back to indexSean Kelly: Existentialism, Nihilism, and the Search for Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #227
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The following is a conversation with Shawn Kelly, a philosopher at Harvard specializing
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in existentialism and the philosophy of mind.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now here's my conversation with Shawn Kelly.
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Your interests are in postcontain European philosophy, especially phenomenology and existentialism.
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So let me ask, what to you is existentialism?
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So it's a hard question.
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I'm teaching a course on existentialism right now.
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Existentialism in literature and film, which is fun.
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I mean, the traditional thing to say about what existentialism is, is that it's a movement
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in mid 20th century, mostly French, some German philosophy, and some of the major figures
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associated with it are people like Jean Paul Sartre and Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, maybe
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But that's a weird thing to say about it, because most of those people denied that they
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were existentialists.
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And in fact, I think of it as a movement that has a much longer history.
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So when I try to describe what the core idea of existentialism is, it's an idea that you
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find expressed in different ways in a bunch of these people.
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One of the ways that it's expressed is that Sartre will say that existentialism is the
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view that there is no God, and at least his form of existentialism, he calls it atheistic
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And since there's no God, there must be some other being around who does something like
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what God does, otherwise there wouldn't be any possibility for significance in a life.
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And that being is us, and the feature of us, according to Sartre and the other existentialists,
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that puts us in the position to be able to play that role is that we're the beings for
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whom, as Sartre says it, existence precedes essence.
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That's the catchphrase for existentialism, and then you have to try to figure out what
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What is existence?
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And what does precedes mean?
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What is existence?
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And what is precedes?
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And in fact, precedes is Sartre's way of talking about it, and other people will talk about
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But here's the way Sartre thinks about it.
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This is not, I think, the most interesting way to think about it, but I'll get you started.
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Sartre says, there's nothing true about what it is to be you until you start existing,
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until you start living.
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And for Sartre, the core feature of what it is to be existing, the way we do, is to be
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making decisions, to be making choices in your life, to be sort of taking a stand on
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what it is to be you by deciding to do this or that, and the key feature of how to do
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that right for Sartre is to do it in the full recognition of the fact that when you make
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that choice, nobody is responsible for it other than you.
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So you don't make the choice because God tells you to, you don't make the choice because
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some utilitarian calculus about what it's right to do tells you to do.
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You don't make the choice because some other philosophical theory tells you to do it.
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There's literally nothing on the basis of which you make the choice other than the fact
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that in that moment, you're the one making it.
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You are conscious thinking being that made a decision.
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So all of the questions about physics and free will are out the window.
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Yeah, that's right.
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If you were a determinist about the mind, if you were a physicalist about the mind,
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if you thought there was nothing to your choices other than the activity of the brain that's
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governed by physical laws, then there's some sense in which it would seem at any rate like
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you're not the ground of that choice.
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The ground of that choice was the physical universe and the laws that govern it.
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And then you'd have no responsibility.
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And so Sartre's view is that the thing that's special about us, used to be special about
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God, is that we're responsible for becoming the being that makes the choices that we do.
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And Sartre thinks that that's simultaneously empowering, I mean, it practically puts us
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in the place of God, and also terrifying because what responsibility?
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How can you possibly take on that responsibility?
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And he thinks it's worse than that.
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He thinks that it's always happening, everything that you do is the result of some choice that
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you've made, the posture that you sit in, the way you hold someone's gaze when you're
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having a conversation with them or not, the choice to make a note when someone says something
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or not make a note.
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Everything that you do presents you as a being who makes decisions and you're responsible
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So it's constantly happening.
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And furthermore, there's no fact about you independent of the choices and actions you've
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So you don't get to say, Sartre's example, I really am a great writer, just haven't written
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my great book yet.
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If you haven't written your great book, you're not a great writer.
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And so it's terrifying, it puts a huge burden on us.
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And that's why Sartre says on his view of existentialism, human beings are the beings
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that are condemned to be free.
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Our freedom consists in our ability and our responsibility to make these choices and to
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become someone through making them.
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And we can't get away from that.
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But to him, it's terrifying not liberating in the positive meaning of the word liberating.
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Well, so he thinks it should be liberating, but he thinks that it takes a very courageous
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individual to be liberated by it.
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Nietzsche, I think, thought something similar.
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I think Sartre is really coming out of a Nietzschean sort of tradition.
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But what's liberating about it, if it is, is also terrifying because it means in a certain
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way, you're the ground of your own being.
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You become what you do through existing.
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So that's one form of existentialism.
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That's a stark atheistic version of it.
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There's lots of other versions.
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But it's somehow organized around the idea that it's through living your life that you
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become who you are.
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It's not facts that are sort of true about you, independent of your living your life.
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But then if there's no God in that view, does any of the decisions matter?
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So how does existentialism differ from nihilism?
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There was two different ways that you're asking it.
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Let me leave nihilism to the side for just a second and think about mattering.
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Or is there any way that you can criticize someone for doing, for living the way they
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do if you're an existentialist?
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Including yourself.
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Including yourself.
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Sartre addresses that and he says, yes, he says, there is a criticism that you can make
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of yourself or of others and it's the criticism of living in such a way as to fail to take
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responsibility for your choices.
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He gives these two sort of amazing examples.
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One doesn't, I don't know if it reads as well as for us as it did in sort of mid 20th century
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But it's about a waiter.
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He gives this in his big book, Being in Nothingness.
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And he says, so waiters played, still do I think in a certain way in Paris.
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A big role in Parisian society to be a waiter involved having a certain kind of identity,
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being a certain way, taking control of and charge of the experience of the people that
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you're waiting on, but also really being the authority, like knowing that this is the way
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it's supposed to go.
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And so Sartre imagines a waiter who does everything that a waiter is supposed to do, the perfect
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form of the waiter, except that you can somehow see in the way he's doing it that he's doing
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it because he believes that's the way a waiter should act.
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So there's some sense in which he's passing off the responsibility for his actions onto
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some idea of what those actions should be.
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He's not taking responsibility for it.
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He's sort of playing a role and the contours of the role are predetermined by someone other
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So he starts acting in bad faith and that's critical because it's acting in such a way
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as to fail to take responsibility for the kind of being Sartre thinks you are.
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So you're not taking responsibility.
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So that's one example.
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And I think any teenager, if you've ever met a teenager, you've known someone who does
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Teenagers try on roles.
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They think, if I dressed like this, I would be cool.
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So I'll dress like this or if I spoke like this or acted like this.
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And it's natural for a teenager who's trying to figure out what their identity is to go
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through a phase like that.
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But if you continue to do that, then you're really passing it.
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So that's one example.
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And the other example he gives is an example, not of passing off responsibility by pretending
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that someone else is the ground of your choice, but passing off responsibility by pretending
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that you might be able to get away with not making a choice at all.
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So he says, you're always, everything you do is a result of your choices.
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And so he gives this other example.
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Where you are on the first date, first date, and the date, the evening reaches moments
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when might be appropriate for one person to hold the hand of the other.
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That's the moment in the date where you are.
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And so you make a choice.
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You decide, I think it's that time and you hold the hand.
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And what should happen is that the other person also makes a choice on Sartre's view, either
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they reject the hand, not that time, and I'm taking responsibility for that, or they grasp
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the hand back, that's a choice.
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But there's a thing that sometimes happens, which is that the other person leaves the
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hand there cold, dead, and clammy, neither rejecting it nor embracing it.
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And Sartre says, that's also bad faith.
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That's also acting as if we're kind of being that we're not, because it pretends that it's
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possible not to make a choice, and we're the beings who are always making choices.
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That was a choice.
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And you're pretending as if it's the kind of thing that you don't have to take responsibility
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So both of the examples you've given, there's some sense in which the social interactions
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between humans is the kind of moving away from the full responsibility that you as a
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human in the view of existentialism should take on.
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So isn't the basic conversation a delegation of responsibility, just holding a hand there?
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You're putting some of the responsibility into the court of the other person.
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And for the waiter, if you're existing a society, you are generally trying on a role.
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All of us are trying on a role.
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Me wearing clothes is me trying on a role that I was told to try as opposed to walking
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around naked all the time.
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There's like standards of how you operate, and that's a decision that's not my own.
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That's me seeing what everyone else is doing and copying them.
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So Sartre thinks that in the ideal, you should try to resist that.
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Other existentialists think that that's actually a clue to how you should live well.
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So Sartre says somewhere else, hell is other people.
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Why is hell other people for Sartre?
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Well, because other people are making choices also.
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And when other people make choices, they put some pressure on me to think that the choice
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they made is one that I should copy or one that I should sort of promote.
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But if I do it because they did it, then I'm in bad faith for Sartre.
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So it is as if Sartre's view is like we would be better if we were all alone.
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This is really simplifying Sartre's position, and this is really just mostly Sartre in a
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certain period of his formation.
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But anyhow, we can imagine that view, and I think there's something to the idea that
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Sartre is attracted to it, at least in the mid 40s.
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Can you dig into hell as other people?
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Is there some, obviously it's kind of almost like a literary, like you push the point strongly
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to really explore that point, but is there some sense in that other people ruin the experience
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of what it means to be human?
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I think for Sartre, the phenomenon is this, it's not just that you wear clothes because
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people wear clothes in our society.
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You have a particular style, you wear a particular kind of clothes.
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And for Sartre, to have that style authentically in good faith rather than in bad faith, it
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has to come from you.
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You have to make the choice.
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But other people are making choices also, and you're looking at their choices and you're
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thinking that guy looks good.
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Maybe I could try that one on, and if you try it on because you were influenced by the
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fact that you thought that guy was doing it well, then there's some important sense in
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which, although that's a resource for a choice for you, it's also acting in bad faith.
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And God wouldn't do that, right?
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God wouldn't be influenced by other's decisions.
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And if that's the model, then that's, I think that's the sense in which he thinks hell is
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And I think parenting is then, because God doesn't have a parent, so aren't we significantly
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influenced first of all in the first few years of life?
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And even the teenager is resisting, learning through resistance.
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I mean, I think what you're pushing on is the intuition that the ideal that Sartre's
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aiming at is a kind of inhuman ideal.
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I mean, there's many ways in which we're not like the traditional view of what God was.
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One is that we're not self generating, we have parents, we're raised into traditions
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and social norms, and we're raised into an understanding of what's appropriate and inappropriate
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And I think that's a deep intuition.
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I think that's exactly right.
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Martin Heidegger, who's the philosopher that Sartre thinks he's sort of taking this from,
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but I think Sartre's a kind of brilliant French misinterpretation of Heidegger's German
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phenomenological view, Heidegger says, a crucial aspect of what it is to be us is our
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thrownness, we're thrown into a situation, we're thrown into history, we're thrown into
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our parental lineage, and we don't choose it.
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That's stuff that we don't choose, we couldn't choose.
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If we were God and we existed outside of time, maybe, but we're not, we're finite in the
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sense that we have a beginning that we never chose, we have an end that we're often trying
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to resist or put off or something, and in between, there's a whole bunch of stuff that
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organizes us without our ever having made the choice, and without our being the kind
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of being that could make the choice to allow it to organize us.
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We have a complicated relationship to that stuff, and I think we should talk about that
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at a certain point, but the first move is to say, Sartre's just got a sort of descriptive
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problem, he's missed this basic fact that there's an awful, there has to be an awful
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lot about us that's settled without our having made the choice to settle it that way.
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Right, the thrownness of life, that's a fundamental part of life, you can't just escape it.
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Exactly, you can't escape it altogether.
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Yeah, exactly, you can't escape it altogether.
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But nevertheless, you are riding a wave, and you make a decision in the riding of the
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way, you can't control the wave, but you should be, as you ride it, you should be making certain
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kinds of decisions and take responsibility for it.
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So why does this matter at all, the chain of decisions you make?
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Good, well, because they constitute you, they make you the person that you are.
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So here's, what's the opposite view?
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What's this view against?
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This view is against most of philosophy from Plato forward, Plato says in the Republic,
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it's a kind of myth, but he says, people will understand their condition, well, if we tell
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them this myth, he says, look, when you're born, there's just a fact about you, your
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soul is either gold, silver, or bronze, those are the three kinds of people there are, and
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you're born that way.
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And if your soul is gold, then we should identify that and make you a philosopher king.
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And if your soul is silver, well, you're not going to be a philosopher king, you're not
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capable of it, but you could be a good warrior, and we should make you that.
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And if your soul is bronze, then you should be a farmer, a laborer, something like that.
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And that's a fact about you that identifies you forever and for always, independent of
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anything you do about it.
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And so that's the alternative view, and you could have modern versions of it, you could
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say the thing that identifies you is your IQ, or your genetic makeup, or the percentage
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of fast switch muscle fibers you've got, or whatever, it could be something totally independent
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of any choice that you've made, independent of the kind of thing about which you could
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make a choice, and it categorizes you, it makes you the person that you are.
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That's the thing that Sartre and the existentialists are against.
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So this idea that something about you is forever limiting the space of possible decisions you
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Sartre says, no, the space is unlimited.
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Sartre is the philosopher of radical freedom.
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Yeah, radical freedom.
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And then you could have other existentialists who say, look, we are free, but we got to
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understand the way in which our freedom is limited by certain aspects of the kind of
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being that we are.
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If we were radically free, we really would be like God in the traditional medieval sense,
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and sort of these folks start with the idea that, look, whatever we are, that's a kind
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of limit point that we're not going to reach.
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So what are the ways in which we're constrained that that being the way the medieval's understood
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him wasn't constrained?
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So can you maybe comment on what is nihilism and is it at all a useful other sort of group
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of ideas that you resist against in defining existentialism?
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So nihilism, the philosopher who made the term popular, although it was used before him
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Nietzsche is writing in the end of the 19th century in various places where he published
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things, but largely in his unpublished works, he identifies the condition of the modern
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world as nihilistic, and that's a descriptive claim.
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He's looking around him, trying to figure out what it's like to be us now, and he says
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it's a lot different from what it was like to be human in 1300 or in the 5th century
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In 1300, what people believed, the way they lived their lives was in the understanding
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that to be human was to be created in the image and likeness of God, that's the way they
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understood themselves, and also to be created sinful because of Adam and Eve's transgression
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in the Garden of Eden, and to have the project of trying to understand how as a sinful being,
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you could nevertheless live a life of virtuous life.
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How could you do that?
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And it had to do with for them getting in the right relation to God.
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Nietzsche says, that doesn't make sense to us anymore in the end of the 19th century.
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God is dead, says Nietzsche famously.
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And what does that mean?
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Well, it means something like the role that God used to play in our understanding of ourselves
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as a culture isn't a role that God can play anymore.
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And so Nietzsche says, the role that God used to play was the role of grounding our existence.
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He was what it is in virtue of which we are who we are.
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And Nietzsche says, the idea that there is a being that makes us what we are doesn't
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make sense anymore.
