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Speaker 1

00:00

The following is a conversation with Sean Kelly, a philosopher at Harvard specializing in existentialism and the philosophy of mind. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, here's my conversation with Sean Kelly.

Speaker 1

00:20

Your interests are in post-content European philosophy, especially phenomenology and existentialism. So let me ask, What to you is existentialism?

Speaker 2

00:34

So it's a hard question. I'm teaching a course on existentialism right now. You are.

Speaker 2

00:38

I am, yeah. Existentialism in literature and film, which is fun. The traditional thing to say about what existentialism is, is that it's a movement in mid 20th century, mostly French, some German philosophy. And some of the major figures associated with it are people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, maybe Martin Heidegger.

Speaker 2

01:07

But that's a weird thing to say about it because most of those people denied that they were existentialists. And in fact, I think of it as a movement that has a much longer history. So when I try to describe what the core idea of existentialism is, it's an idea that you find expressed in different ways in a bunch of these people. 1 of the ways that it's expressed is that Sartre will say that existentialism is the view that there is no God, and at least his form of existentialism, he calls it atheistic existentialism.

Speaker 2

01:44

There is no God, and since there's no God, there must be some other being around who does something like what God does, otherwise there wouldn't be any possibility for significance in a life. And that being is us, and the feature of us, according to Sartre and the other existentialists, that puts us in the position to be able to play that role is that we're the beings for whom, as Sartre says it, existence precedes essence. That's the catchphrase for existentialism and then you have to try to figure out what it means.

Speaker 1

02:23

What is existence, what is presence, and what does precedes mean?

Speaker 2

02:26

Yeah, exactly. What is existence, what is essence, and what is precedes? And in fact, precedes is Sartre's way of talking about it and other people will talk about it differently.

Speaker 2

02:36

But here's the way Sartre thinks about it. This is not, I think, the most interesting way to think about it, but I'll get you started. Sartre says, there's nothing true about what it is to be you until you start existing, and still you, till you start living. And for SART, the core feature of what it is to be existing the way we do is to be making decisions, to be making choices in your life, to be sort of taking a stand on what it is to be you by deciding to do this or that.

Speaker 2

03:11

And the key feature of how to do that right for SART is to do it in the full recognition of the fact that when you make that choice, nobody is responsible for it other than you. So you don't make the choice because God tells you to, you don't make the choice because some utilitarian calculus about what it's right to do tells you to do. You don't make the choice because some other philosophical theory tells you to do it. There's literally nothing on the basis of which you make the choice other than the fact that in that moment, you are the 1 making it.

Speaker 1

03:50

You are a conscious thinking being that made a decision. So all of the questions about physics and free will are out the window.

Speaker 2

03:59

Yeah, that's right. If you were a determinist about the mind, if you were a physicalist about the mind, if you thought there was nothing to your choices other than the activity of the brain that's governed by physical laws, then there's some sense in which it would seem at any rate like you're not the ground of that choice. The ground of that choice was the physical universe and the laws that govern it, and then you'd have no responsibility.

Speaker 2

04:26

And so Sartre's view is that the thing that's special about us, used to be special about God, is that we're responsible for becoming the being that makes the choices that we do. And Sartre thinks that that's simultaneously empowering, I mean, it practically puts us in the place of God, and also terrifying because what responsibility? How can you possibly take on that responsibility? And he thinks it's worse than that.

Speaker 2

04:55

He thinks that it's always happening. Everything that you do is the result of some choice that you've made. The posture that you sit in, the way you hold someone's gaze when you're having a conversation with them or not, the choice to make a note when someone says something or not make a note. Everything that you do presents you as a being who makes decisions and you're responsible for all of them.

Speaker 2

05:24

So it's constantly happening. And furthermore, there's no fact about you independent of the choices and actions you've performed. So you don't get to say, Sartre's example, I really am a great writer, just haven't written my great book yet. If you haven't written your great book, you're not a great writer.

Speaker 2

05:46

And so it's terrifying, it puts a huge burden on us. And that's why Sartre says on his view of existentialism, human beings are the beings that are condemned to be free. Our freedom consists in our ability and our responsibility to make these choices and to become someone through making them, and we can't get away from that.

