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

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Sean Kelly,

00:00:02.640 | a philosopher at Harvard specializing in existentialism

00:00:06.800 | and the philosophy of mind.

00:00:09.120 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:00:11.360 | To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:00:13.640 | in the description.

00:00:15.160 | And now, here's my conversation with Sean Kelly.

00:00:18.980 | Your interests are in post-continental European philosophy,

00:00:24.840 | especially phenomenology and existentialism.

00:00:28.440 | So let me ask, what to you is existentialism?

00:00:32.800 | - So it's a hard question.

00:00:36.000 | I'm teaching a course on existentialism right now.

00:00:38.360 | - You are. - I am, yeah.

00:00:39.720 | Existentialism in literature and film, which is fun.

00:00:42.980 | The traditional thing to say about what existentialism is

00:00:49.400 | is that it's a movement in mid-20th century,

00:00:53.140 | mostly French, some German philosophy,

00:00:56.640 | and some of the major figures associated with it

00:00:59.080 | are people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Camus,

00:01:02.760 | Simone de Beauvoir, maybe Martin Heidegger.

00:01:07.080 | But that's a weird thing to say about it

00:01:09.440 | because most of those people denied

00:01:11.240 | that they were existentialists.

00:01:12.960 | And in fact, I think of it as a movement

00:01:17.320 | that has a much longer history.

00:01:19.700 | So when I try to describe what the core idea

00:01:23.240 | of existentialism is, it's an idea

00:01:25.920 | that you find expressed in different ways

00:01:27.800 | in a bunch of these people.

00:01:29.260 | One of the ways that it's expressed

00:01:32.400 | is that Sartre will say that existentialism

00:01:37.200 | is the view that there is no God,

00:01:40.080 | and at least his form of existentialism,

00:01:42.720 | he calls it atheistic existentialism, there is no God.

00:01:46.320 | And since there's no God,

00:01:48.240 | there must be some other being around

00:01:51.560 | who does something like what God does.

00:01:54.520 | Otherwise, there wouldn't be any possibility

00:01:56.760 | for significance in a life.

00:01:59.000 | And that being is us, and the feature of us,

00:02:03.040 | according to Sartre and the other existentialists,

00:02:06.680 | that puts us in the position to be able to play that role

00:02:10.040 | is that we're the beings for whom,

00:02:12.240 | as Sartre says it, "Existence precedes essence."

00:02:16.420 | That's the catchphrase for existentialism,

00:02:20.240 | and then you have to try to figure out what it means.

00:02:23.320 | - What does existence, what does presence,

00:02:25.080 | and what does precedes mean?

00:02:26.320 | - Yeah, exactly, what is existence,

00:02:28.200 | what is essence, and what is precedes?

00:02:30.440 | And in fact, precedes is Sartre's way of talking about it,

00:02:33.640 | and other people will talk about it differently.

00:02:35.400 | But here's the way Sartre thinks about it.

00:02:38.240 | This is not, I think, the most interesting way

00:02:40.080 | to think about it, but it gets you started.

00:02:42.240 | Sartre says, "There's nothing true

00:02:46.480 | "about what it is to be you

00:02:49.600 | "until you start existing, until you start living."

00:02:54.480 | And for Sartre, the core feature

00:02:57.040 | of what it is to be existing the way we do

00:02:59.960 | is to be making decisions, to be making choices in your life,

00:03:03.680 | to be sort of taking a stand on what it is to be you

00:03:08.160 | by deciding to do this or that.

00:03:11.320 | And the key feature of how to do that right for Sartre

00:03:16.320 | is to do it in the full recognition of the fact

00:03:19.360 | that when you make that choice,

00:03:21.480 | nobody is responsible for it other than you.

00:03:25.560 | So you don't make the choice because God tells you to,

00:03:28.760 | you don't make the choice because some utilitarian calculus

00:03:33.160 | about what it's right to do tells you to do,

00:03:36.060 | you don't make the choice

00:03:37.080 | because some other philosophical theory tells you to do it.

00:03:40.820 | There's literally nothing on the basis

00:03:43.040 | of which you make the choice

00:03:44.920 | other than the fact that in that moment,

00:03:48.160 | you are the one making it.

00:03:50.200 | - You are a conscious thinking being that made a decision.

00:03:54.360 | So all of the questions about physics and free will

00:03:58.040 | are out the window.

00:03:59.600 | - Yeah, that's right.

00:04:00.580 | If you were a determinist about the mind,

00:04:03.520 | if you were a physicalist about the mind,

00:04:05.360 | if you thought there was nothing to your choices

00:04:08.280 | other than the activity of the brain

00:04:10.600 | that's governed by physical laws,

00:04:13.800 | then there's some sense in which it would seem at any rate

00:04:18.060 | like you're not the ground of that choice.

00:04:21.000 | The ground of that choice was the physical universe

00:04:22.960 | and the laws that govern it.

00:04:24.600 | And then you'd have no responsibility.

00:04:26.400 | And so Sartre's view is that the thing that's special

00:04:29.120 | about us used to be special about God

00:04:32.200 | is that we're responsible for becoming the being

00:04:36.640 | that makes the choices that we do.

00:04:38.720 | And Sartre thinks that that simultaneously empowering,

00:04:43.000 | I mean, it practically puts us in the place of God

00:04:46.320 | and also terrifying because what responsibility?

00:04:50.300 | How can you possibly take on that responsibility?

00:04:54.100 | And he thinks it's worse than that.

00:04:55.500 | He thinks that it's always happening.

00:04:59.100 | Everything that you do is the result of some choice

00:05:02.940 | that you've made, the posture that you sit in,

00:05:05.840 | the way you hold someone's gaze

00:05:08.820 | when you're having a conversation with them or not,

00:05:11.900 | the choice to make a note when someone says something

00:05:16.720 | or not make a note.

00:05:18.320 | Everything that you do presents you as a being

00:05:21.920 | who makes decisions and you're responsible for all of them.

00:05:24.560 | So it's constantly happening.

00:05:26.920 | And furthermore, there's no fact about you

00:05:30.000 | independent of the choices and actions you've performed.

00:05:35.880 | So you don't get to say, Sartre's example,

00:05:38.560 | I really am a great writer,

00:05:40.400 | just haven't written my great book yet.

00:05:43.200 | If you haven't written your great book,

00:05:44.220 | you're not a great writer.

00:05:45.820 | And so it's terrifying.

00:05:47.800 | It puts a huge burden on us.

00:05:49.940 | And that's why Sartre says on his view of existentialism,

00:05:54.940 | human beings are the beings that are condemned to be free.

00:05:58.340 | Our freedom consists in our ability and our responsibility

00:06:02.740 | to make these choices and to become someone

00:06:05.120 | through making them.

00:06:06.460 | And we can't get away from that.

00:06:08.660 | - But to him it's terrifying not liberating

00:06:11.980 | in the positive meaning of the word liberating.

00:06:14.720 | - Well, so he thinks it should be liberating,

00:06:17.500 | but he thinks that it takes a very courageous individual

00:06:20.220 | to be liberated by it.

00:06:21.820 | Nietzsche, I think, thought something similar.

00:06:24.860 | I think Sartre's really coming out

00:06:27.160 | of a Nietzschean sort of tradition.

00:06:29.780 | But what's liberating about it, if it is,

00:06:32.620 | is also terrifying because it means in a certain way,

00:06:37.260 | you're the ground of your own being.

00:06:39.340 | You become what you do through existing.

00:06:43.660 | So that's one form of existentialism.

00:06:45.460 | That's a stark atheistic version of it.

00:06:47.500 | There's lots of other versions,

00:06:49.280 | but it's somehow organized around the idea

00:06:52.720 | that it's through living your life

00:06:54.620 | that you become who you are.

00:06:56.020 | It's not facts that are sort of true about you,

00:06:59.140 | independent of you're living your life.

00:07:01.700 | - But then there's no God in that view.

00:07:07.320 | Does any of the decisions matter?

00:07:10.040 | So how does existentialism differ from nihilism?

00:07:14.200 | - Good, okay, great question.

00:07:17.080 | There was two different ways that you're asking it.

00:07:20.760 | Let me leave nihilism to the side for just a second

00:07:23.400 | and think about mattering.

00:07:25.320 | Or is there any way that you can criticize someone

00:07:29.560 | for living the way they do if you're an existentialist?

00:07:32.560 | - Including yourself.

00:07:33.640 | - Including yourself, yeah.

00:07:35.160 | Sartre addresses that and he says, yes.

00:07:39.920 | He says there is a criticism

00:07:41.680 | that you can make of yourself or of others.

00:07:44.480 | And it's the criticism of living in such a way

00:07:46.720 | as to fail to take responsibility for your choices.

00:07:50.200 | He gives these two sort of amazing examples.

00:07:53.660 | One, I don't know if it reads as well for us

00:07:57.080 | as it did in sort of mid 20th century Paris,

00:08:01.040 | but it's about a waiter.

00:08:04.200 | He gives this in his big book, "Being in Nothingness."

00:08:07.200 | And he says, so waiters played, still do I think

00:08:11.320 | in a certain way in Paris, a big role in Parisian society.

00:08:15.680 | To be a waiter involved having a certain kind of identity,

00:08:18.320 | being a certain way, taking control of and charge of

00:08:23.320 | the experience of the people that you're waiting on,

00:08:27.200 | but also really being the authority,

00:08:30.320 | knowing that this is the way it's supposed to go.

00:08:33.680 | And so Sartre imagines a waiter who does everything

00:08:37.440 | that a waiter is supposed to do.

00:08:39.920 | The perfect form of the waiter,

00:08:42.920 | except that you can somehow see in the way he's doing it,

00:08:47.840 | that he's doing it because he believes

00:08:50.600 | that's the way a waiter should act.

00:08:53.160 | So there's some sense in which he's passing off

00:08:57.320 | the responsibility for his actions

00:09:00.320 | onto some idea of what those actions should be.

00:09:03.040 | He's not taking responsibility for it.

00:09:05.080 | He's sort of playing a role and the contours of the role

00:09:09.520 | are predetermined by someone other than him.

00:09:12.760 | So he starts as acting in bad faith.

00:09:15.520 | And that's criticizable because it's acting in such a way

00:09:20.200 | as to fail to take responsibility

00:09:22.640 | for the kind of being Sartre thinks you are.

00:09:25.360 | So you're not taking responsibility.

00:09:26.560 | So that's one example.

00:09:27.920 | And I think any teenager, if you've ever met a teenager,

00:09:32.840 | you've known someone who does that.

00:09:35.000 | Teenagers try on roles.

00:09:36.920 | They think, if I dressed like this, I would be cool.

00:09:41.200 | So I'll dress like this.

00:09:42.680 | Or if I spoke like this or acted like this.

00:09:46.240 | And it's natural for a teenager who's trying to figure out

00:09:49.400 | what their identity is to go through a phase like that.

00:09:52.680 | But if you continue to do that,

00:09:54.400 | then you're really passing it.

00:09:55.800 | So that's one example.

00:09:57.040 | And the other example he gives is an example

00:10:01.040 | not of passing off responsibility

00:10:03.880 | by pretending that someone else is the ground of your choice,

00:10:08.880 | but passing off responsibility by pretending

00:10:12.880 | that you might be able to get away

00:10:14.120 | with not making a choice at all.

00:10:15.720 | So he says, everything you do is a result of your choices.

00:10:20.920 | And so he gives this other example.

00:10:22.600 | There you are on the first date, first date.

00:10:27.920 | And the date, the evening reaches a moment

00:10:31.920 | when might be appropriate for one person

00:10:36.920 | to hold the hand of the other.

00:10:40.760 | That's the moment in the date where you are.

00:10:42.720 | And so you make a choice.

00:10:44.960 | You decide, I think it's that time.

00:10:48.120 | And you hold the hand.

00:10:50.120 | And what should happen is that the other person

00:10:51.680 | also makes a choice on SART's view.

00:10:53.960 | Either they reject the hand, not that time.

00:10:57.320 | And I'm taking responsibility for that.

00:10:59.840 | Or they grasp the hand back.

00:11:02.680 | That's a choice.

00:11:03.680 | But there's a thing that sometimes happens,

00:11:06.280 | which is that the other person leaves the hand there,

00:11:09.480 | cold, dead, and clammy,

00:11:10.800 | neither rejecting it nor embracing it.

00:11:15.000 | And SART says, that's also bad faith.

00:11:18.600 | That's also acting as if we're a kind of being

00:11:21.480 | that we're not, 'cause it pretends

00:11:25.120 | that it's possible not to make a choice.

00:11:27.680 | And we're the beings who are always making choices.

00:11:29.560 | That was a choice.

00:11:31.120 | And you're pretending as if it's the kind of thing

00:11:33.840 | that you don't have to take responsibility for.

00:11:36.040 | - So both of the examples you've given,

00:11:38.480 | there's some sense in which the social interactions

00:11:41.120 | between humans is a kind of moving away

00:11:44.640 | from the full responsibility that you as a human

00:11:48.440 | in the view of existentialism should take on.

00:11:52.600 | So isn't the basic conversation,

00:11:55.720 | a delegation of responsibility,

00:11:57.240 | just holding a hand there.

00:11:59.400 | You're putting some of the responsibility

00:12:01.680 | into the court of the other person.

00:12:04.040 | And for the waiter, if you exist in a society,

00:12:08.240 | you are generally trying on a role.

00:12:12.480 | I mean, all of us are trying on a role.

00:12:15.000 | Me wearing clothes is me trying on a role

00:12:18.760 | that I was told to try,

00:12:20.400 | as opposed to walking around naked all the time.

00:12:22.760 | Like there's like standards of how you operate.

00:12:26.200 | And that's a decision that's not my own.

00:12:31.200 | That's me seeing what everyone else is doing

00:12:33.240 | and copying them.

00:12:34.680 | - Yeah, exactly.

00:12:35.840 | So Sartre thinks that in the ideal,

00:12:40.840 | you should try to resist that.

00:12:43.280 | Other existentialists think that that's actually a clue

00:12:49.120 | to how you should live well.

00:12:51.760 | So Sartre says somewhere else, hell is other people.

00:12:56.120 | Why is hell other people for Sartre?

00:12:57.800 | Well, 'cause other people are making choices also.

00:13:01.200 | And when other people make choices,

00:13:04.000 | they put some pressure on me

00:13:08.320 | to think that the choice they made

00:13:10.040 | is one that I should copy

00:13:12.840 | or one that I should sort of promote.

00:13:17.080 | But if I do it because they did it,

00:13:19.040 | then I'm in bad faith for Sartre.

00:13:21.640 | So it is as if Sartre's view is like,

00:13:24.800 | we would be better if we were all alone.

00:13:27.360 | I mean, this is really simplifying Sartre's position.

00:13:31.040 | And this is really just mostly Sartre

00:13:33.040 | in a certain period of his formation.

00:13:36.640 | But anyhow, we can imagine that view.

00:13:38.600 | And I think there's something to the idea

00:13:41.320 | that Sartre is attracted to it,

00:13:42.480 | at least in the mid 40s.

00:13:44.400 | - Can you dig into hell is other people?

00:13:46.600 | Is there some,

00:13:48.320 | obviously it's kind of almost like a literary,

00:13:51.040 | like you push the point strongly

00:13:53.560 | to really explore that point.

00:13:55.520 | But is there some sense in that other people

00:13:59.440 | ruin the experience of what it means to be human?

00:14:03.400 | - I think for Sartre, the phenomenon is this.

00:14:05.440 | Like, it's not just that you wear clothes

00:14:08.460 | because people wear clothes in our society.

00:14:10.240 | Like you have a particular style.

00:14:12.200 | You wear a particular kind of clothes.

00:14:15.240 | And for Sartre, like to have that style

00:14:18.240 | authentically in good faith, rather than in bad faith,

00:14:22.320 | it has to come from you.

00:14:23.760 | You have to make the choice.

00:14:25.840 | But other people are making choices also.

00:14:27.960 | And like, you're looking at their choices

00:14:30.720 | and you're thinking that guy looks good.

00:14:32.980 | Maybe I could try that one on.

00:14:34.960 | And if you try it on because you were influenced

00:14:39.060 | by the fact that you thought that guy was doing it well,

00:14:42.480 | then there's some important sense in which,

00:14:44.160 | although that's a resource for a choice for you,

00:14:46.320 | it's also acting in bad faith.

00:14:48.800 | So, and God wouldn't do that, right?

00:14:52.900 | God wouldn't be influenced by other's decisions.

00:14:55.600 | And if that's the model, then I think that's the sense

00:14:59.160 | in which he thinks how those other people.

00:15:00.440 | - What do you think parenting is then?

00:15:02.920 | It's like, what, 'cause God doesn't have a parent.

00:15:05.640 | So aren't we significantly influenced,

00:15:08.320 | first of all, in the first few years of life?

00:15:10.880 | - Absolutely.

00:15:11.720 | - And even the teenager is resisting,

00:15:16.280 | learning through resistance.

00:15:18.480 | So. - Absolutely.

00:15:20.280 | I mean, I think what you're pushing on is the intuition

00:15:25.280 | that the ideal that Sartre's aiming at

00:15:29.000 | is a kind of inhuman ideal.

00:15:31.600 | I mean, there's many ways in which we're not like

00:15:34.640 | the traditional view of what God was.

00:15:37.620 | One is that we're not self-generating.

00:15:40.760 | We have parents.

00:15:41.800 | We were raised into traditions and social norms,

00:15:46.800 | and we're raised into an understanding

00:15:51.280 | of what's appropriate and inappropriate to do.

00:15:54.500 | And I think that's a deep intuition.

00:15:58.140 | I think that's exactly right.

00:15:59.940 | Martin Heidegger, who's the philosopher that Sartre thinks

00:16:04.400 | he's sort of taking this from,

00:16:06.040 | but I think Sartre's a kind of brilliant

00:16:08.640 | French misinterpretation of Heidegger's

00:16:11.560 | German phenomenological view.

00:16:14.840 | Heidegger says a crucial aspect of what it is to be us

00:16:19.600 | is our thrownness.

00:16:20.800 | We're thrown into a situation.

00:16:23.520 | We're thrown into history.

00:16:24.800 | We're thrown into our parental lineage.

00:16:28.720 | And we don't choose it.

00:16:30.160 | That's stuff that we don't choose.

00:16:31.640 | We couldn't choose.

