Sean Kelly: Existentialism, Nihilism, and the Search for Meaning
Guests: Sean Kelly
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents18 chapters
§01Transcript · 00:00–09:54§02Transcript · 09:55–19:05§03Transcript · 19:07–28:31§04Transcript · 28:32–38:01§05Transcript · 38:05–47:30§06Transcript · 47:33–56:52§07Transcript · 56:54–1:06:51§08Transcript · 1:06:54–1:16:31§09Transcript · 1:16:34–1:26:49§10Transcript · 1:26:51–1:36:10§11Transcript · 1:36:12–1:45:35§12Transcript · 1:45:40–1:55:28§13Transcript · 1:55:31–2:05:11§14Transcript · 2:05:12–2:14:37§15Transcript · 2:14:40–2:24:35§16Transcript · 2:24:37–2:35:33§17Transcript · 2:35:37–2:45:21§18Transcript · 2:45:22–2:52:51§01Transcript · 00:00–09:54
The following is a conversation with Sean Kelly,
a philosopher at Harvard specializing in existentialism
and the philosophy of mind.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors
in the description.
And now, here's my conversation with Sean Kelly.
Your interests are in post-continental European philosophy,
especially phenomenology and existentialism.
So let me ask, what to you is existentialism?
- So it's a hard question.
I'm teaching a course on existentialism right now.
- You are. - I am, yeah.
Existentialism in literature and film, which is fun.
The traditional thing to say about what existentialism is
is that it's a movement in mid-20th century,
mostly French, some German philosophy,
and some of the major figures associated with it
are people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Camus,
Simone de Beauvoir, maybe Martin Heidegger.
But that's a weird thing to say about it
because most of those people denied
that they were existentialists.
And in fact, I think of it as a movement
that has a much longer history.
So when I try to describe what the core idea
of existentialism is, it's an idea
that you find expressed in different ways
in a bunch of these people.
One of the ways that it's expressed
is that Sartre will say that existentialism
is the view that there is no God,
and at least his form of existentialism,
he calls it atheistic existentialism, there is no God.
And since there's no God,
there must be some other being around
who does something like what God does.
Otherwise, there wouldn't be any possibility
for significance in a life.
And that being is us, and the feature of us,
according to Sartre and the other existentialists,
that puts us in the position to be able to play that role
is that we're the beings for whom,
as Sartre says it, "Existence precedes essence."
That's the catchphrase for existentialism,
and then you have to try to figure out what it means.
- What does existence, what does presence,
and what does precedes mean?
- Yeah, exactly, what is existence,
what is essence, and what is precedes?
And in fact, precedes is Sartre's way of talking about it,
and other people will talk about it differently.
But here's the way Sartre thinks about it.
This is not, I think, the most interesting way
to think about it, but it gets you started.
Sartre says, "There's nothing true
"about what it is to be you
"until you start existing, until you start living."
And for Sartre, the core feature
of what it is to be existing the way we do
is to be making decisions, to be making choices in your life,
to be sort of taking a stand on what it is to be you
by deciding to do this or that.
And the key feature of how to do that right for Sartre
is to do it in the full recognition of the fact
that when you make that choice,
nobody is responsible for it other than you.
So you don't make the choice because God tells you to,
you don't make the choice because some utilitarian calculus
about what it's right to do tells you to do,
you don't make the choice
because some other philosophical theory tells you to do it.
There's literally nothing on the basis
of which you make the choice
other than the fact that in that moment,
you are the one making it.
- You are a conscious thinking being that made a decision.
So all of the questions about physics and free will
are out the window.
- Yeah, that's right.
If you were a determinist about the mind,
if you were a physicalist about the mind,
if you thought there was nothing to your choices
other than the activity of the brain
that's governed by physical laws,
then there's some sense in which it would seem at any rate
like you're not the ground of that choice.
The ground of that choice was the physical universe
and the laws that govern it.
And then you'd have no responsibility.
And so Sartre's view is that the thing that's special
about us used to be special about God
is that we're responsible for becoming the being
that makes the choices that we do.
And Sartre thinks that that simultaneously empowering,
I mean, it practically puts us in the place of God
and also terrifying because what responsibility?
How can you possibly take on that responsibility?
And he thinks it's worse than that.
He thinks that it's always happening.
Everything that you do is the result of some choice
that you've made, the posture that you sit in,
the way you hold someone's gaze
when you're having a conversation with them or not,
the choice to make a note when someone says something
or not make a note.
Everything that you do presents you as a being
who makes decisions and you're responsible for all of them.
So it's constantly happening.
And furthermore, there's no fact about you
independent of the choices and actions you've performed.
So you don't get to say, Sartre's example,
I really am a great writer,
just haven't written my great book yet.
If you haven't written your great book,
you're not a great writer.
And so it's terrifying.
It puts a huge burden on us.
And that's why Sartre says on his view of existentialism,
human beings are the beings that are condemned to be free.
Our freedom consists in our ability and our responsibility
to make these choices and to become someone
through making them.
And we can't get away from that.
- But to him it's terrifying not liberating
in the positive meaning of the word liberating.
- Well, so he thinks it should be liberating,
but he thinks that it takes a very courageous individual
to be liberated by it.
Nietzsche, I think, thought something similar.
I think Sartre's really coming out
of a Nietzschean sort of tradition.
But what's liberating about it, if it is,
is also terrifying because it means in a certain way,
you're the ground of your own being.
You become what you do through existing.
So that's one form of existentialism.
That's a stark atheistic version of it.
There's lots of other versions,
but it's somehow organized around the idea
that it's through living your life
that you become who you are.
It's not facts that are sort of true about you,
independent of you're living your life.
- But then there's no God in that view.
Does any of the decisions matter?
So how does existentialism differ from nihilism?
- Good, okay, great question.
There was two different ways that you're asking it.
Let me leave nihilism to the side for just a second
and think about mattering.
Or is there any way that you can criticize someone
for living the way they do if you're an existentialist?
- Including yourself.
- Including yourself, yeah.
Sartre addresses that and he says, yes.
He says there is a criticism
that you can make of yourself or of others.
And it's the criticism of living in such a way
as to fail to take responsibility for your choices.
He gives these two sort of amazing examples.
One, I don't know if it reads as well for us
as it did in sort of mid 20th century Paris,
but it's about a waiter.
He gives this in his big book, "Being in Nothingness."
And he says, so waiters played, still do I think
in a certain way in Paris, a big role in Parisian society.
To be a waiter involved having a certain kind of identity,
being a certain way, taking control of and charge of
the experience of the people that you're waiting on,
but also really being the authority,
knowing that this is the way it's supposed to go.
And so Sartre imagines a waiter who does everything
that a waiter is supposed to do.
The perfect form of the waiter,
except that you can somehow see in the way he's doing it,
that he's doing it because he believes
that's the way a waiter should act.
So there's some sense in which he's passing off
the responsibility for his actions
onto some idea of what those actions should be.
He's not taking responsibility for it.
He's sort of playing a role and the contours of the role
are predetermined by someone other than him.
So he starts as acting in bad faith.
And that's criticizable because it's acting in such a way
as to fail to take responsibility
for the kind of being Sartre thinks you are.
So you're not taking responsibility.
So that's one example.
And I think any teenager, if you've ever met a teenager,
you've known someone who does that.
Teenagers try on roles.
They think, if I dressed like this, I would be cool.
So I'll dress like this.
Or if I spoke like this or acted like this.
And it's natural for a teenager who's trying to figure out
what their identity is to go through a phase like that.
But if you continue to do that,
then you're really passing it.
§02Transcript · 09:55–19:05
So that's one example.
And the other example he gives is an example
not of passing off responsibility
by pretending that someone else is the ground of your choice,
but passing off responsibility by pretending
that you might be able to get away
with not making a choice at all.
So he says, everything you do is a result of your choices.
And so he gives this other example.
There you are on the first date, first date.
And the date, the evening reaches a moment
when might be appropriate for one person
to hold the hand of the other.
That's the moment in the date where you are.
And so you make a choice.
You decide, I think it's that time.
And you hold the hand.
And what should happen is that the other person
also makes a choice on SART's view.
Either they reject the hand, not that time.
And I'm taking responsibility for that.
Or they grasp the hand back.
That's a choice.
But there's a thing that sometimes happens,
which is that the other person leaves the hand there,
cold, dead, and clammy,
neither rejecting it nor embracing it.
And SART says, that's also bad faith.
That's also acting as if we're a kind of being
that we're not, 'cause it pretends
that it's possible not to make a choice.
And we're the beings who are always making choices.
That was a choice.
And you're pretending as if it's the kind of thing
that you don't have to take responsibility for.
- So both of the examples you've given,
there's some sense in which the social interactions
between humans is a kind of moving away
from the full responsibility that you as a human
in the view of existentialism should take on.
So isn't the basic conversation,
a delegation of responsibility,
just holding a hand there.
You're putting some of the responsibility
into the court of the other person.
And for the waiter, if you exist in a society,
you are generally trying on a role.
I mean, all of us are trying on a role.
Me wearing clothes is me trying on a role
that I was told to try,
as opposed to walking around naked all the time.
Like there's like standards of how you operate.
And that's a decision that's not my own.
That's me seeing what everyone else is doing
and copying them.
- Yeah, exactly.
So Sartre thinks that in the ideal,
you should try to resist that.
Other existentialists think that that's actually a clue
to how you should live well.
So Sartre says somewhere else, hell is other people.
Why is hell other people for Sartre?
Well, 'cause other people are making choices also.
And when other people make choices,
they put some pressure on me
to think that the choice they made
is one that I should copy
or one that I should sort of promote.
But if I do it because they did it,
then I'm in bad faith for Sartre.
So it is as if Sartre's view is like,
we would be better if we were all alone.
I mean, this is really simplifying Sartre's position.
And this is really just mostly Sartre
in a certain period of his formation.
But anyhow, we can imagine that view.
And I think there's something to the idea
that Sartre is attracted to it,
at least in the mid 40s.
- Can you dig into hell is other people?
Is there some,
obviously it's kind of almost like a literary,
like you push the point strongly
to really explore that point.
But is there some sense in that other people
ruin the experience of what it means to be human?
- I think for Sartre, the phenomenon is this.
Like, it's not just that you wear clothes
because people wear clothes in our society.
Like you have a particular style.
You wear a particular kind of clothes.
And for Sartre, like to have that style
authentically in good faith, rather than in bad faith,
it has to come from you.
You have to make the choice.
But other people are making choices also.
And like, you're looking at their choices
and you're thinking that guy looks good.
Maybe I could try that one on.
And if you try it on because you were influenced
by the fact that you thought that guy was doing it well,
then there's some important sense in which,
although that's a resource for a choice for you,
it's also acting in bad faith.
So, and God wouldn't do that, right?
God wouldn't be influenced by other's decisions.
And if that's the model, then I think that's the sense
in which he thinks how those other people.
- What do you think parenting is then?
It's like, what, 'cause God doesn't have a parent.
So aren't we significantly influenced,
first of all, in the first few years of life?
- Absolutely.
- And even the teenager is resisting,
learning through resistance.
So. - Absolutely.
I mean, I think what you're pushing on is the intuition
that the ideal that Sartre's aiming at
is a kind of inhuman ideal.
I mean, there's many ways in which we're not like
the traditional view of what God was.
One is that we're not self-generating.
We have parents.
We were raised into traditions and social norms,
and we're raised into an understanding
of what's appropriate and inappropriate to do.
And I think that's a deep intuition.
I think that's exactly right.
Martin Heidegger, who's the philosopher that Sartre thinks
he's sort of taking this from,
but I think Sartre's a kind of brilliant
French misinterpretation of Heidegger's
German phenomenological view.
Heidegger says a crucial aspect of what it is to be us
is our thrownness.
We're thrown into a situation.
We're thrown into history.
We're thrown into our parental lineage.
And we don't choose it.
That's stuff that we don't choose.
We couldn't choose.
If we were God and we existed outside of time, maybe,
but we're not.
We're finite in the sense that we have a beginning
that we never chose.
We have an end that we're often trying to resist
or put off or something.
And in between, there's a whole bunch of stuff
that organizes us without our ever having made the choice
and without our being the kind of being
that could make the choice to allow it to organize us.
We have a complicated relationship to that stuff.
And I think we should talk about that at a certain point,
but the first move is to say,
so it's just got a sort of descriptive problem.
He's missed this basic fact that there has to be
an awful lot about us that's settled
without our having made the choice to settle it that way.
- Right, the thrownness of life.
- Yeah.
- That's a fundamental part of life.
You can't just escape it.
- Exactly.
You can't escape it altogether.
- Altogether.
- Yeah, exactly.
You can't escape it altogether.
- But nevertheless, you are riding a wave
and you make a decision in the riding of the wave.
You can't control the wave, but you should be,
as you ride it, you should be making certain kinds
of decisions and take responsibility for it.
So why does this matter at all,
the chain of decisions you make?
- Good, well, because they constitute you.
They make you the person that you are.
So what's the opposite view?
What's this view against?
This view is against most of philosophy from Plato forward.
Plato says in "The Republic," it's a kind of myth,
but he says people will understand their condition well
if we tell them this myth.
He says, "Look, when you're born,
"there's just a fact about you.
"Your soul is either gold, silver, or bronze."
Those are the three kinds of people there are,
and you're born that way.
And if your soul is gold, then we should identify that
and make you a philosopher king.
And if your soul is silver,
well, you're not gonna be a philosopher king.
You're not capable of it, but you could be a good warrior
and we should make you that.
And if your soul is bronze, then you should be a farmer,
a laborer, something like that.
And that's a fact about you that identifies you
forever and for always,
independent of anything you do about it.
And so that's the alternative view.
And you could have modern versions of it.
§03Transcript · 19:07–28:31
You could say the thing that identifies you is your IQ
or your genetic makeup or the percentage
of fast-switch muscle fibers you've got or whatever.
It could be something totally independent
of any choice that you've made,
independent of the kind of thing
about which you could make a choice,
and it categorizes you.
It makes you the person that you are.
That's the thing that Sartre
and the existentialists are against.
- So this idea that something about you
is forever limiting the space
of possible decisions you can make.
Sartre says, "No, the space is unlimited."
- Sartre is the philosopher of radical freedom.
- Radical freedom.
- Yeah, radical freedom.
And then you could have other existentialists who say,
"Look, we are free, but we gotta understand
the way in which our freedom is limited
by certain aspects of the kind of being that we are.
If we were radically free, we really would be like God
in the traditional medieval sense."
And these folks start with the idea that,
"Look, whatever we are, that's a kind of limit point
that we're not gonna reach.