Speaker 1

06:08

But to him it's terrifying not liberating in the positive meaning of the word liberating.

Speaker 2

06:14

Well, So he thinks it should be liberating, but he thinks that it takes a very courageous individual to be liberated by it. Nietzsche, I think, thought something similar. I think Sartre is really coming out of a Nietzschean sort of tradition.

Speaker 2

06:30

But what's liberating about it, if it is, is also terrifying because it means in a certain way you're the ground of your own being. You become what you do through existing. That's 1 form of existentialism. That's a stark atheistic version of it.

Speaker 2

06:47

There's lots of other versions, but it's somehow organized around the idea that it's through living your life that you become who you are. It's not facts that are sort of true about you, independent of your living your life.

Speaker 1

07:01

But then, if there's no God in that view, does any of the decisions matter? So how does existentialism differ from nihilism?

Speaker 2

07:14

Good, okay, great question. There's 2 different ways that you're asking it. Let me leave nihilism to the side for just a second and think about mattering, or is there any way that you can criticize someone for living the way they do if you're an existentialist.

Speaker 1

07:32

Including yourself.

Speaker 2

07:33

Including yourself, yeah. Sartre addresses that and he says, yes, he says there is a criticism that you can make of yourself or of others and it's the criticism of living in such a way as to fail to take responsibility for your choices. He gives these 2 sort of amazing examples.

Speaker 2

07:53

1, I don't know if it reads as well for us as it did in sort of mid 20th century Paris, but it's about a waiter. He gives this in his big book, Being in Nothingness. And he says, so waiters played, still do, I think, in a certain way in Paris, a big role in Parisian society to be a waiter involved having a certain kind of identity, being a certain way, taking control of and charge of the experience of the people that you're waiting on, but also really being the authority, knowing that this is the way it's supposed to go. And so Sartre imagines a waiter who does everything that a waiter is supposed to do, the perfect form of the waiter, except that you can somehow see in the way he's doing it, that he's doing it because he believes that's the way a waiter should act.

Speaker 2

08:54

So there's some sense in which he's passing off the responsibility for his actions onto some idea of what those actions should be. He's not taking responsibility for it. He's sort of playing a role. And the contours of the role are predetermined by someone other than him.

Speaker 2

09:12

So Sartre says, acting in bad faith. And that's criticizable because it's acting in such a way as to fail to take responsibility for the kind of being Sartre thinks you are. So you're not taking responsibility. So that's 1 example.

Speaker 2

09:28

And I think, you know, I think any teenager, If you've ever met a teenager, you've known someone who does that. Teenagers try on roles. They think, if I dressed like this, I would be cool, so I'll dress like this. Or if I spoke like this, or acted like this.

Speaker 2

09:46

And it's natural for a teenager who's trying to figure out what their identity is to go through a phase like that. But if you continue to do that, then you're really passing it. So that's 1 example. And the other example he gives is an example not of passing off responsibility by pretending that someone else is the ground of your choice, but passing off responsibility by pretending that you might be able to get away with not making a choice at all.

Speaker 2

10:16

So he says, everything you do is a result of your choices. And so he gives this other example. There you are on the first date, first date. And the date, the evening reaches a moment when might be appropriate for 1 person to hold the hand of the other.

Speaker 2

10:40

That's the moment in the date where you are. And so you make a choice. You decide, I think it's that time and you hold the hand. And what should happen is that the other person also makes a choice on Sartre's view.

Speaker 2

10:53

Either they reject the hand, not that time, and I'm taking responsibility for that. Or they grasp the hand back, That's a choice. But there's a thing that sometimes happens, which is that the other person leaves the hand there cold, dead, and clammy, neither rejecting it nor embracing it. And Sartre says, that's also bad faith.

Speaker 2

11:18

That's also acting as if we're a kind of being that we're not, because it pretends that it's possible not to make a choice and we're the beings who are always making choices. That was a choice. And you're pretending as if it's the kind of thing that you don't have to take responsibility for.