00:16:33.360 | If we were God and we existed outside of time, maybe,

00:16:36.800 | but we're not.

00:16:37.760 | We're finite in the sense that we have a beginning

00:16:41.480 | that we never chose.

00:16:42.880 | We have an end that we're often trying to resist

00:16:47.640 | or put off or something.

00:16:49.400 | And in between, there's a whole bunch of stuff

00:16:51.400 | that organizes us without our ever having made the choice

00:16:55.400 | and without our being the kind of being

00:16:57.080 | that could make the choice to allow it to organize us.

00:17:00.680 | We have a complicated relationship to that stuff.

00:17:04.300 | And I think we should talk about that at a certain point,

00:17:06.560 | but the first move is to say,

00:17:08.600 | so it's just got a sort of descriptive problem.

00:17:12.280 | He's missed this basic fact that there has to be

00:17:17.120 | an awful lot about us that's settled

00:17:22.120 | without our having made the choice to settle it that way.

00:17:25.640 | - Right, the thrownness of life.

00:17:28.160 | - Yeah.

00:17:29.200 | - That's a fundamental part of life.

00:17:30.760 | You can't just escape it.

00:17:32.120 | - Exactly.

00:17:32.960 | You can't escape it altogether.

00:17:34.600 | - Altogether.

00:17:35.440 | - Yeah, exactly.

00:17:36.280 | You can't escape it altogether.

00:17:37.360 | - But nevertheless, you are riding a wave

00:17:39.880 | and you make a decision in the riding of the wave.

00:17:42.840 | You can't control the wave, but you should be,

00:17:45.140 | as you ride it, you should be making certain kinds

00:17:49.360 | of decisions and take responsibility for it.

00:17:53.000 | So why does this matter at all,

00:17:57.000 | the chain of decisions you make?

00:17:59.440 | - Good, well, because they constitute you.

00:18:01.100 | They make you the person that you are.

00:18:03.160 | So what's the opposite view?

00:18:06.280 | What's this view against?

00:18:08.680 | This view is against most of philosophy from Plato forward.

00:18:13.040 | Plato says in "The Republic," it's a kind of myth,

00:18:17.260 | but he says people will understand their condition well

00:18:22.260 | if we tell them this myth.

00:18:24.640 | He says, "Look, when you're born,

00:18:27.000 | "there's just a fact about you.

00:18:28.760 | "Your soul is either gold, silver, or bronze."

00:18:32.680 | Those are the three kinds of people there are,

00:18:35.040 | and you're born that way.

00:18:36.720 | And if your soul is gold, then we should identify that

00:18:39.880 | and make you a philosopher king.

00:18:42.120 | And if your soul is silver,

00:18:43.760 | well, you're not gonna be a philosopher king.

00:18:45.720 | You're not capable of it, but you could be a good warrior

00:18:48.280 | and we should make you that.

00:18:49.440 | And if your soul is bronze, then you should be a farmer,

00:18:51.840 | a laborer, something like that.

00:18:53.320 | And that's a fact about you that identifies you

00:18:58.180 | forever and for always,

00:18:59.760 | independent of anything you do about it.

00:19:02.520 | And so that's the alternative view.

00:19:05.240 | And you could have modern versions of it.

00:19:07.640 | You could say the thing that identifies you is your IQ

00:19:10.800 | or your genetic makeup or the percentage

00:19:15.200 | of fast-switch muscle fibers you've got or whatever.

00:19:18.560 | It could be something totally independent

00:19:21.280 | of any choice that you've made,

00:19:23.140 | independent of the kind of thing

00:19:24.400 | about which you could make a choice,

00:19:26.660 | and it categorizes you.

00:19:29.400 | It makes you the person that you are.

00:19:30.920 | That's the thing that Sartre

00:19:32.240 | and the existentialists are against.

00:19:34.080 | - So this idea that something about you

00:19:38.600 | is forever limiting the space

00:19:40.920 | of possible decisions you can make.

00:19:42.480 | Sartre says, "No, the space is unlimited."

00:19:45.960 | - Sartre is the philosopher of radical freedom.

00:19:49.280 | - Radical freedom.

00:19:50.760 | - Yeah, radical freedom.

00:19:52.600 | And then you could have other existentialists who say,

00:19:54.840 | "Look, we are free, but we gotta understand

00:19:58.440 | the way in which our freedom is limited

00:20:00.360 | by certain aspects of the kind of being that we are.

00:20:03.560 | If we were radically free, we really would be like God

00:20:06.360 | in the traditional medieval sense."

00:20:09.040 | And these folks start with the idea that,

00:20:12.760 | "Look, whatever we are, that's a kind of limit point

00:20:16.040 | that we're not gonna reach.

00:20:17.880 | So what are the ways in which we're constrained

00:20:21.240 | that that being the way the medievals understood him

00:20:25.560 | wasn't constrained?"

00:20:27.000 | - So can you maybe comment on what is nihilism

00:20:29.960 | and is it at all a useful other sort of group of ideas

00:20:34.400 | that you resist against in defining existentialism?

00:20:37.240 | - Yes, good, excellent.

00:20:38.600 | So nihilism, the philosopher who made the term popular,

00:20:43.600 | although it was used before him as Nietzsche,

00:20:46.160 | Nietzsche's writing in the end of the 19th century,

00:20:48.660 | in various places where he published things,

00:20:53.400 | but largely in his unpublished works,

00:20:56.800 | he identifies the condition of the modern world

00:21:01.760 | as nihilistic.

00:21:03.360 | And that's a descriptive claim.

00:21:06.720 | He's looking around him, trying to figure out

00:21:10.000 | what it's like to be us now.

00:21:13.220 | And he says, "It's a lot different from what it was like

00:21:17.240 | to be human in 1300 or in the fifth century BCE."

00:21:23.040 | In 1300, like what people believed,

00:21:28.040 | the way they lived their lives was in the understanding

00:21:33.520 | that to be human was to be created

00:21:36.320 | in the image and likeness of God.

00:21:38.360 | That's the way they understood themselves.

00:21:40.400 | And also to be created sinful because of Adam and Eve's

00:21:45.400 | transgression in the Garden of Eden.

00:21:47.760 | And to have the project of trying to understand

00:21:51.120 | how as a sinful being, you could nevertheless live

00:21:55.160 | a virtuous life.

00:21:56.760 | How could you do that?

00:21:57.760 | And it had to do with, for them,

00:21:59.480 | getting in the right relation to God.

00:22:01.400 | Nietzsche says, "That doesn't make sense to us anymore

00:22:04.720 | in the end of the 19th century."

00:22:06.720 | "God is dead," says Nietzsche famously.

00:22:09.880 | And what does that mean?

00:22:11.060 | Well, it means something like the role that God used to play

00:22:15.080 | in our understanding of ourselves as a culture

00:22:18.320 | isn't a role that God can play anymore.

00:22:21.480 | And so Nietzsche says, "The role that God used to play

00:22:25.360 | was the role of grounding our existence.

00:22:27.760 | He was what it is in virtue of which we are who we are."

00:22:31.400 | And Nietzsche says, "The idea that there is a being

00:22:36.040 | that makes us what we are doesn't make sense anymore."

00:22:38.520 | That's like Sartre's atheism.

00:22:39.920 | Sartre's taking that from Nietzsche.

00:22:41.520 | And so the question is, what does ground our existence?

00:22:46.320 | And the answer is nihil, nothing.

00:22:49.280 | And so nihilism is the idea that there's nothing

00:22:51.680 | outside of us that grounds our existence.

00:22:54.840 | And then Nietzsche asked the question,

00:22:57.080 | "Well, what are we supposed to do about that?

00:22:59.840 | How do we live?"

00:23:01.280 | And I think Nietzsche has a different story

00:23:05.640 | than Sartre about that.

00:23:07.180 | Nietzsche doesn't emphasize this notion of radical freedom.

00:23:12.180 | Nietzsche emphasizes something else.

00:23:15.120 | He says, "We're artists of life."

00:23:18.800 | And artists are interesting

00:23:22.240 | because the natural way of thinking about artists

00:23:25.560 | is that they're responding to something.

00:23:28.280 | They find themselves in a situation and they say,

00:23:30.780 | "This is what's gonna make sense of the situation.

00:23:32.760 | This is what I have to write.

00:23:34.600 | This is the way I have to dance.

00:23:36.200 | This is the way I've got to play the music."

00:23:38.900 | And Nietzsche says, "We should live like that."

00:23:41.760 | There are constraints, but understanding what they are

00:23:44.880 | is a complicated aspect of living itself.

00:23:49.880 | And there's a great story, I think, from music

00:23:53.840 | that maybe helps to understand this.

00:23:56.960 | I think Nietzsche, of course, jazz didn't exist

00:23:59.800 | when Nietzsche was writing,

00:24:01.400 | but I think Nietzsche really is thinking

00:24:03.600 | of something like jazz improvisation.

00:24:05.880 | I mean, he talks about improvisation.

00:24:08.280 | There's classical improvisation.

00:24:09.520 | Nietzsche was, by the way, a musician.

00:24:11.440 | I mean, he was a composer and a pianist,

00:24:14.440 | not a great one, really, to be fair, but he loved music.

00:24:18.880 | And Herbie Hancock, who's a pianist, a jazz pianist,

00:24:23.320 | who played with Miles Davis for quite a while in the '60s,

00:24:28.000 | tells this kind of incredible story

00:24:30.040 | that I think exemplifies Nietzsche's view

00:24:35.260 | about the way in which we bear some responsibility

00:24:40.720 | for being creative,

00:24:42.200 | and that gives us a certain kind of freedom,

00:24:45.780 | but we don't have the radical freedom that's art thinks.

00:24:50.720 | So what's the story?

00:24:52.080 | Herbie Hancock says, I think they were in Stuttgart,

00:24:55.880 | he says, playing a show, and things were great, he says.

00:25:00.880 | He's a young pianist, and Miles Davis is the master.

00:25:07.880 | And he says, I'm back in the solo,

00:25:12.000 | and I'm playing these chords, and he says,

00:25:16.000 | I played this chord, and it was the wrong chord.

00:25:21.000 | (both laughing)

00:25:22.720 | He's like, that's what you gotta say.

00:25:25.200 | It didn't work right there.

00:25:27.160 | And I thought, holy mackerel, I screwed up.

00:25:30.080 | I screwed up, we were tight, everything was working,

00:25:32.640 | and I blew it for Miles, who's doing his solo.

00:25:35.640 | And he said, Miles paused for a moment,

00:25:40.480 | and then all of a sudden, he went on

00:25:45.560 | in a way that made my chord right.

00:25:49.780 | (laughs)

00:25:51.800 | And I think that idea, that you could be an artist

00:25:55.240 | who responds to what's thrown at you

00:25:57.240 | in such a way as to make it right,

00:26:03.040 | by what measure, everyone could hear it,

00:26:06.240 | is all you can say, right?

00:26:07.720 | Everyone knew, wow, that really works.

00:26:11.220 | And I think that's not, there are constraints.

00:26:14.360 | Not anything would have worked there.

00:26:16.280 | He couldn't have just played anything.

00:26:18.900 | Most of what anyone would have played

00:26:21.200 | would have sounded terrible.

00:26:23.360 | But the constraints aren't preexisting.

00:26:26.480 | They're sort of what's happening now in the moment

00:26:29.880 | for these listeners and these performers.

00:26:32.200 | And I think that's what Nietzsche thinks

00:26:34.040 | the right response to nihilism is.

00:26:35.560 | We're involved, but we're not radically free

00:26:38.520 | to make any choice and just stand behind it,

00:26:40.780 | the way Sartre thinks.

00:26:42.200 | Our choices have to be responsive to our situation,

00:26:45.580 | and they have to make the situation work.

00:26:48.040 | They have to make it right.

00:26:49.920 | - And there's something about music too.

00:26:52.120 | So you basically have to make music

00:26:55.020 | of all the moments of life.

00:26:57.320 | And there is something about music.

00:26:59.160 | Why is music so compelling?

00:27:01.680 | And when you listen to it,

00:27:02.840 | something about certain kinds of music,

00:27:05.120 | it connects with you.

00:27:06.500 | It doesn't make any sense.

00:27:07.480 | But in that same way for Nietzsche,

00:27:10.100 | you should be a creative force

00:27:12.120 | that creates a musical masterpiece.

00:27:14.680 | - Exactly.

00:27:15.520 | And I think what's interesting is the question,

00:27:17.800 | what does it mean to be a creative force there?

00:27:20.340 | There's a traditional notion of creation

00:27:23.600 | that we associate with God.

00:27:26.040 | God creates ex nihilo, out of nothing.

00:27:30.560 | And you might think that nihilism

00:27:33.080 | thinks that we should do that,

00:27:34.240 | create ex nihilo,

00:27:35.800 | 'cause it's about how there's nothing at our ground.

00:27:38.440 | But I think the right way to read Nietzsche

00:27:40.560 | is to recognize that we don't create out of nothing.

00:27:43.800 | Miles Davis wasn't nothing.

00:27:46.040 | That situation preexisted him.

00:27:47.840 | It was given to him, maybe by accident.

00:27:50.740 | Maybe it was a mistake, whatever.

00:27:53.080 | But he was responding to that situation

00:27:55.560 | in a way that made it right.

00:27:57.440 | He wasn't just creating out of nothing.

00:27:59.520 | He was creating out of what was already there.

00:28:01.600 | - So that makes that first date with the climbing hand

00:28:04.040 | even more complicated,

00:28:05.200 | 'cause you're given a climbing hand,

00:28:08.080 | you're gonna have to make art and music out of that.

00:28:10.280 | - Exactly.

00:28:11.120 | - And that's the responsibility for both of them.

00:28:13.840 | Wow, that's a lot of responsibility for a first date,

00:28:16.240 | 'cause you have to create.

00:28:19.560 | The emphasis isn't just on making decisions.

00:28:22.660 | It's on creating.

00:28:25.960 | - But also on listening, right?

00:28:28.320 | I mean, Miles Davis was listening.

00:28:30.640 | He heard that.

00:28:31.760 | He knew it was wrong.

00:28:32.800 | And the question was, what do I play that makes it right?

00:28:35.640 | - So let me ask about Nietzsche.

00:28:40.120 | Is God dead?

00:28:41.960 | What did he mean by that statement?

00:28:43.720 | What's, in your sense, the truth behind the question

00:28:47.440 | and the possible set of answers

00:28:49.480 | that our world today provides?

00:28:52.500 | - Good, so I mean, I think that

00:28:55.600 | there's something super perceptive

00:28:57.480 | about Nietzsche's diagnosis of the condition

00:29:00.360 | at the end of the 19th century.

00:29:02.360 | So not so far from the condition

00:29:04.520 | that I think we're currently in.

00:29:06.340 | And I think there's an interesting question

00:29:10.160 | what we're supposed to do in response.

00:29:12.520 | But what is the condition that we're currently in?

00:29:14.840 | When Nietzsche says God is dead,

00:29:16.920 | I think, like I was saying before,

00:29:18.880 | he means something like the role that God used to play

00:29:23.320 | in grounding our existence

00:29:24.920 | is not a role that works for us anymore as a culture.

00:29:28.940 | And when people talk about a view like that nowadays,

00:29:33.140 | they use a different terminology,

00:29:34.640 | but I think it's roughly what Nietzsche was aiming at.

00:29:37.660 | They say we live in a secular age.

00:29:40.520 | Our age is a secular age.

00:29:41.960 | And so what do people mean when they say that?

00:29:44.760 | I think, first of all, it's a descriptive claim.

00:29:47.600 | It could be wrong.

00:29:48.860 | The question is, does this really describe

00:29:50.840 | the way we experience ourselves as a culture

00:29:53.400 | or as a culture in the West or wherever it is that we are?

00:29:56.300 | So what does it mean to say that we live in a secular age,

00:29:59.720 | an age in which God is dead?

00:30:01.160 | Well, first thing is it doesn't mean

00:30:02.760 | there are no religious believers 'cause there are plenty.

00:30:05.440 | There are lots of people who go to church or synagogue

00:30:08.880 | or mosque every week or more.

00:30:11.320 | And there are people who really find that

00:30:15.040 | to be an important aspect of the way they live their lives.

00:30:19.320 | But it does mean that for those people,

00:30:23.720 | the role that their religious belief plays in their life

00:30:29.540 | isn't the same as it used to be in previous ages.

00:30:32.340 | So what's that role?

00:30:34.140 | We'll go back to the high Middle Ages.

00:30:35.760 | That was clearly not a secular age.

00:30:38.520 | That was a religious age.

00:30:40.400 | And so there we are in 1300,

00:30:43.240 | Dante is writing "The Divine Comedy" or something.

00:30:46.320 | And what did it mean then to live in a sacred age?

00:30:50.480 | Well, it meant not just that the default

00:30:54.560 | was that you were a Christian in the West,

00:30:57.700 | but that your Christianity, your religious belief,

00:31:02.000 | your religious affiliation justified certain assumptions

00:31:07.000 | about people who didn't share that religious belief.

00:31:10.960 | So you're a Christian in the West in 1300

00:31:15.080 | and you meet someone who's a Muslim.

00:31:18.800 | And the fact that they don't share your religious belief

00:31:22.180 | justifies the conclusion that they're less than human.

00:31:26.020 | And that was the ground of the Crusades.

00:31:30.400 | That was the religious wars of the high Middle Ages.

00:31:33.540 | To say that we live in a secular age

00:31:37.760 | is to say that not that we don't have,

00:31:40.240 | there aren't a lot of people

00:31:41.080 | who have religious belief, there are.

00:31:42.700 | But it's to say that their religious belief

00:31:45.000 | doesn't justify that conclusion.

00:31:48.840 | If you're a religious believer and you meet me

00:31:53.840 | and suppose I'm not a religious believer,

00:31:56.800 | learning that about me doesn't justify your concluding

00:32:00.480 | that I'm less than human.

00:32:02.400 | And that's the kind of liberalism of the modern age.

00:32:05.880 | Most of the time we think that's a good thing.

00:32:08.300 | We let a thousand flowers bloom.

00:32:10.320 | There are lots of ways to live a good life.

00:32:12.960 | And there's some way in which that is a nice progressive

00:32:16.600 | kind of liberal thought.