So what are the ways in which we're constrained
that that being the way the medievals understood him
wasn't constrained?"
- So can you maybe comment on what is nihilism
and is it at all a useful other sort of group of ideas
that you resist against in defining existentialism?
- Yes, good, excellent.
So nihilism, the philosopher who made the term popular,
although it was used before him as Nietzsche,
Nietzsche's writing in the end of the 19th century,
in various places where he published things,
but largely in his unpublished works,
he identifies the condition of the modern world
as nihilistic.
And that's a descriptive claim.
He's looking around him, trying to figure out
what it's like to be us now.
And he says, "It's a lot different from what it was like
to be human in 1300 or in the fifth century BCE."
In 1300, like what people believed,
the way they lived their lives was in the understanding
that to be human was to be created
in the image and likeness of God.
That's the way they understood themselves.
And also to be created sinful because of Adam and Eve's
transgression in the Garden of Eden.
And to have the project of trying to understand
how as a sinful being, you could nevertheless live
a virtuous life.
How could you do that?
And it had to do with, for them,
getting in the right relation to God.
Nietzsche says, "That doesn't make sense to us anymore
in the end of the 19th century."
"God is dead," says Nietzsche famously.
And what does that mean?
Well, it means something like the role that God used to play
in our understanding of ourselves as a culture
isn't a role that God can play anymore.
And so Nietzsche says, "The role that God used to play
was the role of grounding our existence.
He was what it is in virtue of which we are who we are."
And Nietzsche says, "The idea that there is a being
that makes us what we are doesn't make sense anymore."
That's like Sartre's atheism.
Sartre's taking that from Nietzsche.
And so the question is, what does ground our existence?
And the answer is nihil, nothing.
And so nihilism is the idea that there's nothing
outside of us that grounds our existence.
And then Nietzsche asked the question,
"Well, what are we supposed to do about that?
How do we live?"
And I think Nietzsche has a different story
than Sartre about that.
Nietzsche doesn't emphasize this notion of radical freedom.
Nietzsche emphasizes something else.
He says, "We're artists of life."
And artists are interesting
because the natural way of thinking about artists
is that they're responding to something.
They find themselves in a situation and they say,
"This is what's gonna make sense of the situation.
This is what I have to write.
This is the way I have to dance.
This is the way I've got to play the music."
And Nietzsche says, "We should live like that."
There are constraints, but understanding what they are
is a complicated aspect of living itself.
And there's a great story, I think, from music
that maybe helps to understand this.
I think Nietzsche, of course, jazz didn't exist
when Nietzsche was writing,
but I think Nietzsche really is thinking
of something like jazz improvisation.
I mean, he talks about improvisation.
There's classical improvisation.
Nietzsche was, by the way, a musician.
I mean, he was a composer and a pianist,
not a great one, really, to be fair, but he loved music.
And Herbie Hancock, who's a pianist, a jazz pianist,
who played with Miles Davis for quite a while in the '60s,
tells this kind of incredible story
that I think exemplifies Nietzsche's view
about the way in which we bear some responsibility
for being creative,
and that gives us a certain kind of freedom,
but we don't have the radical freedom that's art thinks.
So what's the story?
Herbie Hancock says, I think they were in Stuttgart,
he says, playing a show, and things were great, he says.
He's a young pianist, and Miles Davis is the master.
And he says, I'm back in the solo,
and I'm playing these chords, and he says,
I played this chord, and it was the wrong chord.
(both laughing)
He's like, that's what you gotta say.
It didn't work right there.
And I thought, holy mackerel, I screwed up.
I screwed up, we were tight, everything was working,
and I blew it for Miles, who's doing his solo.
And he said, Miles paused for a moment,
and then all of a sudden, he went on
in a way that made my chord right.
(laughs)
And I think that idea, that you could be an artist
who responds to what's thrown at you
in such a way as to make it right,
by what measure, everyone could hear it,
is all you can say, right?
Everyone knew, wow, that really works.
And I think that's not, there are constraints.
Not anything would have worked there.
He couldn't have just played anything.
Most of what anyone would have played
would have sounded terrible.
But the constraints aren't preexisting.
They're sort of what's happening now in the moment
for these listeners and these performers.
And I think that's what Nietzsche thinks
the right response to nihilism is.
We're involved, but we're not radically free
to make any choice and just stand behind it,
the way Sartre thinks.
Our choices have to be responsive to our situation,
and they have to make the situation work.
They have to make it right.
- And there's something about music too.
So you basically have to make music
of all the moments of life.
And there is something about music.
Why is music so compelling?
And when you listen to it,
something about certain kinds of music,
it connects with you.
It doesn't make any sense.
But in that same way for Nietzsche,
you should be a creative force
that creates a musical masterpiece.
- Exactly.
And I think what's interesting is the question,
what does it mean to be a creative force there?
There's a traditional notion of creation
that we associate with God.
God creates ex nihilo, out of nothing.
And you might think that nihilism
thinks that we should do that,
create ex nihilo,
'cause it's about how there's nothing at our ground.
But I think the right way to read Nietzsche
is to recognize that we don't create out of nothing.
Miles Davis wasn't nothing.
That situation preexisted him.
It was given to him, maybe by accident.
Maybe it was a mistake, whatever.
But he was responding to that situation
in a way that made it right.
He wasn't just creating out of nothing.
He was creating out of what was already there.
- So that makes that first date with the climbing hand
even more complicated,
'cause you're given a climbing hand,
you're gonna have to make art and music out of that.
- Exactly.
- And that's the responsibility for both of them.
Wow, that's a lot of responsibility for a first date,
'cause you have to create.
The emphasis isn't just on making decisions.
It's on creating.
- But also on listening, right?
I mean, Miles Davis was listening.
He heard that.
He knew it was wrong.
§04Transcript · 28:32–38:01
And the question was, what do I play that makes it right?
- So let me ask about Nietzsche.
Is God dead?
What did he mean by that statement?
What's, in your sense, the truth behind the question
and the possible set of answers
that our world today provides?
- Good, so I mean, I think that
there's something super perceptive
about Nietzsche's diagnosis of the condition
at the end of the 19th century.
So not so far from the condition
that I think we're currently in.
And I think there's an interesting question
what we're supposed to do in response.
But what is the condition that we're currently in?
When Nietzsche says God is dead,
I think, like I was saying before,
he means something like the role that God used to play
in grounding our existence
is not a role that works for us anymore as a culture.
And when people talk about a view like that nowadays,
they use a different terminology,
but I think it's roughly what Nietzsche was aiming at.
They say we live in a secular age.
Our age is a secular age.
And so what do people mean when they say that?
I think, first of all, it's a descriptive claim.
It could be wrong.
The question is, does this really describe
the way we experience ourselves as a culture
or as a culture in the West or wherever it is that we are?
So what does it mean to say that we live in a secular age,
an age in which God is dead?
Well, first thing is it doesn't mean
there are no religious believers 'cause there are plenty.
There are lots of people who go to church or synagogue
or mosque every week or more.
And there are people who really find that
to be an important aspect of the way they live their lives.
But it does mean that for those people,
the role that their religious belief plays in their life
isn't the same as it used to be in previous ages.
So what's that role?
We'll go back to the high Middle Ages.
That was clearly not a secular age.
That was a religious age.
And so there we are in 1300,
Dante is writing "The Divine Comedy" or something.
And what did it mean then to live in a sacred age?
Well, it meant not just that the default
was that you were a Christian in the West,
but that your Christianity, your religious belief,
your religious affiliation justified certain assumptions
about people who didn't share that religious belief.
So you're a Christian in the West in 1300
and you meet someone who's a Muslim.
And the fact that they don't share your religious belief
justifies the conclusion that they're less than human.
And that was the ground of the Crusades.
That was the religious wars of the high Middle Ages.
To say that we live in a secular age
is to say that not that we don't have,
there aren't a lot of people
who have religious belief, there are.
But it's to say that their religious belief
doesn't justify that conclusion.
If you're a religious believer and you meet me
and suppose I'm not a religious believer,
learning that about me doesn't justify your concluding
that I'm less than human.
And that's the kind of liberalism of the modern age.
Most of the time we think that's a good thing.
We let a thousand flowers bloom.
There are lots of ways to live a good life.
And there's some way in which that is a nice progressive
kind of liberal thought.
But it's also true that it's an undermining thought
because it means if you're a religious believer now,
your belief can't ground your understanding
of what you ought to be aiming at in a life
in the way it used to be able to.
You can't say as a religious believer,
I know it's right to do this
because you also know that if you meet someone
who doesn't share that religious belief
and so doesn't think it's right to do that necessarily
or does, but for different reasons,
you can't conclude that they've got it wrong.
So there's this sort of unsettling aspect to it.
- Well, isn't it true that you can't conclude
as a public statement to others,
but within your own mind,
it's almost like an existentialist version of belief,
which is like, you create the world around you.
It doesn't matter what others believe.
It's actually almost like empowering thought,
so as opposed to the more traditional view of religion
where it's like a tribal idea,
like where you share that idea together.
Here you have the full, back to Sartre,
a full responsibility of your beliefs as well.
- Good, good, but what you're describing
is not a religious believer, right?
You're describing someone who's found in themselves
the ground of their existence
rather than in something outside of themselves.
So the religious belief, I mean, if you go full Sartrean,
then, well, you're not in a position to criticize others
for the choices that they make,
but you are in a position to criticize them
for the way in which they make them,
either taking responsibility or not taking responsibility.
But the religious believer used to be able to say,
"Look, the choices that I make are right
"because God demands that I make them."
And nowadays, like,
and so it would be wrong to make any others.
And nowadays, our kind of,
to say that we live in a secular age,
say, "Well, you can't quite do that
"and be a religious believer."
Your religious belief can't justify that move
and so it can't ground your life in the way it does.
So it's sort of unsettling.
I think that's one of the interpretations
of what Nietzsche might've meant when he said, "God is dead."
God can't play the role for religious believers
in our world that he used to.
But we nevertheless find meaning.
I mean, you don't see nihilism
as a prevalent set of ideas
that are overtaking modern culture.
So a secular world is still full of meaning.
Good, well, I think that's the interesting question.
I think it's certainly possible for a secular world
to be a world in which we live meaningful lives,
worthwhile lives,
lives that are sort of worthy of respect
and that we can be proud of aiming to live.
But I think it is a hard question,
what we're doing when we do that.
And that is the question of existence.
Sort of what does it mean to exist in a way
that brings us out at our best as the beings that we are?
That's the question for existentialism.
- So besides Sartre,
who to you is the most important existentialist
to understand for others?
What ideas in particular of theirs do you like?
Maybe other existentialists, not just one.
- Yeah, good.
- Who portrays the grounding,
strong, atheistic existentialism statement?
Who else is there?
- So I'm teaching an existentialism course now.
And I think the tradition goes back
at least to the 17th century.
And I'll just tell you some of the figures
that I'm teaching there.
We could talk about any of them that you like.
The figure I start with is Pascal.
Pascal, French mathematician from the 17th century.
He died, I'm terrible with dates,
but I think 1661 or something like that,
middle of the 17th century.
Brilliant polymath, sort of,
we have computer languages named after him.
He built the first mechanical calculating machine.
But he was also deeply invested in his understanding
of what Christianity was.
And he thought that everyone before him
had really misunderstood what Christianity was.
That they'd really attempted to think about it,
not as a way of living a life,
but as a set of beliefs that you can have
and which you can justify.
And I think that's the first move
that's really pretty interesting.
And then figures like Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky
developed that move.
And all of those take themselves to be defending
an interpretation of a certain kind of Christianity.
An existential interpretation of Christianity.
And then I think there are other figures,
other theistic figures.
Figures like Camus and Fanon,
who are mid 20th century figures.
And then I'll just mention the figure
who I think is the most interesting is Martin Heidecker.
He's a complicated figure 'cause--
- By the way, when you said, sorry to interrupt,
that when you said Camus, you meant atheistic?
- I think that Camus is an atheistic existentialist.
Yeah, I'm happy to talk about that.
- So, okay, so we got, it's like sports cards.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- We have the different existentialists.
So maybe let's go to,
you know what, let's go to Dostoevsky.
§05Transcript · 38:05–47:30
- All right, okay, let's do it.
- So my favorite novel of his is "The Idiot."
First of all, I see myself as the idiot and an idiot.
And I love the optimism and the love
the main character has for the world.
So that just deeply connects with me as a novel.
Notes from underground as well.
But what ideas of Dostoevsky's do you think
are existentialist?
What ideas are formative
to the whole existentialist movement?
- Excellent, so let me talk about "The Brothers Karamazov."
Partly because that's the last novel that Dostoevsky wrote.
I think it's certainly one of the greatest novels
of the 19th century, maybe the best.
And I'm about to teach it in a few weeks.
So I'm super excited about it.
But what is "The Brothers Karamazov" about?
I mean, without spoiling the ending for anyone.
- Spoiler alert.
- Yeah, I mean, look, it's a murder mystery, right?
I mean, the father gets murdered.
And the question is, who did it?
Who's responsible for it?
So there's a notion of responsibility here, like in "Sartre."
But it's responsibility for a murder.
That's what we're talking about.
And there's a bunch of brothers,
each of whom has pretty good motivation
for having murdered the father.
The father's a jerk.
I mean, he's, you know,
if anybody is worthy of being murdered, he's the guy.
He's a force of chaos and he's nasty in all sorts of ways.
But still, it's not good to murder people.
(laughs)
So what's the view of Dostoevsky?
I mean, it's this intense exploration
of what it means to be involved in various ways
with an activity that everyone can recognize as atrocious.
And what the right way is to take responsibility for that,
what the right way is to relate to others in the face of it,
and how even through this kind of action,
you can achieve some kind of salvation.
That's Dostoevsky's word for it.
But salvation here and now,
not like you live some afterlife
where you're paradise for eternity.
Who cares about that, says one of the characters.
That doesn't make my life now any good,
and it doesn't justify any of the bad things
that happen in my life now.
What matters is, can we live well
in the face of these things that we do
and have to take responsibility for?
So it's this intense exploration of notions
and gradations of guilt and responsibility,
and the possibility of love and salvation
in the face of those.
It is incredibly human work.
But I think Dostoevsky is the opposite of Sartre.
And let me just, I think it's so fascinating.
I don't know anybody else who notices this,
but Sartre actually quotes a passage from Dostoevsky
when he's developing his view.
It's close to a passage.
It doesn't appear quite in this way.
But the passage that Sartre quotes is this.
It's in the form of an argument.
Sartre puts it in the form of an argument.