Speaker 1

11:36

So both of the examples you've given, there's some sense in which the social interactions between humans is a kind of moving away from the full responsibility that you as a human in the view of existentialism should take on. So like, isn't all, isn't the basic conversation a delegation of responsibility, just holding a hand there? You're putting the response, some of the responsibility into the court or the other person.

Speaker 1

12:04

And for the waiter, if you exist in a society, you are generally trying on a role. I mean, all of us are trying on a role. Me wearing clothes is me trying on a role that I was told to try, as opposed to walking around naked all the time. Like there's like standards of how you operate, and that's a decision that's not my own.

Speaker 1

12:31

That's me seeing what everyone else is doing and copying them.

Speaker 2

12:34

Yeah, exactly. So Sartre thinks that in the ideal, you should try to resist that. Other existentialists think that that's actually a clue to how you should live well.

Speaker 2

12:51

So Sartre says somewhere else, hell is other people. Why is hell other people for Sartre? Well, because other people are making choices also. And when other people make choices, they put some pressure on me to think that the choice they made is 1 that I should copy or 1 that I should sort of promote.

Speaker 2

13:16

But if I do it because they did it, then I'm in bad faith for Sartre. So, it is as if Sartre's view is like, we would be better if we were all alone. I mean, this is really simplifying Sartre's position, and this is really just mostly Sartre in a certain period of his formation. But anyhow, we can imagine that view, and I think there's something to the idea that Sartre is attracted to it, at least in the mid 40s.

Speaker 1

13:44

Can you dig into hell is other people? Is there some, obviously it's kind of almost like a literary, like you push the point strongly to really explore that point, but is there some sense in that other people ruin the experience of what it means to be human?

Speaker 2

14:03

I think for Sartre, the phenomenon is this, like it's not just that you wear clothes because people wear clothes in our society, like you have a particular style, you wear a particular kind of clothes. And for Sartre, like to have that style authentically in good faith rather than in bad faith, it has to come from you. You have to make the choice.

Speaker 2

14:25

But other people are making choices also. And you're looking at their choices, And you're thinking, that guy looks good. Maybe I could try that 1 on. And if you try it on because you were influenced by the fact that you thought that guy was doing it well, then there's some important sense in which, although that's a resource for a choice for you, it's also acting in bad faith.

Speaker 2

14:49

So, and God wouldn't do that, right? God wouldn't be influenced by other's decisions. And if that's the model, then I think that's the sense in which he thinks how those

Speaker 1

15:00

other people. What do you think parenting is then? It's like what, because God doesn't have a parent.

Speaker 1

15:05

Yeah. So aren't we significantly influenced, first of all, in the first few years of life? Absolutely. And even the teenager is resisting, learning through resistance.

Speaker 1

15:18

So. Absolutely.

Speaker 2

15:20

I mean, I think what you're pushing on is the intuition that the ideal that Sartre's aiming at is a kind of inhuman ideal. I mean, there's many ways in which we're not like the traditional view of what God was. 1 is that we're not self-generating, we have parents.

Speaker 2

15:43

We're raised into traditions and social norms and we're raised into an understanding of what's appropriate and inappropriate to do. And I think that's a deep intuition. I think that's exactly right. Martin Heidegger, who's the philosopher that Sartre thinks he's taking this from, but I think Sartre's a brilliant French misinterpretation of Heidegger's German phenomenological view.

Speaker 2

16:15

Heidegger says a crucial aspect of what it is to be us is our thrownness. We're thrown into a situation. We're thrown into history. We're thrown into our parental lineage.

Speaker 2

16:28

And we don't choose it. That's stuff that we don't choose. We couldn't choose. If we were God and we existed outside of time, maybe, but we're not.

Speaker 2

16:37

We're finite in the sense that we have a beginning that we never chose, we have an end that we're often trying to resist or put off or something. And in between, there's a whole bunch of stuff that organizes us without our ever having made the choice and without our being the kind of being that could make the choice to allow it to organize us. We have a complicated relationship to that stuff. And I think we should talk about that at a certain point.

Speaker 2

17:06

But the first move is to say, so it's just got a sort of descriptive problem. He's missed this basic fact that There has to be an awful lot about us that's settled without our having made the choice to settle it that way.

