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 postcontinent 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.

I mean, 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, 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 is existence?

What is 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 and

still use 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 are 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's 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 is 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 your 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.

So it's 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 in existentialism?

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 doesn't...

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 and 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.

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.

Where you are on the first date, first date.

And the date, the evening reaches moments when it 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 Sartre'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 Sartre says, that's also bad faith, that's also acting as if we're a kind of being that

we're not, because 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.

There's standards of how you operate, and that's a decision that's not my own.

It'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, because 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 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 as 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.

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 hell is other people.

What do you think parenting is then?

It's like, what, because God doesn't have a parent, so aren't we significantly influenced,

first of all, in the first few years of life, and even the teenager is resisting, like,

learning through resistance.

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 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, Sartre'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.

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, 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.

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 sort of these folks start with the idea that 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 medieval's 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 5th 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.

It's like Sartre's atheism, Sartre is 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 going to 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.

He talks about improvisation, there's classical improvisation.

Nietzsche was, by the way, a musician.

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 Sartre 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.

He's like, that's what you got to 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.

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 like, 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 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, because

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 because you're

given a climbing hand, you're going to have to make art and music out of that.

Exactly.

That's the responsibility for both of them.

Wow, that's a lot of responsibility for a first date because 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.

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?

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, the first thing is it doesn't mean there are no religious believers because there are

plenty.

There are 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 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,

concerning 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 the 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 and around you, like 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, 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, and so it would be wrong to make any others.

And nowadays, 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 have 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 overtaken in 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 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.

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.

So Sartre is 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 can talk about any of them that you like.

The figure I start with is Pascal.

Pascal, French mathematician from 17th century.

He died, I'm terrible with dates, but I think 1661 or something like that, middle of the

17th century.

Brilliant polymath, 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.

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

Heidegger.

He's a complicated figure because...

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, we have the different existentialists.

So maybe let's go to...

You know what?

Let's go to Dostoevsky.

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.

It comes from underground as well, but what ideas of Dostoevsky's do you think are existentialists?

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.

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, 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.

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 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.

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 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 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.

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, 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 like 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.

I 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 native speakers.

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 in 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 to 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.

Absolutely.

And you can do that for other projects and 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 Eckhart.

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 Eckhart did, and everybody knows this, he translated Christianity into

the vernacular.

He started giving sermons in German to the peasants, 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.

Then there's a word in middle high German, Grund, which we translated 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 Eckhart'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 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.

I just thought that's terrible.

How can I...

I mean, it's not wrong, but do I want to 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 going to 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.

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 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, 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, 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 by embracing this

existence rather than giving up and committing suicide.

And I thought, well, it's kind of a happy ending.

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.

Because 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

going to 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.

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 it 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 like 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 that 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, you know, 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, that, you know,

it just reminds me how amazing life is.

And that's chemistry, I don't know what that is, but that's not, 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.

The famous line, nothing focuses the mind more than one's impending execution.

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 I'm 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 going to 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, you know, imagine you're

in like a hotel and you're saying the room I'm in sucks, but like there's other rooms.

So like 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 there's a, 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.

And I think that character is, as you say, very ill.

And it's possible and often because, as you say, of, you know, brain chemistry, physiology,

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, you know,

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 the 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 sort of

like watch the river and like 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 got to like laugh at it.

I think there is some, let me just say something about humor because I think you're absolutely

right.

Richard Bard, who is Danish and most people think deeply depressed and 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, there 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 important possibilities

for us.

And so there's the idea that 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 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, and I thought, maybe it's time.

It wasn't really time for the 11 year old, so somewhat inappropriate.

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 irradiates 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 John Goodman

character that's 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 and hence the humor.

Okay.

All right, good.

Well, that's helpful.

Yeah.

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 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 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.

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 and say something.

So there's some kind of apathy to that particular nihilism.

Could you comment on whether you see sort of apathy as a philosophy part of that nihilism?

Sort of 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 apathe, it means without passions.

And the Stoics, who you mentioned earlier, really thought that passions are what get

in the way if you're 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.

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.

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.

So it just so happens that 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?

Did 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, 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 is like, 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 focusing 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, 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.

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 see 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 she'd be contented with.

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 Sartre and that whole 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, 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 seem to me from your description

of her and remembering what I remember from 35 years ago, they seem pretty opposite from

one another.

One of the things I find interesting about Beauvoir is that she takes seriously the thing

that Sartre didn't, which is our throwness, which is the sense in which we're born into

a situation that's already got a significance.

I think it was easier for her to recognize that than Sartre because she was a woman.

And Sartre seems to act as if there are no constraints or at least there shouldn't be.

We're pretty close as privileged white males and 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 recognizes one's not born but becomes a woman, she says.

So how does that happen?

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.

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 throwness 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 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, but 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.

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 we could 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?

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 because 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 ask 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.

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.

Maybe it is.

I'm not making a substantive claim, I'm just saying lots of people say it is.

And if you're in a culture where those norms take roots, 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 want to take responsibility for what's going on around me.

And that's a way of taking responsibility by refusing to do it.

I think we're implicated in whatever's going on around us.

And if we're going to 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.

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 is 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?

Because he's kind of embarrassed.

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 want to be associated with me.

He can see that I'm a fallen woman.

He knows that in order to maintain his purity, he's got to 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, 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 want

to avoid her?

And that's a huge moment.

So, but the idea is that we're implicated in bringing other people down, whether we

want to 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 is easy to fix.

No, in our society, 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 got to be thinking about the world.

You've constantly got to be listening.

You've constantly got to be attending.

And it's not simple.

All that sounds exactly right to me.

The phrase that rings through my head is another one from the Brothers Karamazov.

Demetri, 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 and the battlefield is the heart

of man.

And I just think, yeah, it's not simple.

And the idea that there might be a purely good way of doing things is just not our condition.

That everything we do is going to be sort of undermined by some aspect of it.

There's not going to be a kind of pure good in human existence.

And so it's sort of required that we're going to have to be empathetic, that we're going

to have to recognize that others are dealing with that just as we are.

So I apologize for distracting us.

We were talking about Heidegger 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.

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 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 going to 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 going to 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'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.

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 were 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 Sartre, it's us.

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.

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, 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 Holderlin, 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 nonchanging.

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.

Nobody ever felt that way.

But think about, but it's also true that 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.

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 going to come

from optimization and efficiency.

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 Burt 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, Burt 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 because

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.

Because you're basically fascinated with the philosophy of mind, of the human mind, 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 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 programming,

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