He says, "Look, there's a conditional statement is true.
"If there is no God, then everything is permitted."
And then there's a second premise.
There is no God.
That's Sartre's view.
I mean, he's an atheist.
There is no God.
Conclusion, everything is permitted.
And that's Sartre's radical freedom.
And if you think about the structure
of the Brothers Karamazov,
I think Dostoevsky, though he never says it this way,
would run the argument differently.
It's a modus tollens instead of a modus ponens.
The argument for Dostoevsky would go like this.
Yeah, conditional statement.
If there is no God, then everything is permitted.
But look at your life.
Not everything is permitted.
You do horrible, atrocious things,
like be involved in the death of your father,
and there is a price to pay.
That's not a livable moment.
To have to take responsibility,
to have to recognize that you're at fault
or you're somehow guilty for having been involved
in whatever way you were in letting that happen
or bringing it about that it does happen,
is to pay a price.
So we're not beings that are constituted in such a way
that everything is permitted.
Look at the facts of your existence.
So not everything is permitted.
Therefore, there is a God.
(laughs)
And the presence of a God for Dostoevsky,
I think, is just found in this fact
that when we do bad things, we feel guilty for them,
that we find ourselves to be responsible for things,
even when we didn't intend to do them,
but we just allowed ourselves to be involved in them.
- And the nature of God for Dostoevsky is, I mean, unclear.
I mean, it's a very complex exploration in itself.
And he basically, God speaks through several
of his characters in complicated ways.
So it's not like a trivial version of God.
- It's totally not trivial.
And it's not a being that exists outside of time.
None of that is sort of relevant for Dostoevsky.
For him, it's a question about how we live our lives.
Do we live our lives in the mood
that Christianity says it makes available to us,
which is the mood of joy?
- Is there, maybe this is a bit of a tangent,
but so I'm a Russian speaker,
and one of the, I kind of listen to my heart.
And what my heart says is I need to take on this project.
So there's a couple of famous translators
of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy that live in Paris currently.
So I'm going to take the journey.
We agreed to have a full conversation about Dostoevsky,
about Tolstoy, and like a series of conversations.
And the reason I fell in love with this idea
is I just realized in translating from Russian to English,
how deep philosophical,
how much deep philosophical thinking is required.
Just to, like single sentences.
They spent like weeks debating single sentences.
So, and all of that is part of a journey
to Russia for several reasons.
But I just, I want to explore something in me
that longs to understand and to connect
with the roots where I come from.
So maybe can you comment, whether it's on the Russian side
or the niche of the German side, or other French side,
is there something in your own explorations
of these philosophies that you find that you miss
because you don't deeply know the language?
Or like how important is it to understand the language?
- Good.
I think it's super important.
And I'm always embarrassed that I don't know more languages
and don't know the languages I know
as well as I would like to.
But there's a way in.
So I do think different languages
allow you to think in different ways.
And that there's a sort of a mode of existence,
a way of being that's captured by a language
that it makes certain ways of thinking about yourself
or others more natural.
And it closes off other ways
of thinking about yourself and others.
And so I think languages are fascinating in that way.
The Heidegger, who is this philosopher
that I'm interested in, says at one point,
"Language is the house of being."
And I think that means something like,
it's by living in a language that you come to understand
or that possibilities for understanding
what it is to be you and others and anything are opened up.
And different languages open up different possibilities.
- And we had that discussion offline about James Joyce,
how I took a course in James Joyce
and how I don't think I understood anything
besides the dead and the short stories.
And you suggested that it might be helpful
to actually visit Ireland, visit Dublin,
to truly, to help you understand,
maybe fall in love with the words.
And so that presumably is not purely about the understanding
of the actual words of the language.
It's understanding something much deeper.
The music of the language or something.
Music of the ideas. (laughs)
- Absolutely, something like that.
It's very hard to say exactly what that is,
but when you hear an Irish person
who really understands Joyce read some sentences,
they have a different cadence,
they have a different tonality,
they have different music, to use your word.
And all of a sudden you think about them differently.
And the sentences sort of draw different thoughts out of you
when they're read in certain ways.
That's what great actors can do.
But I think language is rich like that.
And the idea, which philosophers tend to have,
that we're really studying the crucial aspects of language
when we think about its logical form.
§06Transcript · 47:33–56:52
When we think about the sort of claims
of philosophical logic that you can make,
or how do you translate this proposition
into some symbolic form?
I think that's part of what goes on in language.
But I think that when language affects us
in the deep way that it can,
when great poets or great writers or great thinkers
use it to great effect, it's way more than that.
And that's the interesting form of language
that I'm interested in.
- It's kind of a challenge I'm hoping to take on
is I feel like some of the ideas
that are conveyed through language
are actually can be put outside of language.
So one of the challenges I have to do
is to have a conversation with people in Russian,
but for an English audience.
And not rely purely on translators.
There would of course be translators there
that help me dance through this mess of language.
But also, my goal, my hope is to dance
from Russian to English back and forth
for an English speaking audience
and for a Russian speaking audience.
So not this pure, this is Russian,
it's going to be translated to English,
or this is English, it's going to be translated to Russian,
but dance back and forth.
And try to share with people who don't speak
one of the languages, the music that they're missing.
And sort of almost hear that music
as if you're sitting in another room
and you hear the music through the wall.
Like get a sense of it.
I think that would be a waste if I don't try to pursue this,
being a bilingual human being.
And I wonder whether it's possible to capture
some of the magic of the ideas
in a way that can be conveyed to people
who don't speak that particular language.
- I think it's a super exciting project.
I look forward to following it.
I'll tell you one thing that does happen.
So we read Dostoevsky in translation.
Occasionally I do have Russian speakers in the room,
which is super helpful.
But I also encourage my students to,
some of them will have different translations than others.
And that can be really helpful for the non-native speaker
because by paying attention to the places
where translators diverge in their translations
of a given word or a phrase or something like that,
you can start to get the idea that somehow the words
that we have in English,
they don't have the same contours
as the word in Russian that's being translated.
And then you can start to ask
about what those differences are.
And I think there's a kind of magic to it.
I mean, it's astonishing how rich and affecting
these languages can be for people
who grew up in them especially, who speak them as natives.
- And that's a really powerful thing
that actually doesn't exist enough of is,
for example, for Dostoevsky,
most novels have been translated
by two or three famous translators.
And there's a lot of discussion
about who did it better and so on.
But I would love to, I'm a computer science person,
I would love to do a diff where you automatically detect
all the differences in the translation
just as you're saying and use that.
Like somebody needs to publish literally
just books describing the differences.
In fact, I'll probably do a little bit of this.
I heard the individual translators in interviews
and blog posts and articles discuss particular phrases
that they differ on, but like to do that for an entire book,
that's a fascinating exploration.
As an English speaker,
just read the differences in the translations.
You probably can get some deep understanding
of ideas in those books by seeing the struggle
of the translators to capture that idea.
That's a really interesting idea, yeah.
- Absolutely, and you can do that
for other projects in other languages too.
I mean, one of the, I don't know,
I have this weird, huge range of interests.
And some days I'll find myself reading about something.
At one point I was interested
in 14th century German mysticism.
Okay, turns out there's somebody who's written
like volumes and volumes about this.
He's fantastic.
And I was interested in reading Meister Eckart.
I wanted to know what was interesting about him.
And the sort of move that this guy, Bernard McGinn,
who's the great scholar of this period, made,
was to say what Eckart did, and everybody knows this,
he translated Christianity into the vernacular.
He started giving sermons in German to the peasant.
And sermons used to be in Latin,
and nobody could speak Latin.
Can you imagine sitting there for a two-hour sermon
in a language that you don't know?
So he translated it into German.
But in doing it, the resources of the German language
are different from the resources of the Latin language.
And there's a word in Middle High German, grund,
which is like, we translate it as ground.
And it's got this earthy feel to it.
It sort of invokes the notion of soil and what you stand on
and what things grow out of,
and sort of what you could run your fingers through
that would have a kind of honesty to it.
And there's no Latin word for that.
But in Eckart's interpretation of Christianity,
grund, that's like the fundamental thing.
You don't understand God until you understand
the way in which he is our ground.
And all of a sudden, this mysticism
gets a kind of German cant
that makes sense to the people who speak German,
and that reveals something totally different
about what you could think that form of existence was
that was covered over by the fact
that it had always been done in Latin.
Yeah, that's fascinating.
So, okay, we talked about Dostoevsky
and the use of murder to explore human nature.
Let's go to Camus, who is maybe less concerned with murder,
more concerned with suicide as a way to explore human nature.
So he is probably my favorite existentialist,
probably one of the more accessible existentialists.
And like you said, one of the people
who didn't like to call himself an existentialist.
So what are your thoughts about Camus?
What role does he play in the story of existentialism?
So I find Camus totally fascinating, I really do.
And for years, I didn't teach Camus
because the famous thing that you're referring to,
the "Myth of Sisyphus," which is a sort of essay,
it's published as a book, super accessible,
really fascinating, he's a great writer, really engaging.
The opening line is something like,
"There is but one truly significant philosophical question,
and that is the question of suicide."
And I thought, I can't teach my 18-year-olds.
(ZDoggMD laughing)
You know, like how?
(ZDoggMD laughing)
I just thought that's terrible.
Like, how can I?
I mean, it's not wrong, but do I wanna bring that
into the classroom?
And so I read it, I read the essay.
I avoided it for a long time, just because of that line.
And I thought, I'm not gonna be able to make sense of this
in a way that will be helpful for anyone.
But finally, one year, maybe seven or eight years ago,
I sat down to read it.
I thought, I've got to really confront it.
And I read it, and it's incredibly engaging.
I mean, it's really, really beautiful.
And Camus was against suicide,
which just turns out to be good.
(ZDoggMD laughing)
I was happy about that.
But he has a bit of a bleak understanding
of what human existence amounts to.
And so in the end, he thinks that human existence is absurd.
And it's being absurd is a kind of technical term for him.
And it means that the episodes in your life
and your life as a whole presents itself to you
as if it's got a meaning, but really it doesn't.
So there's this tension between the way things
seem to be on their surface
and what really turns out to be true about them.
And he gives these great examples.
You probably remember these.
He says, "There you are, you're walking along the street,
and there's a plate glass window in a building.
And through the window,
you see somebody talking on a telephone."
I mean, I imagined it as a cell phone,
but Camus didn't. (ZDoggMD laughing)
But you see somebody talking on a cell phone,
and he's animated, he's talking a lot
as if things really meant something.
And yet Camus says, "It's a dumb show."
And it's not dumb just in the sense that it's stupid,
it's dumb in the sense that it's silent.
It presents itself as if it's got some significance,
and yet its significance is withheld from you.
And he says, "That's what our lives are like.
Everything in our lives presents themselves to us
as if it's got a significance, but it doesn't.
§07Transcript · 56:54–1:06:51
It's absurd."
And then he says, "Really what our lives are like,
they're like the lives of Sisyphus."
Just day after day, you do the same thing.
You wake up at a certain time, you get on the bus,
you go to work, you take your lunch break, you get off.
I have a colleague who once said to me something like this.
It was about October or so in the fall semester.
I said, "How's it going, Dick?"
He said, "Well, you know how it is.
I got on the conveyor belt at the beginning of the semester
and I'm just going through and that's the way my life is."
And Camus thinks that experience,
which you can sometimes have,
reveals something true about what human lives are like.
Our lives really just are like the life of Sisyphus
who rolls this boulder up the hill from morning till night.
And then at night he gets to the top
and it rolls back down to the bottom.
Over the course of the night, he walks back down
and then he starts it all over again.
And he says, "Sisyphus is condemned to this life."
Like we're condemned to our lives,
but we do have one bit of freedom.
And it's the only thing that we can hang on to.
It's the freedom to stick it to the gods
who put us in this position
(ZDoggMD laughing)
by embracing this existence
rather than giving up and committing suicide.
And I thought, "Well, it's kind of a happy ending."
(ZDoggMD laughing)
But I also thought it's a dim view
of what our existence amounts to.
So I think there's something fascinating about that.
But what I came to believe,
and I tried to write about this once,
I know you read the thing about aliveness
that I published once.
That's secretly a criticism of Camus.
I don't think I mentioned Camus in there.
But I think Camus has got the phenomenon wrong,
or he's missed some important aspect of it.
'Cause in Camus' view,
when you experience your day
as sort of going on in this deadening way,
and you're just doing the things that you always do
the way you always do them,
for Camus, that reveals the truth about what our lives are.
But I think there's some aspect, at least for me,
and maybe he just didn't feel this
or didn't have access to it.
Maybe others don't.
But for me, there's an extra part to it,
which is somehow that, yes, that's the way things are,
and it's inadequate.
And there's something that's missing
from that aspect of our existence that could be there.
And it feels like our lives are not about
just putting up with that
and sticking it to the gods by embracing it,
but seeking that absence part of it,
the part that's recognizable in its absence
in your experience of that.
And that's what I think.
I think we do have the experience of the presence of that
in moments when you feel truly alive.
- And that's what you mean by the word aliveness,
which is a fascinating and a powerful word.
- Yeah, that's what I mean by it.
I think most people can recognize moments in their lives
when they really felt alive.
And it could happen in a moment when,
I don't know, maybe Miles Davis felt it in that moment
when he was responding to Herbie Hancock's chord.
Or maybe you feel it in that moment
where you grab for the hand on the first date
and the gesture is reciprocated.
Or maybe you feel it in some moment
when you are doing a kind of peak athletic thing,
or watching somebody else do a peak athletic thing.
But I think there are moments when it feels like
it's not like the way Camus is describing things.
And it's better because of that.
- So I think one really powerful way
for me to understand aliveness
is to think about, to go into a darker territory,
is to think about suicide.
And I've known people in my life
who suffer from clinical depression.
And whatever the chemistry is in our brain,
there is a certain kind of feeling that is to be depressed.
Where you look in the mirror and ask,
do I want to kill myself today?
This is the question that Camus asks,
this question, this philosophical question.
And there is people who, when they're depressed,
say, not only do they say, I want to kill myself,
or I don't, they say, it doesn't matter.
And that's chemistry, that's whatever that is,
that's chemistry in our mind.
And then on the flip side of that, for me,
I've had some low points, but I've been very fortunate
to not suffer from that kind of depression.
I am the opposite, which is not only moments
of peak performance in athletics,
or great music, or any of that,
I'm just deeply joyful often by mundane things.
Like, as you were saying it,
I was drinking this thing and it's cold,
and for some reason the coldness of that was like,
oh, great, like refrigeration, I don't know.