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That's like Sartre's atheism, Sartre is taking that from Nietzsche.
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And so the question is, what does ground our existence?
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And the answer is, knee hill, nothing.
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And so nihilism is the idea that there's nothing outside of us that grounds our existence.
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And then Nietzsche asked the question, well, what are we supposed to do about that?
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And I think Nietzsche has a different story than Sartre about that.
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Nietzsche doesn't emphasize this notion of radical freedom.
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Nietzsche emphasizes something else.
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He says, we're artists of life.
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And artists are interesting because the natural way of thinking about artists is that they're
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responding to something.
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They find themselves in a situation and they say, this is what's going to make sense of
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This is what I have to write.
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This is the way I have to dance.
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This is the way I've got to play the music.
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And Nietzsche says, we should live like that.
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There are constraints, but understanding what they are is a complicated aspect of living
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And there's a great story, I think, from music that maybe helps to understand this.
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I think Nietzsche, of course, jazz didn't exist when Nietzsche was writing, but I think
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Nietzsche really is thinking of something like jazz improvisation.
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I mean, he talks about improvisation.
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There's classical improvisation.
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Nietzsche was, by the way, a musician.
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I mean, he was a composer and a pianist.
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Not a great one, really, to be fair, but he loved music.
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And Herbie Hancock, who's a pianist, a jazz pianist, who played with Miles Davis for quite
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a while in the 60s, tells this kind of incredible story that I think exemplifies Nietzsche's
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view about the way in which we bear some responsibility for being creative, and that gives us a certain
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kind of freedom, but we don't have the radical freedom that's our thing.
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So what's the story?
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Herbie Hancock says, I think they were in Stuttgart, he says, playing a show and things
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were great, he says.
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He's a young pianist, and Miles Davis is the master.
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And he says, I'm back in the solo, and I'm playing these chords, and he says, I played
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this chord, and it was the wrong chord.
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He's like, that's what you got to say, it didn't work right there.
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And I thought, holy mackerel, I screwed up, you know, I screwed up, we were tight, everything
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was working, and I blew it for Miles, who's doing his solo.
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And he said, Miles paused for a moment, and then all of a sudden he went on in a way that
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made my chord right.
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And I think that idea that like you could be an artist who responds to what's thrown
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at you in such a way as to make it right by what measure everyone could hear it is all
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Everyone knew, wow, that really works.
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And I think that's not like, there are constraints, not anything would have worked there.
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He couldn't have just played anything.
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Most of what anyone would have played would have sounded terrible.
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But the constraints aren't like preexisting, they're sort of what's happening now in the
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moment for these listeners and these performers.
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And I think that's what Nietzsche thinks the right response to nihilism is.
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We're involved, but we're not radically free to make any choice and just stand behind it
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the way Sartre thinks.
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Our choices have to be responsive to our situation, and they have to make the situation
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They have to make it right.
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And there's something about music too, so you basically have to make music of all the
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And there is something about why is music so compelling when you listen to it, something
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about certain kinds of music, it connects with you.
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It doesn't make any sense.
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But in that same way, for Nietzsche, you should be a creative force that creates a musical
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And I think what's interesting is the question, what does it mean to be a creative force
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There's a traditional notion of creation that we associate with God.
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God creates ex nihilo, out of nothing.
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And you might think that nihilism thinks that we should do that, create ex nihilo because
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it's about how there's nothing at our ground.
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But I think the right way to read Nietzsche is to recognize that we don't create out of
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Miles Davis wasn't nothing.
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That situation preexisted him.
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It was given to him, maybe by accident, maybe it was a mistake, whatever, but he was responding
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to that situation in a way that made it right.
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He wasn't just creating out of nothing.
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He was creating out of what was already there.
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So that makes that first date with the climbing hand even more complicated because you're
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giving a climbing hand, you're going to have to make art and music out of that.
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And that's the responsibility for both of them.
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Wow, that's a lot of responsibility for his day because you have to create.
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The emphasis isn't just on making decisions, it's on creating.
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But also on listening, right?
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I mean, Miles Davis was listening.
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He knew it was wrong.
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And the question was, what do I play that makes it right?
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So let me ask about Nietzsche, is God dead?
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What do you mean by that statement?
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What's in your sense the truth behind the question and the possible set of answers that
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our world today provides?
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So I mean, I think that there's something super perceptive about Nietzsche's diagnosis
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of the condition at the end of the 19th century.
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So not so far from the condition that I think we're currently in.
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And I think there's an interesting question, what we're supposed to respond, what we're
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supposed to do in response.
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But what is the condition that we're currently in?
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When Nietzsche says God is dead, I think, like I was saying before, he means something
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like the role that God used to play in grounding our existence is not a role that works for
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us anymore as a culture.
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And when people talk about a view like that nowadays, they use a different terminology,
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but I think it's roughly what Nietzsche was aiming at.
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They say, we live in a secular age.
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Our age is a secular age.
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And so what do people mean when they say that?
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I think, first of all, it's a descriptive claim.
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It could be wrong.
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The question is, does this really describe the way we experience ourselves as a culture
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or as a culture in the West or wherever it is that we are?
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So what does it mean to say that we live in a secular age, an age in which God is dead?
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Well, first thing is, it doesn't mean there are no religious believers because there are
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There are lots of people who go to church or synagogue or mosque every week or more.
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And there are people who really find that to be an important aspect of the way they
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But it does mean that for those people, the role that their religious belief plays in
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their life isn't the same as it used to be in previous ages.
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So what's that role?
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We'll go back to the High Middle Ages.
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That was clearly not a secular age.
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That was a religious age.
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And so there we are in 1300, Dante is writing the Divine Comedy or something.
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And what did it mean then to live in a sacred age?
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Well, it meant not just that the default was that you were a Christian in the West, but
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that your Christianity, your religious belief, your religious affiliation justified certain
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assumptions about people who didn't share that religious belief.
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So you're a Christian in the West in 1300, and you meet someone who's a Muslim.
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And the fact that they don't share your religious belief justifies the conclusion that they're
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And that was the ground of the crusades.
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That was the religious wars of the High Middle Ages.
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To say that we live in a secular age is to say that not that there aren't a lot of people
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who have religious belief, there are, but it's to say that their religious belief doesn't
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justify that conclusion.
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If you're a religious believer and you meet me and suppose I'm not a religious believer,
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learning that about me doesn't justify your concluding that I'm less than human.
link |
And that's the kind of liberalism of the modern age.
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Most of the time we think that's a good thing.
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We let a thousand flowers bloom.
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There are lots of ways to live a good life.
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And there's some way in which that is a nice progressive kind of liberal thought.
link |
But it's also true that it's an undermining thought because it means if you're a religious
link |
believer now, your belief can't ground your understanding of what you ought to be aiming
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at in the life in the way it used to be able to.
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You can't say, as a religious believer, I know it's right to do this because you also
link |
know that if you meet someone who doesn't share that religious belief and so doesn't
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think it's right to do that necessarily or does, but for different reasons, you can't
link |
conclude that they've got it wrong.
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So there's this sort of unsettling aspect to it.
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Well, isn't it true that you can't conclude as a public statement to others?
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But within your own mind, it's almost like an existentialist version of belief, which
link |
is like you create the world and around you.
link |
It doesn't matter what others believe.
link |
It's actually almost like empowering thought as opposed to the more traditional view of
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religion where it's like a tribal idea, like where you share that idea together.
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Here you have the full, back to Sartre, full responsibility of your beliefs as well.
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But what you're describing is not a religious believer.
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You're describing someone who's found in themselves the ground of their existence rather than
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in something outside of themselves.
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So the religious belief, I mean, if you go full Sartrean, then well, you're not in a
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position to criticize others for the choices that they make, but you are in a position
link |
to criticize them for the way in which they make them, either taking responsibility or
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not taking responsibility.
link |
But the religious believer used to be able to say, look, the choices that I make are
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right because God demands that I make them.
link |
And nowadays, and so it would be wrong to make any others.
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And nowadays, to say that we live in a secular age, say, well, you can't quite do that and
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be a religious believer.
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Your religious belief can't justify that move, and so it can't ground your life in
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So it's sort of unsettling.
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I think that's one of the interpretations of what Nietzsche might have meant when he
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God can't play the role for religious believers in our world that he used to.
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But we nevertheless find meaning.
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I mean, you don't see nihilism as a prevalent set of ideas that are overtaken modern culture.
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So a secular world is still full of meaning.
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Well, I think that's the interesting question.
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I think it's certainly possible for a secular world to be a world in which we live meaningful
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lives, worthwhile lives, lives that are sort of worthy of respect and that we can be proud
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of aiming to live.
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But I think it is a hard question, what we're doing when we do that.
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And that is the question of existence, sort of what does it mean to exist in a way that
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brings us out at our best as the beings that we are?
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That's the question for existentialism.
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So besides Sartre, who to you is the most important existentialist to understand for
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What ideas in particular of theirs do you like?
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Maybe other existentialists, not just one.
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So Sartre is the grounding, strong, atheistic existentialism statement.
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Who else is there?
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So I'm teaching an existentialism course now.
link |
And I think the tradition goes back at least to the 17th century, and I'll just tell you
link |
some of the figures that I'm teaching there.
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We could talk about any of them that you like.
link |
The figure I start with is Pascal, Pascal, French mathematician from the 17th century.
link |
I'm terrible with dates, but I think 1661 or something like that, middle of the 17th
link |
Brilliant polymath, sort of we have computer languages named after him.
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He built the first mechanical calculating machine, but he was also deeply invested in his understanding
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of what Christianity was.
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And he thought that everyone before him had really misunderstood what Christianity was,
link |
that they'd really attempted to think about it not as a way of living a life, but as a
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set of beliefs that you can have and which you can justify.
link |
And I think that's the first move that's really pretty interesting.
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And then figures like Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky developed that move, and all of those take
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themselves to be defending an interpretation of a certain kind of Christianity, an existential
link |
interpretation of Christianity.
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And then I think there are other figures, other theistic figures, figures like Camus
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and Fanon, who are mid 20th century figures.
link |
And then I'll just mention the figure who I think is the most interesting is Martin
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He's a complicated figure because…
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By the way, when you said, sorry to interrupt, when you said Camus, you meant atheistic.
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I think that Camus is an atheistic existentialist.
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Yeah, I'm happy to talk about that.
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So, okay, so we got, it's like sports cards, we have the different existentialist.
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So maybe let's go to, you know what?
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Let's go to Dostoevsky.
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All right, okay, let's do it.
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So my favorite novel of his is The Idiot.
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First of all, I see myself as the idiot and an idiot.
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And I love the optimism and the love the main character has for the world.
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So that just deeply connects with me as a novel.
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I know it's from underground as well.
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But what ideas of Dostoevsky's do you think are existentialist?
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What ideas are formative to the whole existentialist movement?
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So, let me talk about The Brothers Karamazov partly because that's the last novel that
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I think it's certainly one of the greatest novels of the 19th century, maybe the best.
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And I'm about to teach it in a few weeks, so I'm super excited about it.
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But what is The Brothers Karamazov about?
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I mean, without spoiling the ending for anyone.
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I mean, look, it's a murder mystery, right?
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I mean, the father gets murdered.
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And the question is, who did it?
link |
Who's responsible for it?
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So there's a notion of responsibility here, like in Sartre.
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But it's responsibility for a murder, that's what we're talking about.
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And there's a bunch of brothers, each of whom has pretty good motivation for having
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murdered the father.
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The father's a jerk.
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I mean, he's, you know, if anybody is worthy of being murdered, he's the guy.
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He's a force of chaos, and he's nasty in all sorts of ways.
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But still, it's not good to murder people.
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So, what's the view of Dostoevsky?
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I mean, it's this intense exploration of what it means to be involved in various ways with
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an activity that everyone can recognize as atrocious.
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And what the right way is to take responsibility for that?
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What the right way is to relate to others in the face of it?
link |
And how, even through this kind of action, you can achieve some kind of salvation.
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That's Dostoevsky's word for it.
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That salvation here and now, not like you live some afterlife where you're paradise
link |
Who cares about that, says one of the characters.
link |
That doesn't make my life now any good, and it doesn't justify any of the bad things that
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happen in my life now.
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What matters is, can we live well in the face of these things that we do and have to take
link |
responsibility for?
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So, it's this intense exploration of notions and gradations of guilt and responsibility
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and the possibility of love and salvation in the face of those.
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It is incredibly human work.
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But I think Dostoevsky is the opposite of Sartre.
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And let me just, I think it's so fascinating.
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I don't know anybody else who notices this, but Sartre actually quotes a passage from
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Dostoevsky, when he's developing his view, it's close to a passage.
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It doesn't appear quite in this way.
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But the passage that Sartre quotes is this, it's in the form of an argument, Sartre puts
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it in the form of an argument.
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He says, look, there's a conditional statement is true.
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If there is no God, then everything is permitted.
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And then there's a second premise, there is no God.
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That's Sartre's view.
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I mean, he's an atheist, there is no God.
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Conclusion, everything is permitted.
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And that's Sartre's radical freedom.
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And if you think about the structure of the brothers Karamazov, I think Dostoevsky, though
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he never says it this way, would run the argument differently, is a modus tolens instead of
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The argument for Dostoevsky would go like this, yeah, conditional statement, if there
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is no God, then everything is permitted, but look at your life, not everything is permitted.
link |
You do horrible, atrocious things, like be involved in the death of your father.
link |
And there is a price to pay.
link |
That's not a livable moment to take, to have to take responsibility, to have to recognize
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that you're at fault or you're somehow guilty for having been involved in whatever way you
link |
were in letting that happen or bringing it about that it does happen, is to pay a price.
link |
So we're not beings that are constituted in such a way that everything is permitted.
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Look at the facts of your existence.
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So not everything is permitted, therefore, there is a God.
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And the presence of a God for Dostoevsky, I think, is just found in this fact that when
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we do bad things, we feel guilty for them, that we find ourselves to be responsible
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for things even when we didn't intend to do them, but we just allowed ourselves to be
link |
And the nature of God for Dostoevsky is, I mean, unclear, I mean, it's a very complex
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exploration in itself.
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And he basically, God speaks through several of his characters in complicated ways.
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So it's not like a trivial version of God.
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It's totally not trivial and it's not a being that exists outside of time and none of that
link |
is sort of relevant for Dostoevsky.
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For him, it's a question about how we live our lives.
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Do we live our lives in the mood that Christianity says it makes available to us, which is the
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Is there, maybe this is a bit of a tangent, but Salma Russian speaker and one of the,
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I kind of listen to my heart and what my heart says is I need to take on this project.
link |
So there's a couple of famous translators of Dostoevsky and Dostoevsky that live in
link |
So I'm going to take the journey.