Speaker 1

17:25

Right, the thrownness of life. Yeah. That's a fundamental part of life, you can't just escape it.

Speaker 2

17:32

Exactly, you can't escape it altogether.

Speaker 1

17:34

Altogether.

Speaker 2

17:35

Yeah, exactly, you can't escape it altogether.

Speaker 1

17:37

But nevertheless, you are riding a wave and you make a decision in the riding of the wave. You can't control the wave, but you should be, like, as you ride it, you should be making certain kinds of decisions and take responsibility for it. So why does this matter at all, the chain of decisions you make?

Speaker 2

17:59

Good, well, because they constitute you. They make you the person that you are. So what's the opposite view?

Speaker 2

18:06

What's this view against? This view is against most of philosophy from Plato forward. Plato says in the Republic, it's a kind of myth, but he says people will understand their condition well if we tell them this myth. He says, look, when you're born, there's just a fact about you.

Speaker 2

18:28

Your soul is either gold, silver, or bronze. Those are the 3 kinds of people there are, and you're born that way. And if your soul is gold, then we should identify that and make you a philosopher king. And if your soul is silver, well, you're not going to be a philosopher king.

Speaker 2

18:45

You're not capable of it, but you could be a good warrior and we should make you that. And if your soul is bronze, then you should be a farmer, laborer, something like that. And that's a fact about you that identifies you forever and for always, independent of anything you do about it. And so that's the alternative view.

Speaker 2

19:05

And you could have modern versions of it. You could say the thing that identifies you is your IQ or your genetic makeup or the percentage of fast-switch muscle fibers you've got or whatever. It could be something totally independent of any choice that you've made, independent of the kind of thing about which you could make a choice, and it categorizes you. It makes you the person that you are.

Speaker 2

19:31

That's the thing that Sartre and the existentialists are against.

Speaker 1

19:35

So this idea that something about you is forever limiting the space of possible decisions you can make. Sartre says, no, the space is unlimited.

Speaker 2

19:46

Sartre is the philosopher of radical freedom.

Speaker 1

19:49

Radical freedom.

Speaker 2

19:50

Yeah, radical freedom. And then you could have other existentialists who say, look, we are free, but we gotta understand the way in which our freedom is limited by certain aspects of the kind of being that we are. If we were radically free, we really would be like God in the traditional medieval sense.

Speaker 2

20:10

And these folks start with the idea that whatever we are, that's a kind of limit point that we're not gonna reach. So what are the ways in which we're constrained that that being the way the medievals understood him wasn't constrained?

Speaker 1

20:26

So can you maybe comment on what is nihilism and is it at all a useful other sort of group of ideas that you resist against in defining existentialism?

Speaker 2

20:37

Yes, good, excellent. So nihilism, the philosopher who made the term popular, although it was used before him as Nietzsche, Nietzsche's writing in the end of the 19th century in various places where he published things, but largely in his unpublished works, he identifies the condition of the modern world as nihilistic, And that's a descriptive claim. He's looking around him, trying to figure out what it's like to be us now.

Speaker 2

21:13

And he says it's a lot different from what it was like to be human in 1300 or in the 5th century BCE. In

Speaker 1

21:23

1300,

Speaker 2

21:25

like what people believed, the way they lived their lives was in the understanding that to be human was to be created in the image and likeness of God. That's the way they understood themselves. And also to be created sinful because of, you know, Adam and Eve's transgression in the Garden of Eden, and to have the project of trying to understand how as a sinful being you could nevertheless live a virtuous life.

Speaker 2

21:56

How could you do that? And it had to do with, for them, getting in the right relation to God. Nietzsche says, that doesn't make sense to us anymore in the end of the 19th century. God is dead, says Nietzsche famously.

Speaker 2

22:09

And what does that mean? Well, it means something like the role that God used to play in our understanding of ourselves as a culture isn't a role that God can play anymore. And so Nietzsche says, the role that God used to play was the role of grounding our existence. He was what it is in virtue of which we are who we are.

Speaker 2

22:32

And Nietzsche says, the idea that there is a being that makes us what we are doesn't make sense anymore. That's like Sartre's atheism. Sartre's taking that from Nietzsche. And so the question is, what does ground our existence?