There was a joy in that, like, I can't put it into words,
but I just felt great.
And then just so many things, you look out in nature,
there's a nice breeze, and just like, it's amazing.
So that doesn't feel like I'm embracing the absurd.
That seems like I'm getting some nice dopamine hits
in whatever the chemistry is from just the basics of life.
And that is the source of aliveness.
However my brain is built, it's gotten a natural
sort of mechanism for aliveness.
And so one nice way to see the absence of aliveness
is to look at the chemical, the clinical depression.
And so Camus doesn't seem to contend with that at all
in asking the question of suicide,
because when you look in the mirror and ask,
like if I ask myself, do I want to kill myself today,
I ask that question in a different way,
more like a stoic way often, like basically every day,
is what if I die today?
It's more like contemplating your mortality
every single day.
You know, that excites me,
the possibility that this is my last day.
It just reminds me how amazing life is.
And that's chemistry, I don't know what that is,
but that's certainly not some kind of philosophical
decision I made.
I am a little bit riding a wave of the chemistry
of the genetics I've been given.
- Of the dopamine.
So that question of suicide,
by the way, do you find that formulation
of the question of existentialism,
I know you didn't want to teach it
because obviously suicide is a very difficult word,
especially for young minds,
but do you think that's a useful formulation
of the question of existentialism?
Like him saying, this is the most important question
of suicide.
- I think there is something to it.
If you read the question as the question,
what is it in virtue of which it ought to be desirable
to live the lives that we're capable of living?
That's a deep question.
Yeah, that's a question that gets focused
when someone asks themselves whether they ought to continue
to live that life.
Who, the famous line,
nothing focuses the mind more than one's impending execution.
I mean, I think there's something important about that,
that recognizing the riskiness and the vulnerability
of one's existence is super important.
And I think that if we didn't have that,
our lives wouldn't be capable of being meaningful.
If they weren't risky and vulnerable,
there would be nothing to lose.
And it's only because there are things to lose
that they can come to have the significance that they do.
So yeah, I think, not against the idea
that that's a deep way of approaching the questions
at the core of existentialism.
But as you said, I was worried for a while
about how I was gonna teach it.
- Well, I think there's a difference
between suicide and not living.
Because suicide is an action.
So it feels like, to me,
like suicide doesn't make sense because,
imagine you're in a hotel
and you're saying the room I'm in sucks.
But there's other rooms.
So maybe explore those other rooms.
Maybe you'll find meaning in those other rooms.
Like basically embracing the fact
that you don't know everything.
And you need time to explore everything.
It's like, once you've explored everything,
then maybe you can make a full decision.
But it's unfair to make a decision.
It's, I would say, unethical to make a decision
until you've explored all the rooms in the hotel.
- Yeah.
And this gets focused in the brothers Karamazov, of course.
There's one brother who is really asking that question,
is asking the question of suicide.
He's asking the question whether the world that we live in
is a world that's worth living in.
§08Transcript · 1:06:54–1:16:31
And I think that character's, as you say, very ill.
I mean, and it's possible.
And often because, as you say,
of brain chemistry, physiology.
So there's certainly a physical ground
to that situation, to that condition.
But I think it is possible
for someone to be in that situation.
I think that Ivan Karamazov,
who's the character who's asking this question,
is maybe, let's say, chemically depressed
or something like that.
But I think there's more to it too.
And I think that Dostoevsky's real view
is that brain chemistry doesn't exist on its own.
Like the way we interact with one another,
the way we care about or isolate ourselves from others,
the way we care for the lives that we lead
affects the chemistry of our brain,
which goes on and changes the mood that we're in.
So I think Dostoevsky does think that
Ivan's salvation, if he's capable of being saved,
is gonna come through the love of his brother Alyosha.
- Let me spring maybe a bit of a tangent on you.
Do you ever, one of my other favorite authors
is Herman Hesse, do you ever include him
in our deck of sport cards that represent existentialism?
- I haven't, maybe I should.
What should I read?
What should I think about including?
- Oh no, there's some kind of embrace of absurdism.
Like there's a existentialist kind of ideal
pervading most of his work.
But there's more of a, like with Siddhartha,
there's more almost like a Buddhist.
- Yeah, that's right.
- Sort of like watch the river and become the river,
like this kind of idea that what it means
to truly experience the moment.
So there is an experiential part of existentialism
where you want to, it's not just about,
we've been talking about kind of decisions and actions,
but also what it means to listen, like you said from Nietzsche,
like what it means to really take in the world
and experience the moment.
So he's very good at writing about
what it means to experience the moment
and experience the full absurdity of the moment.
And for him, I'm starting to forget,
Steppenwolf I think is humor,
it's part of the absurdity,
which I think modern day internet explores very well
with memes and so on.
Humor is a fundamental part of the existentialist ethic
that's able to deal with absurdity.
You gotta like laugh at it.
I think there is some,
let me just say something about humor,
'cause I think you're absolutely right.
Kierkegaard, who is Danish
and most people think deeply depressed and then so on,
is actually an incredibly funny writer.
And someone who was a classmate of mine in graduate school
who left philosophy to become a Hollywood comedy writer,
he's a very successful guy.
And then he came back 25 years later
and finished his dissertation.
And I was the reader on the dissertation,
but it may be a conflict of interest, I'm not quite sure.
But his dissertation was about,
he called it Kierkegaard and the funny,
which is a kind of a funny title, yeah.
But Kierkegaard, according to Eric Kaplan's reading,
Kierkegaard does have this idea
that there's something destabilizing about humor
that's crucial to the sort of the absurdity
of the important possibilities for us.
And so there's the idea that like,
there's a moment when a joke is being set up,
when you're sort of proceeding as if you're on stable ground
and then the punchline comes
and the rug is pulled out from under you.
And for a moment, it's like you're falling.
There's nothing supporting you
until you're captured by your totally new understanding
of what was going on.
And that humor necessarily has that kind
of destabilizing feature to it.
And that's like the riskiness.
That's like the riskiness that you were pointing to.
If there aren't risks in your life,
if your life is totally safe,
then there's no possibility of significance.
And so I think on Eric's reading,
Kierkegaard sort of wants to line up the importance
of the riskiness and vulnerability in your life
to its having meaning.
With the experience of destabilization
that you get in jokes and comedy,
which then becomes significant, right?
When you remember having heard a joke for the first time,
it's got a kind of salience for you.
- Speaking of jokes and speaking of,
you mentioned film and literature.
So existentialism in film and literature.
I think for a lot of people, especially nihilism,
was experienced in the great work of art,
modern work of art called Big Lebowski.
I don't know if you've ever seen that film,
but there's a group of nihilists in that film.
They're just like, they don't care about anything.
I think they happen to be German,
at least they have German accents.
So maybe can you talk about notable appearances
of existentialism in film?
And if you at all ever bring up Big Lebowski,
if that ever comes into play.
- So I know that people think about the Big Lebowski
in this context.
And I did actually rewatch it not so long ago.
We have kids.
Maybe it's time.
It wasn't really time for the 11 year old.
So somewhat inappropriate.
But I have never taught that film.
So I'd have to think more.
We could talk about it.
I'd be happy to try to think on the fly about it.
- Okay, so I would love to,
because there is a,
feels like there's a philosophical depth to that film.
So there's a person that just, the main character.
- The Jeff Bridges character.
- Jeff Bridges character, yeah.
He kind of, he drinks like these white Russians,
and he just kind of walks around in a very relaxed way.
And he radiates both a love for life,
but also just an acceptance of like,
it is what it is kind of philosophy.
And then there's a bunch of characters
that have very busy lives,
trying to do some big projects
that are dramatic in some way,
make some huge amounts of money.
So it kind of actually reminds me of "The Idiot"
by Dostoevsky in a certain kind of sense.
And then there's these players.
I mean, they're phrased as nihilists,
but they kind of don't care to enjoy life.
They want to mess with life in some kind of way.
And of course there's interesting personalities that,
what is it, Jesus, the bowler.
And then there's like Donnie, who is a bit clueless.
And then there's the, always-
- John Goodman character.
- John Goodman character,
is talking about Vietnam and just takes life
way too seriously, too intensely and so on.
So it just paints a full sort of spectrum of characters
that are operating in this world.
And perhaps most importantly for existentialism,
are thrown into absurdity.
- Yeah.
- And hence the humor.
- Okay, all right, good.
Well, that's helpful.
Thank you for reminding me of all that.
And I think, so one thing to say is that the nihilists,
the group of nihilists who call themselves nihilists,
I think they've got a bad misinterpretation
of what nihilism is supposed to be.
And this happened actually in the '20s.
There was a famous case of a couple of German students,
Leopold and Loeb, who'd read a lot of Nietzsche.
Nietzsche was a kind of hero for the Nazis even,
I think based on a pretty bad misunderstanding
of what he was up to.
But Leopold and Loeb had the bad understanding first,
and they were students, they'd read a lot of Nietzsche,
and they thought, okay, nothing means anything.
The only way that there's any significance in a life
is through our will to sort of powerfully
bring something about.
And if we're gonna do that in a way
that reflects the fact that nothing means anything,
then what we should do is take these things,
these actions that people always thought were bad,
and do them and show that there's nothing wrong
with doing them.
And so they decided they would murder someone,
not because they were angry at them,
just someone they'd never met.
It was important that it was someone they'd never met.
It was a totally unmotivated act.
And they thought, we'll embrace nihilism
by showing that we can act in such a way
as to do something that morality thinks is bad,
and through our will, bring it about that we desire to do it
for no reason that has anything to do
with its potentially being interpretable as good.
§09Transcript · 1:16:34–1:26:49
And I think that's a terrible misreading
of what Nietzsche thinks the response to nihilism is.
I mean, I think read that against the Miles Davis thing.
Miles Davis aim is to creatively bring it about
that something works well in a situation
where he is kind of constrained.
So they thought two things.
One, there are no constraints at all,
not even the constraints of the situation
that we find ourselves in.
And two, we only become the beings that we really are
when we act against what you might have thought
the constraints were.
And I just think that's a bad misreading
of what that kind of nihilism is up to.
And I think maybe that group in the Big Lebowski
has got that kind of bad misreading.
But then the major characters are much more interesting.
Go ahead, you were gonna say something.
- So there's some kind of apathy
to their particular nihilism.
Could you comment on whether you see sort of apathy
as a philosophy part of that nihilism?
So like from an existentialist perspective,
how important is it to care about stuff?
Like really take on life?
What does existentialism have to say
about just sitting back and just not caring?
- Excellent.
So apathy is like a really important word.
The Greek word is apatheia, it means without passions.
And the Stoics, who you mentioned earlier,
really thought that passions are what get in the way
of your living well.
Because to live well, you have to think clearly
about what you should do.
And you shouldn't let your resentments and your angers
and your petty animosities direct your behavior.
You should release yourself from those kinds of passions.
So Stoicism, again, huge caricature,
but it's an aim not to care because caring is bad.
And there's certain forms of existentialism,
certainly in Pascal and Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky
and Heidegger and Sartre in his own way.
So it's not just a theistic or atheistic thing,
where what's crucial about us is that we do care.
Heidegger says, "Care is the being of Dasein."
Dasein is his name for us.
What it is to be us is to be the being that already cares.
And you can't not do that.
You can pretend you're not doing it,
but you're just caring in a different way.
It's like Sartre saying,
you can pretend you're not taking responsibility.
Or you can pretend that you don't have to make a decision.
That is making a decision.
Not caring is a way of caring.
And so I think the existentialists that I'm interested in
think that we do care.
That's constitutive of what it is to be us.
And so they'll think that the Stoics got it wrong,
but that leaves open a huge range of moves
about how we inhabit that existence well.
- Let me ask about Ayn Rand.
- Okay.
- So it just so happens that I've gotten,
she's entered a few conversations in this podcast,
and just looking at academic philosophy
or just philosophers in general,
they seem to ignore Ayn Rand.
Do you have a sense of why that is?
Does she ever come into play, her ideas of objectivism
come into play of discussions of a good life
from the perspective of existentialism
in how you teach it and how you think about it?
Is she somebody who you find at all interesting?
- So no, I don't think she is.
But it's been a long time since I've read her stuff.
I read it in high school.
I read "The Fountainhead" in high school and "Atlas Shrugged,"
but that's at this point a very long time ago.
I think I read something about objective epistemology
or something too.
So my view about her could be based on a total
misunderstanding of what she's up to.
But sort of my caricature of her,
and tell me if I've got it wrong,
is that she's sort of motivated by a kind of,
I think maybe sometimes you call it libertarianism,
but maybe let's, in the context of our discussion,
tie it back to Sartre, a kind of view according to which
we're the being who has to contend with the fact
that we're radically free to do stuff
and we're just not being courageous or brave enough
when we don't do that.
And the people to admire are the people
who make stuff out of nothing.
So maybe that's a bad caricature.
- No, no, no, I think that's pretty accurate.
I'm not, again, very knowledgeable about the full depth
of her philosophy, but I think she takes a view
of the world that's similar to Sartre in the conclusions,
but makes stronger statements about epistemology
that first of all, everything is knowable.
And there's some, you should always operate through reason.
Like reason is very important.
Like it's like you start with a few axioms
and you build on top of that.
And the axioms that everybody should operate on
are the same.
Again, reality is objective, it's not subjective.
So from that, you can derive the entirety
of how humans should behave at the individual level
and at the societal level.
And there's a few conclusions.
She would talk about virtue of selfishness
and sort of a lot of people use that to dismiss her.
Look, she's very selfish and so on.
She actually meant something very different.
It's more like the Sartre thing.
Take responsibility for yourself,
understand what forces you're operating under
and make the best of this life.
And that's how you can be the best member of societies
by making the best life you can.
And just focus on yourself, like fix your own problems first
and then that will make you the best member of society,
of your family, of loved ones, of friends and so on.
I think the reason she's disliked,
obviously on the philosophy side, she's disliked
because a little bit like Nietzsche, she's literary.
I think the reason she's publicly disliked
in sort of public conversations
is because of how sure she is of herself.
So that, which is some of the philosophers
have been known to do, like make very strong statements
like hell is other people,
but she was making very strong statements
about basically everything.
And, but the reason I bring her up is,
she is an influential thinker
that is not for some reason often brought up as such.
It's not acknowledged how influential she is.
I was recently looking at like a list
of the most important women of the 20th century
in terms of thought, not science, but like thought.
And she wasn't in that list.
And I just, I've seen this time and time again,
and it doesn't make sense to me
why she's so kind of dismissed
because clearly she's an author
of some of the most read books like ever.