00:32:18.280 | But it's also true that it's an undermining thought

00:32:20.840 | because it means if you're a religious believer now,

00:32:25.740 | your belief can't ground your understanding

00:32:31.120 | of what you ought to be aiming at in a life

00:32:33.740 | in the way it used to be able to.

00:32:35.460 | You can't say as a religious believer,

00:32:38.360 | I know it's right to do this

00:32:40.400 | because you also know that if you meet someone

00:32:42.680 | who doesn't share that religious belief

00:32:44.320 | and so doesn't think it's right to do that necessarily

00:32:47.040 | or does, but for different reasons,

00:32:49.340 | you can't conclude that they've got it wrong.

00:32:52.760 | So there's this sort of unsettling aspect to it.

00:32:56.120 | - Well, isn't it true that you can't conclude

00:32:59.280 | as a public statement to others,

00:33:02.600 | but within your own mind,

00:33:05.180 | it's almost like an existentialist version of belief,

00:33:10.060 | which is like, you create the world around you.

00:33:15.060 | It doesn't matter what others believe.

00:33:17.800 | It's actually almost like empowering thought,

00:33:23.540 | so as opposed to the more traditional view of religion

00:33:28.260 | where it's like a tribal idea,

00:33:30.900 | like where you share that idea together.

00:33:32.980 | Here you have the full, back to Sartre,

00:33:35.780 | a full responsibility of your beliefs as well.

00:33:38.880 | - Good, good, but what you're describing

00:33:41.480 | is not a religious believer, right?

00:33:44.240 | You're describing someone who's found in themselves

00:33:47.780 | the ground of their existence

00:33:49.080 | rather than in something outside of themselves.

00:33:51.000 | So the religious belief, I mean, if you go full Sartrean,

00:33:54.840 | then, well, you're not in a position to criticize others

00:33:59.520 | for the choices that they make,

00:34:02.000 | but you are in a position to criticize them

00:34:04.760 | for the way in which they make them,

00:34:06.680 | either taking responsibility or not taking responsibility.

00:34:10.280 | But the religious believer used to be able to say,

00:34:13.400 | "Look, the choices that I make are right

00:34:15.560 | "because God demands that I make them."

00:34:17.980 | And nowadays, like,

00:34:22.040 | and so it would be wrong to make any others.

00:34:25.560 | And nowadays, our kind of,

00:34:28.760 | to say that we live in a secular age,

00:34:30.440 | say, "Well, you can't quite do that

00:34:32.860 | "and be a religious believer."

00:34:33.920 | Your religious belief can't justify that move

00:34:37.600 | and so it can't ground your life in the way it does.

00:34:40.880 | So it's sort of unsettling.

00:34:42.240 | I think that's one of the interpretations

00:34:44.740 | of what Nietzsche might've meant when he said, "God is dead."

00:34:47.760 | God can't play the role for religious believers

00:34:50.360 | in our world that he used to.

00:34:52.600 | But we nevertheless find meaning.

00:34:54.760 | I mean, you don't see nihilism

00:34:57.440 | as a prevalent set of ideas

00:34:59.120 | that are overtaking modern culture.

00:35:00.620 | So a secular world is still full of meaning.

00:35:04.200 | Good, well, I think that's the interesting question.

00:35:06.600 | I think it's certainly possible for a secular world

00:35:10.280 | to be a world in which we live meaningful lives,

00:35:13.160 | worthwhile lives,

00:35:14.240 | lives that are sort of worthy of respect

00:35:19.240 | and that we can be proud of aiming to live.

00:35:23.920 | But I think it is a hard question,

00:35:26.320 | what we're doing when we do that.

00:35:27.880 | And that is the question of existence.

00:35:30.620 | Sort of what does it mean to exist in a way

00:35:33.500 | that brings us out at our best as the beings that we are?

00:35:36.820 | That's the question for existentialism.

00:35:38.940 | - So besides Sartre,

00:35:42.700 | who to you is the most important existentialist

00:35:47.700 | to understand for others?

00:35:49.220 | What ideas in particular of theirs do you like?

00:35:52.040 | Maybe other existentialists, not just one.

00:35:54.980 | - Yeah, good.

00:35:55.820 | - Who portrays the grounding,

00:35:57.260 | strong, atheistic existentialism statement?

00:36:00.640 | Who else is there?

00:36:02.620 | - So I'm teaching an existentialism course now.

00:36:05.540 | And I think the tradition goes back

00:36:07.820 | at least to the 17th century.

00:36:09.680 | And I'll just tell you some of the figures

00:36:12.460 | that I'm teaching there.

00:36:13.820 | We could talk about any of them that you like.

00:36:16.360 | The figure I start with is Pascal.

00:36:18.940 | Pascal, French mathematician from the 17th century.

00:36:24.320 | He died, I'm terrible with dates,

00:36:26.040 | but I think 1661 or something like that,

00:36:28.800 | middle of the 17th century.

00:36:30.640 | Brilliant polymath, sort of,

00:36:32.680 | we have computer languages named after him.

00:36:34.920 | He built the first mechanical calculating machine.

00:36:38.960 | But he was also deeply invested in his understanding

00:36:43.320 | of what Christianity was.

00:36:45.880 | And he thought that everyone before him

00:36:50.880 | had really misunderstood what Christianity was.

00:36:53.960 | That they'd really attempted to think about it,

00:36:57.640 | not as a way of living a life,

00:37:00.820 | but as a set of beliefs that you can have

00:37:04.080 | and which you can justify.

00:37:06.520 | And I think that's the first move

00:37:09.680 | that's really pretty interesting.

00:37:11.880 | And then figures like Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky

00:37:15.400 | developed that move.

00:37:17.000 | And all of those take themselves to be defending

00:37:20.600 | an interpretation of a certain kind of Christianity.

00:37:23.640 | An existential interpretation of Christianity.

00:37:27.040 | And then I think there are other figures,

00:37:28.960 | other theistic figures.

00:37:30.920 | Figures like Camus and Fanon,

00:37:34.640 | who are mid 20th century figures.

00:37:37.840 | And then I'll just mention the figure

00:37:40.000 | who I think is the most interesting is Martin Heidecker.

00:37:43.000 | He's a complicated figure 'cause--

00:37:45.560 | - By the way, when you said, sorry to interrupt,

00:37:48.200 | that when you said Camus, you meant atheistic?

00:37:51.840 | - I think that Camus is an atheistic existentialist.

00:37:54.280 | Yeah, I'm happy to talk about that.

00:37:55.920 | - So, okay, so we got, it's like sports cards.

00:37:58.360 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:37:59.200 | - We have the different existentialists.

00:38:00.120 | So maybe let's go to,

00:38:01.820 | you know what, let's go to Dostoevsky.

00:38:05.680 | - All right, okay, let's do it.

00:38:07.420 | - So my favorite novel of his is "The Idiot."

00:38:10.960 | First of all, I see myself as the idiot and an idiot.

00:38:15.280 | And I love the optimism and the love

00:38:19.320 | the main character has for the world.

00:38:22.080 | So that just deeply connects with me as a novel.

00:38:25.560 | Notes from underground as well.

00:38:27.460 | But what ideas of Dostoevsky's do you think

00:38:32.080 | are existentialist?

00:38:33.160 | What ideas are formative

00:38:34.720 | to the whole existentialist movement?

00:38:36.360 | - Excellent, so let me talk about "The Brothers Karamazov."

00:38:40.000 | Partly because that's the last novel that Dostoevsky wrote.

00:38:43.480 | I think it's certainly one of the greatest novels

00:38:45.360 | of the 19th century, maybe the best.

00:38:48.320 | And I'm about to teach it in a few weeks.

00:38:49.960 | So I'm super excited about it.

00:38:52.320 | But what is "The Brothers Karamazov" about?

00:38:54.800 | I mean, without spoiling the ending for anyone.

00:38:58.640 | - Spoiler alert.

00:38:59.480 | - Yeah, I mean, look, it's a murder mystery, right?

00:39:02.880 | I mean, the father gets murdered.

00:39:05.200 | And the question is, who did it?

00:39:07.960 | Who's responsible for it?

00:39:09.440 | So there's a notion of responsibility here, like in "Sartre."

00:39:12.720 | But it's responsibility for a murder.

00:39:15.240 | That's what we're talking about.

00:39:17.120 | And there's a bunch of brothers,

00:39:19.880 | each of whom has pretty good motivation

00:39:24.200 | for having murdered the father.

00:39:26.760 | The father's a jerk.

00:39:28.040 | I mean, he's, you know,

00:39:29.800 | if anybody is worthy of being murdered, he's the guy.

00:39:33.160 | He's a force of chaos and he's nasty in all sorts of ways.

00:39:38.160 | But still, it's not good to murder people.

00:39:42.560 | (laughs)

00:39:43.600 | So what's the view of Dostoevsky?

00:39:46.240 | I mean, it's this intense exploration

00:39:49.120 | of what it means to be involved in various ways

00:39:54.120 | with an activity that everyone can recognize as atrocious.

00:39:58.440 | And what the right way is to take responsibility for that,

00:40:04.840 | what the right way is to relate to others in the face of it,

00:40:09.960 | and how even through this kind of action,

00:40:14.000 | you can achieve some kind of salvation.

00:40:16.600 | That's Dostoevsky's word for it.

00:40:18.640 | But salvation here and now,

00:40:22.440 | not like you live some afterlife

00:40:24.480 | where you're paradise for eternity.

00:40:27.800 | Who cares about that, says one of the characters.

00:40:31.000 | That doesn't make my life now any good,

00:40:33.600 | and it doesn't justify any of the bad things

00:40:35.840 | that happen in my life now.

00:40:37.080 | What matters is, can we live well

00:40:40.160 | in the face of these things that we do

00:40:42.400 | and have to take responsibility for?

00:40:43.840 | So it's this intense exploration of notions

00:40:48.400 | and gradations of guilt and responsibility,

00:40:52.000 | and the possibility of love and salvation

00:40:55.040 | in the face of those.

00:40:56.120 | It is incredibly human work.

00:40:58.760 | But I think Dostoevsky is the opposite of Sartre.

00:41:03.080 | And let me just, I think it's so fascinating.

00:41:05.720 | I don't know anybody else who notices this,

00:41:07.760 | but Sartre actually quotes a passage from Dostoevsky

00:41:11.880 | when he's developing his view.

00:41:13.600 | It's close to a passage.

00:41:15.920 | It doesn't appear quite in this way.

00:41:18.000 | But the passage that Sartre quotes is this.

00:41:21.560 | It's in the form of an argument.

00:41:23.040 | Sartre puts it in the form of an argument.

00:41:24.640 | He says, "Look, there's a conditional statement is true.

00:41:28.760 | "If there is no God, then everything is permitted."

00:41:32.160 | And then there's a second premise.

00:41:36.200 | There is no God.

00:41:37.640 | That's Sartre's view.

00:41:38.920 | I mean, he's an atheist.

00:41:40.080 | There is no God.

00:41:41.320 | Conclusion, everything is permitted.

00:41:44.760 | And that's Sartre's radical freedom.

00:41:46.680 | And if you think about the structure

00:41:49.640 | of the Brothers Karamazov,

00:41:51.200 | I think Dostoevsky, though he never says it this way,

00:41:54.480 | would run the argument differently.

00:41:56.240 | It's a modus tollens instead of a modus ponens.

00:41:59.360 | The argument for Dostoevsky would go like this.

00:42:02.400 | Yeah, conditional statement.

00:42:04.040 | If there is no God, then everything is permitted.

00:42:07.000 | But look at your life.

00:42:09.200 | Not everything is permitted.

00:42:11.760 | You do horrible, atrocious things,

00:42:14.360 | like be involved in the death of your father,

00:42:17.560 | and there is a price to pay.

00:42:19.160 | That's not a livable moment.

00:42:22.400 | To have to take responsibility,

00:42:25.160 | to have to recognize that you're at fault

00:42:28.760 | or you're somehow guilty for having been involved

00:42:32.560 | in whatever way you were in letting that happen

00:42:34.800 | or bringing it about that it does happen,

00:42:36.880 | is to pay a price.

00:42:38.640 | So we're not beings that are constituted in such a way

00:42:42.720 | that everything is permitted.

00:42:44.440 | Look at the facts of your existence.

00:42:46.880 | So not everything is permitted.

00:42:48.640 | Therefore, there is a God.

00:42:51.760 | (laughs)

00:42:53.840 | And the presence of a God for Dostoevsky,

00:42:57.320 | I think, is just found in this fact

00:42:59.920 | that when we do bad things, we feel guilty for them,

00:43:02.840 | that we find ourselves to be responsible for things,

00:43:05.880 | even when we didn't intend to do them,

00:43:07.720 | but we just allowed ourselves to be involved in them.

00:43:09.920 | - And the nature of God for Dostoevsky is, I mean, unclear.

00:43:14.320 | I mean, it's a very complex exploration in itself.

00:43:16.920 | And he basically, God speaks through several

00:43:19.880 | of his characters in complicated ways.

00:43:22.880 | So it's not like a trivial version of God.

00:43:26.320 | - It's totally not trivial.

00:43:27.400 | And it's not a being that exists outside of time.

00:43:31.280 | None of that is sort of relevant for Dostoevsky.

00:43:33.680 | For him, it's a question about how we live our lives.

00:43:36.600 | Do we live our lives in the mood

00:43:38.040 | that Christianity says it makes available to us,

00:43:40.360 | which is the mood of joy?

00:43:41.600 | - Is there, maybe this is a bit of a tangent,

00:43:45.280 | but so I'm a Russian speaker,

00:43:47.360 | and one of the, I kind of listen to my heart.

00:43:52.320 | And what my heart says is I need to take on this project.

00:43:55.560 | So there's a couple of famous translators

00:43:59.000 | of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy that live in Paris currently.

00:44:03.840 | So I'm going to take the journey.

00:44:06.200 | We agreed to have a full conversation about Dostoevsky,

00:44:09.880 | about Tolstoy, and like a series of conversations.

00:44:14.680 | And the reason I fell in love with this idea

00:44:16.840 | is I just realized in translating from Russian to English,

00:44:21.180 | how deep philosophical,

00:44:25.680 | how much deep philosophical thinking is required.

00:44:29.040 | Just to, like single sentences.

00:44:31.080 | They spent like weeks debating single sentences.

00:44:35.240 | So, and all of that is part of a journey

00:44:38.600 | to Russia for several reasons.

00:44:40.120 | But I just, I want to explore something in me

00:44:44.120 | that longs to understand and to connect

00:44:48.240 | with the roots where I come from.

00:44:50.040 | So maybe can you comment, whether it's on the Russian side

00:44:55.600 | or the niche of the German side, or other French side,

00:45:00.600 | is there something in your own explorations

00:45:04.580 | of these philosophies that you find that you miss

00:45:08.240 | because you don't deeply know the language?

00:45:11.400 | Or like how important is it to understand the language?

00:45:14.600 | - Good.

00:45:15.520 | I think it's super important.

00:45:17.180 | And I'm always embarrassed that I don't know more languages

00:45:20.040 | and don't know the languages I know

00:45:21.960 | as well as I would like to.

00:45:23.760 | But there's a way in.

00:45:26.160 | So I do think different languages

00:45:28.520 | allow you to think in different ways.

00:45:30.720 | And that there's a sort of a mode of existence,

00:45:33.160 | a way of being that's captured by a language

00:45:37.140 | that it makes certain ways of thinking about yourself

00:45:39.980 | or others more natural.

00:45:41.540 | And it closes off other ways

00:45:43.900 | of thinking about yourself and others.

00:45:46.500 | And so I think languages are fascinating in that way.

00:45:51.140 | The Heidegger, who is this philosopher

00:45:53.900 | that I'm interested in, says at one point,

00:45:56.060 | "Language is the house of being."

00:45:58.860 | And I think that means something like,

00:46:02.300 | it's by living in a language that you come to understand

00:46:07.300 | or that possibilities for understanding

00:46:09.920 | what it is to be you and others and anything are opened up.

00:46:14.480 | And different languages open up different possibilities.

00:46:16.720 | - And we had that discussion offline about James Joyce,

00:46:19.560 | how I took a course in James Joyce

00:46:22.160 | and how I don't think I understood anything

00:46:24.320 | besides the dead and the short stories.

00:46:27.000 | And you suggested that it might be helpful

00:46:30.320 | to actually visit Ireland, visit Dublin,

00:46:33.280 | to truly, to help you understand,

00:46:35.160 | maybe fall in love with the words.

00:46:37.360 | And so that presumably is not purely about the understanding

00:46:42.200 | of the actual words of the language.

00:46:44.400 | It's understanding something much deeper.

00:46:47.280 | The music of the language or something.

00:46:50.080 | Music of the ideas. (laughs)

00:46:52.300 | - Absolutely, something like that.

00:46:53.960 | It's very hard to say exactly what that is,

00:46:56.020 | but when you hear an Irish person

00:46:58.220 | who really understands Joyce read some sentences,

00:47:01.800 | they have a different cadence,

00:47:03.120 | they have a different tonality,

00:47:04.800 | they have different music, to use your word.

00:47:07.240 | And all of a sudden you think about them differently.

00:47:10.600 | And the sentences sort of draw different thoughts out of you

00:47:14.120 | when they're read in certain ways.

00:47:15.460 | That's what great actors can do.

00:47:18.000 | But I think language is rich like that.

00:47:22.200 | And the idea, which philosophers tend to have,

00:47:26.520 | that we're really studying the crucial aspects of language

00:47:30.560 | when we think about its logical form.

00:47:33.040 | When we think about the sort of claims

00:47:35.400 | of philosophical logic that you can make,

00:47:37.320 | or how do you translate this proposition

00:47:39.480 | into some symbolic form?

00:47:41.660 | I think that's part of what goes on in language.

00:47:44.080 | But I think that when language affects us

00:47:47.600 | in the deep way that it can,

00:47:49.880 | when great poets or great writers or great thinkers

00:47:54.180 | use it to great effect, it's way more than that.

00:47:58.180 | And that's the interesting form of language

00:47:59.960 | that I'm interested in.

00:48:01.000 | - It's kind of a challenge I'm hoping to take on

00:48:03.380 | is I feel like some of the ideas

00:48:06.500 | that are conveyed through language

00:48:08.880 | are actually can be put outside of language.

00:48:11.400 | So one of the challenges I have to do

00:48:13.700 | is to have a conversation with people in Russian,

00:48:17.280 | but for an English audience.

00:48:19.800 | And not rely purely on translators.