Speaker 2

22:46

And the answer is nihil, nothing. And so nihilism is the idea that there's nothing outside of us that grounds our existence. And then Nietzsche asked the question, well, what are we supposed to do about that? How do we live?

Speaker 2

23:03

And I think Nietzsche has a different story than Sartre about that. Nietzsche doesn't emphasize this notion of radical freedom. Nietzsche emphasizes something else. He says, we're artists of life.

Speaker 2

23:19

And artists are interesting because the natural way of thinking about artists is that they're responding to something. They find themselves in a situation and they say, this is what's going to make sense of the situation. This is what I have to write. This is the way I have to dance.

Speaker 2

23:36

This is the way I've got to play the music. And Nietzsche says we should live like that. There are constraints, but understanding what they are is a complicated aspect of living itself. And There's a great story, I think, from music that maybe helps to understand this.

Speaker 2

23:57

I think Nietzsche, of course, jazz didn't exist when Nietzsche was writing. But I think Nietzsche really is thinking of something like jazz improvisation. I mean, he talks about improvisation. There's classical improvisation.

Speaker 2

24:09

Nietzsche was, by the way, a musician. I mean, he was a composer and a pianist. Not a great 1, really, to be fair, but he loved music. And Herbie Hancock, who's a pianist, a jazz pianist, who played with Miles Davis for quite a while in the 60s, tells this kind of incredible story that I think exemplifies Nietzsche's view about the way in which we bear some responsibility for being creative, and that gives us a certain kind of freedom, but we don't have the radical freedom that Sarth thinks.

Speaker 2

24:50

So what's the story? Herbie Hancock says, I think they were in Stuttgart, he says, playing a show and things were great, he says. He's a young pianist and Miles Davis is the master. And he says, I'm back in the solo and I'm playing these chords.

Speaker 2

25:14

And he says, I played this chord and it was the wrong chord. He's like, that's what you got to say. It didn't work right there. And I thought, holy mackerel, I screwed up.

Speaker 2

25:29

I screwed up. We were tight, everything was working, and I blew it for Miles, who's doing his solo. And he said, Miles paused for a moment, and then all of a sudden, he went on in a way that made my chord right. And I think that idea that like you could be an artist who responds to what's thrown at you in such a way as to make it right, by what measure?

Speaker 2

26:05

Everyone could hear it is all you can say. Everyone knew, wow, that really works. And I think that's not... There are constraints.

Speaker 2

26:14

Not anything would have worked there. He couldn't have just played anything. Most of what anyone would have played would have sounded terrible. But the constraints aren't pre-existing.

Speaker 2

26:26

They're sort of what's happening now in the moment for these listeners and these performers. And I think that's what Nietzsche thinks the right response to nihilism is. We're involved, but we're not radically free to make any choice and just stand behind it the way Sartre thinks. Our choices have to be responsive to our situation And they have to make the situation work.

Speaker 2

26:47

They have to make it right.

Speaker 1

26:49

And there's something about music too. So you basically have to make music of all the moments of life. And there is something about music.

Speaker 1

26:59

Why is music so compelling? And when you listen to it, something about certain kinds of music, it connects with you. It doesn't make any sense. But in that same way for Nietzsche, you should be a creative force that creates a musical masterpiece.

Speaker 2

27:15

Exactly. And I think what's interesting is the question, what does it mean to be a creative force there? There's a traditional notion of creation that we associate with God. God creates ex nihilo, out of nothing.

Speaker 2

27:30

And you might think that nihilism thinks that we should do that, create ex nihilo because it's about how there's nothing at our ground. But I think the right way to read Nietzsche is to recognize that we don't create out of nothing. Miles Davis wasn't nothing, that situation preexisted him. It was given to him, maybe by accident, maybe it was a mistake, whatever.

Speaker 2

27:52

But he was responding to that situation in a way that made it right. He wasn't just creating out of nothing. He was creating out of what was already there.

Speaker 1

28:01

So that makes that first date with the climbing hand even more complicated, because you're given a climbing hand, you're going to have to make art and music out of that. Exactly. And that's the responsibility for both of them.