And she clearly had very strong ideas
that should be contended with, you know,
and that's why it kind of didn't make sense to me
because she's also a creature of her time
and an important one.
She's a creation of the Soviet Union,
somebody who left because of that.
And so some of the strength of her ideas
has to do with how much she dislikes
that particular philosophy and way of life.
But also she's a creature of like Sartre
and like that's whole like Nietzsche and so on.
Now, one of the other criticisms is
she doesn't integrate herself into this history.
She keeps basically kind of implying
that she's purely original in all her thoughts,
even though she's kind of citing a lot of other people.
But again, many philosophers do this kind of thing
as if they are truly original and they're not.
It is interesting.
And also what's interesting about her is she is a woman.
She is a strong feminist.
And it feels like with Simone de Beauvoir, you know,
like it seems like she's a very important person
in this moment of history that shouldn't be fully forgotten.
- Interesting, yeah.
Well, so I mean, I don't have a lot to add.
I will just say this.
I mean, the way she and Beauvoir seemed to me
from your description of her
and remembering what I remember from 35 years ago,
they seem pretty opposite from one another.
Like one of the things I find interesting about Beauvoir
is that she takes seriously the thing that Sartre didn't,
which is our throne-ness,
which is the sense in which we're born into a situation
that's already got a significance for her.
I think it was easier for her to recognize that than Sartre
because she was a woman.
And Sartre seems to act as if, you know,
there are no constraints or at least there shouldn't be.
We're pretty close as, you know, privileged white males.
- Yeah, exactly.
- If we could just get rid of the last bits of them,
we would be God like we're supposed to be.
And I think Beauvoir sort of sees things differently.
I think she, one's not born but becomes a woman, she says.
So how does that happen?
§10Transcript · 1:26:51–1:36:10
Well, you're thrown into your culture
and your culture starts treating you in a certain way
because of your gender.
And that starts to form your understanding
and your experience of things.
And by the time you're grown up,
well, you're pretty well-formed by that.
That seems a fact.
It's a fact about Sartre too, though,
it was harder for him to notice it
because he was formed into his privilege.
- But the world reminds us of our throne-ness
for some more than others.
- Yes, absolutely.
And for people who have to contend on a daily basis
with the fact that the social position they're thrown into
is one that negates them or one that oppresses them
or one that sort of pushes them to the side
in some way or another.
I mean, the black experience
is interesting in this respect too.
Frantz Fanon, who's a contemporary of Sartre
and Beauvoir's, writes about it.
And it's very familiar, the things that he's saying now,
but he writes back in the '50s
about being a black man in Paris
and getting on an elevator with a woman alone.
And how her reaction to him, not knowing him,
not having any views about,
any reason to have any views about him,
sort of puts him in a particular social position
with respect to her.
And if you don't have that experience,
it's much harder to recognize the way
in which what we're thrown into
is something we might not have chosen.
So the idea that that's not an aspect of our existence,
which as you describe Ayn Rand's views,
she sounds more like Sartre,
she sounds more like either it's not an aspect
of our existence, or at least we ought to sort of aim
at it's not being an aspect of our existence.
- Yeah, almost act as if it's not.
- Yeah, exactly. - Act as if it's not.
- And so I think from my point of view,
I don't pretend that I'm explaining
the public reception of her.
I'm just sort of trying to say how I understand her
in this intellectual context.
From my point of view, that's something big to miss.
And the ambition to think that really what's happening
is that we're all the same, we're all rational beings.
We're all beings who, if we just got the axioms
of our existence right and made good judgments
and reasoned in an appropriate way, would optimize ourselves.
That feels to me like a kind of natural end point
of the philosophical tradition.
I mean, sort of Plato starts off with a view
that helps us in that direction,
and the enlightenment moves us further in that direction.
But from my point of view, that movement has led us astray
because it's missed something really important
that's crucial to the kind of being that we are.
- Yeah, it misses the music.
- Exactly, it misses the music.
- Let's talk about thrownness,
and I think you mentioned that in the context of Heidegger.
- Yeah.
- So can we talk about Heidegger?
- Okay.
- Who is this philosopher?
What are some fascinating ideas
that he brought to the world?
- Okay, so Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher.
I do know when he was born, 1889.
I know that only by accident.
It's because it's the same year that Wittgenstein,
an Austrian philosopher, was born,
and the same year that Hitler was born.
So if I've remembered my dates right,
and someone will call in and correct me otherwise.
But that's the way it sort of sits in my memory bank.
And it's interesting that the three of them were born
at the same time.
Wittgenstein and Heidegger share some similarities,
but then it's also interesting that Heidegger was a Nazi.
I mean, this is a very disturbing fact
about his personal political background.
And so it's something that anyone who thinks
that things that he said might be interesting
has got to contend with.
- Heidegger was born in Germany, Hitler in Austria.
- That's right.
- Wittgenstein is Austria also.
But so you have to, when you call Heidegger a Nazi,
you have to remember, I mean,
there was millions of Nazis too.
So like there are parts of their,
that's the history of the world.
There's a lot of communists, Marxists,
and Nazis in that part of history.
- Absolutely.
And one of the discussion points is,
well, was he just a kind of social Nazi?
I mean, you know, he went to parties with them
and stuff or was he like,
did he really believe in the ideology?
And that's a choice point.
And, you know, we can talk about it if you want.
He held a political position.
That's one of the relevant parts.
In 1933, he was made rector of the University of Freiburg.
That's like the president of the university.
And that was in Germany, all the universities
are state universities.
And so that's a political appointment.
- Can we just pause on this point?
- Yeah.
- From an existentialist perspective,
what's the role for standing up to evil?
So, I mean, I think Camus probably had something to say
about these things 'cause he was a bit of a political figure.
Like, do you have a responsibility,
not just for your decisions,
but, you know, if the world you see around you
is going against what you believe somewhere deep inside,
is ethical, do you have a responsibility
to stand up to that, even if it costs you your life
or your wellbeing?
- Well, you asked from an existential perspective,
and there's lots of different positions that you could have.
So let me tell you something in the area
of what I think I might believe,
which comes out of this tradition.
And it's this, if you live in a community
where people are being dragged down
by the norms of the community rather than elevated,
then there's two things that you have to recognize.
One is that you bear some responsibility for that,
not necessarily because you chose it,
maybe you reviled it, maybe you were against it,
but there's some way in which we all act
in accordance with the norms of our culture.
We all give in to them in some way or another.
And if those norms are broken,
then there's some way in which we've allowed ourselves
to be responsible for broken norms,
or we've become responsible for broken norms.
And I do think you have to face up to that.
I think that, let's just take gender norms.
Maybe the gender norms are broken.
Maybe the way men and women treat one another
or the way men treat women is broken.
You know, maybe there's, maybe it is,
maybe there's, I'm not making a substantive claim,
I'm just saying, you know, lots of people say it is.
And if you're in a culture where those norms take root,
you don't get to just isolate yourself
and pull yourself out of the culture
and think I don't have any responsibility.
You're already a part of the culture,
even if you're isolating yourself from it.
That's a way of rejecting the sort of part you play
in the culture, but it's not a way of getting behind it.
Now you're playing that role differently.
You're saying, I don't wanna take responsibility
for what's going on around me.
And that's a way of taking responsibility
by refusing to do it.
So I think we're implicated
in whatever's going on around us.
And if we're gonna do anything in our lives,
we ought to recognize that,
recognize that even in situations
where you maybe didn't decide to do it,
you could be part of bringing other people down
and then devote yourself to trying to figure out
how to act differently so that the norms update themselves.
And I think this is not a criticism of people.
The Alyosha who we mentioned in "The Brothers Karamazov",
he's a character, he's a kind of saintly character
in "The Brothers Karamazov".
But that one crucial moment in that story,
when he realizes how awful he's been being to someone
without ever even intending to do that.
It's Grushenka, who's this sort of fascinating woman.
And she's a very erotic woman.
She's sort of sexual.
And Alyosha, in my reading of it,
is kind of attracted to her.
But he's a young kid, he's 20 or whatever,
and he's kind of embarrassed about it.
And he lives in the monastery
and he's thinking maybe he wants to be a priest
and he's kind of embarrassed by it.
So what does he do?
Every time they run across one another in the street,
he averts his gaze.
And why is he doing that?
'Cause he's kind of embarrassed.
§11Transcript · 1:36:12–1:45:35
But how does Grushenka experience it?
Well, she knows she's a fallen woman
and she knows that Alyosha
has this other position in society.
So her read on it is, he's passing judgment on me.
He can see that he doesn't wanna be associated with me.
He can see that I'm a fallen woman.
He knows that in order to maintain his purity,
he's gotta avoid me.
That's not what Alyosha intended to do,
but that's the way it's experienced.
And so there's this way he comes to recognize, oh my God,
like what I'm supposed to do is love people
in Dostoevsky's view of things.
And what I'm doing instead is dragging this poor woman down.
I'm making her life worse.
I'm making her feel terrible about herself.
And if I actually came to know her,
I'd recognize her condition is difficult.
She's living a difficult life.
She's making hard choices.
And why don't I see that in her face
instead of this other thing
that's making me wanna avoid her?
And that's a huge moment.
So the idea is that we're implicated
in bringing other people down,
whether we wanna be or not.
And that's our condition.
- The requirement to understand that
is to be almost to a radical degree,
be empathetic and to listen to the world.
And I mean, you brought up sort of gender roles.
It's not so simple.
All of this is messy.
For example, this is me talking.
It's clear to me that, for example,
the woke culture has bullying built into it,
has some elements of the same kind of evil built into it.
And when you're part of the wave of wokeness,
standing up for social rights,
you also have to listen and think,
are we going too far?
Are we hurting people?
Are we doing the same things that others,
that we're fighting against
that others were doing in the past?
So it's not simple once you see
that there's evil being done.
That it's easy to fix.
No, in our society,
it's, there's something about our human nature
that just too easily stops listening to the world,
to empathizing with the world.
And we label things as evil.
This is through human history.
This is evil.
You mentioned tribes.
This religious belief is evil.
And so we have to fight it
and we become certain and dogmatic about it.
And then in so doing, commit evil onto the world.
It seems like a life that accepts
and responsibility for the norms we're in
has to constantly be sort of questioning yourself
and questioning, like listening to the world fully
and richly without being weighed down
by any one sort of realization.
You just always constantly have to be thinking
about the world.
Am I wrong?
Am I wrong in seeing the world this way?
- I mean, the very last thing you said,
you've constantly gotta be thinking about the world.
You've constantly gotta be listening.
You've constantly gotta be attending.
And it's not simple.
All that sounds exactly right to me.
And the phrase that rings through my head
is another one from the Brothers Karamazov,
Dmitry, this passionate,
sort of sometimes violent brother,
who is also sort of deeply cares.
I mean, because he's passionate,
he's sort of got care through and through,
but it's breaking him apart.
He says at one point,
"God and the devil are fighting
"in the battlefield is the heart of man."
(both laughing)
And I just think, yeah, it's not simple.
And the idea that there might be a purely good way
of doing things, it's just not our condition.
That everything we do is gonna be sort of undermined
by some aspect of it.
There's not gonna be a kind of pure good
in human existence.
And so it's sort of required
that we're gonna have to be empathetic,
that we're gonna have to recognize
that others are dealing with that just as we are.
- So I apologize for distracting us.
We were talking about Heidegger.
- Okay.
- And the reason we were distracted
is he happened to also be a Nazi,
but he nevertheless has a lot of powerful ideas.
What are the ideas he's brought to the world?
- Okay, so that's a big, huge question.
So let me see how much of it I can get on the table.
(Lex laughing)
I mean, the big picture is that Heidegger thinks,
and he's not really wrong to think this,
that the whole history of philosophy from Plato forward,
maybe even from the pre-Socratics forward,
from like the sixth century BC to now
has been motivated by a certain kind,
or has been grounded on a certain kind of assumption
that it didn't have the right to make,
and that it's led us astray,
and that until we understand
the way in which it's led us astray,
we're not gonna be able to get to grips
with the condition we now find ourselves in.
So let me start with what he thinks
the condition we now find ourselves in is.
Lots of periods to Heidegger's views.
I'm just gonna sort of mush it all together
for the purposes of today.
Heidegger thinks that one of the crucial things
that we need to contend with
when we think about what it is to be us now
is that the right name for our age is a technological age.
And what does it mean for our age to be a technological age?
Well, it means that we have an understanding
of what it is for anything at all to be, at all,
that we never really chose,
that sort of animating the way we live our lives,
that's animating our understanding of ourselves
and everything else,
that is quite limited.
And it's organized around the idea
that to be something is to be what's sitting there
as an infinitely flexible reserve
to be optimized and made efficient.
And Heidegger thinks that that's not just the way
we think of silicon circuits or the river
when we put a hydroelectric power plant on it,
we're optimizing the flow of the river
so that it makes energy which is infinitely flexible
and we can use in any way at all.
It's the way we understand ourselves too.
We think of ourselves as this reserve of potential
that needs to be made efficient and optimized.
And when I talk with my students about it,
I ask them, "What's your calendar look like?
What's the goal of your day?
Is it to get as many things into it as possible?
Is it to feel like I've failed
unless I've made my life so efficient
that I'm doing this and this and this and this and this
that I can't let things go by?"
The feeling that I think we all have
that there's some pressure to do that,
to relate to ourselves that way
is a clue to what Heidegger thinks
the technological age is about.
And he thinks that's different
from every other age in history.
We used to think of ourselves in the 17th century
at the beginning of the enlightenment
as subjects who represent objects.
Descartes thought that a subject is something,
some mental sort of realm
that represents the world in a certain way.
And we are closed in on ourselves
in the sense that we have a special relation
to our representations.
And that's what the realm of the subject is.
But others, in the Middle Ages,
we were created in the image and likeness of God.
And in the pre-Socratic age,
to be was to be what whooshes up and lingers for a while
and fades away the paradigm of what is,
where thunderstorms and the anger of the gods,
Achilles' battle fury,
and it overtakes everything and stays for a while
and then leaves, the flowers blooming in spring.
And that's very different
from the way we experience ourselves.
And so the question is,
what are we supposed to do in the face of that?
And Heidegger thinks that the presupposition
that's motivated everything from the pre-Socratics forward
is that there is some entity
that's the ground of the way we understand everything to be.
For the Middle Ages, it was God.
That was the entity that made things
be the things that they are.
For the Enlightenment, it was us, maybe for a start, it's us.
§12Transcript · 1:45:40–1:55:28
And Heidegger thinks whatever it is
that stands at the ground of what we are,
it's not another thing, it's not another entity.
And we're relating to it in the wrong way
if we think of it like that.
