 And what he came to, my takeaway from his version of this story is that it is true that

02:44:22 computers are winning these contests more and more as technology progresses.

02:44:29 But there’s two possible explanations for that.

02:44:32 One is that the computers are becoming more human, and the other is that the humans are

02:44:38 becoming more like computers.

02:44:41 And he says, actually, the more we live our lives in this technological world where we

02:44:52 have to moderate our behavior so that it’s readable by something that’s effectively a

02:45:01 computer, the more we become like that.

02:45:04 And he says, it happens even when you’re not interacting with a computer.

02:45:09 He says, have you ever been on the phone with a call center?

02:45:14 And they’re going through their script, and that’s what they’ve got to do.

02:45:18 They’ve got to go through their script because that’s how they keep their job.

02:45:21 And they ask you this question, you’ve got to answer it.

02:45:24 And it’s as if you’re no longer interacting with a person, even though it’s a person,

02:45:29 because they’ve so given up everything that’s involved normally with being able to make

02:45:34 judgments and decisions and act in situations and take responsibility.

02:45:38 And so I think that’s the other side of it.

02:45:43 It is true that technology is amazing and can solve huge ranges of problems and do fantastic

02:45:51 things.

02:45:52 But it’s also true that we’re changing ourselves in response to it.

02:45:57 And the one thing I’m worried about is that we’re changing ourselves in such a way that

02:46:03 the norms for what we’re aiming at are being changed to move in the direction of this sort

02:46:10 of efficiently and in an optimized way solving a problem and move away from this other kind

02:46:16 of thing that we were calling aliveness or significance.

02:46:22 And so that’s the other side of the story.

02:46:25 And that’s the worry.

02:46:26 But it’s very possible that there is, for you and I, the ancient dinosaurs, we may not

02:46:32 see the aliveness in TikTok, the aliveness in the digital space, that you see it as us

02:46:39 being dragged into this over optimized world, but that may be this is in fact, it is a world

02:46:49 that opens up opportunities to truly experience life.

02:46:55 And there’s interesting to think about all the people growing up now, who their early

02:47:01 experience of life is always mediated through a digital device, not always, but more and

02:47:06 more often mediated through that device, and how we’re both evolving, the technology is

02:47:11 evolving and the humans are evolving to then maybe open a door to a whole world where the

02:47:16 humans and the technology or AI systems are interacting as equals.

02:47:22 So now I’m going to agree with you.

02:47:24 You might be surprised that I’m going to agree with you, but I think that’s exactly right.

02:47:28 I don’t want to be the person who’s saying our job is to resist all of this stuff.

02:47:34 I don’t want to be a Luddite.

02:47:35 That’s not my goal.

02:47:37 The goal is to point out that in the supreme danger lies the saving power.

02:47:46 The point is to get in the right relation to that understanding of what we are.

02:47:52 That allows us to find the joy in it.

02:47:54 And I think that’s a hard thing to do.

02:47:56 It’s hard to understand even what we’re supposed to be doing when we do it.

02:48:00 Maybe I, more than you, am not of the right generation to be able to do that.

02:48:06 But I do think that’s got to be the move.

02:48:07 The move is not to resist it.

02:48:09 It’s not a nostalgic move.

02:48:11 It’s an attempt to push people to get in the relation to it that’s not the relation of

02:48:17 it controlling you and depriving you of stuff, but of your recognizing some great joy that

02:48:22 can be found in it.

02:48:24 When I interact with legged robots, I see there’s magic there.

02:48:29 And I just feel like the person who hears the music when others don’t.

02:48:34 And I don’t know what that is.

02:48:35 And I’d love to explore that.

02:48:38 Because it’s almost like the future talking.

02:48:43 And I’m trying to hear what it’s saying.

02:48:45 Is this a dangerous world or is this a beautiful world?

02:48:48 Well, I can certainly understand your enthusiasm for that.

02:48:51 Those used to be things that I found overwhelmingly exciting.

02:48:56 And I’m not sort of closed off from that anymore.

02:49:01 I mean, I’m not now closed off from that even though my views are changed and I don’t work

02:49:06 in that world.

02:49:09 But I think it’s interesting to figure out what’s at the ground of that response.

02:49:15 We talked about meaning quite a bit throughout in a secular age, but let me ask you the big

02:49:21 ridiculous question, almost too big.

02:49:25 What is the meaning of this thing we got going on?

02:49:28 What is the meaning of life?

02:49:32 You’re saving the softball for the end, is that it?

02:49:34 Easy one.

02:49:35 Easy one.

02:49:36 I don’t know what the meaning of life is.

02:49:37 I think there’s something that characterizes us that’s not the thing that people normally

02:49:44 think characterizes us.

02:49:46 The traditional thing to say and the philosophical tradition, even in the AI tradition, which

02:49:51 is a kind of manifestation of philosophy from Plato forward.

02:49:57 The traditional thing to say is that what characterizes us is our rationality, that

02:50:02 we’re intelligent beings, that we’re the ones that think.

02:50:06 And I think that’s certainly part of what characterizes us.

02:50:11 But I think there’s more to it too.

02:50:14 I think we’re capable of experiencing simultaneously the complete and utter ungroundedness of everything

02:50:27 that’s meaningful in our existence and also the real significance of it.

02:50:34 And that sounds like a contradiction.

02:50:38 How could it really be significant and not be based on anything?

02:50:42 But I think that’s the contradiction that somehow characterizes us.

02:50:45 And I think that we’re the being that sort of has to hold that weird mystery before us

02:50:52 and live in the light of it.

02:50:55 That’s the thing that I think is really at our core.

02:50:59 And so how do we do that?

02:51:00 I will say this one thing.

02:51:03 And I learned it from a philosopher, from a guy named Albert Borgmann, who’s a German

02:51:08 philosopher who lives in Montana now, taught in Montana for his whole career.

02:51:13 And I say this to my students at Harvard now.

02:51:16 He said, this is the way that I think about my life, and I hope you’ll think about your

02:51:21 life too.

02:51:22 He said, you should think about your life hoping that there will be many moments in

02:51:30 it about which you can say, there’s no place I’d rather be, there’s no thing I’d rather

02:51:39 be doing, there’s nobody I’d rather be with, and this I will remember well.

02:51:49 And I think if you can aim to fill your life with moments like that, it will be a meaningful

02:51:54 one.

02:51:55 I don’t know if that’s the meaning of life, but I think if you can hold that before you,

02:51:59 it’ll help to clarify this mystery and this sort of bizarre situation in which we find

02:52:04 ourselves.

02:52:05 Sean, this conversation was incredible, and those four requirements have certainly been

02:52:11 fulfilled for me.

02:52:13 This was a magical moment in that way, and I will remember it well.

02:52:19 Thank you so much.

02:52:20 It’s an honor that you spend your valuable time with me.

02:52:22 This was great.

02:52:23 Thank you.

02:52:24 Thank you for having me, Lex.

02:52:25 I really, really enjoyed it.

02:52:27 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sean Kelly.

02:52:30 To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:52:34 And now, let me leave you with some words from Albert Camus.

02:52:39 In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

02:52:46 Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.