Speaker 1

28:13

Wow, that's a lot of responsibility for a first date, because you have to create. It's just the emphasis isn't just on making decisions, it's on creating.

Speaker 2

28:25

But also on listening, right? I mean, Miles Davis was listening. He heard that, he knew it was wrong.

Speaker 2

28:32

And the question was, what do I play that makes it right?

Speaker 1

28:37

So let me ask about Nietzsche, is God dead? What did he mean by that statement? What's in your sense the truth behind the question and the possible set of answers that our world today provides?

Speaker 2

28:52

Good. So, I mean, I think that there's something super perceptive about Nietzsche's diagnosis of the condition at the end of the 19th century. So not so far from the condition that I think we're currently in. And I think there's an interesting question what we're supposed to do in response.

Speaker 2

29:12

But what is the condition that we're currently in? When Nietzsche says God is dead, I think, like I was saying before, he means something like the role that God used to play in grounding our existence is not a role that works for us anymore as a culture. And when people talk about a view like that nowadays, they use a different terminology, but I think it's roughly what Nietzsche was aiming at. They say we live in a secular age.

Speaker 2

29:40

Our age is a secular age. And so what do people mean when they say that? I think, First of all, it's a descriptive claim. It could be wrong.

Speaker 2

29:48

The question is, does this really describe the way we experience ourselves as a culture or as a culture in the West or wherever it is that we are? So what does it mean to say that we live in a secular age, an age in which God is dead? Well, first thing is, it doesn't mean there are no religious believers, because there are plenty.

Speaker 1

30:05

There are

Speaker 2

30:05

lots of people who go to church or synagogue or mosque every week or more. And there are people who really find that to be an important aspect of the way they live their lives. But it does mean that for those people, the role that their religious belief plays in their life isn't the same as it used to be in previous ages.

Speaker 2

30:32

So what's that role? Well, go back to the high middle ages. That was clearly not a secular age. That was a religious age.

Speaker 2

30:40

And so there we are in 1300, Dante is writing the Divine Comedy or something. And what did it mean then to live in a sacred age? Well, it meant not just that the default was that you were a Christian in the West, but that your Christianity, your religious belief, your religious affiliation justified certain assumptions about people who didn't share that religious belief. So you're a Christian in the West in 1300 and you meet someone who's a Muslim, and the fact that they don't share your religious belief justifies the conclusion that they're less than human.

Speaker 2

31:27

And that was the ground of the Crusades. That was the religious wars of the high middle ages. We live in it, to say that we live in a secular age is to say that, not that we don't have, there aren't a lot of people who have religious belief, there are. But it's to say that their religious belief doesn't justify that conclusion.

Speaker 2

31:49

If you're a religious believer and you meet me and suppose I'm not a religious believer, learning that about me doesn't justify your concluding that I'm less than human. And that's the kind of liberalism of the modern age. Most of the time we think that's a good thing. We let a thousand flowers bloom.

Speaker 2

32:10

There are lots of ways to live a good life. And there's some way in which that is a nice progressive kind of liberal thought, but it's also true that it's an undermining thought because it means if you're a religious believer now, your belief can't ground your understanding of what you ought to be aiming at in a life in the way it used to be able to. You can't say, as a religious believer, I know it's right to do this, because you also know that if you meet someone who doesn't share that religious belief and so doesn't think it's right to do that necessarily, or does, but for different reasons. You can't conclude that they've got it wrong.

Speaker 2

32:52

So there's this sort of unsettling aspect to it.

Speaker 1

32:56

Well, isn't it true that you can't conclude as a public statement to others, But within your own mind, it's almost like an existentialist version of belief, which is like you create the world around you. It doesn't matter what others believe. You don't, there's not, it's actually almost like empowering thought.

Speaker 1

33:23

So as opposed to the more traditional view of religion where it's like a tribal idea, like where you share that idea together. Here you have the full, back to Sartre, full responsibility of your beliefs as well.

Speaker 2

33:38

Good, good, but what you're describing is not a religious believer, right? You're describing someone who's found in themselves the ground of their existence rather than in something outside of themselves. So the religious belief, I mean, if you go full Sartrean, then, well, you're not in a position to criticize others for the choices that they make, but you are in a position to criticize them for the way in which they make them, either taking responsibility or not taking responsibility.