00:48:21.920 | There would of course be translators there

00:48:23.620 | that help me dance through this mess of language.

00:48:28.620 | But also, my goal, my hope is to dance

00:48:33.160 | from Russian to English back and forth

00:48:35.880 | for an English speaking audience

00:48:37.480 | and for a Russian speaking audience.

00:48:38.940 | So not this pure, this is Russian,

00:48:41.320 | it's going to be translated to English,

00:48:43.280 | or this is English, it's going to be translated to Russian,

00:48:45.980 | but dance back and forth.

00:48:47.740 | And try to share with people who don't speak

00:48:50.880 | one of the languages, the music that they're missing.

00:48:54.080 | And sort of almost hear that music

00:48:56.280 | as if you're sitting in another room

00:48:58.320 | and you hear the music through the wall.

00:49:00.320 | Like get a sense of it.

00:49:01.720 | I think that would be a waste if I don't try to pursue this,

00:49:05.600 | being a bilingual human being.

00:49:08.040 | And I wonder whether it's possible to capture

00:49:11.540 | some of the magic of the ideas

00:49:13.320 | in a way that can be conveyed to people

00:49:16.440 | who don't speak that particular language.

00:49:18.960 | - I think it's a super exciting project.

00:49:20.920 | I look forward to following it.

00:49:23.280 | I'll tell you one thing that does happen.

00:49:25.560 | So we read Dostoevsky in translation.

00:49:27.820 | Occasionally I do have Russian speakers in the room,

00:49:29.840 | which is super helpful.

00:49:31.720 | But I also encourage my students to,

00:49:35.440 | some of them will have different translations than others.

00:49:39.360 | And that can be really helpful for the non-native speaker

00:49:43.480 | because by paying attention to the places

00:49:48.360 | where translators diverge in their translations

00:49:51.360 | of a given word or a phrase or something like that,

00:49:53.720 | you can start to get the idea that somehow the words

00:49:57.080 | that we have in English,

00:49:58.920 | they don't have the same contours

00:50:00.520 | as the word in Russian that's being translated.

00:50:03.080 | And then you can start to ask

00:50:04.320 | about what those differences are.

00:50:07.240 | And I think there's a kind of magic to it.

00:50:11.260 | I mean, it's astonishing how rich and affecting

00:50:15.520 | these languages can be for people

00:50:17.000 | who grew up in them especially, who speak them as natives.

00:50:20.400 | - And that's a really powerful thing

00:50:21.680 | that actually doesn't exist enough of is,

00:50:25.560 | for example, for Dostoevsky,

00:50:27.440 | most novels have been translated

00:50:29.180 | by two or three famous translators.

00:50:33.320 | And there's a lot of discussion

00:50:35.440 | about who did it better and so on.

00:50:37.320 | But I would love to, I'm a computer science person,

00:50:40.320 | I would love to do a diff where you automatically detect

00:50:44.600 | all the differences in the translation

00:50:46.680 | just as you're saying and use that.

00:50:49.240 | Like somebody needs to publish literally

00:50:51.560 | just books describing the differences.

00:50:56.120 | In fact, I'll probably do a little bit of this.

00:50:58.040 | I heard the individual translators in interviews

00:51:01.280 | and blog posts and articles discuss particular phrases

00:51:04.920 | that they differ on, but like to do that for an entire book,

00:51:08.200 | that's a fascinating exploration.

00:51:10.520 | As an English speaker,

00:51:11.800 | just read the differences in the translations.

00:51:15.240 | You probably can get some deep understanding

00:51:18.760 | of ideas in those books by seeing the struggle

00:51:23.760 | of the translators to capture that idea.

00:51:26.240 | That's a really interesting idea, yeah.

00:51:28.040 | - Absolutely, and you can do that

00:51:30.280 | for other projects in other languages too.

00:51:32.480 | I mean, one of the, I don't know,

00:51:34.760 | I have this weird, huge range of interests.

00:51:37.640 | And some days I'll find myself reading about something.

00:51:40.920 | At one point I was interested

00:51:42.360 | in 14th century German mysticism.

00:51:46.200 | Okay, turns out there's somebody who's written

00:51:48.280 | like volumes and volumes about this.

00:51:50.560 | He's fantastic.

00:51:51.800 | And I was interested in reading Meister Eckart.

00:51:55.520 | I wanted to know what was interesting about him.

00:51:58.480 | And the sort of move that this guy, Bernard McGinn,

00:52:02.960 | who's the great scholar of this period, made,

00:52:05.200 | was to say what Eckart did, and everybody knows this,

00:52:09.960 | he translated Christianity into the vernacular.

00:52:12.760 | He started giving sermons in German to the peasant.

00:52:15.960 | And sermons used to be in Latin,

00:52:17.080 | and nobody could speak Latin.

00:52:18.120 | Can you imagine sitting there for a two-hour sermon

00:52:20.000 | in a language that you don't know?

00:52:22.380 | So he translated it into German.

00:52:25.560 | But in doing it, the resources of the German language

00:52:27.920 | are different from the resources of the Latin language.

00:52:30.240 | And there's a word in Middle High German, grund,

00:52:34.400 | which is like, we translate it as ground.

00:52:37.800 | And it's got this earthy feel to it.

00:52:41.480 | It sort of invokes the notion of soil and what you stand on

00:52:45.440 | and what things grow out of,

00:52:47.240 | and sort of what you could run your fingers through

00:52:51.160 | that would have a kind of honesty to it.

00:52:54.200 | And there's no Latin word for that.

00:52:56.980 | But in Eckart's interpretation of Christianity,

00:53:00.040 | grund, that's like the fundamental thing.

00:53:02.560 | You don't understand God until you understand

00:53:04.560 | the way in which he is our ground.

00:53:07.040 | And all of a sudden, this mysticism

00:53:09.840 | gets a kind of German cant

00:53:12.560 | that makes sense to the people who speak German,

00:53:16.360 | and that reveals something totally different

00:53:19.640 | about what you could think that form of existence was

00:53:23.240 | that was covered over by the fact

00:53:24.880 | that it had always been done in Latin.

00:53:26.720 | Yeah, that's fascinating.

00:53:29.480 | So, okay, we talked about Dostoevsky

00:53:32.920 | and the use of murder to explore human nature.

00:53:36.240 | Let's go to Camus, who is maybe less concerned with murder,

00:53:40.000 | more concerned with suicide as a way to explore human nature.

00:53:44.120 | So he is probably my favorite existentialist,

00:53:47.520 | probably one of the more accessible existentialists.

00:53:52.320 | And like you said, one of the people

00:53:55.560 | who didn't like to call himself an existentialist.

00:53:58.640 | So what are your thoughts about Camus?

00:54:00.920 | What role does he play in the story of existentialism?

00:54:03.840 | So I find Camus totally fascinating, I really do.

00:54:07.240 | And for years, I didn't teach Camus

00:54:10.520 | because the famous thing that you're referring to,

00:54:14.160 | the "Myth of Sisyphus," which is a sort of essay,

00:54:16.960 | it's published as a book, super accessible,

00:54:19.840 | really fascinating, he's a great writer, really engaging.

00:54:23.880 | The opening line is something like,

00:54:26.480 | "There is but one truly significant philosophical question,

00:54:31.480 | and that is the question of suicide."

00:54:33.440 | And I thought, I can't teach my 18-year-olds.

00:54:36.800 | (ZDoggMD laughing)

00:54:37.640 | You know, like how?

00:54:38.480 | (ZDoggMD laughing)

00:54:39.320 | I just thought that's terrible.

00:54:41.520 | Like, how can I?

00:54:42.800 | I mean, it's not wrong, but do I wanna bring that

00:54:46.400 | into the classroom?

00:54:47.800 | And so I read it, I read the essay.

00:54:51.000 | I avoided it for a long time, just because of that line.

00:54:54.840 | And I thought, I'm not gonna be able to make sense of this

00:54:57.120 | in a way that will be helpful for anyone.

00:54:59.760 | But finally, one year, maybe seven or eight years ago,

00:55:02.520 | I sat down to read it.

00:55:03.840 | I thought, I've got to really confront it.

00:55:06.920 | And I read it, and it's incredibly engaging.

00:55:10.560 | I mean, it's really, really beautiful.

00:55:12.560 | And Camus was against suicide,

00:55:14.720 | which just turns out to be good.

00:55:16.040 | (ZDoggMD laughing)

00:55:17.480 | I was happy about that.

00:55:19.160 | But he has a bit of a bleak understanding

00:55:23.120 | of what human existence amounts to.

00:55:26.120 | And so in the end, he thinks that human existence is absurd.

00:55:32.440 | And it's being absurd is a kind of technical term for him.

00:55:36.640 | And it means that the episodes in your life

00:55:41.160 | and your life as a whole presents itself to you

00:55:46.180 | as if it's got a meaning, but really it doesn't.

00:55:50.240 | So there's this tension between the way things

00:55:54.880 | seem to be on their surface

00:55:58.440 | and what really turns out to be true about them.

00:56:02.760 | And he gives these great examples.

00:56:05.480 | You probably remember these.

00:56:06.760 | He says, "There you are, you're walking along the street,

00:56:11.320 | and there's a plate glass window in a building.

00:56:13.880 | And through the window,

00:56:15.840 | you see somebody talking on a telephone."

00:56:18.440 | I mean, I imagined it as a cell phone,

00:56:20.400 | but Camus didn't. (ZDoggMD laughing)

00:56:23.440 | But you see somebody talking on a cell phone,

00:56:25.200 | and he's animated, he's talking a lot

00:56:28.760 | as if things really meant something.

00:56:31.720 | And yet Camus says, "It's a dumb show."

00:56:35.140 | And it's not dumb just in the sense that it's stupid,

00:56:39.260 | it's dumb in the sense that it's silent.

00:56:41.760 | It presents itself as if it's got some significance,

00:56:44.920 | and yet its significance is withheld from you.

00:56:47.280 | And he says, "That's what our lives are like.

00:56:49.640 | Everything in our lives presents themselves to us

00:56:52.240 | as if it's got a significance, but it doesn't.

00:56:54.640 | It's absurd."

00:56:56.280 | And then he says, "Really what our lives are like,

00:56:59.680 | they're like the lives of Sisyphus."

00:57:01.760 | Just day after day, you do the same thing.

00:57:06.760 | You wake up at a certain time, you get on the bus,

00:57:10.040 | you go to work, you take your lunch break, you get off.

00:57:13.800 | I have a colleague who once said to me something like this.

00:57:17.280 | It was about October or so in the fall semester.

00:57:20.360 | I said, "How's it going, Dick?"

00:57:22.680 | He said, "Well, you know how it is.

00:57:24.040 | I got on the conveyor belt at the beginning of the semester

00:57:27.360 | and I'm just going through and that's the way my life is."

00:57:32.040 | And Camus thinks that experience,

00:57:34.800 | which you can sometimes have,

00:57:36.560 | reveals something true about what human lives are like.

00:57:41.240 | Our lives really just are like the life of Sisyphus

00:57:44.160 | who rolls this boulder up the hill from morning till night.

00:57:48.040 | And then at night he gets to the top

00:57:50.600 | and it rolls back down to the bottom.

00:57:52.960 | Over the course of the night, he walks back down

00:57:55.240 | and then he starts it all over again.

00:57:57.440 | And he says, "Sisyphus is condemned to this life."

00:58:00.400 | Like we're condemned to our lives,

00:58:03.560 | but we do have one bit of freedom.

00:58:06.520 | And it's the only thing that we can hang on to.

00:58:09.160 | It's the freedom to stick it to the gods

00:58:14.080 | who put us in this position

00:58:15.560 | (ZDoggMD laughing)

00:58:16.800 | by embracing this existence

00:58:19.240 | rather than giving up and committing suicide.

00:58:21.360 | And I thought, "Well, it's kind of a happy ending."

00:58:24.800 | (ZDoggMD laughing)

00:58:26.640 | But I also thought it's a dim view

00:58:30.360 | of what our existence amounts to.

00:58:33.080 | So I think there's something fascinating about that.

00:58:37.320 | But what I came to believe,

00:58:39.960 | and I tried to write about this once,

00:58:41.600 | I know you read the thing about aliveness

00:58:44.320 | that I published once.

00:58:45.760 | That's secretly a criticism of Camus.

00:58:48.000 | I don't think I mentioned Camus in there.

00:58:50.200 | But I think Camus has got the phenomenon wrong,

00:58:53.680 | or he's missed some important aspect of it.

00:58:56.440 | 'Cause in Camus' view,

00:58:58.440 | when you experience your day

00:59:00.280 | as sort of going on in this deadening way,

00:59:03.000 | and you're just doing the things that you always do

00:59:05.320 | the way you always do them,

00:59:07.480 | for Camus, that reveals the truth about what our lives are.

00:59:11.920 | But I think there's some aspect, at least for me,

00:59:14.280 | and maybe he just didn't feel this

00:59:16.880 | or didn't have access to it.

00:59:18.960 | Maybe others don't.

00:59:20.320 | But for me, there's an extra part to it,

00:59:22.640 | which is somehow that, yes, that's the way things are,

00:59:26.480 | and it's inadequate.

00:59:29.400 | And there's something that's missing

00:59:33.000 | from that aspect of our existence that could be there.

00:59:36.920 | And it feels like our lives are not about

00:59:40.560 | just putting up with that

00:59:42.360 | and sticking it to the gods by embracing it,

00:59:45.600 | but seeking that absence part of it,

00:59:48.760 | the part that's recognizable in its absence

00:59:52.600 | in your experience of that.

00:59:54.600 | And that's what I think.

00:59:56.800 | I think we do have the experience of the presence of that

01:00:00.160 | in moments when you feel truly alive.

01:00:04.360 | - And that's what you mean by the word aliveness,

01:00:06.400 | which is a fascinating and a powerful word.

01:00:08.960 | - Yeah, that's what I mean by it.

01:00:10.720 | I think most people can recognize moments in their lives

01:00:15.520 | when they really felt alive.

01:00:17.480 | And it could happen in a moment when,

01:00:19.960 | I don't know, maybe Miles Davis felt it in that moment

01:00:23.720 | when he was responding to Herbie Hancock's chord.

01:00:26.680 | Or maybe you feel it in that moment

01:00:29.280 | where you grab for the hand on the first date

01:00:31.440 | and the gesture is reciprocated.

01:00:34.120 | Or maybe you feel it in some moment

01:00:37.000 | when you are doing a kind of peak athletic thing,

01:00:41.200 | or watching somebody else do a peak athletic thing.

01:00:45.440 | But I think there are moments when it feels like

01:00:48.320 | it's not like the way Camus is describing things.

01:00:53.120 | And it's better because of that.

01:00:56.400 | - So I think one really powerful way

01:00:58.720 | for me to understand aliveness

01:01:02.160 | is to think about, to go into a darker territory,

01:01:05.840 | is to think about suicide.

01:01:07.280 | And I've known people in my life

01:01:08.920 | who suffer from clinical depression.

01:01:12.480 | And whatever the chemistry is in our brain,

01:01:16.520 | there is a certain kind of feeling that is to be depressed.

01:01:22.880 | Where you look in the mirror and ask,

01:01:26.280 | do I want to kill myself today?

01:01:30.040 | This is the question that Camus asks,

01:01:32.740 | this question, this philosophical question.

01:01:36.400 | And there is people who, when they're depressed,

01:01:41.760 | say, not only do they say, I want to kill myself,

01:01:45.480 | or I don't, they say, it doesn't matter.

01:01:47.520 | And that's chemistry, that's whatever that is,

01:01:52.360 | that's chemistry in our mind.

01:01:54.560 | And then on the flip side of that, for me,

01:01:57.360 | I've had some low points, but I've been very fortunate

01:02:00.400 | to not suffer from that kind of depression.

01:02:03.920 | I am the opposite, which is not only moments

01:02:08.000 | of peak performance in athletics,

01:02:10.360 | or great music, or any of that,

01:02:13.920 | I'm just deeply joyful often by mundane things.

01:02:18.360 | Like, as you were saying it,

01:02:20.500 | I was drinking this thing and it's cold,

01:02:22.240 | and for some reason the coldness of that was like,

01:02:26.160 | oh, great, like refrigeration, I don't know.

01:02:28.600 | There was a joy in that, like, I can't put it into words,

01:02:31.720 | but I just felt great.

01:02:32.800 | And then just so many things, you look out in nature,

01:02:36.080 | there's a nice breeze, and just like, it's amazing.

01:02:40.080 | So that doesn't feel like I'm embracing the absurd.

01:02:45.080 | That seems like I'm getting some nice dopamine hits

01:02:50.240 | in whatever the chemistry is from just the basics of life.

01:02:53.880 | And that is the source of aliveness.

01:02:55.960 | However my brain is built, it's gotten a natural

01:03:00.880 | sort of mechanism for aliveness.

01:03:05.160 | And so one nice way to see the absence of aliveness

01:03:09.360 | is to look at the chemical, the clinical depression.

01:03:14.160 | And so Camus doesn't seem to contend with that at all

01:03:18.120 | in asking the question of suicide,

01:03:20.280 | because when you look in the mirror and ask,

01:03:22.260 | like if I ask myself, do I want to kill myself today,

01:03:25.120 | I ask that question in a different way,

01:03:27.040 | more like a stoic way often, like basically every day,

01:03:30.680 | is what if I die today?

01:03:33.080 | It's more like contemplating your mortality

01:03:35.480 | every single day.

01:03:36.360 | You know, that excites me,

01:03:40.760 | the possibility that this is my last day.

01:03:43.320 | It just reminds me how amazing life is.

01:03:47.080 | And that's chemistry, I don't know what that is,

01:03:49.520 | but that's certainly not some kind of philosophical

01:03:54.520 | decision I made.

01:03:57.160 | I am a little bit riding a wave of the chemistry

01:04:00.720 | of the genetics I've been given.

01:04:03.000 | - Of the dopamine.

01:04:04.240 | So that question of suicide,

01:04:06.340 | by the way, do you find that formulation

01:04:10.000 | of the question of existentialism,

01:04:12.520 | I know you didn't want to teach it

01:04:16.040 | because obviously suicide is a very difficult word,

01:04:18.720 | especially for young minds,

01:04:20.480 | but do you think that's a useful formulation

01:04:22.520 | of the question of existentialism?

01:04:24.460 | Like him saying, this is the most important question

01:04:28.460 | of suicide.