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We agreed to have a full conversation about Dostoevsky, about Dostoevsky and like a series
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And the reason I fell in love with this idea is I just realized in translating from Russian
link |
to English, how deep philosophical, how much deep philosophical thinking is required.
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Just like single sentences, they spent like weeks debating single sentences.
link |
So and all of that is part of a journey to Russia for several reasons, but I just I want
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to explore something in me that long still understand and to connect with the roots where
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So maybe can you comment, whether it's on the Russian side or the German side or other
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French side, is there something in your own explorations of these philosophies that you
link |
find that you miss because you don't deeply know the language?
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Or like how important is it to understand the language?
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I think it's super important and I'm always embarrassed that I don't know more languages
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and don't know the languages I know as well as I would like to, but there's a way in.
link |
So I do think different languages allow you to think in different ways and that there's
link |
a sort of a mode of existence, a way of being that's captured by a language, that it makes
link |
certain ways of thinking about yourself or others more natural and it closes off other
link |
ways of thinking about yourself and others.
link |
And so I think languages are fascinating in that way.
link |
The Heidegger who is this philosopher that I'm interested in says at one point, language
link |
is the house of being and I think that means something like it's by living in a language
link |
that you come to understand or that possibilities for understanding what it is to be you and
link |
others and anything are opened up and different languages open up different possibilities.
link |
And we had that discussion offline about James Joyce, how I took a course in James Joyce
link |
and how I don't think I understood anything besides the dead and the short stories.
link |
And you suggested that it might be helpful to actually visit Ireland, visit Dublin to
link |
help you understand, maybe fall in love with the words.
link |
And so that presumably is not purely about the understanding of the actual words of
link |
the language, it's understanding something much deeper.
link |
The music of the language or something, music of the ideas.
link |
Something like that.
link |
It's very hard to say exactly what that is, but when you hear an Irish person who really
link |
understands Joyce, read some sentences, they have a different cadence, they have a different
link |
tonality, they have different music to use your word.
link |
And all of a sudden, you think about them differently.
link |
And the sentences sort of draw different thoughts out of you when they're read in certain ways.
link |
That's what great actors can do.
link |
But I think language is rich like that.
link |
And the idea which philosophers tend to have, that we're really studying the crucial aspects
link |
of language when we think about its logical form, when we think about the sort of claims
link |
of philosophical logic that you can make, or how do you translate this proposition into
link |
some symbolic form, I think that's part of what goes on in language.
link |
But I think that when language affects us in the deep way that it can, when great poets
link |
or great writers or great thinkers use it to great effect, it's way more than that.
link |
And that's the interesting form of language that I'm interested in.
link |
It's kind of a challenge I'm hoping to take on is I feel like some of the ideas that are
link |
conveyed through language are actually can be put outside of language.
link |
So one of the challenges I have to do is to have a conversation with people in Russian,
link |
but for an English audience, and not rely purely on translators, there would of course
link |
be translators there that help me dance through this mess of language.
link |
But also, like my goal, my hope is to dance from Russian to English back and forth for
link |
an English speaking audience and for a Russian speaking audience.
link |
So not this pure, this is Russian, it's going to be translated to English, or this is English,
link |
it's going to be translated to Russian, but dance back and forth and try to share with
link |
people who don't speak one of the languages, the music that they're missing and sort of
link |
almost hear that music because if you're sitting in another room and you hear the music through
link |
the wall, I get a sense of it.
link |
I think that would be a waste if I don't try to pursue this being a bilingual human
link |
And I wonder whether it's possible to capture some of the magic of the ideas in a way that
link |
can be conveyed to people who don't speak that particular language.
link |
I think it's a super exciting project.
link |
I look forward to following it.
link |
I'll tell you one thing that does happen.
link |
So we read Dostoevsky in translation, occasionally I do have Russian speakers in the room, which
link |
is super helpful, but I also encourage my students to, you know, some of them will have
link |
different translations than others.
link |
And that can be really helpful for the non native speaker because by paying attention
link |
to the places where translators diverge in their translations of a given word or a phrase
link |
or something like that, you can start to get the idea that somehow the words that we have
link |
in English, they don't have the same contours as the word in Russian that's being translated.
link |
And then you can start to ask about what those differences are.
link |
And I think there's a kind of magic to it.
link |
I mean, it's astonishing how rich and affecting these languages can be for people who really,
link |
who grew up in them especially, who speak them as natives.
link |
And that's a really powerful thing that actually doesn't exist enough of is, for example, for
link |
Dostoevsky, most novels have been translated by two or three famous translators.
link |
And there's a lot of discussions about who did it better and so on.
link |
But I would love to, I'm a computer science person, I would love to do a diff where you
link |
automatically detect all the differences in the translation just as you're saying and
link |
use that, like somebody needs to publish literally just books describing the differences.
link |
In fact, I'll probably do a little bit of this.
link |
I heard the individual translators and interviews and blog posts and articles discuss particular
link |
phrases that they differ on, but like to do that for an entire book.
link |
That's a fascinating exploration.
link |
As an English speaker, just read the differences in the translations.
link |
You probably can get some deep understanding of ideas in those books by seeing the struggle
link |
of the translators to capture that idea.
link |
That's a really interesting idea.
link |
And you can do that for other projects and other languages too.
link |
I mean, one of the, I don't know, I have this weird huge range of interests and some
link |
days I'll find myself reading about something.
link |
At one point I was interested in 14th century German mysticism.
link |
It turns out there's somebody who's written like volumes and volumes about this.
link |
And I was interested in reading Meister Eckhart.
link |
I wanted to know what was interesting about him.
link |
And the sort of move that this guy Bernard McGinn, who's the great scholar of this period
link |
made was to say, what Eckhart did, and everybody knows this, he translated Christianity into
link |
He started giving sermons in German to the peasants, sermons used to be in Latin and
link |
nobody could speak Latin.
link |
Can you imagine sitting there for a two hour sermon in a language that you don't know?
link |
So he translated it into German, but in doing it, the resources of the German language are
link |
different from the resources of the Latin language.
link |
And there's a word in Middle High German, Grund, which we translated as ground.
link |
And it's got this earthy feel to it.
link |
It sort of invokes the notion of soil and what you stand on and what things grow out
link |
of and sort of what you could run your fingers through that would have a kind of honesty
link |
And there's no Latin word for that.
link |
But in Eckhart's interpretation of Christianity, Grund, that's like the fundamental thing.
link |
You don't understand God until you understand the way in which he is our ground.
link |
And all of a sudden, this mysticism gets a kind of German cant that makes sense to the
link |
people who speak German and that reveals something totally different about what you could think
link |
that form of existence was that was covered over by the fact that it had always been done
link |
Yeah, that's fascinating.
link |
So okay, we talked about Dostoyevsky and the use of murder to explore human nature.
link |
Let's go to Camus, who is maybe less concerned with murder, more concerned with suicide as
link |
a way to explore human nature.
link |
So he is probably my favorite existentialist, probably one of the more accessible existentialists.
link |
And like you said, one of the people who didn't like to call himself an existentialist.
link |
So what are your thoughts about Camus?
link |
What role does he play in the story of existentialism?
link |
So I find Camus totally fascinating, I really do.
link |
And for years, I didn't teach Camus because the famous thing that you're referring to,
link |
the myth of Sisyphus, which is a sort of essay, it's published as a book, super accessible,
link |
really fascinating.
link |
He's a great writer, really engaging.
link |
The opening line is something like, there is but one truly significant philosophical question,
link |
and that is the question of suicide.
link |
And I thought, I can't teach my 18 year olds a, you know, like how, I just thought that's
link |
Like how can I, I mean, it's not wrong, like that's a, but do I want to bring that into
link |
And so I read it, I read the essay, I avoided it for a long time because just because of
link |
And I thought, I'm not going to be able to make sense of this in a way that will be
link |
helpful for anyone.
link |
But finally, one year, maybe seven or eight years ago, I sat down to read it.
link |
I thought, I've got to really confront it.
link |
And I read it and it's incredibly engaging.
link |
I mean, it's really, really beautiful and Camus was against suicide, which just turns
link |
You know, I was happy about that.
link |
But he has a bit of a bleak understanding of what human existence amounts to.
link |
And so in the end, he thinks that human existence is absurd.
link |
And it's being absurd as a kind of technical term for him.
link |
And it means that the episodes in your life and your life as a whole presents itself to
link |
you as if it's got a meaning, but really it doesn't.
link |
So there's this tension between the way things seem to be on their surface and what really
link |
turns out to be true about them.
link |
And he gives these great examples.
link |
You probably remember these.
link |
He says, there you are, you're walking along the street and there's a plate glass window
link |
and a building and through the window, you see somebody talking on a cell phone.
link |
I mean, I imagine it as a cell phone, but Camus for didn't.
link |
But you see somebody talking on a cell phone and he's animated.
link |
He's talking a lot as if things really meant something.
link |
And yet Camus says, it's a dumb show.
link |
And it's not dumb in the sense, just in the sense that it's stupid.
link |
It's dumb in the sense that it's silent.
link |
It presents itself as if it's got some significance and yet its significance is withheld from you.
link |
And he says, that's what our lives are like.
link |
Everything in our lives presents themselves to us as if it's got a significance, but it
link |
And then he says, really what our lives are like, they're like the lives of Sisyphus.
link |
Just day after day, you do the same thing.
link |
You wake up at a certain time, you get on the bus, you go to work, you take your lunch
link |
break, you get off.
link |
I have a colleague who once said to me something like this, it was about October or so in the
link |
I said, how's it going, Dick?
link |
He said, well, you know how it is.
link |
I got on the conveyor belt at the beginning of the semester and I'm just going through.
link |
And that's the way my life is.
link |
And Camus thinks that experience, which you can sometimes have, reveals something true
link |
about what human lives are like.
link |
Our lives really just are like the life of Sisyphus who rolls this boulder up the hill
link |
from morning till night.
link |
And then at night, he gets to the top and it rolls back down to the bottom.
link |
Over the course of the night, he walks back down and then he starts it all over again.
link |
And he says, Sisyphus is condemned to this life.
link |
Like we're condemned to our lives, but we do have one bit of freedom and it's the only
link |
thing that we can hang on to.
link |
It's the freedom to stick it to the gods who put us in this position by embracing this
link |
existence rather than giving up and committing suicide.
link |
And I thought, well, it's kind of a happy ending, but I also thought it's a dim view
link |
of what our existence amounts to.
link |
So I think there's something fascinating about that, but what I came to believe and
link |
I tried to write about this once.
link |
I know you read the thing about a liveness that I published once.
link |
That's secretly a criticism of Camus.
link |
I don't think I mentioned Camus in there, but I think Camus has got the phenomenon wrong
link |
or he's missed some important aspect of it because in Camus view, when you experience
link |
your day as sort of going on in this deadening way and you're just doing the things that
link |
you always do, the way you always do them.
link |
For Camus, that reveals the truth about what our lives are, but I think there's some aspect,
link |
at least for me, and maybe he just didn't feel this or didn't have access to it.
link |
Maybe others don't.
link |
But for me, there's an extra part to it, which is somehow that, yes, that's the way things
link |
are and it's inadequate.
link |
And there's something that's missing from that aspect of our existence that could be there
link |
and it feels like our lives are not about just putting up with that and sticking it
link |
to the gods by embracing it, but seeking that absence part of it, the part that's recognizable
link |
in its absence in your experience of that.
link |
And that's what I think we do have the experience of the presence of that in moments when you
link |
And that's what you mean by the word aliveness, which is a fascinating and a powerful word.
link |
Yeah, that's what I mean by it.
link |
I think most people can recognize moments in their lives when they really felt alive
link |
and it could happen in a moment when, I don't know, maybe Miles Davis felt it in that moment
link |
when he was responding to Herbie Hancock's chord, or maybe you feel it in that moment
link |
where you grab for the hand on the first date and the gesture is reciprocated, or maybe
link |
you feel it in some moment when you are doing a kind of peak athletic thing or watching
link |
somebody else do a peak athletic thing.
link |
But I think there are moments when it feels like it's not like the way Camu is describing
link |
things and it's better because of that.
link |
So I think one really powerful way for me to understand aliveness is to think about going
link |
to a darker territory, is to think about suicide and I've known people in my life who suffer
link |
from clinical depression.
link |
And you know, whatever the chemistry is in our brain, there is a certain kind of feeling
link |
that is to be depressed.
link |
Where you look in the mirror and ask, do I want to kill myself today?
link |
This is the question that Camu asks, this question, this philosophical question.
link |
And there is people who, when they're depressed, say, not only do they say, I want to kill
link |
myself or I don't, they say, it doesn't matter.
link |
And that's chemistry, that's whatever that is, that's chemistry in our mind.
link |
And then on the flip side of that, for me, I've had some low points, but I've been very
link |
fortunate to not suffer from that kind of depression.
link |
I am the opposite, which is not only moments of peak performance in athletics or great
link |
music or any of that, I'm just deeply joyful often by mundane things.
link |
Like, as you were saying it, I was drinking this thing and it's cold and for some reason,
link |
the coldness of that was like, oh, great, like refrigeration, I don't know, there was
link |
a joy in that, like, I can't put it into words, but it just felt great.
link |
And then just so many things, you look out in nature, there's a nice breeze and just
link |
like, it's amazing.
link |
So that doesn't feel like I'm embracing the absurd.
link |
That seems like I'm getting some nice like dopamine hits in whatever the chemistry is
link |
from just the basics of life and that is the source of aliveness, however my brain is built,
link |
it's gotten a natural sort of mechanism for aliveness.
link |
And so the one nice way to see the absence of aliveness is to look at the chemical, the
link |
clinical depression.
link |
And so Camus doesn't seem to contend with that at all and asking the question of suicide
link |
because when you look in the mirror and ask, like, if I ask myself, do I want to kill myself
link |
I ask that question in a different way, more like a stoic way often, like basically every
link |
day is, you know, what if I die today?
link |
It's more like contemplating your mortality every single day.
link |
You know, that excites me, the possibility that this is my last day that, you know, it
link |
just reminds me how amazing life is and that's chemistry.
link |
I don't know what that is, but that's certainly not some kind of philosophical decision I
link |
I am a little bit riding a wave of the chemistry of the genetics I've been given of the dopamine.
link |
So that question of suicide, by the way, do you find that formulation of the question
link |
of existentialism?
link |
I know you didn't want to teach it because obviously, suicide is a very difficult word,
link |
especially for young minds.
link |
But do you think that's a useful formulation of the question of existentialism?
link |
Like him saying, this is the most important question of suicide?
link |
I think there is something to it.
link |
If you read the question as the question, what is it in virtue of which it ought to be
link |
desirable to live the lives that we're capable of living?
link |
That's a deep question.