Speaker 2

34:10

But the religious believer used to be able to say, look, the choices that I make are right because God demands that I make them. And nowadays, like, and so it would be wrong to make any others. And nowadays, our kind of, to say that we live in a secular age, say, well, you can't quite do that and be a religious believer. Your religious belief can't justify that move and so it can't ground your life in the way it does.

Speaker 2

34:40

So it's sort of unsettling.

Speaker 1

34:42

I think that's 1 of the interpretations of what Nietzsche might have meant when he said God is dead. God can't play the role for religious believers in our world that he used to. But we nevertheless find meaning.

Speaker 1

34:54

I mean, you don't see nihilism as a prevalent set of ideas that are overtaken in modern culture. So a secular world is still full of meaning. Good, well,

Speaker 2

35:04

I think that's the interesting question. I think it's certainly possible for a secular world to be a world in which we live meaningful lives, worthwhile lives, lives that are sort of worthy of respect and that we can be proud of aiming to live. But I think it is a hard question, what we're doing when we do that.

Speaker 2

35:28

And that is the question of existence. Sort of what does it mean to exist in a way that brings us out at our best as the beings that we are? That's the question for existentialism.

Speaker 1

35:40

So besides Sartre, who to you is the most important existentialist to understand for others? What ideas in particular of theirs do you like? Maybe other existentialists, not just 1.

Speaker 1

35:55

So Sartre is the grounding, strong, atheistic existentialism statement. Who else is there?

Speaker 2

36:02

So I'm teaching an existentialism course now, and I think the tradition goes back at least to the 17th century. And I'll just tell you some of the figures that I'm teaching there. We could talk about any of them that you like.

Speaker 2

36:16

The figure I start with is Pascal. Pascal, French mathematician from the 17th century. He died, I'm terrible with dates, but I think 1661 or something like that, middle of the 17th century. Brilliant polymath, we have computer languages named after him.

Speaker 2

36:34

He built the first mechanical calculating machine. But he was also deeply invested in his understanding of what Christianity was. And he thought that everyone before him had really misunderstood what Christianity was, that they'd really attempted to think about it not as a way of living a life, but as a set of beliefs that you can have and which you can justify. And I think that's the first move that's really pretty interesting.

Speaker 2

37:11

And then figures like Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky developed that move. And all of those take themselves to be defending an interpretation of a certain kind of Christianity, an existential interpretation of Christianity. And then I think there are other figures, other theistic figures, figures like Camus and Fanon who are mid-20th century figures. And then I'll just mention the figure who I think is the most interesting is Martin Heidegger.

Speaker 2

37:42

He's a complicated figure, Because- By

Speaker 1

37:45

the way, when you said, sorry to interrupt, that when you said Camus, you meant atheistic.

Speaker 2

37:51

I think that Camus is an atheistic existentialist. Yeah, I'm happy to talk about that.

Speaker 1

37:55

So, okay, so we got, it's like sports cards. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have the different existentialists.

Speaker 1

38:00

So maybe let's go to, you know what? Let's go to Dusty Yeske.

Speaker 2

38:05

All right, okay, let's do it.

Speaker 1

38:07

So my favorite novel of his is The Idiot. First of all, I see myself as the idiot and an idiot, And I love the optimism and the love the main character has for the world. So that just deeply connects with me as a novel.

Speaker 1

38:25

Notes from Underground as well. But what ideas of Dostoevsky's do you think are existentialist? What ideas are formative to the whole existentialist movement? Excellent.

Speaker 1

38:36

So let

Speaker 2

38:38

me talk about the Brothers Karamazov. Partly because that's the last novel that Dostoevsky wrote. I think it's certainly 1 of the greatest novels of the 19th century, maybe the best.

Speaker 2

38:48

And I'm about to teach it in a few weeks. So I'm super excited about it. But what is the Brothers Karamazov about? I mean, without spoiling the ending for anyone.

Speaker 2

38:58

Spoiler alert. Yeah, I mean, look, it's a murder mystery, right? I mean, the father gets murdered. And the question is who did it?