01:04:29.360 | - I think there is something to it.

01:04:31.360 | If you read the question as the question,

01:04:34.640 | what is it in virtue of which it ought to be desirable

01:04:38.960 | to live the lives that we're capable of living?

01:04:42.760 | That's a deep question.

01:04:44.400 | Yeah, that's a question that gets focused

01:04:47.600 | when someone asks themselves whether they ought to continue

01:04:50.800 | to live that life.

01:04:52.160 | Who, the famous line,

01:04:55.080 | nothing focuses the mind more than one's impending execution.

01:04:59.840 | I mean, I think there's something important about that,

01:05:04.440 | that recognizing the riskiness and the vulnerability

01:05:08.040 | of one's existence is super important.

01:05:12.760 | And I think that if we didn't have that,

01:05:16.200 | our lives wouldn't be capable of being meaningful.

01:05:20.740 | If they weren't risky and vulnerable,

01:05:23.360 | there would be nothing to lose.

01:05:25.180 | And it's only because there are things to lose

01:05:26.980 | that they can come to have the significance that they do.

01:05:29.000 | So yeah, I think, not against the idea

01:05:31.480 | that that's a deep way of approaching the questions

01:05:35.320 | at the core of existentialism.

01:05:38.040 | But as you said, I was worried for a while

01:05:40.200 | about how I was gonna teach it.

01:05:43.160 | - Well, I think there's a difference

01:05:44.400 | between suicide and not living.

01:05:46.320 | Because suicide is an action.

01:05:49.520 | So it feels like, to me,

01:05:52.700 | like suicide doesn't make sense because,

01:05:58.280 | imagine you're in a hotel

01:06:00.560 | and you're saying the room I'm in sucks.

01:06:03.440 | But there's other rooms.

01:06:04.720 | So maybe explore those other rooms.

01:06:07.920 | Maybe you'll find meaning in those other rooms.

01:06:12.160 | Like basically embracing the fact

01:06:15.040 | that you don't know everything.

01:06:17.040 | And you need time to explore everything.

01:06:20.280 | It's like, once you've explored everything,

01:06:23.240 | then maybe you can make a full decision.

01:06:25.480 | But it's unfair to make a decision.

01:06:30.480 | It's, I would say, unethical to make a decision

01:06:33.840 | until you've explored all the rooms in the hotel.

01:06:36.520 | - Yeah.

01:06:37.360 | And this gets focused in the brothers Karamazov, of course.

01:06:40.440 | There's one brother who is really asking that question,

01:06:45.300 | is asking the question of suicide.

01:06:47.160 | He's asking the question whether the world that we live in

01:06:51.160 | is a world that's worth living in.

01:06:54.400 | And I think that character's, as you say, very ill.

01:06:58.440 | I mean, and it's possible.

01:07:00.900 | And often because, as you say,

01:07:05.200 | of brain chemistry, physiology.

01:07:08.160 | So there's certainly a physical ground

01:07:11.000 | to that situation, to that condition.

01:07:14.200 | But I think it is possible

01:07:17.680 | for someone to be in that situation.

01:07:20.440 | I think that Ivan Karamazov,

01:07:23.480 | who's the character who's asking this question,

01:07:26.840 | is maybe, let's say, chemically depressed

01:07:30.120 | or something like that.

01:07:31.360 | But I think there's more to it too.

01:07:33.480 | And I think that Dostoevsky's real view

01:07:35.840 | is that brain chemistry doesn't exist on its own.

01:07:40.160 | Like the way we interact with one another,

01:07:42.960 | the way we care about or isolate ourselves from others,

01:07:46.800 | the way we care for the lives that we lead

01:07:52.520 | affects the chemistry of our brain,

01:07:54.960 | which goes on and changes the mood that we're in.

01:07:57.640 | So I think Dostoevsky does think that

01:08:01.400 | Ivan's salvation, if he's capable of being saved,

01:08:06.720 | is gonna come through the love of his brother Alyosha.

01:08:09.960 | - Let me spring maybe a bit of a tangent on you.

01:08:12.840 | Do you ever, one of my other favorite authors

01:08:15.160 | is Herman Hesse, do you ever include him

01:08:19.400 | in our deck of sport cards that represent existentialism?

01:08:24.400 | - I haven't, maybe I should.

01:08:26.400 | What should I read?

01:08:27.240 | What should I think about including?

01:08:28.960 | - Oh no, there's some kind of embrace of absurdism.

01:08:33.960 | Like there's a existentialist kind of ideal

01:08:39.920 | pervading most of his work.

01:08:42.520 | But there's more of a, like with Siddhartha,

01:08:46.160 | there's more almost like a Buddhist.

01:08:48.720 | - Yeah, that's right.

01:08:49.560 | - Sort of like watch the river and become the river,

01:08:53.760 | like this kind of idea that what it means

01:08:57.640 | to truly experience the moment.

01:08:59.740 | So there is an experiential part of existentialism

01:09:02.760 | where you want to, it's not just about,

01:09:05.460 | we've been talking about kind of decisions and actions,

01:09:08.000 | but also what it means to listen, like you said from Nietzsche,

01:09:11.400 | like what it means to really take in the world

01:09:14.760 | and experience the moment.

01:09:16.440 | So he's very good at writing about

01:09:18.280 | what it means to experience the moment

01:09:20.000 | and experience the full absurdity of the moment.

01:09:23.160 | And for him, I'm starting to forget,

01:09:26.240 | Steppenwolf I think is humor,

01:09:30.320 | it's part of the absurdity,

01:09:31.680 | which I think modern day internet explores very well

01:09:35.800 | with memes and so on.

01:09:37.440 | Humor is a fundamental part of the existentialist ethic

01:09:42.440 | that's able to deal with absurdity.

01:09:45.540 | You gotta like laugh at it.

01:09:48.200 | I think there is some,

01:09:49.440 | let me just say something about humor,

01:09:50.820 | 'cause I think you're absolutely right.

01:09:52.520 | Kierkegaard, who is Danish

01:09:54.840 | and most people think deeply depressed and then so on,

01:09:59.100 | is actually an incredibly funny writer.

01:10:01.940 | And someone who was a classmate of mine in graduate school

01:10:05.080 | who left philosophy to become a Hollywood comedy writer,

01:10:09.060 | he's a very successful guy.

01:10:11.040 | And then he came back 25 years later

01:10:13.760 | and finished his dissertation.

01:10:15.780 | And I was the reader on the dissertation,

01:10:18.460 | but it may be a conflict of interest, I'm not quite sure.

01:10:21.500 | But his dissertation was about,

01:10:24.020 | he called it Kierkegaard and the funny,

01:10:26.180 | which is a kind of a funny title, yeah.

01:10:28.660 | But Kierkegaard, according to Eric Kaplan's reading,

01:10:32.660 | Kierkegaard does have this idea

01:10:36.140 | that there's something destabilizing about humor

01:10:40.460 | that's crucial to the sort of the absurdity

01:10:45.620 | of the important possibilities for us.

01:10:47.900 | And so there's the idea that like,

01:10:50.700 | there's a moment when a joke is being set up,

01:10:54.260 | when you're sort of proceeding as if you're on stable ground

01:10:59.020 | and then the punchline comes

01:11:01.540 | and the rug is pulled out from under you.

01:11:03.980 | And for a moment, it's like you're falling.

01:11:06.820 | There's nothing supporting you

01:11:10.780 | until you're captured by your totally new understanding

01:11:15.300 | of what was going on.

01:11:17.140 | And that humor necessarily has that kind

01:11:20.700 | of destabilizing feature to it.

01:11:23.580 | And that's like the riskiness.

01:11:25.500 | That's like the riskiness that you were pointing to.

01:11:28.220 | If there aren't risks in your life,

01:11:30.140 | if your life is totally safe,

01:11:32.460 | then there's no possibility of significance.

01:11:35.220 | And so I think on Eric's reading,

01:11:37.380 | Kierkegaard sort of wants to line up the importance

01:11:41.300 | of the riskiness and vulnerability in your life

01:11:43.820 | to its having meaning.

01:11:45.540 | With the experience of destabilization

01:11:48.940 | that you get in jokes and comedy,

01:11:52.440 | which then becomes significant, right?

01:11:54.740 | When you remember having heard a joke for the first time,

01:11:58.260 | it's got a kind of salience for you.

01:12:00.500 | - Speaking of jokes and speaking of,

01:12:03.420 | you mentioned film and literature.

01:12:05.900 | So existentialism in film and literature.

01:12:08.980 | I think for a lot of people, especially nihilism,

01:12:13.980 | was experienced in the great work of art,

01:12:17.460 | modern work of art called Big Lebowski.

01:12:19.540 | I don't know if you've ever seen that film,

01:12:21.440 | but there's a group of nihilists in that film.

01:12:26.060 | They're just like, they don't care about anything.

01:12:28.020 | I think they happen to be German,

01:12:29.300 | at least they have German accents.

01:12:31.300 | So maybe can you talk about notable appearances

01:12:36.100 | of existentialism in film?

01:12:38.500 | And if you at all ever bring up Big Lebowski,

01:12:42.860 | if that ever comes into play.

01:12:45.140 | - So I know that people think about the Big Lebowski

01:12:47.140 | in this context.

01:12:48.780 | And I did actually rewatch it not so long ago.

01:12:51.800 | We have kids.

01:12:53.100 | Maybe it's time.

01:12:54.780 | It wasn't really time for the 11 year old.

01:12:57.240 | So somewhat inappropriate.

01:12:59.660 | But I have never taught that film.

01:13:01.780 | So I'd have to think more.

01:13:02.900 | We could talk about it.

01:13:03.780 | I'd be happy to try to think on the fly about it.

01:13:06.460 | - Okay, so I would love to,

01:13:07.700 | because there is a,

01:13:09.500 | feels like there's a philosophical depth to that film.

01:13:12.460 | So there's a person that just, the main character.

01:13:17.460 | - The Jeff Bridges character.

01:13:18.980 | - Jeff Bridges character, yeah.

01:13:20.380 | He kind of, he drinks like these white Russians,

01:13:24.100 | and he just kind of walks around in a very relaxed way.

01:13:28.140 | And he radiates both a love for life,

01:13:34.340 | but also just an acceptance of like,

01:13:36.980 | it is what it is kind of philosophy.

01:13:41.100 | And then there's a bunch of characters

01:13:43.020 | that have very busy lives,

01:13:47.620 | trying to do some big projects

01:13:50.420 | that are dramatic in some way,

01:13:52.360 | make some huge amounts of money.

01:13:54.320 | So it kind of actually reminds me of "The Idiot"

01:13:56.380 | by Dostoevsky in a certain kind of sense.

01:13:58.580 | And then there's these players.

01:14:00.980 | I mean, they're phrased as nihilists,

01:14:03.460 | but they kind of don't care to enjoy life.

01:14:07.100 | They want to mess with life in some kind of way.

01:14:09.500 | And of course there's interesting personalities that,

01:14:13.740 | what is it, Jesus, the bowler.

01:14:18.380 | And then there's like Donnie, who is a bit clueless.

01:14:23.180 | And then there's the, always-

01:14:25.420 | - John Goodman character.

01:14:26.260 | - John Goodman character,

01:14:27.700 | is talking about Vietnam and just takes life

01:14:30.400 | way too seriously, too intensely and so on.

01:14:33.080 | So it just paints a full sort of spectrum of characters

01:14:35.960 | that are operating in this world.

01:14:38.260 | And perhaps most importantly for existentialism,

01:14:40.660 | are thrown into absurdity.

01:14:42.620 | - Yeah.

01:14:43.460 | - And hence the humor.

01:14:45.460 | - Okay, all right, good.

01:14:46.740 | Well, that's helpful.

01:14:47.580 | Thank you for reminding me of all that.

01:14:49.540 | And I think, so one thing to say is that the nihilists,

01:14:53.700 | the group of nihilists who call themselves nihilists,

01:14:57.220 | I think they've got a bad misinterpretation

01:15:00.580 | of what nihilism is supposed to be.

01:15:02.980 | And this happened actually in the '20s.

01:15:07.380 | There was a famous case of a couple of German students,

01:15:12.140 | Leopold and Loeb, who'd read a lot of Nietzsche.

01:15:16.200 | Nietzsche was a kind of hero for the Nazis even,

01:15:21.200 | I think based on a pretty bad misunderstanding

01:15:24.940 | of what he was up to.

01:15:26.220 | But Leopold and Loeb had the bad understanding first,

01:15:30.040 | and they were students, they'd read a lot of Nietzsche,

01:15:32.540 | and they thought, okay, nothing means anything.

01:15:35.100 | The only way that there's any significance in a life

01:15:39.100 | is through our will to sort of powerfully

01:15:42.340 | bring something about.

01:15:43.980 | And if we're gonna do that in a way

01:15:47.380 | that reflects the fact that nothing means anything,

01:15:50.840 | then what we should do is take these things,

01:15:53.540 | these actions that people always thought were bad,

01:15:58.180 | and do them and show that there's nothing wrong

01:16:01.060 | with doing them.

01:16:02.380 | And so they decided they would murder someone,

01:16:05.660 | not because they were angry at them,

01:16:07.420 | just someone they'd never met.

01:16:08.860 | It was important that it was someone they'd never met.

01:16:10.940 | It was a totally unmotivated act.

01:16:13.340 | And they thought, we'll embrace nihilism

01:16:16.580 | by showing that we can act in such a way

01:16:19.900 | as to do something that morality thinks is bad,

01:16:24.900 | and through our will, bring it about that we desire to do it

01:16:28.820 | for no reason that has anything to do

01:16:31.260 | with its potentially being interpretable as good.

01:16:34.300 | And I think that's a terrible misreading

01:16:37.020 | of what Nietzsche thinks the response to nihilism is.

01:16:40.940 | I mean, I think read that against the Miles Davis thing.

01:16:44.260 | Miles Davis aim is to creatively bring it about

01:16:48.180 | that something works well in a situation

01:16:51.260 | where he is kind of constrained.

01:16:52.980 | So they thought two things.

01:16:54.260 | One, there are no constraints at all,

01:16:57.100 | not even the constraints of the situation

01:16:59.420 | that we find ourselves in.

01:17:00.980 | And two, we only become the beings that we really are

01:17:04.900 | when we act against what you might have thought

01:17:08.820 | the constraints were.

01:17:10.300 | And I just think that's a bad misreading

01:17:12.460 | of what that kind of nihilism is up to.

01:17:14.060 | And I think maybe that group in the Big Lebowski

01:17:17.260 | has got that kind of bad misreading.

01:17:20.380 | But then the major characters are much more interesting.

01:17:23.340 | Go ahead, you were gonna say something.

01:17:24.540 | - So there's some kind of apathy

01:17:26.820 | to their particular nihilism.

01:17:28.860 | Could you comment on whether you see sort of apathy

01:17:33.860 | as a philosophy part of that nihilism?

01:17:37.060 | So like from an existentialist perspective,

01:17:41.540 | how important is it to care about stuff?

01:17:45.380 | Like really take on life?

01:17:48.020 | What does existentialism have to say

01:17:51.300 | about just sitting back and just not caring?

01:17:56.300 | - Excellent.

01:17:57.420 | So apathy is like a really important word.

01:18:01.780 | The Greek word is apatheia, it means without passions.

01:18:05.180 | And the Stoics, who you mentioned earlier,

01:18:08.220 | really thought that passions are what get in the way

01:18:11.500 | of your living well.

01:18:14.100 | Because to live well, you have to think clearly

01:18:16.780 | about what you should do.

01:18:17.820 | And you shouldn't let your resentments and your angers

01:18:21.140 | and your petty animosities direct your behavior.

01:18:24.580 | You should release yourself from those kinds of passions.

01:18:28.500 | So Stoicism, again, huge caricature,

01:18:31.740 | but it's an aim not to care because caring is bad.

01:18:36.740 | And there's certain forms of existentialism,

01:18:41.060 | certainly in Pascal and Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky

01:18:44.620 | and Heidegger and Sartre in his own way.

01:18:48.620 | So it's not just a theistic or atheistic thing,

01:18:52.060 | where what's crucial about us is that we do care.

01:18:57.060 | Heidegger says, "Care is the being of Dasein."

01:19:00.540 | Dasein is his name for us.

01:19:02.260 | What it is to be us is to be the being that already cares.

01:19:06.660 | And you can't not do that.

01:19:08.940 | You can pretend you're not doing it,

01:19:11.620 | but you're just caring in a different way.

01:19:13.260 | It's like Sartre saying,

01:19:14.420 | you can pretend you're not taking responsibility.

01:19:17.180 | Or you can pretend that you don't have to make a decision.

01:19:21.420 | That is making a decision.

01:19:23.300 | Not caring is a way of caring.

01:19:25.380 | And so I think the existentialists that I'm interested in

01:19:29.180 | think that we do care.

01:19:30.940 | That's constitutive of what it is to be us.

01:19:34.780 | And so they'll think that the Stoics got it wrong,

01:19:37.700 | but that leaves open a huge range of moves

01:19:42.180 | about how we inhabit that existence well.

01:19:49.740 | - Let me ask about Ayn Rand.

01:19:52.780 | - Okay.

01:19:53.620 | - So it just so happens that I've gotten,

01:19:56.980 | she's entered a few conversations in this podcast,

01:20:00.740 | and just looking at academic philosophy

01:20:03.740 | or just philosophers in general,

01:20:05.900 | they seem to ignore Ayn Rand.

01:20:08.180 | Do you have a sense of why that is?

01:20:09.940 | Does she ever come into play, her ideas of objectivism

01:20:14.740 | come into play of discussions of a good life

01:20:19.460 | from the perspective of existentialism

01:20:23.820 | in how you teach it and how you think about it?

01:20:26.660 | Is she somebody who you find at all interesting?

01:20:29.740 | - So no, I don't think she is.

01:20:33.020 | But it's been a long time since I've read her stuff.

01:20:36.420 | I read it in high school.

01:20:37.660 | I read "The Fountainhead" in high school and "Atlas Shrugged,"

01:20:40.500 | but that's at this point a very long time ago.

01:20:42.580 | I think I read something about objective epistemology

01:20:45.500 | or something too.

01:20:46.820 | So my view about her could be based on a total

01:20:50.700 | misunderstanding of what she's up to.