There's some way, and this is partly why
I was interested in Meister Eckhart.
He says, what there is is there's giving going on
in the world, and we're the grateful recipient of it.
And the giving is like, whatever it is,
it's the social norms that we're thrown into.
We didn't choose them, they were given to us.
And that's the ground.
That is what makes it possible
for anything to be intelligible at all.
If we lived outside of communities,
if we lived in a world where there were no social norms
at all, nothing would mean anything.
Nothing would have any significance.
Nothing would be regular in the way
that things need to be regular
in order for there to be departures
or manifestations of that regularity.
So community norms are crucial,
but they're also always updating.
We have some responsibility for what they are
and the way in which they're updating themselves.
And yet we didn't ever choose it to be that way.
So those norms are somehow giving significance to us
in a way that we're implicated in,
we have some relation to.
And all that gets covered over
if you think of us as efficient resources to be optimized.
Is that a conflicting view
that we are resources to be optimized?
Is that somehow deeply conflicting
with the fact that there's a ground that we stand on?
Absolutely.
So what Heidegger thinks is that this is the,
he calls this the supreme danger of the technological age
is that without ever having chosen it,
without ever having decided it,
this is the way we understand what it is to be us.
But he thinks that it's also, he says,
quoting Hölderlin, this 18th century German poet,
he says, "In the supreme danger
"lies the saving possibility."
So what does that mean?
It means that this is the understanding
that we've been thrown into, that we've been given.
It's the gift that was given to us.
It's supremely dangerous.
If we let ourselves live that way,
we'll destroy ourselves.
But it's also the saving possibility
because if we recognize that we never chose that,
that it was given to us,
but also we were implicated in its being given
and we could find a way to supersede it,
that it's the ground, but it's also updatable.
He calls the ground the groundless ground.
It's not like an entity, which is there,
solid, stable, like God, who's eternal and non-changing.
It's always updating itself.
And we're always involved in its being updated.
But we're only involved in it in the right way
if we listen, like Miles Davis.
So optimization is not a good way to live life.
If you thought that it was obviously clear
that that was the relevant value,
so obviously clear that it never even occurred to you
to ask whether it was right to think that,
then you would be in danger.
Yeah. - Got it.
So yeah, there is some in this modern technological age
in the full meaning of the word technology
that's updated to actual modern age
with a lot more technology going on.
It does feel like colleagues of mine in the tech space
actually are somehow drawn to that optimization
as if that's going to save us,
as if the thing that truly weighs us down
is the inefficiencies.
- Exactly.
And I think if you think about other contexts,
like what are the moments when,
I mean, we're unique in this respect.
This period in history is unlike any previous period.
No, nobody ever felt that way, right?
But think about, but it's also true that nobody,
no previous period in history was nihilistic.
So our condition is tied up.
That sort of thing is meant to be a response
to the felt lack of a ground.
And so no previous epoch in history felt that way.
They didn't have our problem.
But think, so it was much more natural to them
to experience moments in ways that feel unachievable for us,
what we were calling moments of aliveness before.
Think about the context in which they felt them.
They weren't efficient, optimized contexts.
Think about the Greeks.
If you ever read Homer, it is a bizarre world back there.
But one of the things that's bizarre
is that they're so unmotivated by efficiency and optimizing
that the only thing that seems to run through
all of the different Greek cultures is the idea
that if some stranger comes by,
you better take care of them
because Zeus is the God of strangers
and Zeus will be angry.
That's what they say, right?
But how does it manifest itself?
Odysseus, he's trying to get home
and he gets shipwrecked on an island.
And he's trying to figure out,
he's been at sea for 10 days.
He's starving, he's bedraggled.
And he sees now Sissa, the princess who's beautiful.
And he's like, boy, I better, I don't know,
get some clothes or something.
I don't want them to beat me up and kill me.
And so she takes him to the palace.
They have three days of banquets and festivals
before they even ask his name.
It's like, here's a stranger.
Our job is to celebrate the presence of a stranger
because this is where significance lies.
Now, we don't have to feel that way,
but the idea that that's one of the places
where significance could lie is pretty strongly at odds
with the idea that our salvation is gonna come
from optimization and efficiency.
Now, maybe something about the way we live our lives
will have that integrated into it.
But it's at odds with other moments.
- Let me ask you a question about Hubert "Bert" Dreyfus.
He is a friend, a colleague, a mentor of yours,
unfortunately no longer with us.
You wrote with him the book titled,
"All Things Shining, Reading the Western Classics
to Find Meaning in a Secular Age."
First, can you maybe speak about who that man was,
what you learned from him?
And then we can maybe ask,
how do we find through the classics
meaning in a secular age?
- Okay.
So Bert Dreyfus was a very important philosopher
of the late 20th, early 21st century.
He died in 2017, about a little over four years ago.
He was my teacher.
I met him in 1989 when I went away to graduate school
in Berkeley, that's where he taught.
He plays an interesting and important role
in the history of philosophy in America
because in a period when most philosophers in America
and in the English speaking world
were not taking seriously 20th century
French and German philosophy, he was.
And he was really probably the most important
English speaking interpreter of Heidegger,
the German philosopher that we're talking about,
we've been talking about.
He was an incredible teacher.
A lot of his influence came through his teaching.
And one of the amazing things about him as a teacher
was his sort of mix of intellectual humility
with sort of deep insightful authority.
And he would stand up in front of a class of 300 students,
he taught huge classes 'cause people love to go see him
and I taught for him for many years,
and say, "I've been reading this text for 40 years,
"but the question you asked is one I've never asked."
And it would be true.
He would find in what people said
things that were surprising and new to him.
And that's humility actually.
That is.
Listening to the world.
Absolutely, absolutely.
He was always ready to be surprised
by something that someone said.
And there's something astonishing about that.
So his influence was for people who didn't know him
through his interpretations of these texts,
he wrote about a huge range of stuff.
But for people who did know him, it was through his presence.
It was through the way he carried himself in his life.
And so in any case, that's who he was.
I graduated after many years as a graduate student.
I didn't start in philosophy, I started in math,
math and computer science, actually.
And then I did a lot of work in computational neuroscience
for a few years.
That's a fascinating journey.
We'll get to it through our friendly conversation
about artificial intelligence, I'm sure.
'Cause you're basically fascinated
with the philosophy of mind, of the human mind,
§13Transcript · 1:55:31–2:05:11
but rooted in a curiosity of mind through the,
it's artificial, through the engineering of mind.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
So Bert, I mean, the reason I was attracted to him actually
is because of his, to begin with,
was because of his criticisms of what was called
traditional symbolic AI in the '70s and '80s.
So I came to Berkeley as a graduate student
who'd done a lot of math and a lot of computer science,
a lot of computational neuroscience.
I noticed that you had, you interview a lot of people
in this world.
And I had a teacher at Brown as an undergraduate,
Jim Anderson, who wrote with Jeff Hinton,
a big book on neural networks.
So I was interested in that,
not so interested in traditional AI,
like sort of LISP programmings,
things that went on in the '80s,
because it felt sort of,
when you made a system do something,
all of a sudden it was an interesting thing to have done.
The fact that you'd solved the problem
then made it clear that the problem
wasn't an interesting one to solve.
That's right.
And I had that experience and Bert had criticisms
of symbolic AI, what he called good old fashioned AI,
go-fi.
And I was attracted to those criticisms
because it felt to me that there was something lacking
in that project.
And I didn't know what it was.
I just felt its absence.
And then I learned that all his arguments
came from his reading of this phenomenological
and existential tradition.
And so I had to try to figure out
what those folks were saying.
And it was a long road, let me tell you.
It took me a long time,
but it was because of Bert that I was able to do that.
So I own that huge debt of gratitude.
And eventually we went on to write a book together,
which was a great experience.
And yes, we published "All Things Shining" in 2011.
And that's a book that I definitely
would not have had the chutzpah to try to write
if it weren't for Bert,
because it was really about great literature
in the history of the West,
from Homer and Virgil and Dante to Melville.
There's a huge chapter on Melville,
a big chapter on David Foster Wallace,
who Bert didn't care about at all,
but I was fascinated by.
And so learning to think that way
while writing that book with him
was an amazing experience.
- So I have to admit,
it's one of my failings in life,
one of many failings is I've never gotten through "Moby Dick"
or any of Melville's works.
So maybe can you comment on,
before we talk about David Foster Wallace,
who I have gotten through,
what are some of the sources of meaning in these classics?
- Good, so "Moby Dick" I think
is the other great novel of the 19th century.
So the brothers Karamazov and Moby Dick,
and they're diametrically opposed,
which is one of the really interesting things.
So Dostoevsky, the brothers Karamazov,
is a kind of existential interpretation
of Russian Orthodox Christianity.
How do you live that way and find joy in your existence?
"Moby Dick" is not at all about Christianity.
It's about, it sort of starts with the observation
that the form of Christianity
that Ishmael is familiar with is broken.
It's not gonna work in his living his life.
He has to leave it.
He has to go to sea in order to find what needs to happen.
- And Ishmael is the boating captain,
the whaling boat captain.
- So he's not the captain, that's Ahab.
Ahab is the captain.
Yeah, right, let me back up.
The famous opening line to the book is, "Call me Ishmael."
And Ishmael is the main character in the book.
He's a nobody.
He's you and me.
He's the everyday guy.
He's like a nobody on the ship.
He's like, not the lowest, but certainly not the highest.
He's right in the middle.
And he's named Ishmael, which is interesting
'cause Ishmael is the illegitimate son of Abraham
in the Old Testament.
He is the, I think if I have it right,
again, someone will correct me.
(Luke laughs)
I think he's the one that Islam traces its genesis to.
And so Islam is an Abrahamic religion
like Judaism and Christianity,
but Judaism and Christianity trace their lineage
through Isaac, the quote unquote legitimate son of Abraham,
and Ishmael is the other son of Abraham
who he had with a girlfriend.
And so he's clearly outside of Christianity in some way.
He's named after the non-Christian sort of son of Abraham.
And the book starts out with this, what does he call it?
Something like a dark and misty November mood.
(both laugh)
He's walking along the street and he's overcome by his,
I can't remember what the word is, but his hypos.
That's what he calls them.
He's in a mood, he's depressed, he's down,
things are not going well, and that's where he starts.
And he signs up to go on this whaling voyage
with this captain, Ahab, who is this incredibly charismatic,
deeply disturbing character who is a captain
who's got lots of history and wants to go whaling,
wants to get whales.
That's what they do, they harpoon these whales
and bring them back and sell the blubber
and the oil and so on.
So he's kind of rich and he's famous and he's powerful.
He's an authority figure.
And he is megalomaniacally obsessed
with getting one particular whale,
which is called Moby Dick.
And Moby Dick is like the largest, the whitest,
the sort of most terrifying of all the whales.
And Ahab wants to get him
'cause a number of years earlier,
he had an encounter with Moby Dick
where Moby Dick bit off his leg and he survived,
but he had this deeply religious experience
in the wake of it.
And he needed to find out what the meaning of that was.
Like, what is the meaning of my suffering?
Who am I such that the world and Moby Dick,
this Leviathan at the center of it,
should treat me this way?
And so his task is not just to go whaling,
it's to figure out the meaning of the universe
through going whaling and having a confrontation
with his tormentor, this whale, Moby Dick.
And the confrontation is so weird
because Melville points out that whales,
their faces are so huge, their foreheads are so huge,
and their eyes are on the side of them
that you can never actually look them in the eye.
And it's kind of a metaphor for God.
Like, you can't ever look God in the face.
That's the sort of traditional thing to say about God.
You can't find the ultimate meaning of the universe
by looking God in the face.
But Ahab wants to.
He says he's got a pasteboard mask of a face,
but I'll strike through the mask and find out what's behind.
And so Ishmael is sort of caught up in this thing
and he's like going whaling 'cause he's in a bad mood.
And maybe this will make things better.
And he makes friends with this guy, Queequeg.
And Queequeg is a pagan.
He's from an island in the South Pacific.
And he's got tattoos all over his body, head to toe.
He's party colored, like every different color,
it says, Ishmael, is these tattoos.
And they are the writing on his body, he says,
of the immutable mysteries of the universe
as understood through his culture.
And so somehow Queequeg is this character
who is like not Christian at all.
And he's powerful in a very different way than Ahab is.
He's supposed to be the king.
He's the son of the king.
And probably his father's died by now.
And if he went home, he'd be the king.
But he's off on a voyage too,
trying to understand who he is
before he goes back and leads his people.
And he's a harpooner, the bravest of the people on the ship.
And he's got the mystery of the universe tattooed
on his body, but nobody can understand it.
And it's through his relation with Queequeg
that Ishmael comes to get a different understanding
of what we might be about.
So that's Moby Dick, in a nutshell.
- And connected to a book I have read,
which is funny, there's probably echoes
that represent the 20th century now
in "Old Man and the Sea" by Hemingway
that also has similar, I guess, themes,
but more personal, more focused on the,
I mean, I guess it's less about God.
It's almost more like the existentialist version
of Moby Dick.
§14Transcript · 2:05:12–2:14:37
- Yeah, yeah.
- And hence shorter.
- A lot shorter, yeah.
Well, Hemingway was brilliant that way.
- Yeah.
- But do you see echoes,
and do you find "Old Man and the Sea" interesting?
- It's been since ninth grade that I read
"Old Man and the Sea" even longer ago
than "The Fountainhead."
So I didn't know we were gonna go there.
I mean, I find Hemingway interesting,
but Hemingway, my general sort of picture of him
is that we have to confront the dangers
and the difficulties of our life.
We have to develop in ourselves
a certain kind of courage and manliness.
And I think there's something interesting about that.
He's for risk in a certain way.
And I think that's important.
But I do, now I don't have any right to say this
since it's been so long since I read it.
I do feel like there's,
I don't remember a sense for quite the tragedy of it.
Maybe there is.
Is it a melancholy novel?
I don't even remember.
- No, it's, I mean, it has a sense
like "The Stranger" by Camus.
It has a sense of like, this is how life is.
And it like, it has more about old age
and that you're not quite the man you used to be feeling
of like, this is how time passes.
And then the passing of time and how you get old
and you get older, and this is one last fish.
It's less about this is the fish.
It's more like, this is one last fish.
Like, and asking, who was I?
Who was I as a man, as a human being in this world?
And this one fish helps you ask that question fully.
- Wonderful.
But it's one fish, which is just sort of
all the other fish too, right?
And that is a big difference because for Ahab,
no other fish will do than Moby Dick.
It's gotta be the biggest, the most powerful,
the most tormenting.