Speaker 2

39:07

Who's responsible for it? So there's a notion of responsibility here, like in Sartre. But it's responsibility for a murder. That's what we're talking about.

Speaker 2

39:17

And there's a bunch of brothers, each of whom has pretty good motivation for having murdered the father. The father's a jerk. I mean, he's... If anybody is worthy of being murdered, He's the guy.

Speaker 2

39:34

He's a force of chaos and he's nasty in all sorts of ways. But still, it's not good to murder people. So What's the view of Dostoevsky? I mean, it's this intense exploration of what it means to be involved in various ways with an activity that everyone can recognize as atrocious, And what the right way is to take responsibility for that, what the right way is to relate to others in the face of it, and how even through this kind of action, you can achieve some kind of salvation.

Speaker 2

40:16

That's Dostoevsky's word for it. But salvation here and now, not like you live some afterlife where you're paradise for eternity. Who cares about that, says 1 of the characters. That doesn't make my life now any good, and it doesn't justify any of the bad things that happen in my life now.

Speaker 2

40:37

What matters is, can we live well in the face of these things that we do and have to take responsibility for? So it's this intense exploration of notions and gradations of guilt and responsibility and the possibility of love and salvation in the face of those. It is incredibly human work. But I think Dostoevsky is the opposite of Sartre.

Speaker 2

41:02

And let me just... I think it's so fascinating. I don't know anybody else who notices this, but Sartre actually quotes a passage from Dostoevsky when he's developing his view. It's close to a passage.

Speaker 2

41:15

It doesn't appear quite in this way. But the passage that Sartre quotes is this, it's in the form of an argument. Sartre puts it in the form of an argument. He says, look, there's a conditional statement is true.

Speaker 2

41:29

If there is no God, then everything is permitted. And then there's a second premise, there is no God. That's Sartre's view. I mean, he's an atheist.

Speaker 2

41:39

There is no God. Conclusion, everything is permitted. And that's Sartre's radical freedom. And if you think about the structure of the Brothers Karamazov, I think Dostoevsky, though he never says it this way, would run the argument differently.

Speaker 2

41:56

It's a modus tollens instead of a modus bonens. The argument for Dostoevsky would go like this. Yeah, conditional statement. If there is no God, then everything is permitted.

Speaker 2

42:06

But look at your life. Not everything is permitted. You do horrible, atrocious things, like be involved in the death of your father, and there is a price to pay. That's not a livable moment.

Speaker 2

42:22

To have to take responsibility, to have to recognize that you're at fault or you're somehow guilty for having been involved in whatever way you were in letting that happen or bringing it about that it does happen, is to pay a price. So we're not beings that are constituted in such a way that everything is permitted. Look at the facts of your existence. So not everything is permitted.

Speaker 2

42:49

Therefore, there is a God. That's... And the presence of a God for Dostoevsky, I think, is just found in this fact that when we do bad things, we feel guilty for them, that we find ourselves to be responsible for things, even when we didn't intend to do them, but we just allowed ourselves to be involved in them.

Speaker 1

43:09

And the nature of God for Dostoevsky is, I mean, unclear. I mean, it's a very complex exploration in itself. And he basically, God speaks through several of his characters in complicated ways.

Speaker 1

43:22

So it's not like a trivial version of God.

Speaker 2

43:26

It's totally not trivial. And it's not a being that exists outside of time. And none of that is sort of relevant for Dostoevsky.

Speaker 2

43:33

For him, it's a question about how we live our lives. Do we live our lives in the mood that Christianity says it makes available to us, which is the mood of joy?

Speaker 1

43:42

Is there, maybe this is a bit of a tangent, but so I'm a Russian speaker and 1 of the, I kind of listen to my heart and what my heart says is I need to take on this project. So there's a couple of famous translators of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy that live in Paris currently. So I'm going to take the journey.

Speaker 1

44:06

We agreed to have a full conversation about Dostoyevsky, about Tolstoy and like a series of conversations. And The reason I fell in love with this idea is I just realized in translating from Russian to English, how deep philosophical, how much deep philosophical thinking is required. Just to, like single sentences. They spent like weeks debating single sentences.