01:20:53.700 | But sort of my caricature of her,

01:20:56.700 | and tell me if I've got it wrong,

01:20:58.900 | is that she's sort of motivated by a kind of,

01:21:03.900 | I think maybe sometimes you call it libertarianism,

01:21:09.460 | but maybe let's, in the context of our discussion,

01:21:13.900 | tie it back to Sartre, a kind of view according to which

01:21:17.420 | we're the being who has to contend with the fact

01:21:20.020 | that we're radically free to do stuff

01:21:22.020 | and we're just not being courageous or brave enough

01:21:25.220 | when we don't do that.

01:21:26.980 | And the people to admire are the people

01:21:29.620 | who make stuff out of nothing.

01:21:31.940 | So maybe that's a bad caricature.

01:21:34.780 | - No, no, no, I think that's pretty accurate.

01:21:38.180 | I'm not, again, very knowledgeable about the full depth

01:21:42.460 | of her philosophy, but I think she takes a view

01:21:47.460 | of the world that's similar to Sartre in the conclusions,

01:21:51.860 | but makes stronger statements about epistemology

01:21:56.340 | that first of all, everything is knowable.

01:21:59.380 | And there's some, you should always operate through reason.

01:22:03.060 | Like reason is very important.

01:22:05.500 | Like it's like you start with a few axioms

01:22:09.500 | and you build on top of that.

01:22:11.020 | And the axioms that everybody should operate on

01:22:15.540 | are the same.

01:22:17.060 | Again, reality is objective, it's not subjective.

01:22:21.540 | So from that, you can derive the entirety

01:22:24.860 | of how humans should behave at the individual level

01:22:28.260 | and at the societal level.

01:22:30.060 | And there's a few conclusions.

01:22:32.260 | She would talk about virtue of selfishness

01:22:34.820 | and sort of a lot of people use that to dismiss her.

01:22:37.020 | Look, she's very selfish and so on.

01:22:38.860 | She actually meant something very different.

01:22:41.900 | It's more like the Sartre thing.

01:22:43.860 | Take responsibility for yourself,

01:22:46.540 | understand what forces you're operating under

01:22:51.220 | and make the best of this life.

01:22:52.880 | And that's how you can be the best member of societies

01:22:55.780 | by making the best life you can.

01:22:58.820 | And just focus on yourself, like fix your own problems first

01:23:01.860 | and then that will make you the best member of society,

01:23:05.980 | of your family, of loved ones, of friends and so on.

01:23:10.700 | I think the reason she's disliked,

01:23:13.700 | obviously on the philosophy side, she's disliked

01:23:15.740 | because a little bit like Nietzsche, she's literary.

01:23:20.120 | I think the reason she's publicly disliked

01:23:25.420 | in sort of public conversations

01:23:28.100 | is because of how sure she is of herself.

01:23:30.920 | So that, which is some of the philosophers

01:23:33.060 | have been known to do, like make very strong statements

01:23:35.780 | like hell is other people,

01:23:37.620 | but she was making very strong statements

01:23:39.580 | about basically everything.

01:23:41.820 | And, but the reason I bring her up is,

01:23:45.980 | she is an influential thinker

01:23:50.940 | that is not for some reason often brought up as such.

01:23:54.620 | It's not acknowledged how influential she is.

01:23:57.180 | I was recently looking at like a list

01:24:00.140 | of the most important women of the 20th century

01:24:05.140 | in terms of thought, not science, but like thought.

01:24:09.920 | And she wasn't in that list.

01:24:11.740 | And I just, I've seen this time and time again,

01:24:14.700 | and it doesn't make sense to me

01:24:16.180 | why she's so kind of dismissed

01:24:19.540 | because clearly she's an author

01:24:21.860 | of some of the most read books like ever.

01:24:25.460 | And she clearly had very strong ideas

01:24:29.760 | that should be contended with, you know,

01:24:32.280 | and that's why it kind of didn't make sense to me

01:24:36.380 | because she's also a creature of her time

01:24:39.700 | and an important one.

01:24:41.180 | She's a creation of the Soviet Union,

01:24:43.260 | somebody who left because of that.

01:24:45.340 | And so some of the strength of her ideas

01:24:47.940 | has to do with how much she dislikes

01:24:50.620 | that particular philosophy and way of life.

01:24:55.280 | But also she's a creature of like Sartre

01:24:59.100 | and like that's whole like Nietzsche and so on.

01:25:02.180 | Now, one of the other criticisms is

01:25:04.500 | she doesn't integrate herself into this history.

01:25:07.860 | She keeps basically kind of implying

01:25:10.100 | that she's purely original in all her thoughts,

01:25:14.580 | even though she's kind of citing a lot of other people.

01:25:18.000 | But again, many philosophers do this kind of thing

01:25:20.540 | as if they are truly original and they're not.

01:25:24.660 | It is interesting.

01:25:25.520 | And also what's interesting about her is she is a woman.

01:25:28.460 | She is a strong feminist.

01:25:30.460 | And it feels like with Simone de Beauvoir, you know,

01:25:35.060 | like it seems like she's a very important person

01:25:39.220 | in this moment of history that shouldn't be fully forgotten.

01:25:43.060 | - Interesting, yeah.

01:25:44.480 | Well, so I mean, I don't have a lot to add.

01:25:46.700 | I will just say this.

01:25:50.180 | I mean, the way she and Beauvoir seemed to me

01:25:53.340 | from your description of her

01:25:54.660 | and remembering what I remember from 35 years ago,

01:25:58.320 | they seem pretty opposite from one another.

01:26:01.880 | Like one of the things I find interesting about Beauvoir

01:26:04.600 | is that she takes seriously the thing that Sartre didn't,

01:26:09.600 | which is our throne-ness,

01:26:11.920 | which is the sense in which we're born into a situation

01:26:16.920 | that's already got a significance for her.

01:26:19.860 | I think it was easier for her to recognize that than Sartre

01:26:24.440 | because she was a woman.

01:26:26.040 | And Sartre seems to act as if, you know,

01:26:29.560 | there are no constraints or at least there shouldn't be.

01:26:32.360 | We're pretty close as, you know, privileged white males.

01:26:36.000 | - Yeah, exactly.

01:26:36.840 | - If we could just get rid of the last bits of them,

01:26:38.800 | we would be God like we're supposed to be.

01:26:41.480 | And I think Beauvoir sort of sees things differently.

01:26:44.920 | I think she, one's not born but becomes a woman, she says.

01:26:49.920 | So how does that happen?

01:26:51.440 | Well, you're thrown into your culture

01:26:53.200 | and your culture starts treating you in a certain way

01:26:55.920 | because of your gender.

01:26:57.120 | And that starts to form your understanding

01:26:59.600 | and your experience of things.

01:27:01.040 | And by the time you're grown up,

01:27:03.520 | well, you're pretty well-formed by that.

01:27:06.480 | That seems a fact.

01:27:09.760 | It's a fact about Sartre too, though,

01:27:11.360 | it was harder for him to notice it

01:27:13.000 | because he was formed into his privilege.

01:27:17.440 | - But the world reminds us of our throne-ness

01:27:20.360 | for some more than others.

01:27:21.880 | - Yes, absolutely.

01:27:23.160 | And for people who have to contend on a daily basis

01:27:27.920 | with the fact that the social position they're thrown into

01:27:32.920 | is one that negates them or one that oppresses them

01:27:38.000 | or one that sort of pushes them to the side

01:27:40.760 | in some way or another.

01:27:42.520 | I mean, the black experience

01:27:43.960 | is interesting in this respect too.

01:27:46.200 | Frantz Fanon, who's a contemporary of Sartre

01:27:48.800 | and Beauvoir's, writes about it.

01:27:51.200 | And it's very familiar, the things that he's saying now,

01:27:53.560 | but he writes back in the '50s

01:27:56.560 | about being a black man in Paris

01:27:58.640 | and getting on an elevator with a woman alone.

01:28:02.800 | And how her reaction to him, not knowing him,

01:28:07.800 | not having any views about,

01:28:10.200 | any reason to have any views about him,

01:28:12.800 | sort of puts him in a particular social position

01:28:15.320 | with respect to her.

01:28:16.880 | And if you don't have that experience,

01:28:21.360 | it's much harder to recognize the way

01:28:25.040 | in which what we're thrown into

01:28:26.440 | is something we might not have chosen.

01:28:28.340 | So the idea that that's not an aspect of our existence,

01:28:34.280 | which as you describe Ayn Rand's views,

01:28:38.960 | she sounds more like Sartre,

01:28:40.160 | she sounds more like either it's not an aspect

01:28:44.240 | of our existence, or at least we ought to sort of aim

01:28:46.720 | at it's not being an aspect of our existence.

01:28:47.560 | - Yeah, almost act as if it's not.

01:28:49.480 | - Yeah, exactly. - Act as if it's not.

01:28:51.040 | - And so I think from my point of view,

01:28:53.040 | I don't pretend that I'm explaining

01:28:56.160 | the public reception of her.

01:28:57.380 | I'm just sort of trying to say how I understand her

01:29:00.720 | in this intellectual context.

01:29:03.700 | From my point of view, that's something big to miss.

01:29:07.520 | And the ambition to think that really what's happening

01:29:10.600 | is that we're all the same, we're all rational beings.

01:29:13.680 | We're all beings who, if we just got the axioms

01:29:15.840 | of our existence right and made good judgments

01:29:19.240 | and reasoned in an appropriate way, would optimize ourselves.

01:29:24.240 | That feels to me like a kind of natural end point

01:29:30.340 | of the philosophical tradition.

01:29:33.600 | I mean, sort of Plato starts off with a view

01:29:35.760 | that helps us in that direction,

01:29:37.320 | and the enlightenment moves us further in that direction.

01:29:40.960 | But from my point of view, that movement has led us astray

01:29:45.920 | because it's missed something really important

01:29:48.880 | that's crucial to the kind of being that we are.

01:29:52.760 | - Yeah, it misses the music.

01:29:55.520 | - Exactly, it misses the music.

01:29:57.920 | - Let's talk about thrownness,

01:29:59.320 | and I think you mentioned that in the context of Heidegger.

01:30:02.200 | - Yeah.

01:30:03.040 | - So can we talk about Heidegger?

01:30:05.120 | - Okay.

01:30:05.960 | - Who is this philosopher?

01:30:07.840 | What are some fascinating ideas

01:30:10.880 | that he brought to the world?

01:30:12.160 | - Okay, so Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher.

01:30:14.920 | I do know when he was born, 1889.

01:30:18.560 | I know that only by accident.

01:30:20.440 | It's because it's the same year that Wittgenstein,

01:30:22.520 | an Austrian philosopher, was born,

01:30:24.360 | and the same year that Hitler was born.

01:30:26.120 | So if I've remembered my dates right,

01:30:28.280 | and someone will call in and correct me otherwise.

01:30:31.520 | But that's the way it sort of sits in my memory bank.

01:30:35.080 | And it's interesting that the three of them were born

01:30:37.600 | at the same time.

01:30:39.400 | Wittgenstein and Heidegger share some similarities,

01:30:42.960 | but then it's also interesting that Heidegger was a Nazi.

01:30:47.680 | I mean, this is a very disturbing fact

01:30:49.480 | about his personal political background.

01:30:51.880 | And so it's something that anyone who thinks

01:30:55.280 | that things that he said might be interesting

01:30:57.920 | has got to contend with.

01:30:59.520 | - Heidegger was born in Germany, Hitler in Austria.

01:31:03.240 | - That's right.

01:31:04.160 | - Wittgenstein is Austria also.

01:31:06.760 | But so you have to, when you call Heidegger a Nazi,

01:31:09.600 | you have to remember, I mean,

01:31:12.120 | there was millions of Nazis too.

01:31:14.000 | So like there are parts of their,

01:31:16.080 | that's the history of the world.

01:31:18.320 | There's a lot of communists, Marxists,

01:31:22.320 | and Nazis in that part of history.

01:31:26.400 | - Absolutely.

01:31:27.320 | And one of the discussion points is,

01:31:30.320 | well, was he just a kind of social Nazi?

01:31:32.960 | I mean, you know, he went to parties with them

01:31:36.640 | and stuff or was he like,

01:31:38.160 | did he really believe in the ideology?

01:31:40.080 | And that's a choice point.

01:31:41.960 | And, you know, we can talk about it if you want.

01:31:44.880 | He held a political position.

01:31:46.680 | That's one of the relevant parts.

01:31:48.440 | In 1933, he was made rector of the University of Freiburg.

01:31:52.720 | That's like the president of the university.

01:31:55.000 | And that was in Germany, all the universities

01:31:58.320 | are state universities.

01:32:00.920 | And so that's a political appointment.

01:32:03.240 | - Can we just pause on this point?

01:32:04.720 | - Yeah.

01:32:06.240 | - From an existentialist perspective,

01:32:08.160 | what's the role for standing up to evil?

01:32:11.920 | So, I mean, I think Camus probably had something to say

01:32:17.800 | about these things 'cause he was a bit of a political figure.

01:32:21.600 | Like, do you have a responsibility,

01:32:23.720 | not just for your decisions,

01:32:26.120 | but, you know, if the world you see around you

01:32:30.320 | is going against what you believe somewhere deep inside,

01:32:35.960 | is ethical, do you have a responsibility

01:32:39.840 | to stand up to that, even if it costs you your life

01:32:43.120 | or your wellbeing?

01:32:44.520 | - Well, you asked from an existential perspective,

01:32:46.960 | and there's lots of different positions that you could have.

01:32:50.080 | So let me tell you something in the area

01:32:52.000 | of what I think I might believe,

01:32:53.240 | which comes out of this tradition.

01:32:55.360 | And it's this, if you live in a community

01:33:01.720 | where people are being dragged down

01:33:05.560 | by the norms of the community rather than elevated,

01:33:09.240 | then there's two things that you have to recognize.

01:33:13.760 | One is that you bear some responsibility for that,

01:33:17.360 | not necessarily because you chose it,

01:33:19.920 | maybe you reviled it, maybe you were against it,

01:33:23.000 | but there's some way in which we all act

01:33:26.640 | in accordance with the norms of our culture.

01:33:29.640 | We all give in to them in some way or another.

01:33:31.880 | And if those norms are broken,

01:33:34.800 | then there's some way in which we've allowed ourselves

01:33:37.400 | to be responsible for broken norms,

01:33:40.920 | or we've become responsible for broken norms.

01:33:43.000 | And I do think you have to face up to that.

01:33:45.480 | I think that, let's just take gender norms.

01:33:48.760 | Maybe the gender norms are broken.

01:33:51.080 | Maybe the way men and women treat one another

01:33:53.800 | or the way men treat women is broken.

01:33:56.440 | You know, maybe there's, maybe it is,

01:33:58.280 | maybe there's, I'm not making a substantive claim,

01:34:01.240 | I'm just saying, you know, lots of people say it is.

01:34:03.680 | And if you're in a culture where those norms take root,

01:34:08.680 | you don't get to just isolate yourself

01:34:14.120 | and pull yourself out of the culture

01:34:15.720 | and think I don't have any responsibility.

01:34:17.760 | You're already a part of the culture,

01:34:21.320 | even if you're isolating yourself from it.

01:34:24.560 | That's a way of rejecting the sort of part you play

01:34:29.040 | in the culture, but it's not a way of getting behind it.

01:34:32.880 | Now you're playing that role differently.

01:34:35.120 | You're saying, I don't wanna take responsibility

01:34:39.040 | for what's going on around me.

01:34:41.160 | And that's a way of taking responsibility

01:34:44.200 | by refusing to do it.

01:34:45.760 | So I think we're implicated

01:34:47.640 | in whatever's going on around us.

01:34:50.480 | And if we're gonna do anything in our lives,

01:34:53.440 | we ought to recognize that,

01:34:56.400 | recognize that even in situations

01:34:59.040 | where you maybe didn't decide to do it,

01:35:02.240 | you could be part of bringing other people down

01:35:05.480 | and then devote yourself to trying to figure out

01:35:08.440 | how to act differently so that the norms update themselves.

01:35:12.000 | And I think this is not a criticism of people.

01:35:15.880 | The Alyosha who we mentioned in "The Brothers Karamazov",

01:35:18.960 | he's a character, he's a kind of saintly character

01:35:22.800 | in "The Brothers Karamazov".

01:35:24.560 | But that one crucial moment in that story,

01:35:29.560 | when he realizes how awful he's been being to someone

01:35:34.040 | without ever even intending to do that.

01:35:36.920 | It's Grushenka, who's this sort of fascinating woman.

01:35:40.520 | And she's a very erotic woman.

01:35:43.000 | She's sort of sexual.

01:35:44.760 | And Alyosha, in my reading of it,

01:35:48.800 | is kind of attracted to her.

01:35:51.600 | But he's a young kid, he's 20 or whatever,

01:35:55.080 | and he's kind of embarrassed about it.

01:35:56.680 | And he lives in the monastery

01:35:58.160 | and he's thinking maybe he wants to be a priest

01:36:00.160 | and he's kind of embarrassed by it.

01:36:01.560 | So what does he do?

01:36:02.760 | Every time they run across one another in the street,

01:36:05.840 | he averts his gaze.

01:36:07.320 | And why is he doing that?

01:36:10.200 | 'Cause he's kind of embarrassed.

01:36:12.560 | But how does Grushenka experience it?

01:36:14.360 | Well, she knows she's a fallen woman

01:36:16.320 | and she knows that Alyosha

01:36:17.640 | has this other position in society.

01:36:20.400 | So her read on it is, he's passing judgment on me.

01:36:24.240 | He can see that he doesn't wanna be associated with me.

01:36:27.600 | He can see that I'm a fallen woman.

01:36:29.440 | He knows that in order to maintain his purity,

01:36:32.080 | he's gotta avoid me.

01:36:34.880 | That's not what Alyosha intended to do,

01:36:37.560 | but that's the way it's experienced.

01:36:39.560 | And so there's this way he comes to recognize, oh my God,

01:36:42.920 | like what I'm supposed to do is love people

01:36:46.000 | in Dostoevsky's view of things.

01:36:48.360 | And what I'm doing instead is dragging this poor woman down.

01:36:51.640 | I'm making her life worse.

01:36:53.160 | I'm making her feel terrible about herself.

01:36:55.240 | And if I actually came to know her,

01:36:57.040 | I'd recognize her condition is difficult.

01:36:59.760 | She's living a difficult life.