link |
That's a question that gets focused when someone asks themselves whether they ought to continue
link |
to live that life, with the famous line, nothing focuses the mind more than one's impending
link |
I mean, I think there's something important about that, that recognizing the riskiness
link |
and the vulnerability of one's existence is super important.
link |
And I think that if we didn't have that, our lives wouldn't be capable of being meaningful.
link |
If they weren't risky and vulnerable, there would be nothing to lose.
link |
And it's only because there are things to lose that they can come to have the significance
link |
So yeah, I think I'm not against the idea that that's a deep way of approaching the
link |
questions at the core of existentialism.
link |
But as you say, I was worried for a while about how I was going to teach it.
link |
Well, I think there's a difference between suicide and not living because suicide is an
link |
So it feels like to me, suicide doesn't make sense because imagine you're in a hotel and
link |
you're saying, the room I'm in sucks, but there's other rooms.
link |
So maybe explore those other rooms.
link |
Maybe you'll find meaning in those other rooms.
link |
Basically embracing the fact that you don't know everything and you need time to explore
link |
But once you've explored everything, then maybe you can make a full decision.
link |
But it's unfair to make a decision.
link |
I would say unethical to make a decision until you've explored all the rooms in the hotel.
link |
And this gets focused in the brothers Karamazov, of course.
link |
There's one brother who is really asking that question, is asking the question of suicide.
link |
He's asking the question whether the world that we live in is a world that's worth living
link |
And I think that character is, as you say, very ill.
link |
And it's possible, and often because, as you say, of brain chemistry, physiologies.
link |
There's certainly a physical ground to that situation, to that condition.
link |
But I think it is possible for someone to be in that situation.
link |
I think that Ivan Karamazov, who's the character who's asking this question, is maybe, let's
link |
say, chemically depressed or something like that.
link |
But I think there's more to it too.
link |
And I think that Dostoevsky's real view is that the brain chemistry doesn't exist on
link |
The way we interact with one another, the way we care about or isolate ourselves from
link |
others, the way we care for the lives that we lead, affects the chemistry of our brain,
link |
which goes on and changes the mood that we're in.
link |
So I think Dostoevsky does think that Ivan's salvation, if he's capable of being saved,
link |
is going to come through the love of his brother Alyosha.
link |
Let me spring maybe a bit of a tangent on you.
link |
Do you ever, one of my other favorite authors is Herman Hesse, do you ever include him in
link |
our deck of sport cards that represent existentialism?
link |
What should I read?
link |
What should I think about including?
link |
No, there's some kind of embrace of absurdism.
link |
There's a existentialist ideal pervading most of his work.
link |
But there's more of, like with Siddhartha, there's more, almost like a Buddhist sort
link |
of like watch the river and become the river, this kind of idea that what it means to truly
link |
experience the moment.
link |
So there is an experiential part of existentialism where you want to, it's not just about, we've
link |
been talking about kind of decisions and actions, but also what it means to listen,
link |
like you said from Nietzsche, like what it means to really take in the world and experience
link |
So he's very good at writing about what it means to experience the moment and experience
link |
the full absurdity of the moment.
link |
And for him, I'm starting to forget, Steppenwolf I think is humor is part of the absurdity,
link |
which I think modern day internet explores very well with memes and so on.
link |
Humor is a fundamental part of the existentialist ethic that's able to deal with absurdity.
link |
You got to like laugh at it.
link |
I think there is some, let me just say something about humor because I think you're absolutely
link |
I mean, regard who is Danish and most people think deeply depressed and then so on is actually
link |
an incredibly funny writer and someone who was a classmate of mine in graduate school
link |
who left philosophy to become a Hollywood comedy writer, he's a very successful guy
link |
and then he came back 25 years later and wrote, finished his dissertation and I was the reader
link |
on the dissertation, there may be a conflict of interest, I'm not quite sure.
link |
But his dissertation was about, he called it Kierkegaard and the funny, which is a kind
link |
But Kierkegaard, according to Eric Kaplan's reading, Kierkegaard does have this idea that
link |
there's something destabilizing about humor that's crucial to the sort of the important
link |
possibilities for us.
link |
So there's the idea that like there's a moment when a joke is being set up, when you're sort
link |
of proceeding as if you're on stable ground and then the punch line comes and the rug
link |
is pulled out from under you and for a moment, it's like you're falling, there's nothing
link |
supporting you until you're captured by your totally new understanding of what was going
link |
on and that humor necessarily has that kind of destabilizing feature to it.
link |
And that's like the riskiness, that's like the riskiness that you were pointing to.
link |
If there aren't risks in your life, if your life is totally safe, then there's no possibility
link |
And so I think on Eric's reading, Kierkegaard sort of wants to line up the importance of
link |
the riskiness and vulnerability in your life to its having meaning with the experience
link |
of destabilization that you get in jokes and comedy, which then becomes significant, right?
link |
When you remember having heard a joke for the first time, it's got a kind of salience
link |
Speaking of jokes and speaking of, you mentioned film and literature.
link |
So existentialism in film and literature, I think for a lot of people, especially nihilism,
link |
was experienced in the great work of art, modern work of art called Big Lebowski.
link |
I don't know if you've ever seen that film, but there's a group of nihilists in that film.
link |
They're just like, they don't care about anything.
link |
I think they happen to be German, at least they have German accents.
link |
So maybe can you talk about notable appearances of existentialism in film?
link |
And if you at all ever bring up Big Lebowski, if that ever comes into play.
link |
So I know that people think about the Big Lebowski in this context.
link |
And I did actually rewatch it not so long ago.
link |
I thought maybe it's time, just wasn't really time for the 11 year old.
link |
So somewhat inappropriate.
link |
But I have never taught that film.
link |
So I'd have to think more.
link |
We could talk about it.
link |
I'd be happy to try to think on the fly about it.
link |
So I would love to because there is a, feels like there's a philosophical depth to that
link |
So there's a person that just the main character.
link |
The Jeff Bridges character.
link |
Jeff Bridges character.
link |
He kind of, he drinks like these white Russians and he just kind of walks around in a very
link |
relaxed way and irradiates both a love for life, but also just an acceptance of like,
link |
it is what it is kind of philosophy.
link |
And then there's a bunch of characters that have very busy lives, trying to do some big
link |
projects that are dramatic in some way, make some huge amounts of money.
link |
So it kind of actually reminds me of the idiot by the SDSK in a certain kind of sense.
link |
And then there's these players, I mean, they're phrased as nihilists, but they kind of don't
link |
care to enjoy life.
link |
They want to mess with life in some kind of way.
link |
And of course there's interesting personalities that, what is it, Jesus, the bowler.
link |
And then there's like Donnie, who is a bit clueless, and then there's the John Goodman
link |
character that's talking about Vietnam and just takes life way too seriously, too intensely
link |
So it just paints a full sort of spectrum of characters that are operating in this world.
link |
And perhaps most importantly for existentialism are thrown into absurdity and hence the humor.
link |
Well, that's helpful.
link |
It's just reminding me of all that.
link |
And I think, so one thing to say is that the nihilists, the group of nihilists who call
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themselves nihilists, I think they've got a bad misinterpretation of what nihilism
link |
is supposed to be.
link |
And this happened actually in the 20s.
link |
There was a famous case of a couple of German students, Leopold and Loeb, who'd read a lot
link |
Nietzsche was a kind of hero for the Nazis even, I think based on a pretty bad misunderstanding
link |
of what he was up to.
link |
But Leopold and Loeb had the bad understanding first and they were students, they'd read
link |
a lot of Nietzsche and they thought, okay, nothing means anything.
link |
The only way that there's any significance in life is through our will to sort of powerfully
link |
bring something about.
link |
And if we're going to do that in a way that reflects the fact that nothing means anything,
link |
then what we should do is take these things, these actions that people always thought were
link |
bad and do them and show that there's nothing wrong with doing them.
link |
And so they decided they would murder someone.
link |
Not because they were angry at them, just someone they'd never met.
link |
It was important that it was someone they'd never met.
link |
It was totally unmotivated act and they thought, we'll embrace nihilism by showing that we
link |
can act in such a way as to do something that morality thinks is bad and through our will
link |
bring it about that we desire to do it for no reason that has anything to do with its
link |
potentially being interpretable as good.
link |
And I think that's a terrible misreading of what Nietzsche thinks the response to nihilism
link |
I mean, I think read that against the Miles Davis thing, Miles Davis's aim is to creatively
link |
bring it about that something works well in a situation where he is kind of constrained.
link |
So they thought two things, one, there are no constraints at all, not even the constraints
link |
of the situation that we find ourselves in.
link |
And two, we only become the beings that we really are when we act against what you might
link |
have thought the constraints were.
link |
And I just think that's a bad misreading of what that kind of nihilism is up to.
link |
And I think maybe that group in the Big Lebowski has got that kind of bad misreading.
link |
But then the major characters are much more interesting.
link |
Go ahead, you're going to say something.
link |
So there's some kind of apathy to that, their particular nihilism.
link |
Could you comment on whether you see sort of apathy as a philosophy part of that nihilism?
link |
Sort of like, from an existentialist perspective, how important is it to care about stuff?
link |
Like really take on life.
link |
What does existentialism have to say about just sitting back and just not caring?
link |
So apathy is like a really important word.
link |
The Greek word is apathē, it means without passions.
link |
And the Stoics, who you mentioned earlier, really thought that passions are what get
link |
in the way if you're living well.
link |
Because to live well, you have to think clearly about what you should do.
link |
And you shouldn't let your resentments and your angers and your petty animosities direct
link |
You should release yourself from those kinds of passions.
link |
So Stoicism, again, huge caricature.
link |
But you know, it's an aim not to care, because caring is bad.
link |
And there's certain forms of existentialism, certainly in Pascal and Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky
link |
and Heidegger, and Sart in his own way.
link |
So it's not just a theistic or atheistic thing.
link |
Where what's crucial about us is that we do care.
link |
Care says, care is the being of Dasein, Dasein is his name for us.
link |
What it is to be us is to be the being that already cares.
link |
And you can't not do that.
link |
You can pretend you're not doing it, but you're just caring in a different way.
link |
It's like Sart saying, you can pretend you're not taking responsibility, or you could pretend
link |
that you don't have to make a decision, that is making a decision.
link |
Not caring is a way of caring.
link |
And so I think the existentialists that I'm interested in think that we do care.
link |
That's constitutive of what it is to be us.
link |
And so they'll think that the Stoics got it wrong, but that leaves open a huge range
link |
of moves about how we inhabit that existence well.
link |
Let me ask about Ayn Rand.
link |
So it just so happens that she's entered a few conversations in this podcast.
link |
And just looking at academic philosophy or just philosophers in general, they seem to
link |
Do you have a sense of why that is?
link |
Does she ever come into play her ideas of objectivism, come into play of discussions
link |
of a good life from the perspective of existentialism in how you teach it and how you think about
link |
Is she somebody who you find it all interesting?
link |
So no, I don't think she is, but it's been a long time since I've read her stuff.
link |
I read it in high school.
link |
I read The Fountainhead in high school and Atlas Shrugged, but that's at this point a
link |
very long time ago.
link |
I think I read something about objective epistemology or something too.
link |
So my view about her could be based on a total misunderstanding of what she's up to.
link |
But my caricature of her and tell me if I've got it wrong is that she's sort of motivated
link |
by a kind of, I think it's maybe sometimes you call it libertarianism, but maybe let's
link |
in the context of our discussion, tie it back to Sartre, a kind of view according to
link |
which we're the being who has to contend with the fact that we're radically free to do stuff
link |
and we're just not being courageous or brave enough when we don't do that and the people
link |
to admire are the people who make stuff out of nothing.
link |
So maybe that's a bad caricature.
link |
I think, no, I think that's pretty accurate.
link |
I'm not, again, very knowledgeable about the full depth of her philosophy, but I think
link |
she takes a view of the world that's similar to Sartre in the conclusions, but makes stronger
link |
statements about epistemology that first of all, everything is knowable and there's some,
link |
you should always operate through reason.
link |
Like reason is very important.
link |
Like it's like, you start with a few axioms and you build on top of that and the axioms
link |
that everybody should operate on are the same, again, reality is objective, it's not subjective.
link |
So from that, you can derive the entirety of how humans should behave at the individual
link |
level and at the societal level and there's a few conclusions, she would talk about virtue
link |
of selfishness and a lot of people use that to dismiss her look, she's very selfish and
link |
She actually meant something very different, it's more like the Sartre thing, take responsibility
link |
for yourself, understand what forces you're operating under and make the best of this
link |
life and that's how you can be the best member of societies by making the best life you can
link |
and just focus on yourself, fix your own problems first and that will make you the best member
link |
of society, of your family, of loved ones, of friends and so on.
link |
I think the reason she's disliked, obviously on the philosophy side she's disliked because
link |
a little bit like Nietzsche, she's like, she's literary.
link |
I think the reason she's publicly disliked in public conversations is because of how
link |
sure she is of herself, which is some of the philosophy has been known to do, make very
link |
strong statements like hell is other people, but she was making very strong statements
link |
about basically everything but the reason I bring her up is she is an influential thinker
link |
that is not for some reason often brought up as such, it's not acknowledged how influential
link |
I was recently looking at a list of the most important women of the 20th century in terms
link |
of thought, not science, but thought and she wasn't in that list and I see this time and
link |
time again and it doesn't make sense to me why she's so dismissed because clearly she's
link |
an author of some of the most read books ever and she clearly had very strong ideas that
link |
should be contended with.
link |
That's why it didn't make sense to me because she's also a creature of her time and an important
link |
woman, she's a creation of the Soviet Union, somebody who left because of that and so some
link |
of the strength of her ideas has to do with how much she dislikes that particular philosophy
link |
and way of life, but also she's a creature of like Sartre and that whole Nietzsche and
link |
Now, one of the other criticisms is she doesn't integrate herself into this history.
link |
She keeps basically kind of implying that she's purely original in all her thoughts even though
link |
she's kind of citing a lot of other people, but again, many philosophers do this kind
link |
of thing as if they are truly original and they're not.
link |
It is interesting and also what's interesting about her is she is a woman, she is a strong
link |
feminist and it feels like with Simone de Beauvoir, like it seems like she's a very
link |
important person in this moment of history that shouldn't be fully forgotten.
link |
Well, so I mean, I don't have a lot to add.
link |
I will just say this.
link |
I mean, the way she and Beauvoir seemed to me from your description of her and remembering
link |
what I remember from 35 years ago, they seem pretty opposite from one another.
link |
One of the things I find interesting about Beauvoir is that she takes seriously the thing
link |
that Sartre didn't, which is our thrownness, which is the sense in which we're born into
link |
a situation that's already got a significance for her.
link |
I think it was easier for her to recognize that than Sartre because she was a woman and
link |
Sartre seems to act as if there are no constraints or at least there shouldn't be.