It's gotta be the one that you've got history with
that has defiled you.
And it's a raucous ride, Moby Dick.
- Yeah.
What about David Foster Wallace?
So why is he important to you in the search of meaning
in a secular age?
- Good, so I'll just, just to finish the Moby Dick thing,
I think what's interesting about Melville
is that he thinks our salvation comes
not if we get in the right relation
to monotheism or Christianity,
but if we get in the right relation to polytheism,
to the idea that there's not a unity to our existence,
but there are lots of little meanings
and they don't cohere.
Sometimes, you know, like in Homer,
sometimes you're in love.
Helen's in love with Paris and they do crazy things.
They go off and run away and the Trojan War begins.
And sometimes you're in a battle fury.
Love is Aphrodite's realm and the battle fury,
that's Ares' realm.
And that's a totally different world.
And they're not even, I mean, they're related.
There's a kind of family resemblance, but not much.
Mostly, you're just in different
sort of local meaningful worlds.
And Melville seems to think that that's a thing
that we could aim to bring back.
He says, we have to lure back the merry May Day gods of old
and lovingly enthrone them in the now egotistical sky,
the now unhaunted hill.
That's what, we live in this world where hills
aren't haunted with significance anymore.
And the sky is just a bunch of stuff
that we're studying with physics and astrophysics and stuff,
but they used to be awe-inspiring.
And we have to figure out how to get in that relation
to them, but not by trying to give a unity to our existence
through developing habits and practices
that get written on our body.
And so his is about the end of Judeo-Christianity
and the sort of Roman appropriation of it.
In Wallace, one of the things I think is so interesting
about him is that I think he is a great observer
of the contemporary world.
And he's a very funny writer.
He's really funny.
But he's a great observer of the contemporary world.
And what he thought was at the core
of the contemporary world was this constant temptation
to diversion through entertainment.
That's a different story than Heidegger's story
about efficiency and optimization,
but it's the other side of it.
What is this temptation sort of diverting us from?
The ability to be more efficient.
So you're tempted to go watch some stupid film
or television show or something that's dumb
and not really very interesting,
but you read that temptation as a temptation
precisely in virtue of it's taking you away
from your optimizing your existence.
And so I think they're two sides of the same coin.
I think he's brilliant at describing it.
I think he thought it was a desperate position to be in,
that it was something that we needed to confront
and find a way out of.
And his characters are trying to do that.
And I think there's two different David Foster Wallace's.
One, I mean, David Foster Wallace committed suicide.
And when I, and it's very sad.
And he clearly did have sort of,
there was a physiological basis to his condition.
He knew it.
He was treating it for decades with medication.
He had electroshock therapy a number of times.
It's just very, very sad story.
When I decided that we were gonna write
about David Foster Wallace,
the first thing I was worried about is,
can you, like obviously a motivating factor,
maybe the motivating factor in his committing suicide
was his physiological condition.
But there was a question.
Could you think, I mean, he's obsessed with the condition,
with what we need to do to achieve our salvation,
to live well, to make our lives worth living.
And he clearly in the end felt like he couldn't do that.
So in addition to the physiological thing,
which probably most of it,
the question for me was, could you find in his writing
what his, what he was identifying
as the thing we needed to be doing
that he nevertheless felt we couldn't be doing?
And he talks as if that's the difficulty for him.
So that's one side of him.
And I did wanna find that.
I think there's another side of him that's very different,
but you were gonna ask.
No, please, what's the other side?
I mean, what I write about in the chapter mostly
is what I think he's got as our saving possibility.
He thinks our saving possibility,
he says this in a graduation speech that he gave to Kenyon,
is that we have the freedom to interpret situations
however we like.
So what's the problem case for him?
He says, look, the problem case, we have it all the time.
You get pissed off at the world.
Some big SUV cuts you off on the highway
and you're pissed off.
And you might express your anger
with one finger or another, right?
Directed at that person.
And he says, but actually,
you're being pissed off as the result
of your having made an assumption.
And the assumption is that that action was directed at you.
Like the assumption is that
you're the center of the universe
and you shouldn't assume that.
And the way to talk yourself out of it, he says,
is to recognize the possibility
that maybe that wasn't an action directed at you.
Like maybe that guy is racing to the hospital
to take care of his dying spouse
who's been there suffering from cancer.
Or maybe he's on the way to pick up a sick child.
Or maybe he's, and it's not an action directed,
that was your assumption,
not something that was inherent in the situation.
And I think there's something interesting about that.
I think there's something right about that.
At the same time, I don't think,
he speaks as if we can just spin out these stories
and whether they're true or not doesn't matter.
What matters is that they free us from this assumption.
Yes.
And I think they only free us from this assumption
if they're true.
(laughs)
Sometimes the guy really did direct it at you
and that's part of the situation.
And you can't pretend that it's not part of the situation.
You have to find the right way
of dealing with that situation.
So you have to listen to what's actually happening
and then you have to figure out how to make it right.
And I think he thinks that we have too much freedom.
He thinks that you don't have to listen to the situation.
You can just tell whatever story you like about it.
§15Transcript · 2:14:40–2:24:35
And I think that's actually too tough.
I don't think we have that kind of freedom.
And he writes these sort of incredibly moving letters
when he's trying to write "The Pale King,"
which is the unfinished novel
that really sort of drove him to distraction.
At the center of the novel is this character
who, or one of the characters at the center of the novel
is a guy who's doing the most boring thing
you could possibly imagine.
He is an IRS tax examiner.
He's going over other people's tax returns,
trying to figure out whether they followed the rules or not.
And like just the idea of doing that for eight hours a day
is just terrifying.
And he puts this guy in a enormous warehouse
that extends for miles,
where person after person after person
is in rows of desks, sort of nameless,
each of them doing this task.
So he's in nowhere doing nothing,
and it's gotta be intensely boring.
And now the main character's trying to teach himself
to do that.
And the question is, how do you put up with the boredom?
How do you put up with this onslaught of meaninglessness?
And the main character is able to confront that condition
with such bliss that he literally levitates from happiness
while he's going over other people's tax returns.
And that's my metaphor for what I think
Wallace must've imagined we have to try to aspire to.
And I think that's unlivable.
I think that's not an ambition that we could achieve.
I think there's something else we could achieve.
And the other thing that we can achieve
that I think is something that he also is onto,
but doesn't write about as often,
is something more like achieving peak moments of significance
in a situation when something great happens.
And he writes about this in an article about Roger Federer.
He loved tennis.
Are you a tennis lover?
I'm not a lover of tennis,
but I played tennis for 15 years and so on.
I don't love it the way people love baseball, for example.
I see the beauty in it, the artistry.
I just liked it as a sport.
Good, okay, well, I didn't play much tennis,
but I hit a ball around every once in a while as a kid.
And I always thought it was boring to watch.
But reading David Foster Wallace on Roger Federer,
you're like, wow, I've been missing something.
And the article,
which appeared in the New York Times Magazine,
was called "Roger Federer as Religious Experience."
Oh, wow, there you go.
And he says, look, there's something astonishing
about watching someone who's got a body like us.
And having a body is a limitation.
It's like the sight of sores and pains
and agony and exhaustion.
And it's the thing that dies in the end.
And so it's what we have to confront.
I mean, there's also joys that go along with having a body.
Like if you didn't have a body, there'd be no sex.
If you didn't have a body,
there'd be no sort of physical excitement and so on.
But somehow having a body is essentially a limitation.
(laughing)
That when you watch someone who's got one
and is extraordinary at the way they use it,
you can recognize how that limitation
can be to some degree transcended.
And that that's what we can get when we watch Federer
or some other great athlete sort of doing these things
that transcend the limitations of their bodies.
And that that's the kind of peak experience
that we're capable of that could be a kind of salvation.
That's a very different story.
And I think that's a livable story.
And I don't know if it would have saved him,
but I feel like I wish he'd developed
that side of the story more.
- Can we talk about, and first of all,
let me just comment that I deeply appreciate
that you said you were gonna say something.
The fact that you're listening to me is amazing,
like that you care about other humans.
I really appreciate that.
We should be in this way listening to the world.
That's a meta comment about many of the things
we're talking about.
But you mentioned something about levitating
and a task that is infinitely boring
and contrasting that with essentially levitating
on a task that is great,
like the highest achievement of this physical limiting body
in playing tennis.
Now, I often say this,
I don't know where I heard David Foster Wallace say this,
but he said that the key to life is to be unboreable.
That is the embodiment of this philosophy.
And when people ask me for advice,
like young students, you know,
I don't find this interesting,
I don't find this interesting.
How do I find the thing I'm passionate for?
This would be very interesting to explore
because you kind of say that
that may not be a realizable thing to do,
which is to be unboreable.
But my advice usually is life is amazing.
Like you should be able to,
you should strive to discover the joy,
the levitation in everything.
And the thing you get stuck on for a longer period of time,
that might be the thing you should stick to,
but everything should be full of joy.
So that kind of cynicism of saying life is boring
is a thing that will prevent you from discovering the thing
that will give you deep meaning and joy.
But you're saying being unboreable
is not actionable for a human being.
- So, okay, excellent question, deep question.
And you might think, because of the title of the book
that Bert and I wrote, "All Things Shining,"
that I think all things are shining.
(both laughing)
But actually, I think it's an unachievable goal
to be unboreable.
I do believe that you're right,
that a lot of times when people are bored with something,
it's 'cause they haven't tried hard enough.
And I do think quite a lot of what makes people bored
with something is that they haven't paid attention
well enough, and that they haven't listened,
as you were saying.
So I do think there's something to that.
I think that's a deep insight.
On the other hand, the perfection of that insight
is that nothing is ever anything less than joyful.
And I actually think that Dostoevsky and Melville both agree,
but in very different ways,
that life involves a wide range of moods,
and that all of them are important.
It involves grief.
I think when someone dies, it's appropriate to grieve.
And it's not, in the first instance, joyful.
It's related to joy, because it makes the joys you feel
when you feel them more intense.
But it makes them more intense by putting you
in the position of experiencing the opposite.
And it's only because we're capable of a wide range
of passionate responses to situations
that I think the significances
can be as meaningful as they are.
So Melville, again, has this sort of interest.
I mean, let's just say the guilt and the grief
in the Brothers Karamazov.
Alyosha loses his mentor, Father Zosima.
He's grieving.
It's super important that he's grieving.
He has a religious conversion on the basis of grieving,
where he sees the sort of deep sort of beauty
of everything that is, but it comes through the grief,
not by avoiding the grief.
And Melville says something like,
Ishmael says something like,
he says, "I'm like a Catskill mountain eagle,"
the Catskills mountains nearby, he says,
"who's sort of flying high above the earth,
"going over the peaks and down into the valleys.
"I have these ups and these downs."
But they're all invested with a kind of significance.
They all happen at an enormously high height,
'cause it's through the mountains that I'm flying.
And even when I'm down, it's a way of being up.
But it's really down.
It's just that it's a way of being up
'cause it makes the ups even upper.
- Well, I guess then the perfectionism of that
can be destructive.
I mean, I tend to see, for example, grief,
loss of love as part of love in that it's a celebration
of the richness of feelings you had when you had the love.
So it's all part of the same experience.
But if you turn it into an optimization problem
where everything can be unbearable,
then that can in itself be destructive.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
I heard this interview with David Foster Wallace
on the internet, where it's a video of him
and there is a foreign sounding reporter
asking him questions.
There's an accent of some sort, German, I think,
something like that.
And I don't know, it just painted a picture
of such a human person.
We were talking about listening.
The interviewer, if I may say,
§16Transcript · 2:24:37–2:35:33
wasn't a very good one in the beginning.
So she kind of walked in doing the usual journalistic things
of just kind of generic questions
and just kind of asking very basic questions.
But he brought out something in her over time.
And he was so sensitive and so sensitive to her
and also sensitive to being a thinking
and acting human in this world.
That's just painted such a beautiful picture
that people should go definitely check out.
It made me really sad that we don't get this kind of picture
of other thinkers, all of the ones we've been talking about.
Just that almost this little accidental view
of this human being.
I don't know.
It was a beautiful one and I guess there's not many
like that, even of him.
- Yeah, yeah.
No, I think he was more than his writing ability,
which was extraordinary.
He had developed a style that was, I think,
unlike anyone else's style.
Was his sensitivity to other people
and to sort of what he was there to pay attention to.
In one of his essays, I think it's the one called
an incredibly fun thing I'll never do again.
I didn't know that one about cruise ships.
I think he describes himself as this sort of roving eyeball
that just sort of walks around the ship, noticing things.
And he was incredibly good at that.
But I also worry that that reflects something
that you find in Ivan in the Brothers Karamazov.
Ivan, I don't know if you remember this part,
when he's away at school, at college, as a young boy,
he makes money by going around town
to where tragic events have occurred.
Someone just got run over by a carriage
or something just happened.
And being the first one there, he always knows somehow
where these things are gonna happen.
And writing about it, giving this really good description
and then signing it, "I witness."
And it's as if Ivan's understanding of his life
is that he was supposed to be a witness to it.
He was supposed to see others but not get involved.
He never is interested in trying to keep
the bad things from happening.
He just wants to report on them when he sees them.
And I think that he's an incredibly isolated person,
character, and it's his isolation from others,
from the love of others, and his inability,
his desire not to love others,
'cause that attaches him to someone,
that I think is really at the ground of his condition.
And I think that aim to be isolated,
which many people have nowadays.
I mean, you see it in "The Underground Man" too,
just sort of taking yourself out of the world
because you don't wanna have to take responsibility
for being involved with others.
I think that's a bad move.
And I do worry that maybe,
I mean, I never knew David Foster Wallace.
I have no right to comment on his life.
But he portrays himself in that one episode
as a person who does that.
And I think that's dangerous.
Yeah, there's some sense in which being sensitive
to the world, like I find myself,
the source of joy for me is just being really sensitive
to the world, to experience.
There's some way, it's quite brilliant
what you're saying that that could be isolating.
It's like Darwin studying a new kind of species
on an island, you don't want to interfere with it.
You find it so beautiful that you don't want
to interfere with its beauty.
So there is some sense in which that isolates you.
And then you find yourself deeply alone,
away from the experiences that bring you joy.
- Yeah.
- And that could be destructive.
It's fascinating how that works.
And in his case, of course, some of it is just chemicals
in his brain, but some of it is the path,
his philosophy of life led him down.
And that's the danger with Nietzsche too,
in gazing into the abyss.
- Your job is a difficult one,
'cause doing philosophy changes you.
- Yeah.
- And you may not know how it changes you
until you're changed and you look in the mirror.