01:37:01.520 | She's making hard choices.

01:37:03.160 | And why don't I see that in her face

01:37:06.680 | instead of this other thing

01:37:08.000 | that's making me wanna avoid her?

01:37:09.920 | And that's a huge moment.

01:37:11.120 | So the idea is that we're implicated

01:37:13.280 | in bringing other people down,

01:37:15.480 | whether we wanna be or not.

01:37:17.440 | And that's our condition.

01:37:19.600 | - The requirement to understand that

01:37:21.840 | is to be almost to a radical degree,

01:37:25.280 | be empathetic and to listen to the world.

01:37:29.520 | And I mean, you brought up sort of gender roles.

01:37:33.760 | It's not so simple.

01:37:35.480 | All of this is messy.

01:37:36.920 | For example, this is me talking.

01:37:39.560 | It's clear to me that, for example,

01:37:42.000 | the woke culture has bullying built into it,

01:37:46.640 | has some elements of the same kind of evil built into it.

01:37:50.920 | And when you're part of the wave of wokeness,

01:37:53.880 | standing up for social rights,

01:37:56.200 | you also have to listen and think,

01:37:58.680 | are we going too far?

01:38:00.760 | Are we hurting people?

01:38:02.320 | Are we doing the same things that others,

01:38:06.720 | that we're fighting against

01:38:08.120 | that others were doing in the past?

01:38:10.080 | So it's not simple once you see

01:38:13.960 | that there's evil being done.

01:38:16.940 | That it's easy to fix.

01:38:18.980 | No, in our society,

01:38:22.720 | it's, there's something about our human nature

01:38:26.860 | that just too easily stops listening to the world,

01:38:31.220 | to empathizing with the world.

01:38:33.740 | And we label things as evil.

01:38:35.540 | This is through human history.

01:38:37.100 | This is evil.

01:38:38.180 | You mentioned tribes.

01:38:39.900 | This religious belief is evil.

01:38:41.900 | And so we have to fight it

01:38:42.980 | and we become certain and dogmatic about it.

01:38:45.380 | And then in so doing, commit evil onto the world.

01:38:48.900 | It seems like a life that accepts

01:38:53.660 | and responsibility for the norms we're in

01:38:56.680 | has to constantly be sort of questioning yourself

01:39:00.860 | and questioning, like listening to the world fully

01:39:04.780 | and richly without being weighed down

01:39:09.260 | by any one sort of realization.

01:39:13.540 | You just always constantly have to be thinking

01:39:15.620 | about the world.

01:39:16.460 | Am I wrong?

01:39:17.280 | Am I wrong in seeing the world this way?

01:39:18.820 | - I mean, the very last thing you said,

01:39:21.620 | you've constantly gotta be thinking about the world.

01:39:23.700 | You've constantly gotta be listening.

01:39:25.220 | You've constantly gotta be attending.

01:39:26.800 | And it's not simple.

01:39:28.620 | All that sounds exactly right to me.

01:39:30.140 | And the phrase that rings through my head

01:39:32.780 | is another one from the Brothers Karamazov,

01:39:34.900 | Dmitry, this passionate,

01:39:36.980 | sort of sometimes violent brother,

01:39:39.460 | who is also sort of deeply cares.

01:39:44.460 | I mean, because he's passionate,

01:39:46.940 | he's sort of got care through and through,

01:39:49.280 | but it's breaking him apart.

01:39:51.140 | He says at one point,

01:39:53.060 | "God and the devil are fighting

01:39:56.300 | "in the battlefield is the heart of man."

01:39:58.580 | (both laughing)

01:40:00.180 | And I just think, yeah, it's not simple.

01:40:02.540 | And the idea that there might be a purely good way

01:40:05.540 | of doing things, it's just not our condition.

01:40:08.260 | That everything we do is gonna be sort of undermined

01:40:11.500 | by some aspect of it.

01:40:12.900 | There's not gonna be a kind of pure good

01:40:15.620 | in human existence.

01:40:18.100 | And so it's sort of required

01:40:21.380 | that we're gonna have to be empathetic,

01:40:24.980 | that we're gonna have to recognize

01:40:26.940 | that others are dealing with that just as we are.

01:40:31.180 | - So I apologize for distracting us.

01:40:33.820 | We were talking about Heidegger.

01:40:35.260 | - Okay.

01:40:36.100 | - And the reason we were distracted

01:40:38.940 | is he happened to also be a Nazi,

01:40:41.500 | but he nevertheless has a lot of powerful ideas.

01:40:44.980 | What are the ideas he's brought to the world?

01:40:47.340 | - Okay, so that's a big, huge question.

01:40:49.700 | So let me see how much of it I can get on the table.

01:40:53.100 | (Lex laughing)

01:40:54.300 | I mean, the big picture is that Heidegger thinks,

01:40:57.980 | and he's not really wrong to think this,

01:41:01.140 | that the whole history of philosophy from Plato forward,

01:41:06.140 | maybe even from the pre-Socratics forward,

01:41:08.420 | from like the sixth century BC to now

01:41:12.420 | has been motivated by a certain kind,

01:41:16.380 | or has been grounded on a certain kind of assumption

01:41:19.580 | that it didn't have the right to make,

01:41:21.980 | and that it's led us astray,

01:41:24.580 | and that until we understand

01:41:27.900 | the way in which it's led us astray,

01:41:29.820 | we're not gonna be able to get to grips

01:41:31.620 | with the condition we now find ourselves in.

01:41:34.260 | So let me start with what he thinks

01:41:35.980 | the condition we now find ourselves in is.

01:41:38.900 | Lots of periods to Heidegger's views.

01:41:41.820 | I'm just gonna sort of mush it all together

01:41:44.100 | for the purposes of today.

01:41:45.900 | Heidegger thinks that one of the crucial things

01:41:49.340 | that we need to contend with

01:41:51.380 | when we think about what it is to be us now

01:41:56.180 | is that the right name for our age is a technological age.

01:42:00.860 | And what does it mean for our age to be a technological age?

01:42:04.700 | Well, it means that we have an understanding

01:42:08.280 | of what it is for anything at all to be, at all,

01:42:12.660 | that we never really chose,

01:42:16.660 | that sort of animating the way we live our lives,

01:42:19.420 | that's animating our understanding of ourselves

01:42:21.780 | and everything else,

01:42:23.460 | that is quite limited.

01:42:26.300 | And it's organized around the idea

01:42:29.780 | that to be something is to be what's sitting there

01:42:34.780 | as an infinitely flexible reserve

01:42:40.260 | to be optimized and made efficient.

01:42:43.740 | And Heidegger thinks that that's not just the way

01:42:51.080 | we think of silicon circuits or the river

01:42:56.080 | when we put a hydroelectric power plant on it,

01:43:00.600 | we're optimizing the flow of the river

01:43:02.800 | so that it makes energy which is infinitely flexible

01:43:05.280 | and we can use in any way at all.

01:43:07.620 | It's the way we understand ourselves too.

01:43:11.160 | We think of ourselves as this reserve of potential

01:43:16.160 | that needs to be made efficient and optimized.

01:43:19.360 | And when I talk with my students about it,

01:43:22.600 | I ask them, "What's your calendar look like?

01:43:26.800 | What's the goal of your day?

01:43:29.960 | Is it to get as many things into it as possible?

01:43:32.920 | Is it to feel like I've failed

01:43:36.360 | unless I've made my life so efficient

01:43:40.080 | that I'm doing this and this and this and this and this

01:43:43.520 | that I can't let things go by?"

01:43:45.760 | The feeling that I think we all have

01:43:49.520 | that there's some pressure to do that,

01:43:52.120 | to relate to ourselves that way

01:43:55.160 | is a clue to what Heidegger thinks

01:43:57.600 | the technological age is about.

01:44:00.100 | And he thinks that's different

01:44:01.760 | from every other age in history.

01:44:04.960 | We used to think of ourselves in the 17th century

01:44:07.680 | at the beginning of the enlightenment

01:44:10.060 | as subjects who represent objects.

01:44:14.480 | Descartes thought that a subject is something,

01:44:17.640 | some mental sort of realm

01:44:20.660 | that represents the world in a certain way.

01:44:23.360 | And we are closed in on ourselves

01:44:25.540 | in the sense that we have a special relation

01:44:28.400 | to our representations.

01:44:30.320 | And that's what the realm of the subject is.

01:44:32.920 | But others, in the Middle Ages,

01:44:34.840 | we were created in the image and likeness of God.

01:44:37.000 | And in the pre-Socratic age,

01:44:39.300 | to be was to be what whooshes up and lingers for a while

01:44:43.820 | and fades away the paradigm of what is,

01:44:47.440 | where thunderstorms and the anger of the gods,

01:44:51.880 | Achilles' battle fury,

01:44:53.640 | and it overtakes everything and stays for a while

01:44:57.200 | and then leaves, the flowers blooming in spring.

01:45:00.920 | And that's very different

01:45:02.400 | from the way we experience ourselves.

01:45:04.640 | And so the question is,

01:45:07.200 | what are we supposed to do in the face of that?

01:45:09.640 | And Heidegger thinks that the presupposition

01:45:13.760 | that's motivated everything from the pre-Socratics forward

01:45:18.760 | is that there is some entity

01:45:23.980 | that's the ground of the way we understand everything to be.

01:45:29.460 | For the Middle Ages, it was God.

01:45:31.380 | That was the entity that made things

01:45:33.180 | be the things that they are.

01:45:35.260 | For the Enlightenment, it was us, maybe for a start, it's us.

01:45:40.660 | And Heidegger thinks whatever it is

01:45:43.880 | that stands at the ground of what we are,

01:45:46.160 | it's not another thing, it's not another entity.

01:45:49.400 | And we're relating to it in the wrong way

01:45:51.760 | if we think of it like that.

01:45:53.760 | There's some way, and this is partly why

01:45:55.640 | I was interested in Meister Eckhart.

01:45:57.920 | He says, what there is is there's giving going on

01:46:01.560 | in the world, and we're the grateful recipient of it.

01:46:06.560 | And the giving is like, whatever it is,

01:46:10.560 | it's the social norms that we're thrown into.

01:46:12.960 | We didn't choose them, they were given to us.

01:46:15.120 | And that's the ground.

01:46:16.320 | That is what makes it possible

01:46:18.000 | for anything to be intelligible at all.

01:46:20.160 | If we lived outside of communities,

01:46:22.180 | if we lived in a world where there were no social norms

01:46:25.120 | at all, nothing would mean anything.

01:46:27.960 | Nothing would have any significance.

01:46:29.680 | Nothing would be regular in the way

01:46:31.840 | that things need to be regular

01:46:33.600 | in order for there to be departures

01:46:35.520 | or manifestations of that regularity.

01:46:38.800 | So community norms are crucial,

01:46:43.040 | but they're also always updating.

01:46:44.840 | We have some responsibility for what they are

01:46:50.760 | and the way in which they're updating themselves.

01:46:53.840 | And yet we didn't ever choose it to be that way.

01:46:57.200 | So those norms are somehow giving significance to us

01:47:02.200 | in a way that we're implicated in,

01:47:05.800 | we have some relation to.

01:47:07.960 | And all that gets covered over

01:47:09.760 | if you think of us as efficient resources to be optimized.

01:47:13.040 | Is that a conflicting view

01:47:14.880 | that we are resources to be optimized?

01:47:18.920 | Is that somehow deeply conflicting

01:47:21.440 | with the fact that there's a ground that we stand on?

01:47:23.880 | Absolutely.

01:47:24.700 | So what Heidegger thinks is that this is the,

01:47:27.600 | he calls this the supreme danger of the technological age

01:47:31.280 | is that without ever having chosen it,

01:47:33.640 | without ever having decided it,

01:47:35.640 | this is the way we understand what it is to be us.

01:47:39.040 | But he thinks that it's also, he says,

01:47:43.000 | quoting Hölderlin, this 18th century German poet,

01:47:46.640 | he says, "In the supreme danger

01:47:49.280 | "lies the saving possibility."

01:47:51.160 | So what does that mean?

01:47:52.920 | It means that this is the understanding

01:47:56.120 | that we've been thrown into, that we've been given.

01:47:58.240 | It's the gift that was given to us.

01:48:00.420 | It's supremely dangerous.

01:48:01.760 | If we let ourselves live that way,

01:48:04.400 | we'll destroy ourselves.

01:48:06.280 | But it's also the saving possibility

01:48:08.680 | because if we recognize that we never chose that,

01:48:13.680 | that it was given to us,

01:48:17.320 | but also we were implicated in its being given

01:48:19.680 | and we could find a way to supersede it,

01:48:22.760 | that it's the ground, but it's also updatable.

01:48:26.200 | He calls the ground the groundless ground.

01:48:28.920 | It's not like an entity, which is there,

01:48:32.480 | solid, stable, like God, who's eternal and non-changing.

01:48:37.480 | It's always updating itself.

01:48:39.640 | And we're always involved in its being updated.

01:48:42.840 | But we're only involved in it in the right way

01:48:45.500 | if we listen, like Miles Davis.

01:48:48.220 | So optimization is not a good way to live life.

01:48:54.280 | If you thought that it was obviously clear

01:48:58.980 | that that was the relevant value,

01:49:02.020 | so obviously clear that it never even occurred to you

01:49:04.240 | to ask whether it was right to think that,

01:49:07.080 | then you would be in danger.

01:49:08.800 | Yeah. - Got it.

01:49:09.920 | So yeah, there is some in this modern technological age

01:49:13.960 | in the full meaning of the word technology

01:49:16.280 | that's updated to actual modern age

01:49:18.520 | with a lot more technology going on.

01:49:22.040 | It does feel like colleagues of mine in the tech space

01:49:26.860 | actually are somehow drawn to that optimization

01:49:30.960 | as if that's going to save us,

01:49:33.240 | as if the thing that truly weighs us down

01:49:35.980 | is the inefficiencies.

01:49:39.000 | - Exactly.

01:49:39.840 | And I think if you think about other contexts,

01:49:42.980 | like what are the moments when,

01:49:45.040 | I mean, we're unique in this respect.

01:49:47.480 | This period in history is unlike any previous period.

01:49:50.680 | No, nobody ever felt that way, right?

01:49:52.940 | But think about, but it's also true that nobody,

01:49:55.280 | no previous period in history was nihilistic.

01:49:58.420 | So our condition is tied up.

01:50:00.040 | That sort of thing is meant to be a response

01:50:03.320 | to the felt lack of a ground.

01:50:05.520 | And so no previous epoch in history felt that way.

01:50:10.520 | They didn't have our problem.

01:50:13.240 | But think, so it was much more natural to them

01:50:17.240 | to experience moments in ways that feel unachievable for us,

01:50:22.240 | what we were calling moments of aliveness before.

01:50:25.980 | Think about the context in which they felt them.

01:50:28.600 | They weren't efficient, optimized contexts.

01:50:31.760 | Think about the Greeks.

01:50:33.760 | If you ever read Homer, it is a bizarre world back there.

01:50:37.480 | But one of the things that's bizarre

01:50:39.920 | is that they're so unmotivated by efficiency and optimizing

01:50:44.920 | that the only thing that seems to run through

01:50:50.100 | all of the different Greek cultures is the idea

01:50:53.440 | that if some stranger comes by,

01:50:56.700 | you better take care of them

01:50:59.420 | because Zeus is the God of strangers

01:51:03.600 | and Zeus will be angry.

01:51:04.680 | That's what they say, right?

01:51:05.800 | But how does it manifest itself?

01:51:08.220 | Odysseus, he's trying to get home

01:51:09.780 | and he gets shipwrecked on an island.

01:51:12.020 | And he's trying to figure out,

01:51:14.820 | he's been at sea for 10 days.

01:51:16.660 | He's starving, he's bedraggled.

01:51:18.600 | And he sees now Sissa, the princess who's beautiful.

01:51:23.240 | And he's like, boy, I better, I don't know,

01:51:25.540 | get some clothes or something.

01:51:28.280 | I don't want them to beat me up and kill me.

01:51:30.880 | And so she takes him to the palace.

01:51:34.520 | They have three days of banquets and festivals

01:51:37.600 | before they even ask his name.

01:51:39.380 | It's like, here's a stranger.

01:51:43.200 | Our job is to celebrate the presence of a stranger

01:51:47.000 | because this is where significance lies.

01:51:49.880 | Now, we don't have to feel that way,

01:51:52.120 | but the idea that that's one of the places

01:51:54.060 | where significance could lie is pretty strongly at odds

01:51:57.420 | with the idea that our salvation is gonna come

01:52:00.080 | from optimization and efficiency.

01:52:01.840 | Now, maybe something about the way we live our lives

01:52:04.720 | will have that integrated into it.

01:52:06.840 | But it's at odds with other moments.

01:52:12.040 | - Let me ask you a question about Hubert "Bert" Dreyfus.

01:52:16.520 | He is a friend, a colleague, a mentor of yours,

01:52:21.320 | unfortunately no longer with us.

01:52:24.000 | You wrote with him the book titled,

01:52:26.660 | "All Things Shining, Reading the Western Classics

01:52:30.480 | to Find Meaning in a Secular Age."

01:52:33.680 | First, can you maybe speak about who that man was,

01:52:37.920 | what you learned from him?

01:52:39.880 | And then we can maybe ask,

01:52:41.980 | how do we find through the classics

01:52:44.900 | meaning in a secular age?

01:52:46.580 | - Okay.

01:52:47.480 | So Bert Dreyfus was a very important philosopher

01:52:54.340 | of the late 20th, early 21st century.

01:52:58.220 | He died in 2017, about a little over four years ago.

01:53:03.160 | He was my teacher.

01:53:04.060 | I met him in 1989 when I went away to graduate school

01:53:08.380 | in Berkeley, that's where he taught.

01:53:10.620 | He plays an interesting and important role

01:53:14.220 | in the history of philosophy in America

01:53:16.300 | because in a period when most philosophers in America

01:53:23.220 | and in the English speaking world

01:53:25.780 | were not taking seriously 20th century

01:53:28.380 | French and German philosophy, he was.

01:53:30.740 | And he was really probably the most important

01:53:34.660 | English speaking interpreter of Heidegger,

01:53:37.100 | the German philosopher that we're talking about,

01:53:39.620 | we've been talking about.

01:53:41.060 | He was an incredible teacher.

01:53:44.500 | A lot of his influence came through his teaching.