link |
They're pretty close as privileged white males.
link |
If we could just get rid of the last bits of them, we would be God like we're supposed
link |
And I think Beauvoir sort of sees things differently.
link |
I think she reckons, one's not born but becomes a woman, she says.
link |
So how does that happen?
link |
Well, you're thrown into your culture and your culture starts treating you in a certain
link |
way because of your gender and that starts to form your understanding and your experience
link |
By the time you're grown up, well, you're pretty well formed by that.
link |
That seems a fact.
link |
It's a fact about Sartre too, though it was harder for him to notice it because he was
link |
formed into his privilege.
link |
But the world reminds us of our thrownness for some more than others.
link |
And for people who have to contend on a daily basis with the fact that the social position
link |
they're thrown into is one that negates them or one that oppresses them or one that sort
link |
of pushes them to the side in some way or another.
link |
I mean, the black experience is interesting in this respect too.
link |
Franz Fanon, who's a contemporary of Sartre and Beauvoir's, writes about it.
link |
And it's very familiar the things that he's saying now, but he writes back in the 50s about
link |
being a black man in Paris and getting on an elevator with a woman alone and how her
link |
reaction to him, not knowing him, not having any views about any reason to have any views
link |
about him sort of puts him in a particular social position with respect to her.
link |
And if you don't have that experience, it's much harder to recognize the way in which
link |
what we're thrown into is something we might not have chosen.
link |
So the idea that that's not an aspect of our existence, which as you describe Ayn Rand's
link |
views, she sounds more like Sartre, she sounds more like either it's not an aspect of our
link |
existence or at least we ought to sort of aim at it's not being an aspect of our existence.
link |
Yeah, almost act as if it's not.
link |
Act as if it's not.
link |
And so I think from my point of view, I don't pretend that I'm explaining the public reception
link |
I'm just sort of trying to say how I understand her in this intellectual context.
link |
From my point of view, that's something big to miss.
link |
And the ambition to think that really what's happening is that we're all the same.
link |
We're all rational beings.
link |
We're all beings who, if we just got the axioms of our existence right and made good judgments
link |
and reasoned in an appropriate way, would optimize ourselves.
link |
That feels to me like a kind of natural end point of the philosophical tradition.
link |
I mean, sort of Plato starts off with a view that helps us in that direction and the enlightenment
link |
moves us further in that direction.
link |
And from my point of view, that movement has led us astray because it's missed something
link |
really important that's crucial to the kind of being that we are.
link |
Yeah, it misses the music.
link |
It misses the music.
link |
Let's talk about thrownness and I think you mentioned that in the context of Heidegger.
link |
So can we talk about Heidegger?
link |
So what is this philosopher, what are some fascinating ideas that he brought to the world?
link |
So Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher.
link |
I do know when he was born, 1889, but I don't know that only by accident.
link |
It's because it's the same year that Wittgenstein and Austrian philosopher was born and the
link |
same year that Hitler was born.
link |
So if I've remembered my dates right and someone will call in and correct me otherwise.
link |
But that's the way it sort of sits in my memory bank.
link |
And it's interesting that the three of them were born at the same time.
link |
Wittgenstein and Heidegger share some similarities, but then it's also interesting that Heidegger
link |
I mean, this is a very disturbing fact about his personal political background.
link |
And so it's something that anyone who thinks that things that he said might be interesting
link |
has got a content with.
link |
He was born in Germany, Hitler in Austria, Wittgenstein is Austria also.
link |
But so you have to, when you call Heidegger a Nazi, you have to remember, I mean, there
link |
was millions of Nazis too.
link |
So like there are parts of their, that's the history of the world.
link |
There's a lot of communists, Marxists and Nazis in that part of history.
link |
And one of the discussion points is, well, was he just a kind of social Nazi?
link |
I mean, he went to parties with them and stuff, or was he like, did he really believe in the
link |
And that's a choice point.
link |
And we could talk about it if you want.
link |
He held a political position.
link |
That's one of the relevant parts in 1933.
link |
He was made rector of the University of Freiburg.
link |
That's like the president of the university.
link |
And that was in Germany, all the universities are state universities.
link |
And so that's a political appointment.
link |
Can we just pause on this point?
link |
From an existentialist perspective, what's the role for standing up to evil?
link |
So I mean, I think Camus probably had something to say about these things because he was a
link |
bit of a political figure.
link |
Like do you have a responsibility not just for your decisions, but if the world you see
link |
around you is going against what you believe somewhere deep inside is ethical, do you have
link |
a responsibility to stand up to that even if it costs you your life or your well being?
link |
You ask from an existential perspective and there's lots of different positions that you
link |
You do something in the area of what I think I might believe, which comes out of this tradition.
link |
And it's this, if you live in a community where people are being dragged down by the
link |
norms of the community rather than elevated, then there's two things that you have to recognize.
link |
One is that you bear some responsibility for that, not necessarily because you chose it.
link |
Maybe you reviled it.
link |
Maybe you were against it.
link |
But there's some way in which we all act in accordance with the norms of our culture.
link |
We all give in to them in some way or another.
link |
And if those norms are broken, then there's some way in which we've allowed ourselves
link |
to be responsible for broken norms or we've become responsible for broken norms.
link |
And I do think you have to face up to that.
link |
I think that let's just take gender norms.
link |
Maybe the gender norms are broken.
link |
Maybe the way men and women treat one another or the way men treat women is broken.
link |
Maybe I'm not making a substantive claim, I'm just saying, lots of people say it is.
link |
And if you're in a culture where those norms take root, you don't get to just isolate yourself
link |
and pull yourself out of the culture and think, I don't have any responsibility.
link |
But you're already a part of the culture, even if you're isolating yourself from it.
link |
That's a way of rejecting the sort of part you play in the culture, but it's not a way
link |
of getting behind it.
link |
Now you're playing that role differently, you're saying, I don't want to take responsibility
link |
for what's going on around me.
link |
And that's a way of taking responsibility by refusing to do it.
link |
So I think we're implicated in whatever's going on around us.
link |
And if we're going to do anything in our lives, we ought to recognize that, recognize that
link |
even in situations where you maybe didn't decide to do it, you could be part of bringing
link |
other people down.
link |
And then devote yourself to trying to figure out how to act differently so that the norms
link |
update themselves. And I think this is not a criticism of people.
link |
Aleosha, who we mentioned in the Brothers Karamazov, he's a character, he's a kind of
link |
saintly character in the Brothers Karamazov.
link |
But that one crucial moment in that story, when he realizes how awful he's been being
link |
to someone without ever even intending to do that, it's Grushenka, who's this sort of
link |
fascinating woman, and she's a very erotic woman, she's sort of sexual, and Aleosha,
link |
in my reading of it, is kind of attracted to her.
link |
But he's a young kid, he's 20 or whatever, and he's kind of embarrassed about it.
link |
And he lives in the monastery, and he's thinking maybe he wants to be a priest, and he's kind
link |
of embarrassed by it.
link |
So what does he do?
link |
Every time they run across one another in the street, he averts his gaze.
link |
And why is he doing that?
link |
Because he's kind of embarrassed.
link |
But how does Grushenka experience it?
link |
Well, she knows she's a fallen woman, and she knows that Aleosha has this other position
link |
So her read on it is, he's passing judgment on me.
link |
He can see that I, he doesn't want to be associated with me.
link |
He can see that I'm a fallen woman.
link |
He knows that in order to maintain his purity, he's got to avoid me.
link |
That's not what Aleosha intended to do.
link |
But that's the way it's experienced.
link |
And so there's this way, he comes to recognize, oh my God, like what I'm supposed to do is
link |
love people in Dostoevsky's view of things.
link |
And what I'm doing instead is dragging this poor woman down.
link |
I'm making her life worse, I'm making her feel terrible about herself.
link |
And if I actually came to know her, I'd recognize her condition is difficult.
link |
She's living a difficult life.
link |
She's making hard choices.
link |
And why don't I, you know, why don't I see that in her face instead of this other thing
link |
that's making me want to avoid her?
link |
And that's a huge moment.
link |
So the idea is that we're implicated in bringing other people down, whether we want to be or
link |
And that's our condition.
link |
The requirement to understand that is to be almost to a radical degree, be empathetic
link |
and to listen to the world.
link |
And I mean, you brought up sort of gender roles.
link |
It's not so simple.
link |
All of this is messy.
link |
For example, this is me talking.
link |
It's clear to me that, for example, the woke culture has bullying built into it, has some
link |
elements of the same kind of evil built into it.
link |
And when you're part of the wave of wokeness standing up for social rights, you also have
link |
to listen and think, are we going too far?
link |
Are we hurting people?
link |
Are we doing the same things that others that we're fighting against that others were doing
link |
So it's not simple once you see that there's evil being done, that it's easy to fix.
link |
No, in our society, there's something about our human nature that just too easily stops
link |
listening to the world, to empathize with the world.
link |
And we label things as evil.
link |
This is through human history.
link |
We mentioned tribes.
link |
This religious belief is evil, and so we have to fight it, and we become certain and dogmatic
link |
about it, and then in so doing, commit evil onto the world.
link |
It seems like a life that accepts and responsibility for the norms we're in has to constantly be
link |
sort of questioning yourself and questioning, like listening to the world fully and richly
link |
without being weighed down by any one sort of realization.
link |
You just always constantly have to be thinking about the world.
link |
Am I wrong in seeing the world this way?
link |
I mean, the very last thing you said, you've constantly got to be thinking about the world.
link |
You've constantly got to be listening.
link |
You've constantly got to be attending, and it's not simple.
link |
All that sounds exactly right to me.
link |
The phrase that rings through my head is another one from the Brothers Karamazov.
link |
Dimitri, this passionate, sometimes violent brother who is also deeply cares.
link |
Because he's passionate, he's sort of got care through and through, but it's breaking
link |
He says at one point, God and the devil are fighting in the battlefield is the heart of
link |
I just think, yeah, it's not simple.
link |
And the idea that there might be a purely good way of doing things is just not our condition,
link |
that everything we do is going to be sort of undermined by some aspect of it.
link |
There's not going to be a kind of pure good in human existence.
link |
And so it's sort of required that we're going to have to be empathetic, that we're going
link |
to have to recognize that others are dealing with that just as we are.
link |
So I apologize for distracting us.
link |
We were talking about Heidegger, and the reason we're distracted is he happened to also be
link |
a Nazi, but he nevertheless has a lot of powerful ideas.
link |
What are the ideas he's brought to the world?
link |
So that's a big, huge question.
link |
So let me see how much of it I can get on the table.
link |
I mean, the big picture is that Heidegger thinks, and he's not really wrong to think
link |
this, that the whole history of philosophy from Plato forward, maybe even from the Presocratics
link |
forward, from like the 6th century BC to now, has been motivated by a certain, or has been
link |
grounded on a certain kind of assumption that it didn't have the right to make, and that
link |
it's led us astray, and that until we understand the way in which it's led us astray, we're
link |
not going to be able to get to grips with the condition we now find ourselves in.
link |
So let me start with what he thinks the condition we now find ourselves in is.
link |
Lots of periods to Heidegger's views.
link |
I'm just going to sort of mush it all together for the purposes of today.
link |
Heidegger thinks that one of the crucial things that we need to contend with when we think
link |
about what it is to be us now is that the right name for our age is a technological age.
link |
What does it mean for our age to be a technological age?
link |
Well it means that we have an understanding of what it is for anything at all to be at
link |
all, that we never really chose, that sort of animating the way we live our lives, that's
link |
animating our understanding of ourselves and everything else, that is quite limited.
link |
And it's organized around the idea that to be something is to be what's sitting there
link |
as an infinitely flexible reserve to be optimized and made efficient.
link |
And Heidegger thinks that that's not just the way we think of Silicon Circuits or the
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river when we put a hydroelectric power plant on it, we're optimizing the flow of the river
link |
so that it makes energy which is infinitely flexible and we can use in any way at all.
link |
It's the way we understand ourselves too.
link |
We think of ourselves as this reserve of potential that needs to be made efficient and optimized.
link |
And when I talk with my students about it, I ask them, what's your calendar look like?
link |
What's the goal of your day?
link |
Is it to get as many things into it as possible?
link |
Is it to feel like I've failed unless I've made my life so efficient that I'm doing this
link |
and this and this and this and this, that I can't let things go by?
link |
The feeling that I think we all have that there's some pressure to do that, to relate
link |
to ourselves that way is a clue to what Heidegger thinks the technological age is about.
link |
And he thinks that's different from every other age in history.
link |
We used to think of ourselves in the 17th century at the beginning of the Enlightenment
link |
as subjects who represent objects.
link |
Descartes thought that a subject is something, some mental sort of realm that represents
link |
the world in a certain way.
link |
And we're closed in on ourselves in the sense that we have a special relation to our representations
link |
and that's what the realm of the subject is.
link |
But others, in the Middle Ages, we were created in the image and likeness of God.
link |
In the presecratic age, to be was to be what whooshes up and lingers for a while and fades
link |
away the paradigm of what is, where's thunderstorms and the anger of the gods, Achilles battlefury,
link |
and it overtakes everything and stays for a while and then leaves.
link |
The flowers blooming in spring.
link |
And that's very different from the way we experience ourselves.
link |
And so the question is, what are we supposed to do in the face of that?
link |
And Heidegger thinks that the presupposition that's motivated everything from the presecratics
link |
forward is that there is some entity that's the ground of the way we understand everything
link |
For the Middle Ages, it was God.
link |
That was the entity that made things be the things that they are.
link |
For the Enlightenment, it was us, maybe first art, it's us.
link |
And Heidegger thinks whatever it is that stands at the ground of what we are, it's not another
link |
It's not another entity.
link |
And we're relating to it in the wrong way if we think of it like that.
link |
And this is partly why I was interested in Meister Eckhart.
link |
He says, what there is is there's giving going on in the world.
link |
And we're the grateful recipient of it.
link |
And the giving is like whatever it is, it's the social norms that we're thrown into.
link |
We didn't choose them.
link |
They were given to us.
link |
And that's the ground.
link |
That is what makes it possible for anything to be intelligible at all.
link |
If we lived outside of communities, if we lived in a world where there were no social
link |
norms at all, nothing would mean anything.
link |
Nothing would have any significance.
link |
Nothing would be regular in the way that things need to be regular in order for there to be
link |
departures or manifestations of that regularity.
link |
So community norms are crucial, but they're also always updating.
link |
We have some responsibility for what they are and the way in which they're updating themselves.
link |
And yet we didn't ever choose it to be that way.
link |
So those norms are somehow giving significance to us in a way that we're implicated in.
link |
We have some relation to.
link |
And all that gets covered over if you think of us as efficient resources to be optimized.
link |
Is that a conflicting view that we are resources to be optimized?