You wrote a piece in MIT Tech Review
saying that AI can't be an artist.
Creativity is and always will be a human endeavor.
You mentioned Bert and criticism of symbolic AI.
Can you explain your view of criticizing the possible,
the capacity for artistry and creativity
in our robot friends?
- Yeah, I can try.
So to make the argument, you have to have in mind
what counts as art, what counts as a creative artistic act.
I take it that just doing something new isn't sufficient.
I mean, we say that good art is original,
but not everything that's never been done before
is good art.
So there has to be more than just doing something new.
It has to be somehow doing something new
in a way that speaks to the audience
or speaks to some portion of the audience at least.
It has to be doing something new in such a way
that some people who see or interact with it
can see themselves anew in it.
So I think that art is inherently a creative act.
Sorry, a kind of communicative act
that it involves a relation with other people.
So think about the conditions for that working.
Someone, I talk in that article, I can't remember,
something about new music.
I think I don't talk about Stravinsky,
but let's say Stravinsky.
Stravinsky performs the "Rite of Spring"
and there's riots.
It is new and people hate it.
People can't, it sounds like a cacophony.
It sounds awful.
It's written according to principles
that are not like the principles of music composition
that people are familiar with.
So in some ways it's a failed communicative act.
But as Nietzsche says about his own stuff,
I mean, we now can recognize
that it wasn't a failed communicative act.
It just hadn't reached its time yet.
And now that way of composing music is like,
it's in Disney movies.
It's so part of our musical palette
that we don't have that response.
It changed us.
It changed the way we understand what counts as good music.
So that's a deep communicative act.
It didn't perform its communication in that opening moment,
but it did ultimately establish a new understanding
for all of us of what counts as good art.
And that's the kind of deep communication
that I think good art can do.
It can change our understanding of ourselves
and of what a good manifestation of something of ourselves
in a certain domain is.
- And you use the term socially embedded,
that art is fundamentally socially embedded.
And I really like that term
because I see my love for artificial intelligence
and the kind of system that we can bring to the world
that could make for an interesting and more lively world
and one that enriches human beings
is one where the AI systems are deeply socially embedded.
- Good, yeah.
And that actually is in contrast
to the way artificial intelligence
have been talked about throughout its history
and certainly now, both on the robotic side and the AI side,
especially on the tech sector
where the businesses around AI,
they kind of want to create systems
that are like servants to humans.
And then humans do all the beautiful human messiness
of where art would be part.
I think that there is no reason
why you can't integrate AI systems
in the way you integrate new humans to the picture.
There are just the full diversity and the flaws,
all of that adds to the thing.
Some people might say that AlphaZero
is this system from DeepMind that was able to achieve,
solve the game, it beat the best people in the world
at the game of Go with no supervision from humans.
But more interestingly to me, on the side of creativity,
it was able to surprise a lot of grandmasters
with the kind of moves they came up with.
Now, to me, that's not the creativity,
the magic that's socially embedded
that we're talking about.
That is merely revealing the limitations
of humans to discover.
It's like to solve a particular aspect of a math problem.
I think creativity is not just even socially embedded,
it's the way you're saying,
is this part of the communicative act.
It's the interactive, it's the dance with the culture.
And so it has to be like for AlphaZero
to be creative, truly creative,
it would have to be integrated in a way
where it has a Twitter account
and it becomes aware of the impact
it has on the other grandmasters
with the moves that's coming up.
And one of the fascinating things about AlphaZero,
which I just love so much,
§17Transcript · 2:35:37–2:45:21
is I don't know if you're familiar with chess.
- I am, yeah.
- Okay, so it does certain things
that most chess players, even at the highest level,
don't do, which is it sacrifices pieces,
it gives pieces away,
and then waits like 10 moves before it pays you back.
So to me, that's beautiful.
That's art if only AlphaZero understood
the artistry of that,
which is I'm going to mess with you psychologically
because I'm going to do two things.
One, make you feel overconfident that you're doing well,
but actually also once you realize
you are playing AlphaZero that is much better than you,
you're going to feel really nervous about what's on the way.
Like this is the calm before the storm.
And that creates a beautiful psychological masterpiece
of this chess game.
If only AlphaZero was then messing with you
additionally to that,
like was cognizant of this doing that,
then it becomes art.
And then it's integrated into society in that way.
And I believe it doesn't have to actually have
an understanding of the world in the way that humans have.
It can have a different one.
It can be like a child is as clueless
about so many aspects of the world and it's okay.
And that's part of the magic of it.
Just being flawed,
being lacking understanding all interesting kinds of ways,
but interacting.
And so to me, it's possible to create art for AI,
but exactly as you're saying
in a deeply socially embedded way.
- Good.
Well, I think we agree,
but let me just highlight the thing
that makes me think that we agree.
Which is that I think for people,
for a community to allow themselves
to recognize in a certain kind of creative act,
I'm thinking of Stravinsky here,
but we could think of a chess thing.
To recognize in a certain kind of creative act,
a new and admirable worthy way of thinking
about what's significant in the situation.
You have to believe that it wasn't random.
You have to believe that Stravinsky wrote that way
because he was receptive to what needed to be said now.
And so you said,
if only AlphaZero could do all this
by virtue of recognizing
that this was the thing that needed to be done,
then it would be socially embedded in the right way.
And I think I agree with that.
First of all, it's possible to do in a constrained domain,
a game playing domain, Go or chess.
Go is more complicated than chess,
but either one of them,
because there really are only a finite range
of possibilities if you make the game end
at a certain point.
It's a combinatorial problem in the end.
Now, obviously, AlphaZero doesn't solve the problem
in a combinatorial way.
That would be sort of take too much energy.
You couldn't do it.
It sort of explodes the problem.
So it does it in this other way that's interesting,
this pattern recognition way, roughly.
And in that context, it may well be
that it can see having had lots and lots of experience
in the training stuff against itself
or against another version of itself.
It can see that the sacrifice here
is gonna pay dividends down the road.
See, I put that in quotation marks.
That's to say it's got a high weight to this move here
as a result of experience in the past
where that move down the line led to this improvement.
So in that finite context, I think,
you know, the game players can trust it.
And they talk that way.
That it's got a kind of authority.
They say, I've read some people who said about AlphaZero
when it played Go, it's like it's playing from the future.
It's making these moves that are just outlandish.
And there's a kind of brilliance to them
that we can't really understand.
We'll be catching up to it forever.
I think in that context, like it's mapped the domain
and the domain is mappable
'cause it's a combinatorial problem, roughly.
But in something like music or art of a non-finite form,
it feels to me like it's a little harder for me
to understand what the analog of our trusting
that Stravinsky has recognized something about us
that demands that he write this way.
That doesn't seem like a finite thing
in quite the same way.
Now we could ask, we could ask the system,
why did you do it?
We could ask Stravinsky, why did you do it?
And maybe it will have answers.
But then it's involved in a kind of communicative act.
And I think lots of times artists will often say,
look, I can't communicate better
than what I've done in the piece of work.
That is the statement.
Yeah, yeah.
So yeah, we humans aren't able to answer the why either.
But I do think the question here is,
well, first of all, language is finite.
Certainly when expressed through a tweet.
So it is also a combinatorial problem.
The question is how much more difficult it is than chess.
And I think all the same ways that we see the solutions
to chess is deeply surprising when it was first addressed
with IBM Deep Blue and then with AlphaGo
and AlphaGo Zero, AlphaZero.
I think in that same way, language can be addressed
and communication can be addressed.
I don't see, having done this podcast,
many reasons why everything I'm doing,
especially as a digital being on the internet,
can't be done by an AI system eventually.
So I think we're being very human-centric
and thinking we're special.
I think one of the hardest things is the physical space.
Actually operating like touch and the magic
of body language and the music of all of that
because it's so deeply integrated
through the long evolutionary process
of what it's like to be on earth.
What is fundamentally different and AI can catch up on
is the way we apply our evolutionary history
on the way we act on the internet,
on the way we act online.
And as more and more of the world becomes digital,
you're now operating in a space where AI
is behind much less so.
Like we're both starting at zero.
- I think that's super interesting.
Do you know this author, Brian Christian?
Is that someone you've ever heard of?
- That sounds familiar.
- He's a guy who competed in the,
what is it called, the Loebner competition?
- The Loebner Prize, yeah.
- Yeah, the Turing test thing.
And I'll just tell you the story,
but I think it's directly related to the last thing you said
about where we're starting in the same place.
He competed in this competition,
but he didn't enter a program
that was supposed to try to pass the Turing test.
The Turing test, there's three people.
There's the judge, there's the program,
and then there's someone who's a human the way they do it.
And the judge has got to figure out by asking questions,
which is the computer and which is the human.
So little known fact,
there's two prizes in that competition.
There's the most human computer prize.
That's the computer that wins the most.
And then there's the most human human prize.
And he competed for the most human human prize.
And he won it, he kept winning it.
And so he tried to think about what it is
that you have to be able to do
in order to convince judges
that you're human instead of a computer.
And that's an interesting question, I think.
And when he came to,
my takeaway from his version of this story
is that it is true that computers
are winning these contests more and more,
as technology progresses.
But there's two possible explanations for that.
One is that the computers are becoming more human.
And the other is that the humans
are becoming more like computers.
And he says, actually,
the more we live our lives in this world
where in this sort of technological world,
where we have to moderate our behavior
so that it's readable by something
that's effectively a computer,
the more we become like that.
And he says, it happens even when you're
not interacting with a computer.
He says, have you ever been to the,
on the phone with the call center?
And they're going through their script.
And that's what they've got to do.
They've got to go through their script
because that's how they keep their job.
And they ask you this question,
§18Transcript · 2:45:22–2:52:51
you've got to answer it.
And it's as if you're no longer interacting with a person,
even though it's a person.
Because they've so given up
everything that's involved normally
with being able to make judgments and decisions
and act in situations and take responsibility.
And so I think that's the other side of it.
It is true that technology is amazing
and can solve huge ranges of problems
and do fantastic things.
But it's also true that we're changing ourselves
in response to it.
And the one thing I'm worried about
is that we're changing ourselves
in such a way that the norms for what we're aiming at
are being changed.
To move in the direction of this sort of efficiently
and in an optimized way solving a problem
and move away from this other kind of thing
that we were calling aliveness or significance.
And so that's the other side of the story.
- And that's the worry.
But it's very possible that there is,
for you and I, the ancient dinosaurs,
we may not see the aliveness in TikTok.
The aliveness in the digital space.
That you see it as us being dragged
into this over-optimized world.
But that may be,
in fact, it is a world that opens up opportunities
to truly experience life.
And there's interesting to think about
all the people growing up now
who their early experience of life
is always mediated through a digital device.
Not always, but more and more often
mediated through that device.
And how we're both evolving.
The technology is evolving, the humans are evolving.
To then maybe open a door to a whole world
where the humans and the technology or AI systems
are interacting as equals.
- So now I'm gonna agree with you.
You might be surprised that I'm gonna agree with you.
But I think that's exactly right.
I don't wanna be the person who's saying
our job is to resist all of this stuff.
I don't wanna be a Luddite, that's not my goal.
The goal is to point out
that in the supreme danger lies the saving power.
- Yes. (both laughing)
- The point is to get in the right relation
to that understanding of what we are.
That allows us to find the joy in it.
And I think that's a hard thing to do.
It's hard to understand even what we're supposed
to be doing when we do it.
I'm maybe high more than you.
I'm not of the right generation to be able to do that.
But I do think that's gotta be the move.
The move is not to resist it.
It's not a nostalgic move.
It's an attempt to push people to get in the relation to it.
That's not the relation of it controlling you
and depriving you of stuff.
But of your recognizing some great joy
that can be found in it.
- When I interact with legged robots,
I see there's magic there.
And I just feel like the person who hears the music
when others don't.
And I don't know what that is.
And I'd love to explore that.
- Yeah.
- And because it seems to,
it's almost like the future talking.
And I'm trying to hear what it's saying.
Is this a dangerous world or is this a beautiful world?
- Well, I can certainly understand
your enthusiasm for that.
Those used to be things that I found overwhelmingly exciting.
And I'm not sort of closed off from that anymore.
I mean, I'm not now closed off from that
even though my views are changed
and I don't work in that world.
But I do think, I think it's interesting
to figure out what's at the ground of that response.
Yeah.
- We talked about meaning quite a bit throughout
in a secular age.
But let me ask you the big ridiculous question,
almost too big.
What is the meaning of this thing we got going on?
What is the meaning of life?
- You're saving the softball for the end.
- Easy one.
Easy one.
- I don't know what the meaning of life is.
I think there's something that characterizes us
that's not the thing that people normally think
characterizes us.
The traditional thing to say
in the philosophical tradition,
even in the AI tradition,
which is a kind of manifestation of philosophy
from Plato forward.
The traditional thing to say is that what characterizes us
is our rationality, that we're intelligent beings,
that we're the ones that think.
And I think that's certainly part of what characterizes us.
But I think there's more to it too.
I think we're capable of experiencing simultaneously
the complete and utter ungroundedness of everything
that's meaningful in our existence,
and also the real significance of it.
And that sounds like a contradiction.
Like how could it really be significant
and not be based on anything?
But I think that's the contradiction
that somehow characterizes us.
And I think that we're the being
that sort of has to hold that weird mystery before us
and live in the light of it.
That's the thing that I think is really at our core.
And so how do we do that?
I will say this one thing,
and I learned it from a philosopher,
from a guy named Albert Borgman,
who's a German philosopher,
lived in Montana now,
taught in Montana for his whole career.
And I say this to my students at Harvard now,
he said, "This is the way that I think about my life,
"and I hope you'll think about your life too."
He said, "You should think about your life
"hoping that there will be many moments in it
"about which you can say,
"there's no place I'd rather be,
"there's no thing I'd rather be doing,
"there's nobody I'd rather be with,
"and this I will remember well."
And I think if you can aim to fill your life
with moments like that, it will be a meaningful one.
I don't know if that's the meaning of life,
but I think if you can hold that before you,
it'll help to clarify this mystery
and this sort of bizarre situation
in which we find ourselves.
- Sean, this conversation was incredible,
and those four requirements
have certainly been fulfilled for me.
This was a magical moment in that way,
and I will remember it well.
Thank you so much.
It's an honor that you spend your valuable time with me.
This was great, thank you.
- Thank you for having me, Lex.
I really, really enjoyed it.
- Thanks for listening to this conversation
with Sean Kelly.
To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, let me leave you with some words
from Albert Camus.
In the depth of winter,
I finally learned that within me,
there lay an invincible summer.
Thank you for listening,
and hope to see you next time.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)