link |
Is that somehow deeply conflicting with the fact that there's a ground that we stand on?
link |
So what Heidegger thinks is that he calls this the supreme danger of the technological
link |
age, is that without ever having chosen it, without ever having decided it, this is the
link |
way we understand what it is to be us.
link |
But he thinks that it's also, he says, quoting Holderlin, the 18th century German poet.
link |
He says, in the supreme danger lies the saving possibility.
link |
So what does that mean?
link |
It means that this is the understanding that we've been thrown into, that we've been given.
link |
It's the gift that was given to us.
link |
It's supremely dangerous.
link |
If we let ourselves live that way, we'll destroy ourselves.
link |
But it's also the saving possibility because if we recognize that we never chose that,
link |
that it was given to us, but also we were implicated in its being given, and we could
link |
find a way to supersede it, that it's the ground, but it's also updatable.
link |
He calls the ground the groundless ground.
link |
It's not like an entity which is there, solid, stable, like God, who's eternal and non changing.
link |
It's always updating itself, and we're always involved in its being updated, but we're only
link |
involved in it in the right way if we listen, like Miles Davis.
link |
So optimization is not a good way to live life.
link |
If you thought that it was obviously clear that that was the relevant value, so obviously
link |
clear that it never even occurred to you to ask whether it was right to think that, then
link |
you would be in danger.
link |
So yeah, there is some in this modern technological age, in the full meaning of the word technology
link |
that's updated to actual modern age with a lot more technology going on.
link |
It does feel like colleagues of mine in the tech space actually are somehow drawn to that
link |
optimization as if that's going to save us, as if the thing that truly weighs us down
link |
is the inefficiencies.
link |
And I think if you think about other contexts, like what are the moments when, I mean, we're
link |
unique in this respect.
link |
This period in history is unlike any previous, nobody ever felt that way.
link |
But think about, but it's also true that no previous period in history was nihilistic.
link |
So our condition is tied up, that sort of thing is meant to be a response to the felt
link |
And so no previous epoch in history felt that way.
link |
They didn't have our problem.
link |
But so it was much more natural to them to experience moments in ways that feel unachievable
link |
for us, what we were calling moments of aliveness before.
link |
Think about the context in which they felt them.
link |
They weren't efficient, optimized contexts.
link |
Think about the Greeks.
link |
If you ever read Homer, it is a bizarre world back there.
link |
But one of the things that's bizarre is that they're so unmotivated by efficiency and optimizing
link |
that the only thing that seems to run through all of the different Greek cultures is the
link |
idea that if some stranger comes by, you better take care of them because Zeus is the God
link |
of strangers and Zeus will be angry.
link |
That's what they say, right?
link |
But how does it manifest itself?
link |
Odysseus, he's trying to get home and he gets shipwrecked on an island.
link |
And he's trying to figure out how he's been at sea for 10 days.
link |
He's bedraggled and he sees now Cissa, the princess who's beautiful.
link |
And he's like, boy, I better, I don't know, get some clothes or something.
link |
I don't want them to beat me up and kill me.
link |
And so she takes him to the palace, they have three days of banquets and festivals before
link |
they even ask his name.
link |
It's like, here's a stranger.
link |
Our job is to celebrate the presence of a stranger because this is where significance
link |
Now, we don't have to feel that way, but the idea that that's one of the places where
link |
significance could lie is pretty strongly at odds with the idea that our salvation is
link |
going to come from optimization and efficiency.
link |
Maybe something about the way we live our lives will have that integrated into it.
link |
But it's at odds with other moments.
link |
Let me ask you a question about Hubert Dreyfus.
link |
He is a friend, a colleague, a mentor of yours, unfortunately no longer with us.
link |
You wrote with him the book titled All Things Shining, Reading the Western Classics to Find
link |
Meaning in a Secular Age.
link |
First, can you maybe speak about who that man was, what you learned from him?
link |
And then we can maybe ask, how do we find through the classics, meaning in a secular
link |
So Hubert Dreyfus was a very important philosopher of the late 20th, early 21st century.
link |
He died in 2017, about a little over four years ago.
link |
He was my teacher.
link |
I met him in 1989 when I went away to graduate school in Berkeley.
link |
That's where he taught.
link |
He plays an interesting and important role in the history of philosophy in America because
link |
in a period when most philosophers in America and in the English speaking world were not
link |
taking seriously 20th century French and German philosophy, he was.
link |
And he was really probably the most important English speaking interpreter of Heidegger,
link |
the German philosopher that we've been talking about.
link |
He was an incredible teacher.
link |
A lot of his influence came through his teaching.
link |
And one of the amazing things about him as a teacher was his sort of mix of intellectual
link |
humility with sort of deep, insightful authority.
link |
And he would stand up in front of a class of 300 students, he taught huge classes because
link |
people loved to go see him.
link |
And I taught for him for many years.
link |
And say, I've been reading this text for 40 years, but the question you asked is one
link |
And it would be true.
link |
He would find in what people said things that were surprising and new to him.
link |
And that's humility actually.
link |
That is listening to the world.
link |
He was always ready to be surprised by something that someone said.
link |
And there's just something astonishing about that.
link |
So his influence was, you know, for people who didn't know him through his interpretations
link |
of these texts, he wrote about a huge range of stuff.
link |
But for people who didn't know him, it was through his presence.
link |
It was through the way he carried himself in his life.
link |
And so in any case, that's who he was.
link |
We I graduated after many years as a graduate student, I didn't start in philosophy, I started
link |
I did computer science actually.
link |
And then I did a lot of work in computational neuroscience for a few years.
link |
It's a fascinating journey.
link |
We'll get to it through our friendly conversation about artificial intelligence.
link |
I'm sure because you're basically fascinated with the philosophy of mind of the human mind
link |
but rooted in a curiosity of mind through the its artificial, through the engineering
link |
The reason I was attracted to him actually is because of his, to begin with, was because
link |
of his criticisms of what was called traditional symbolic AI in the 70s and 80s.
link |
So I came to Berkeley as a graduate student who'd done a lot of math and a lot of computer
link |
science, a lot of computational neuroscience.
link |
I noticed that you had, you interview a lot of people in this world.
link |
And I had a teacher at Brown as an undergraduate, Jim Anderson, who wrote with Jeff Hinton,
link |
a big book on neural networks.
link |
So I was interested in that, not so interested in traditional AI, like sort of LISP programings,
link |
things that went on in the 80s, because it felt sort of when you made a system do something,
link |
all of a sudden it was an interesting thing to have done.
link |
The fact that you'd solved the problem then made it clear that the problem wasn't an interesting
link |
And I had that experience.
link |
And Burt had criticisms of symbolic AI, what he called good old fashioned AI, GOFI.
link |
And I was attracted to those criticisms because it felt to me that there was something lacking
link |
And I didn't know what it was.
link |
I just felt its absence.
link |
And then I learned that all his arguments came from his reading of this phenomenological
link |
and existential tradition.
link |
And so I had to try to figure out what those folks were saying.
link |
And it was a long road.
link |
Let me tell you, it took me a long time.
link |
But it was because of Burt that I was able to do that.
link |
So I owe him that huge debt of gratitude.
link |
And eventually we went on to write a book together, which was a great experience.
link |
And yes, we published All Things Shining in 2011.
link |
And that's a book that I definitely would not have had the chutzpah to try to write
link |
if it weren't for Burt, because it was really about great literature in the history of the
link |
West from Homer and Virgil and Dante to Melville.
link |
There's a huge chapter on Melville, a big chapter on David Foster Wallace, who Burt
link |
didn't care about at all.
link |
But I was fascinated by it.
link |
And so learning to think that way while writing that book with him was an amazing experience.
link |
So I have to admit, as one of my failings in life, one of many failings is I've never
link |
gotten through Moby Dick or any of Melville's works.
link |
So maybe can you comment on, before we talk about David Foster Wallace, who I have gotten
link |
through, what are some of the sources of meaning in these classics?
link |
So Moby Dick, I think, is the other great novel of the 19th century.
link |
So The Brothers Karamazov and Moby Dick, and they're diametrically opposed, which is one
link |
of the really interesting things.
link |
So the Brothers Karamazov is a kind of existential interpretation of Russian Orthodox Christianity.
link |
How do you live that way and find joy in your existence?
link |
Moby Dick is not at all about Christianity.
link |
It sort of starts with the observation that the form of Christianity that Ishmael is familiar
link |
It's not going to work in his living, his life.
link |
He has to leave it.
link |
He has to go to sea in order to find what needs to happen.
link |
And Ishmael is the wailing boat captain.
link |
So he's not the captain.
link |
Ahab is the captain.
link |
The famous opening line to the book is, call me Ishmael.
link |
And Ishmael is the main character in the book.
link |
He's the everyday guy.
link |
He's like a nobody on the ship.
link |
He's not the lowest, but certainly not the highest.
link |
He's right in the middle.
link |
And he's named Ishmael, which is interesting because Ishmael is the illegitimate son of
link |
Abraham in the Old Testament.
link |
He is the, I think if I have it right, again, someone will correct me.
link |
I think he's the one that Islam traces its genesis to.
link |
And so Islam is an Abrahamic religion like Judaism and Christianity, but Judaism and
link |
Christianity trace their lineage through Isaac, the quote unquote legitimate son of Abraham.
link |
And Ishmael is the other son of Abraham who he had with a girlfriend.
link |
And so he's clearly outside of Christianity in some way.
link |
He's named after the non Christian sort of son of Abraham.
link |
And the book starts out with this, what does he call it, something like a dark and misty
link |
He's walking along the street and he's overcome by his, I can't remember what the word is,
link |
but his hypos, that's what he calls them.
link |
Things are not going well.
link |
And that's where he starts.
link |
And he signs up to go on this whaling voyage with this captain, Ahab, who is this incredibly
link |
charismatic, deeply disturbing character who is a captain who's got lots of history and
link |
wants to go whaling, wants to get whales.
link |
That's what they do.
link |
They harpoon these whales and bring them back and sell the blubber and the oil and so on.
link |
So he's kind of rich and he's famous and he's powerful.
link |
He's an authority figure and he is megalomaniacally obsessed with getting one particular whale,
link |
which is called Moby Dick.
link |
And Moby Dick is like the largest, the whitest, the sort of most terrifying of all the whales.
link |
And Ahab wants to get him because a number of years earlier, he had an encounter with
link |
Moby Dick where Moby Dick bit off his leg.
link |
And he survived, but he had this deeply religious experience in the wake of it.
link |
And he needed to find out what the meaning of that was.
link |
What is the meaning of my suffering?
link |
Who am I such that the world and Moby Dick, this Leviathan at the center of it should
link |
treat me this way?
link |
And so his task is not just to go whaling, it's to figure out the meaning of the universe
link |
through going whaling and having a confrontation with his tormentor, this whale, Moby Dick.
link |
And the confrontation is so weird because Melville points out that whales, their faces
link |
Their foreheads are so huge and their eyes are on the side of them that you can never
link |
actually look them in the eye.
link |
And it's kind of a metaphor for God, like you can't ever look God in the face.
link |
That's the sort of traditional thing to say about God.
link |
You can't find the ultimate meaning of the universe by looking God in the face.
link |
But Ahab wants to.
link |
He says he's got a pasteboard mask of a face, but I'll strike through the mask and find
link |
out what's behind.
link |
And so Ishmael is sort of caught up in this thing and he's like going whaling because
link |
he's in a bad mood.
link |
And maybe this will make things better and he makes friends with this guy, Queequeg,
link |
and Queequeg is a pagan.
link |
He's from an island in the South Pacific and he's got tattoos all over his body, head
link |
He's a party colored, like every different color, says Ishmael, is these tattoos.
link |
And they are the writing on his body, he says, of the immutable mysteries of the universe
link |
as understood through his culture.
link |
And so somehow Queequeg is this character who is like not Christian at all.
link |
And he's powerful in a very different way than Ahab is.
link |
He's supposed to be the king.
link |
He's the son of the king and probably his father's died by now.
link |
And if he went home, he'd be the king.
link |
But he's off on a voyage too, trying to understand who he is before he goes back and leads his
link |
And he's a harpooner, the bravest of the people on the ship.
link |
And he's got the mystery of the universe tattooed on his body, but nobody can understand it.
link |
And it's through his relation with Queequeg that Ishmael comes to get a different understanding
link |
of what we might be about.
link |
So that's Moby Dick.
link |
And connected to a book I have read, which is funny, there's probably echoes that represent
link |
the 20th century now in Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway, that also has similar, I guess,
link |
themes, but more personal, more focused on the, I mean, I guess it's less about God.
link |
It's almost more like the existentialist version of Moby Dick.
link |
And hence shorter.
link |
And a lot shorter.
link |
Well, Hemingway was brilliant that way.
link |
But do you see echoes and do you find Old Man and the Sea interesting?
link |
It's been since ninth grade that I read Old Man and the Sea even longer ago than the Fountain
link |
So I didn't know we were going to go there.
link |
I mean, I find Hemingway interesting, but Hemingway, my general sort of picture of him
link |
is that, you know, he's, we have to confront the dangers and the difficulties of our life.
link |
We have to develop in ourselves a certain kind of courage and manliness.
link |
And I think there's something interesting about that.
link |
He's for risk in a certain way.
link |
And I think that's important.
link |
But I do, now I don't have any right to say this since it's been so long since I read
link |
I mean, I feel like there's, I don't remember a sense for the quite the tragedy of it.
link |
Is it a melancholy novel?
link |
I don't even remember.
link |
No, it's, I mean, it has a sense like The Stranger by Camus, it has a sense of like this is
link |
how life is and it like has more about old age and that you're not quite the man you
link |
used to be feeling of like, this is how time passes.
link |
And then the passing of time and how you get old and you get older.
link |
And this is one last fish.
link |
It's less about this is the fish.
link |
It's more like this is one last fish.
link |
Like, and asking who was I, who was I as a man as a human being in this world?
link |
And this one fish helps you ask that question fully.
link |
But it's one fish, which is just sort of all the other fish too, right?
link |
And that is a big difference because for, for AHAB, no other fish will do than Moby
link |
It's got to be the biggest, the most powerful, the most tormenting.
link |
It's got to be the one that you've got history with that has defiled you.
link |
And it's, it's a raucous ride, Moby Dick.
link |
What about David Foster Wallace?
link |
So why is he important to you in the search of meaning in a secular age?
link |
So, so I'll just, I'll just, just to finish the Moby Dick thing.
link |
I think what's interesting about Melville is that he thinks our salvation comes not
link |
if we get in the right relation to monotheism or Christianity, but if we get in the right
link |
relation to polytheism, to the idea that there's not a unity to our existence.
link |
But there are lots of little meanings.
link |
And they don't cohere sometimes, you know, uh, like in, like in Homer, sometimes you're
link |
Helen's in love with Paris and they do crazy things.
link |
They go off and run away and the Trojan war begins.
link |
And sometimes you're in a battle fury that's where their love is Aphrodite's realm and
link |
the battle fury, that's Ares realm and that's a totally different world.
link |
And they're not even, I mean, they're related.
link |
There's a kind of family resemblance, but not much.
link |
Really you're just in different sort of local meaningful worlds.
link |
And Melville seems to think that that's, that's a thing that we could aim to bring back.
link |
He says, we have to lure back the Mary May Day gods of old and, and lovingly enthrone
link |
them in the now egotistical sky, the now unhaunted hill.
link |
That's what we live in this world where hills aren't, aren't haunted with significance anymore
link |
and the sky is just a bunch of stuff that we're studying with physics and astrophysics
link |
But, but they used to be awe inspiring and we have to figure out how to get in that relation
link |
to them, but not by trying to give a unity to our existence through developing habits
link |
and practices that get written on our body.
link |
And so his is about the end of Judeo Christianity and the sort of Roman appropriation of it.
link |
And Wallace, what, one of the things I think is so interesting about him is that I think
link |
he is a great observer of the contemporary world and he's a very funny writer, right?
link |
He's really funny, but he's a great observer of the contemporary world.
link |
What he thought was at the core of the contemporary world was this constant temptation to diversion
link |
through entertainment.
link |
That's a different story than the Heidegger story about efficiency and optimization.
link |
But it's the other side of it.
link |
What is this temptation sort of diverting us from?
link |
The ability to be more efficient.
link |
So you're tempted to go watch some stupid film or television show or something that's
link |
dumb and not really very interesting, but you read that temptation as a temptation precisely
link |
in virtue of it's taking you away from your optimizing your existence.
link |
And so I think they're two sides of the same coin.
link |
I think he's brilliant at describing it.
link |
I think he thought it was a desperate position to be in that it was something that we needed
link |
to confront and find a way out of.
link |
And his characters are trying to do that.
link |
And I think there's two different David Foster Wallace's, one, I mean, David Foster Wallace
link |
committed suicide and it's very sad.
link |
And he clearly did have, you know, sort of, there was a physiological basis to his condition.
link |
He was treating it for decades with medication.
link |
He had electroshock therapy a number of times.
link |
It's just very, very sad story.
link |
When I decided that we were going to write about David Foster Wallace, the first thing
link |
I was worried about is what, can you, can you, like obviously a motivating factor, maybe
link |
the motivating factor in his committing suicide was his physiological condition.
link |
But there was, there's, there's this, there was a question.
link |
Could you think, I mean, he's obsessed with the condition with what we need to do to achieve
link |
our salvation, to live well, to make our lives worth living.
link |
And he clearly in the end felt like he couldn't do that.
link |
So in addition to the physiological thing, which probably most of it.
link |
The question for me was, could you find in his writing, what his, what he was identifying
link |
as the thing we needed to be doing, that he nevertheless felt we couldn't be doing.
link |
And he talks as if that's, that's the difficulty for him.
link |
So that, that's one side of him.
link |
And I did want to find that, but I think there's another side of him that's very different,
link |
but you were going to ask.
link |
What's the other side?
link |
I mean, what I write about in the, in the chapter mostly is what I think he's got as
link |
our, as, as our saving possibility.
link |
He thinks our saving possibility, he says this in a graduation speech that he gave to
link |
Kenyon is that we have the freedom to interpret situations however we like.
link |
So what's the problem case for him?
link |
He says, look, you know, the problem case, we have, we have it all the time.
link |
You get pissed off at the world, you know, some, some big SUV cuts you off on the highway
link |
and you're pissed off and you might express your anger with one finger or another directed
link |
And he says, but actually, you know, you're being pissed off as the result of your having
link |
made an assumption.
link |
And the assumption is that that action was directed at you.
link |
Like the assumption is that you're the center of the universe and you shouldn't assume that.
link |
And the way to talk yourself out of it, he says, is to recognize the possibility that
link |
maybe that wasn't an action directed at you.
link |
Like maybe that guy is racing to the hospital, you know, to take care of his dying spouse
link |
who's been there suffering, you know, from cancer, or maybe he's, you know, on the way
link |
to pick up a sick child or maybe he's, and it's not an action directed.
link |
That was your assumption, not something that was inherent in the situation.
link |
And I think there's something interesting about that.
link |
I think there's something right about that.
link |
At the same time, I don't think he speaks as if we can just spin out these stories.
link |
And whether they're true or not, doesn't matter.
link |
What matters is that they free us from this assumption.
link |
And I think they only free us from this assumption if they're true.
link |
Like sometimes the guy really did direct it at you and that's part of the situation.
link |
And like you can't pretend that it's not part of the situation.
link |
You have to find the right way of dealing with that situation.
link |
So you have to listen to what's actually happening.
link |
And then you have to figure out how to make it right.
link |
And I think he thinks that we have too much freedom.
link |
He thinks that you don't have to listen to the situation, you can just tell whatever
link |
story you like about it.
link |
And I think that's actually too tough.
link |
I don't think we have that kind of freedom.
link |
And he writes these sort of incredibly moving letters when he's trying to write The Pale
link |
King, which is the unfinished novel that really sort of drove him to distraction.
link |
At the center of the novel is this character who, one of the characters at the center of
link |
the novel is a guy who's doing the most boring thing you could possibly imagine.
link |
He is an IRS tax examiner.
link |
He's going over other people's tax returns, trying to figure out whether they follow the
link |
And just the idea of doing that for eight hours a day is just terrifying.
link |
And he puts this guy in an enormous warehouse that extends for miles where person after
link |
person after person is in rows of desks, sort of nameless, each of them doing this task.
link |
So he's in nowhere doing nothing, and it's got to be intensely boring.
link |
And now the main character is trying to teach himself to do that.
link |
And the question is, how do you put up with the boredom?
link |
How do you put up with this onslaught of meaninglessness?
link |
And the main character is able to confront that condition with such bliss that he literally
link |
levitates from happiness while he's going over other people's tax returns.
link |
And that's my metaphor for what I think Wallace must have imagined we have to try to aspire
link |
And I think that's unlivable.
link |
I think that's not an ambition that we could achieve.
link |
I think there's something else we could achieve.
link |
And the other thing that we can achieve that I think is something that he also is onto,
link |
but doesn't write about as often, is something more like achieving peak moments of significance
link |
in a situation when something great happens.
link |
And he writes about this in an article about Roger Federer.
link |
Are you a tennis lover?
link |
I'm not a lover of tennis, but I played tennis for 15 years and so on.
link |
I don't love it the way people love baseball, for example.
link |
I see the beauty in it, the artistry.
link |
I just liked it as a sport.
link |
Well, I didn't play much tennis, but I hit a ball around every once in a while as a
link |
And I always thought it was boring to watch, but reading David Foster Wallace on Roger
link |
Federer, you're like, wow, I've been missing something.
link |
And the article, which appeared in the New York Times magazine, was called Roger Federer
link |
as religious experience.
link |
And he says, look, there's something astonishing about watching someone who's got a body like
link |
us and having a body is a limitation.
link |
It's like the sight of sores and pains and agony and exhaustion and it's the thing that
link |
And so it's what we have to confront.
link |
I mean, there's also joys that go along with having a body.
link |
Like if you didn't have a body, there'd be no sex.
link |
If you didn't have a body, there'd be no sort of physical excitement and so on.
link |
But somehow having a body is essentially a limitation that when you watch someone who's
link |
got one and is extraordinary at the way they use it, you can recognize how that limitation
link |
can be to some degree transcended.
link |
And that that's what we can get when we watch Federer or some other great athlete sort of
link |
doing these things that transcend the limitations of their bodies.
link |
And that that's the kind of peak experience that we're capable of that could be a kind
link |
That's a very different story.
link |
And I think that's a livable story and I don't know if it would have saved him, but
link |
I feel like I wish he'd developed that side of the story more.
link |
Can we talk about, and first of all, let me just comment that I deeply appreciate that
link |
you said you were going to say something, that the fact that you're listening to me is amazing,
link |
like that you care about other humans and I really appreciate that.
link |
We should be in this way listening to the world.
link |
So there's that's a meta comment about many of the things we're talking about.
link |
But you mentioned something about levitating and a task that is infinitely boring and contrasting
link |
that with essentially levitating on a task that is great, like the highest achievement
link |
of this physical limiting body in playing tennis.
link |
Now I often say this, I don't know where I heard David Foster Wallace say this, but
link |
he said that the key to life is to be unboreable.
link |
That is the embodiment of this philosophy.
link |
And I, when people ask me for advice, like young students, you know, I don't find this
link |
interesting, I don't find this interesting, how do I find the thing I'm passionate for?
link |
This would be very interesting to explore because you kind of say that that may not
link |
be a realizable thing to do, which is to be unboreable.
link |
But my advice usually is life is amazing, like you should be able to, you should strive
link |
to discover the joy, the levitation in everything.
link |
And the thing you get stuck on for a longer period of time, that might be the thing you
link |
should stick to, but everything should be full of joy.
link |
So that kind of cynicism of saying life is boring is a thing that will prevent you from
link |
discovering the thing that will give you deep meaning and joy.
link |
So you're saying being unboreable is not actionable for human being.
link |
So okay, excellent question, deep question.
link |
And you might think, because of the title of the book that Bert and I wrote, All Things
link |
Shining, that I think all things are shining.
link |
But actually, I think it's an unachievable goal to be unboreable.
link |
But I do believe that you're right that a lot of times when people are bored with something,
link |
it's because they haven't tried hard enough.
link |
And I do think quite a lot of what makes people bored with something is that they haven't
link |
paid attention well enough and that they haven't listened, as you were saying.
link |
So I do think there's something to that.
link |
I think that's a deep insight.
link |
On the other hand, the perfection of that insight is that nothing is ever anything less
link |
And I actually think that Dostoevsky and Melville both agree, but in very different ways, that
link |
life involves a wide range of moods and that all of them are important.
link |
It involves grief.
link |
Actually, I think when someone dies, it's appropriate to grieve.
link |
And it's not, in the first instance, joyful.
link |
It's related to joy because it makes the joys you feel when you feel them more intense.
link |
But it makes them more intense by putting you in the position of experiencing the opposite.
link |
And it's only because we're capable of a wide range of passionate responses to situations.
link |
That I think the significances can be as meaningful as they are.
link |
So Melville, again, has this interest, let's just say, the guilt and the grief in the brothers
link |
Alyosha loses his mentor, Father Zosima.
link |
It's super important that he's grieving.
link |
He has a religious conversion on the basis of grieving, where he sees the deep beauty
link |
of everything that is, but it comes through the grief, not by avoiding the grief.
link |
And Melville says something like, Ishmael says something like, he says, I'm like a
link |
Catskill Mountain Eagle, the Catskill Mountains nearby.
link |
He says, who's sort of flying high above the earth, going over the peaks and down into
link |
I have these ups and these downs, but they're all invested with a kind of significance.
link |
They all happen at an enormously high height because it's through the mountains that I'm
link |
And even when I'm down, it's a way of being up, but it's really down.
link |
It's just that it's a way of being up because it makes the ups even upper.
link |
Well, I guess then the perfectionism of that can be destructive.
link |
I mean, I tend to see, for example, grief, a loss of love as part of love in that it's
link |
the celebration of the richness of feelings you had when you had the love.
link |
So it's like, it's all part of the same experience, but if you turn it into an optimization problem
link |
where everything can be unboreable, then that can itself be destructive.
link |
I heard this interview with David Foster Wallace on the internet where it's a video of him
link |
and there is like a foreign sounding reporter asking him questions, I think there's an accident
link |
of some sort, German, I think, something like that.
link |
And I don't know, it just painted a picture of such a human person.
link |
When we were talking about listening, the interviewer, if I may say, wasn't a very good one in the
link |
So she kind of walked in doing the usual journalistic things of just kind of generic questions and
link |
just kind of asking very basic questions, but he brought out something in her over time.
link |
And he was so sensitive and so sensitive to her and also sensitive to being a thinking
link |
and acting human in this world.
link |
That's just painted such a beautiful picture that people should go definitely check out.
link |
It made me really sad that we don't get this kind of picture of other thinkers, all of the
link |
ones we've been talking about.
link |
Just that almost this little accidental view of this human being, I don't know.
link |
There was a beautiful one and I guess there's not many like that, even of him.
link |
No, I think he was more than his writing ability, which was extraordinary.
link |
He had developed a style that was, I think, unlike anyone else's style.
link |
Was his sensitivity to other people and sort of what he was there to pay attention to.
link |
He wants, in one of his essays, I think it's the one called an incredibly fun thing I'll
link |
I didn't know that one about cruise ships.
link |
I think he describes himself as this sort of roving eyeball that just sort of walks
link |
around the, walks around the ship noticing things and he was incredibly good at that.
link |
But I also worry that that reflects something that you find in Ivan, in the Brothers Karamazov.
link |
Ivan, I don't know if you remember this part, when he's away at school as a young, a college,
link |
as a young boy, he makes money by going around town to where tragic events have occurred.
link |
Someone just got run over by a carriage or someone, something just happened.
link |
And being the first one there, he always knows somehow where these things are going to happen.
link |
And writing about it, giving this really good description and then signing it, I witness.
link |
And it's as if Ivan's understanding of his life is that he was supposed to be a witness
link |
He was supposed to see others but not get involved.
link |
He never is interested in trying to keep the bad things from happening.
link |
He just wants to report on them when he sees them.
link |
And I think that he's an incredibly isolated person, character, and it's his isolation
link |
from others, from the love of others and his inability, his desire not to love others
link |
because that attaches him to someone that I think is really at the ground of his condition.
link |
And I think that aim to be isolated, which many people have nowadays, I mean, you see
link |
it in the underground man too, just sort of taking yourself out of the world because
link |
you don't want to have to take responsibility for being involved with others.
link |
I think that's a bad move.
link |
And I do worry that maybe, I mean, I never knew David Foster Wallace.
link |
I have no right to comment on his life.
link |
But he portrays himself in that one episode as a person who does that.
link |
And I think that's dangerous.
link |
There's some sense in which being sensitive to the world, like I find myself, the source
link |
of joy for me is just being really sensitive to the world, to experience.
link |
There's some way, it's quite brilliant what you're saying that that could be isolating.
link |
It's like Darwin studying a new kind of species on an island you don't want to interfere with.
link |
You find it so beautiful that you don't want to interfere with his beauty.
link |
So there is some sense in which that isolates you and then you find yourself deeply alone
link |
away from the experiences that bring you joy and that could be destructive.
link |
That's fascinating how that works and in his case, of course, some of it is just chemicals
link |
But some of it is the path, his philosophy of life let him down and that's the danger
link |
would need you to and gazing into the abyss that your job is a difficult one because doing
link |
philosophy changes you.
link |
And you may not know how it changes you until you're changed and you look in the mirror.
link |
You wrote a piece in MIT Tech Review saying that AI can't be an artist.
link |
Creativity is and always will be a human endeavor.
link |
You mentioned BERT and criticism of symbolic AI.
link |
Can you explain your view of criticizing the possible, the capacity for artistry and creativity
link |
in our robot friends?
link |
So to make the argument, you have to have in mind what counts as art, what counts as
link |
a creative artistic act.
link |
I take it that just doing something new isn't sufficient.
link |
I mean, we say that good art is original but not everything that's never been done before
link |
So there has to be more than just doing something new.
link |
It has to be somehow doing something new in a way that speaks to the audience or speaks
link |
to some portion of the audience at least.
link |
It has to be doing something new in such a way that some people who see or interact with
link |
it can see themselves anew in it.
link |
So I think that art is inherently a creative act, sorry, a kind of communicative act,
link |
that it involves a relation with other people.
link |
So think about the conditions for that working.
link |
I talk in that article, I can't remember, something about new music.
link |
I think I don't talk about Stravinsky, but let's say Stravinsky.
link |
Stravinsky performs the Rite of Spring and there's riots.
link |
It is new and people hate it.
link |
People can't, it sounds like a cacophony.
link |
It's written according to principles that are not like the principles of music composition
link |
that people are familiar with.
link |
So in some ways it's a failed communicative act.
link |
But as Nietzsche says about his own stuff, we now can recognize that it wasn't a failed
link |
communicative act.
link |
It just hadn't reached its time yet.
link |
And now that way of composing music is like, it's in Disney movies.
link |
It's so part of our musical palette that we don't have that responsibility.
link |
It changed the way we understand what counts as good music.
link |
So that's a deep communicative act.
link |
It didn't perform its communication in that opening moment, but it did ultimately establish
link |
a new understanding for all of us of what counts as good art.
link |
And that's the kind of deep communication that I think good art can do.
link |
It can change our understanding of ourselves and of what a good manifestation of something
link |
of ourselves in a certain domain is.
link |
And use the term socially embedded, that art is fundamentally socially embedded.
link |
And I really like that term because I see like my love for artificial intelligence and
link |
the kind of system that we can bring to the world that could make for an interesting and
link |
more lively world and one that enriches human beings is one where the AI systems are deeply
link |
socially embedded.
link |
So that and that actually is in contrast to the way artificial intelligence have been
link |
talked about throughout its history and certainly now both on the robotics side and the AI side,
link |
it's especially on the tech sector with the businesses around AI, they kind of want to
link |
create systems that are like servants to humans.
link |
And then humans do all the beautiful human messiness of where art will be part.
link |
I think that there is no reason why you can't integrate AI systems in the way you integrate
link |
new humans to the picture.
link |
There are just the full diversity and the flaws, all of that adds to the thing.
link |
Some people might say that AlphaZero is this system from DeepMind that was able to achieve,
link |
solve the game, it beat the best people in the world at the game of Go with no supervision
link |
But more interestingly to me on the side of creativity, it was able to surprise a lot
link |
of grandmasters with the kind of moves that came up with.
link |
To me, that's not the creativity, the magic that's socially embedded that we're talking
link |
That is merely revealing the limitations of humans to discover.
link |
It's like to solve a particular aspect of a math problem.
link |
I think creativity is not just even socially embedded, it's the way you're saying is part
link |
of the communicative act, it's the interactive, it's the dance with the culture.
link |
And so it has to be like for AlphaZero to be creative, truly creative, it would have
link |
to be integrated in a way where it has a Twitter account and it becomes aware of the impact
link |
it has on the other grandmasters with the moves that's coming up.
link |
And one of the fascinating things about AlphaZero, which I just love so much, is I don't know
link |
if you're familiar with chess.
link |
So it does certain things that most chess players even at the highest level don't do,
link |
which is it sacrifices pieces, it gives pieces away and then waits like 10 moves before it
link |
So to me, that's beautiful.
link |
That's art if only AlphaZero understood the artistry of that, which is I'm going to mess
link |
with you psychologically because I'm going to do two things.
link |
One make you feel overconfident that you're doing well, but actually also once you realize
link |
you are playing AlphaZero that is much better than you, you're going to feel really nervous
link |
about what's on the way.
link |
This is the calm before the storm.
link |
And that creates a beautiful psychological masterpiece of this chess game.
link |
If only AlphaZero was then messing with you additionally to that and was cognizant of
link |
this doing that, then it becomes art.
link |
And then it's integrated into society in that way.
link |
And I believe it doesn't have to actually have an understanding of the world in the
link |
way that humans have.
link |
It can have a different one.
link |
It can be like a child is as clueless about so many aspects of the world and it's okay.
link |
And that's part of the magic of it, just being flawed, being lacking understanding all interesting
link |
kinds of ways, but interacting.
link |
And so to me, it's possible to create art for AI, but exactly as you're saying in a deeply
link |
socially embedded way.
link |
Well, I think we agree, but let me just highlight the thing that makes me think that we agree,
link |
which is that I think for people, for a community to allow themselves to recognize in a certain
link |
kind of creative act, I'm thinking of Stravinsky here, but we could think of a chess thing,
link |
to recognize in a certain kind of creative act a new and admirable, worthy way of thinking
link |
about what's significant in the situation, you have to believe that it wasn't random.
link |
You have to believe that Stravinsky wrote that way because he was receptive to what
link |
needed to be said now.
link |
And so you said, if only AlphaZero could do all this by virtue of recognizing that this
link |
was the thing that needed to be done, then it would be socially embedded in the right
link |
And I think I agree with that.
link |
First of all, it's possible to do in a constrained domain, a game playing domain, go or chess.
link |
Go is more complicated than chess, but either one of them, because there really are only
link |
a finite range of possibilities if you make the game end at a certain point, it's a combinatorial
link |
problem in the end.
link |
Now, obviously, AlphaZero doesn't solve the problem in a combinatorial way.
link |
That would take too much energy, you couldn't do it, it sort of explodes the problem.
link |
So it does it in this other way that's interesting, this pattern recognition way roughly.
link |
And in that context, it may well be that it can see, having had lots and lots of experience
link |
in the training stuff against itself or against another version of itself, it can see that
link |
the sacrifice here is going to pay dividends down the road.
link |
See, I put that in quotation marks.
link |
Just to say, it's got a high weight to this move here as a result of experience in the
link |
past where that move down the line led to this improvement.
link |
So in that finite context, I think the game players can trust it and they talk that way.
link |
It's got a kind of authority.
link |
They say, I've read some people who said about AlphaZero when it played Go, it's like it's
link |
playing from the future.
link |
It's making these moves that are just outlandish and there's a kind of brilliance to them that
link |
we can't really understand, we'll be catching up to it forever.
link |
I think in that context, it's mapped the domain and the domain is mappable because it's a
link |
combinatorial problem, roughly, but in something like music or art of a nonfinite form, it
link |
feels to me like it's a little harder for me to understand what the analog of our trusting
link |
that Stravinsky has recognized something about us that demands that he write this way.
link |
That doesn't seem like a finite thing in quite the same way.
link |
Now we could ask, we could ask the system, why did you do it?
link |
We could ask Stravinsky, why did you do it?
link |
And maybe it will have answers, but then it's involved in a kind of communicative act and
link |
I think lots of times, artists will often say, look, I can't communicate better than
link |
what I've done in the piece of work.
link |
That is the statement.
link |
We humans aren't able to answer the why either.
link |
But I do think the question here is, well, first of all, language is finite, certainly
link |
when expressed through a tweet.
link |
So it is also a combinatorial problem.
link |
The question is how much more difficult it is than chess.
link |
And I think all the same ways that we see the solutions to chess is deeply surprising when
link |
it was first addressed with IBM D Blue and then with AlphaGo and AlphaGo Zero, AlphaZero.
link |
I think in that same way, language can be addressed and communication can be addressed.
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I don't see having done this podcast many reasons why everything I'm doing, especially
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as a digital being on the internet, can't be done by an AI system eventually.
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So I think we're being very human centric and thinking more special.
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I think one of the hardest things is the physical space, actually operating like touch and the
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magic of body language and the music of all of that because it's so deeply integrated
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through the long evolutionary process of what it's like to be on earth.
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What is fundamentally different and AI can catch up on is the way we apply our evolutionary
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history on the way we act on the internet, on the way we act online.
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And as more and more of the world becomes digital, you're not operating in a space where AI
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is behind much less so, like we're both starting at zero.
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I think that's super interesting, do you know this author, Brian Christian, is that
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someone you've ever heard of?
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He's a guy who competed in the, what is it called, the Lobner competition?
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The Lobner Prize, yeah.
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Yeah, the Turing Test thing.
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And I'll just tell you the story, but I think it's directly related to the last thing you
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said about where we're starting in the same place.
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He competed in this competition, but not, he didn't enter a program that was supposed
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to try to pass the Turing Test.
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The Turing Test, there's three people.
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There's the judge, there's the program, and then there's someone who's a human the way
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And the judge has got to figure out by asking questions, which is the computer and which
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So little known fact, there's two prizes in that competition.
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There's the most human computer prize.
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Pass the computer that wins the most, and then there's the most human human prize.
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And he competed for the most human human prize.
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He kept winning it.
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And so he tried to think about what it is that you have to be able to do in order to
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convince judges that you're human instead of a computer.
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And that's an interesting question, I think.
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And my takeaway from his version of this story is that it is true that computers are
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winning these contests more and more as technology progresses.
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But there's two possible explanations for that.
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One is that the computers are becoming more human, and the other is that the humans are
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becoming more like computers.
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And he says, actually, the more we live our lives in this world where, in this sort of
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technological world, where we have to moderate our behavior so that it's readable by something
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that's effectively a computer, the more we become like that.
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And he says, it happens even when you're not interacting with a computer.
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He says, have you ever been on the phone with a call center?
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And they're going through their script, and that's what they've got to do.
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They've got to go through their script, because that's how they keep their job.
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And they ask you this question, and you've got to answer it, and it's as if you're no
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longer interacting with a person, even though it's a person, because they've so given up
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everything that's involved normally with being able to make judgments and decisions and
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act in situations and take responsibility.
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And so I think that's the other side of it.
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It is true that technology is amazing and can solve huge ranges of problems and do fantastic
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But it's also true that we're changing ourselves in response to it, and the one thing I'm worried
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about is that we're changing ourselves in such a way that the norms for what we're aiming
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at are being changed to move in the direction of this sort of efficiently in an optimized
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way solving a problem, and move away from this other kind of thing that we were calling
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aliveness or significance.
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And so that's the other side of the story.
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And that's the worry, but it's very possible that there is for you and I, the ancient dinosaurs,
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we may not see the aliveness in TikTok, the aliveness in the digital space, that you see
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it as us being dragged into this over optimized world.
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But that may be, this is, in fact, it is a world that opens up opportunities to truly
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And there's interesting to think about all the people growing up now, who they're early
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experience of life is always mediated through a digital device, not always, but more and
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more often mediated through that device, and how we're both evolving, the technology is
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evolving and the humans are evolving to them may be open a door to a whole world where
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the humans and the technology or AI systems are interacting as equals.
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So now I'm going to agree with you, you might be surprised that I'm going to agree with
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But I think that's exactly right.
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I don't want to be the person who's saying, our job is to resist all of this stuff.
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I don't want to be a Luddite.
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That's not my goal.
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The goal is to point out that in the supreme danger lies the saving power.
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The point is to get in the right relation to that understanding of what we are.
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That allows us to find the joy in it.
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And that's, I think that's a hard thing to do.
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It's hard to understand even what we're supposed to be doing when we do it.
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Maybe I'm more than you, I'm not of the right generation to be able to do that.
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But I do think that's got to be the move.
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The move is not to resist it.
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It's not a nostalgic move.
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It's an attempt to push people to get in the relation to it.
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That's not the relation of it controlling you and depriving you of stuff, but of your
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recognizing some great joy that can be found in it.
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When I interact with Lego robots, I see there's magic there.
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And I just feel like the person who hears the music when others don't.
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And I don't know what that is.
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And I'd love to explore that because it seems to, it's almost like the future talking.
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And I'm trying to hear what it's saying.
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Is this a dangerous world or is this a beautiful world?
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Well, I can certainly understand your enthusiasm for that.
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Those used to be things that I found overwhelmingly exciting.
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And I'm not sort of closed off from that anymore.
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I mean, I'm not now closed off from that even though my views are changed and I don't work
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But I do think, I think it's interesting to figure out what's at the ground of that response.
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We talked about meaning quite a bit throughout in a secular age, but let me ask you the big
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ridiculous question, almost too big.
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What is the meaning of this thing we got going on?
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What is the meaning of life?
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You're saving the softball for the end.
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I don't know what the meaning of life is.
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I think there's something that characterizes us that's not the thing that people normally
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think characterizes us.
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The traditional thing to say and the philosophical tradition, even in the AI tradition, which
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is a kind of manifestation of philosophy from Plato for, the traditional thing to say is
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that what characterizes us is our rationality, that we're intelligent beings, that we're
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the ones that think.
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And I think that's certainly part of what characterizes us.
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But I think there's more to it too.
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I think we're capable of experiencing simultaneously the complete and utter ungroundedness of everything
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that's meaningful in our existence and also the real significance of it.
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And that sounds like a contradiction.
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How could it really be significant and not be based on anything?
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But I think that's the contradiction that somehow characterizes us.
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And I think that we're the being that sort of has to hold that weird mystery before us
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and live in the light of it.
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That's the thing that I think is really at our core.
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And so how do we do that?
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I will say this one thing.
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And I learned it from a philosopher, from a guy named Albert Borgmann, who's a German
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philosopher, who lives in Montana now, taught in Montana for his whole career.
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And I say this to my students at Harvard now.
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He said, this is the way that I think about my life, and I hope you'll think about your
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He said, you should think about your life hoping that there will be many moments in
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it about which you can say, there's no place I'd rather be.
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There's no thing I'd rather be doing.
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There's no buddy I'd rather be with, and this I will remember well.
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And I think if you can aim to fill your life with moments like that, it will be a meaningful
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I don't know if that's the meaning of life, but I think if you can hold that before you,
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it'll help to clarify this mystery and this sort of bizarre situation in which we find
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Sean, this conversation was incredible, and those four requirements have certainly been
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This was a magical moment in that way, and I will remember it well.
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Thank you so much.
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It's an honor that you have spent your valuable time with me.
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Thank you for having me, Lex.
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I really, really enjoyed it.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sean Kelly.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, let me leave you with some words from Albert Camus.
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In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me, there lay an invincible summer.
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Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.