01:53:47.260 | And one of the amazing things about him as a teacher

01:53:52.620 | was his sort of mix of intellectual humility

01:53:57.620 | with sort of deep insightful authority.

01:54:04.980 | And he would stand up in front of a class of 300 students,

01:54:09.580 | he taught huge classes 'cause people love to go see him

01:54:13.100 | and I taught for him for many years,

01:54:14.980 | and say, "I've been reading this text for 40 years,

01:54:20.220 | "but the question you asked is one I've never asked."

01:54:23.180 | And it would be true.

01:54:24.660 | He would find in what people said

01:54:29.660 | things that were surprising and new to him.

01:54:31.980 | And that's humility actually.

01:54:33.540 | That is.

01:54:34.500 | Listening to the world.

01:54:36.020 | Absolutely, absolutely.

01:54:38.180 | He was always ready to be surprised

01:54:41.260 | by something that someone said.

01:54:43.940 | And there's something astonishing about that.

01:54:46.620 | So his influence was for people who didn't know him

01:54:50.780 | through his interpretations of these texts,

01:54:52.980 | he wrote about a huge range of stuff.

01:54:55.060 | But for people who did know him, it was through his presence.

01:54:57.740 | It was through the way he carried himself in his life.

01:55:01.860 | And so in any case, that's who he was.

01:55:05.700 | I graduated after many years as a graduate student.

01:55:10.540 | I didn't start in philosophy, I started in math,

01:55:12.580 | math and computer science, actually.

01:55:14.340 | And then I did a lot of work in computational neuroscience

01:55:16.580 | for a few years.

01:55:18.180 | That's a fascinating journey.

01:55:19.460 | We'll get to it through our friendly conversation

01:55:22.860 | about artificial intelligence, I'm sure.

01:55:25.940 | 'Cause you're basically fascinated

01:55:28.580 | with the philosophy of mind, of the human mind,

01:55:31.900 | but rooted in a curiosity of mind through the,

01:55:36.180 | it's artificial, through the engineering of mind.

01:55:39.620 | Yeah, yeah, that's right.

01:55:41.300 | So Bert, I mean, the reason I was attracted to him actually

01:55:44.780 | is because of his, to begin with,

01:55:48.420 | was because of his criticisms of what was called

01:55:50.700 | traditional symbolic AI in the '70s and '80s.

01:55:54.460 | So I came to Berkeley as a graduate student

01:55:57.340 | who'd done a lot of math and a lot of computer science,

01:55:59.380 | a lot of computational neuroscience.

01:56:00.940 | I noticed that you had, you interview a lot of people

01:56:05.940 | in this world.

01:56:07.180 | And I had a teacher at Brown as an undergraduate,

01:56:11.420 | Jim Anderson, who wrote with Jeff Hinton,

01:56:13.900 | a big book on neural networks.

01:56:16.100 | So I was interested in that,

01:56:19.140 | not so interested in traditional AI,

01:56:22.060 | like sort of LISP programmings,

01:56:24.260 | things that went on in the '80s,

01:56:26.140 | because it felt sort of,

01:56:29.220 | when you made a system do something,

01:56:31.180 | all of a sudden it was an interesting thing to have done.

01:56:34.020 | The fact that you'd solved the problem

01:56:36.740 | then made it clear that the problem

01:56:37.940 | wasn't an interesting one to solve.

01:56:39.660 | That's right.

01:56:40.620 | And I had that experience and Bert had criticisms

01:56:44.100 | of symbolic AI, what he called good old fashioned AI,

01:56:48.620 | go-fi.

01:56:49.460 | And I was attracted to those criticisms

01:56:52.820 | because it felt to me that there was something lacking

01:56:56.940 | in that project.

01:56:58.780 | And I didn't know what it was.

01:57:00.380 | I just felt its absence.

01:57:02.980 | And then I learned that all his arguments

01:57:07.580 | came from his reading of this phenomenological

01:57:10.820 | and existential tradition.

01:57:12.460 | And so I had to try to figure out

01:57:14.100 | what those folks were saying.

01:57:15.140 | And it was a long road, let me tell you.

01:57:17.100 | It took me a long time,

01:57:19.020 | but it was because of Bert that I was able to do that.

01:57:21.540 | So I own that huge debt of gratitude.

01:57:23.860 | And eventually we went on to write a book together,

01:57:26.140 | which was a great experience.

01:57:28.180 | And yes, we published "All Things Shining" in 2011.

01:57:31.700 | And that's a book that I definitely

01:57:34.060 | would not have had the chutzpah to try to write

01:57:37.500 | if it weren't for Bert,

01:57:38.540 | because it was really about great literature

01:57:42.620 | in the history of the West,

01:57:43.780 | from Homer and Virgil and Dante to Melville.

01:57:47.660 | There's a huge chapter on Melville,

01:57:49.580 | a big chapter on David Foster Wallace,

01:57:52.500 | who Bert didn't care about at all,

01:57:54.060 | but I was fascinated by.

01:57:56.060 | And so learning to think that way

01:57:58.740 | while writing that book with him

01:58:00.620 | was an amazing experience.

01:58:04.220 | - So I have to admit,

01:58:06.580 | it's one of my failings in life,

01:58:08.540 | one of many failings is I've never gotten through "Moby Dick"

01:58:11.820 | or any of Melville's works.

01:58:15.180 | So maybe can you comment on,

01:58:17.420 | before we talk about David Foster Wallace,

01:58:20.140 | who I have gotten through,

01:58:21.660 | what are some of the sources of meaning in these classics?

01:58:28.300 | - Good, so "Moby Dick" I think

01:58:30.700 | is the other great novel of the 19th century.

01:58:33.780 | So the brothers Karamazov and Moby Dick,

01:58:36.180 | and they're diametrically opposed,

01:58:38.180 | which is one of the really interesting things.

01:58:40.180 | So Dostoevsky, the brothers Karamazov,

01:58:42.460 | is a kind of existential interpretation

01:58:46.380 | of Russian Orthodox Christianity.

01:58:48.540 | How do you live that way and find joy in your existence?

01:58:52.020 | "Moby Dick" is not at all about Christianity.

01:58:55.300 | It's about, it sort of starts with the observation

01:58:59.380 | that the form of Christianity

01:59:02.780 | that Ishmael is familiar with is broken.

01:59:07.780 | It's not gonna work in his living his life.

01:59:11.260 | He has to leave it.

01:59:12.620 | He has to go to sea in order to find what needs to happen.

01:59:17.620 | - And Ishmael is the boating captain,

01:59:20.780 | the whaling boat captain.

01:59:23.700 | - So he's not the captain, that's Ahab.

01:59:26.020 | Ahab is the captain.

01:59:27.020 | Yeah, right, let me back up.

01:59:28.380 | The famous opening line to the book is, "Call me Ishmael."

01:59:32.020 | And Ishmael is the main character in the book.

01:59:35.420 | He's a nobody.

01:59:36.780 | He's you and me.

01:59:37.780 | He's the everyday guy.

01:59:39.260 | He's like a nobody on the ship.

01:59:41.140 | He's like, not the lowest, but certainly not the highest.

01:59:44.900 | He's right in the middle.

01:59:46.500 | And he's named Ishmael, which is interesting

01:59:50.020 | 'cause Ishmael is the illegitimate son of Abraham

01:59:53.460 | in the Old Testament.

01:59:55.340 | He is the, I think if I have it right,

01:59:58.820 | again, someone will correct me.

02:00:00.420 | (Luke laughs)

02:00:01.260 | I think he's the one that Islam traces its genesis to.

02:00:06.260 | And so Islam is an Abrahamic religion

02:00:12.700 | like Judaism and Christianity,

02:00:14.780 | but Judaism and Christianity trace their lineage

02:00:17.460 | through Isaac, the quote unquote legitimate son of Abraham,

02:00:21.820 | and Ishmael is the other son of Abraham

02:00:24.660 | who he had with a girlfriend.

02:00:28.060 | And so he's clearly outside of Christianity in some way.

02:00:32.860 | He's named after the non-Christian sort of son of Abraham.

02:00:37.740 | And the book starts out with this, what does he call it?

02:00:43.740 | Something like a dark and misty November mood.

02:00:48.060 | (both laugh)

02:00:49.900 | He's walking along the street and he's overcome by his,

02:00:53.580 | I can't remember what the word is, but his hypos.

02:00:56.340 | That's what he calls them.

02:00:57.700 | He's in a mood, he's depressed, he's down,

02:01:01.380 | things are not going well, and that's where he starts.

02:01:04.700 | And he signs up to go on this whaling voyage

02:01:09.380 | with this captain, Ahab, who is this incredibly charismatic,

02:01:14.380 | deeply disturbing character who is a captain

02:01:20.380 | who's got lots of history and wants to go whaling,

02:01:24.060 | wants to get whales.

02:01:25.780 | That's what they do, they harpoon these whales

02:01:27.820 | and bring them back and sell the blubber

02:01:29.460 | and the oil and so on.

02:01:30.860 | So he's kind of rich and he's famous and he's powerful.

02:01:35.860 | He's an authority figure.

02:01:37.620 | And he is megalomaniacally obsessed

02:01:41.380 | with getting one particular whale,

02:01:43.340 | which is called Moby Dick.

02:01:45.020 | And Moby Dick is like the largest, the whitest,

02:01:47.980 | the sort of most terrifying of all the whales.

02:01:51.020 | And Ahab wants to get him

02:01:52.620 | 'cause a number of years earlier,

02:01:55.580 | he had an encounter with Moby Dick

02:01:57.500 | where Moby Dick bit off his leg and he survived,

02:02:02.500 | but he had this deeply religious experience

02:02:06.540 | in the wake of it.

02:02:08.180 | And he needed to find out what the meaning of that was.

02:02:11.540 | Like, what is the meaning of my suffering?

02:02:14.260 | Who am I such that the world and Moby Dick,

02:02:17.700 | this Leviathan at the center of it,

02:02:20.260 | should treat me this way?

02:02:22.500 | And so his task is not just to go whaling,

02:02:25.620 | it's to figure out the meaning of the universe

02:02:27.940 | through going whaling and having a confrontation

02:02:32.380 | with his tormentor, this whale, Moby Dick.

02:02:36.060 | And the confrontation is so weird

02:02:37.860 | because Melville points out that whales,

02:02:40.700 | their faces are so huge, their foreheads are so huge,

02:02:45.700 | and their eyes are on the side of them

02:02:49.260 | that you can never actually look them in the eye.

02:02:52.340 | And it's kind of a metaphor for God.

02:02:54.820 | Like, you can't ever look God in the face.

02:02:57.580 | That's the sort of traditional thing to say about God.

02:03:00.060 | You can't find the ultimate meaning of the universe

02:03:02.820 | by looking God in the face.

02:03:04.460 | But Ahab wants to.

02:03:07.380 | He says he's got a pasteboard mask of a face,

02:03:10.940 | but I'll strike through the mask and find out what's behind.

02:03:15.100 | And so Ishmael is sort of caught up in this thing

02:03:18.380 | and he's like going whaling 'cause he's in a bad mood.

02:03:21.860 | And maybe this will make things better.

02:03:23.740 | And he makes friends with this guy, Queequeg.

02:03:27.940 | And Queequeg is a pagan.

02:03:30.460 | He's from an island in the South Pacific.

02:03:33.100 | And he's got tattoos all over his body, head to toe.

02:03:38.100 | He's party colored, like every different color,

02:03:42.300 | it says, Ishmael, is these tattoos.

02:03:45.300 | And they are the writing on his body, he says,

02:03:51.340 | of the immutable mysteries of the universe

02:03:54.860 | as understood through his culture.

02:03:56.620 | And so somehow Queequeg is this character

02:04:02.260 | who is like not Christian at all.

02:04:05.000 | And he's powerful in a very different way than Ahab is.

02:04:09.260 | He's supposed to be the king.

02:04:10.740 | He's the son of the king.

02:04:11.860 | And probably his father's died by now.

02:04:13.860 | And if he went home, he'd be the king.

02:04:15.780 | But he's off on a voyage too,

02:04:17.420 | trying to understand who he is

02:04:18.740 | before he goes back and leads his people.

02:04:20.900 | And he's a harpooner, the bravest of the people on the ship.

02:04:24.940 | And he's got the mystery of the universe tattooed

02:04:28.780 | on his body, but nobody can understand it.

02:04:32.220 | And it's through his relation with Queequeg

02:04:36.060 | that Ishmael comes to get a different understanding

02:04:39.360 | of what we might be about.

02:04:40.660 | So that's Moby Dick, in a nutshell.

02:04:43.740 | - And connected to a book I have read,

02:04:47.940 | which is funny, there's probably echoes

02:04:50.420 | that represent the 20th century now

02:04:53.220 | in "Old Man and the Sea" by Hemingway

02:04:55.940 | that also has similar, I guess, themes,

02:05:01.780 | but more personal, more focused on the,

02:05:06.820 | I mean, I guess it's less about God.

02:05:09.020 | It's almost more like the existentialist version

02:05:11.660 | of Moby Dick.

02:05:12.820 | - Yeah, yeah.

02:05:13.660 | - And hence shorter.

02:05:14.860 | - A lot shorter, yeah.

02:05:15.820 | Well, Hemingway was brilliant that way.

02:05:18.020 | - Yeah.

02:05:19.260 | - But do you see echoes,

02:05:20.340 | and do you find "Old Man and the Sea" interesting?

02:05:23.820 | - It's been since ninth grade that I read

02:05:25.780 | "Old Man and the Sea" even longer ago

02:05:28.340 | than "The Fountainhead."

02:05:29.860 | So I didn't know we were gonna go there.

02:05:31.740 | I mean, I find Hemingway interesting,

02:05:33.380 | but Hemingway, my general sort of picture of him

02:05:37.440 | is that we have to confront the dangers

02:05:42.440 | and the difficulties of our life.

02:05:44.340 | We have to develop in ourselves

02:05:46.180 | a certain kind of courage and manliness.

02:05:48.260 | And I think there's something interesting about that.

02:05:50.500 | He's for risk in a certain way.

02:05:53.940 | And I think that's important.

02:05:55.780 | But I do, now I don't have any right to say this

02:06:00.620 | since it's been so long since I read it.

02:06:02.860 | I do feel like there's,

02:06:05.380 | I don't remember a sense for quite the tragedy of it.

02:06:11.180 | Maybe there is.

02:06:12.860 | Is it a melancholy novel?

02:06:14.260 | I don't even remember.

02:06:15.380 | - No, it's, I mean, it has a sense

02:06:18.300 | like "The Stranger" by Camus.

02:06:20.540 | It has a sense of like, this is how life is.

02:06:24.900 | And it like, it has more about old age

02:06:27.940 | and that you're not quite the man you used to be feeling

02:06:32.940 | of like, this is how time passes.

02:06:36.620 | And then the passing of time and how you get old

02:06:40.260 | and you get older, and this is one last fish.

02:06:43.900 | It's less about this is the fish.

02:06:46.420 | It's more like, this is one last fish.

02:06:48.860 | Like, and asking, who was I?

02:06:53.420 | Who was I as a man, as a human being in this world?

02:06:56.820 | And this one fish helps you ask that question fully.

02:07:00.140 | - Wonderful.

02:07:01.420 | But it's one fish, which is just sort of

02:07:04.340 | all the other fish too, right?

02:07:06.220 | And that is a big difference because for Ahab,

02:07:11.220 | no other fish will do than Moby Dick.

02:07:13.460 | It's gotta be the biggest, the most powerful,

02:07:16.260 | the most tormenting.

02:07:18.060 | It's gotta be the one that you've got history with

02:07:20.380 | that has defiled you.

02:07:22.500 | And it's a raucous ride, Moby Dick.

02:07:27.020 | - Yeah.

02:07:28.020 | What about David Foster Wallace?

02:07:29.900 | So why is he important to you in the search of meaning

02:07:34.500 | in a secular age?

02:07:35.980 | - Good, so I'll just, just to finish the Moby Dick thing,

02:07:39.700 | I think what's interesting about Melville

02:07:42.020 | is that he thinks our salvation comes

02:07:44.780 | not if we get in the right relation

02:07:46.340 | to monotheism or Christianity,

02:07:48.140 | but if we get in the right relation to polytheism,

02:07:51.300 | to the idea that there's not a unity to our existence,

02:07:54.860 | but there are lots of little meanings

02:07:56.980 | and they don't cohere.

02:07:58.700 | Sometimes, you know, like in Homer,

02:08:03.540 | sometimes you're in love.

02:08:05.420 | Helen's in love with Paris and they do crazy things.

02:08:09.180 | They go off and run away and the Trojan War begins.

02:08:12.220 | And sometimes you're in a battle fury.

02:08:14.860 | Love is Aphrodite's realm and the battle fury,

02:08:17.820 | that's Ares' realm.

02:08:19.060 | And that's a totally different world.

02:08:20.580 | And they're not even, I mean, they're related.

02:08:22.820 | There's a kind of family resemblance, but not much.

02:08:25.460 | Mostly, you're just in different

02:08:28.180 | sort of local meaningful worlds.

02:08:30.180 | And Melville seems to think that that's a thing

02:08:34.100 | that we could aim to bring back.

02:08:36.420 | He says, we have to lure back the merry May Day gods of old

02:08:40.660 | and lovingly enthrone them in the now egotistical sky,

02:08:45.980 | the now unhaunted hill.

02:08:47.860 | That's what, we live in this world where hills

02:08:49.980 | aren't haunted with significance anymore.

02:08:52.340 | And the sky is just a bunch of stuff

02:08:54.700 | that we're studying with physics and astrophysics and stuff,

02:08:58.460 | but they used to be awe-inspiring.

02:09:01.660 | And we have to figure out how to get in that relation

02:09:04.220 | to them, but not by trying to give a unity to our existence

02:09:07.660 | through developing habits and practices

02:09:10.260 | that get written on our body.

02:09:12.260 | And so his is about the end of Judeo-Christianity

02:09:16.140 | and the sort of Roman appropriation of it.

02:09:19.780 | In Wallace, one of the things I think is so interesting

02:09:23.180 | about him is that I think he is a great observer

02:09:27.060 | of the contemporary world.

02:09:29.420 | And he's a very funny writer.

02:09:31.460 | He's really funny.

02:09:33.020 | But he's a great observer of the contemporary world.

02:09:35.540 | And what he thought was at the core

02:09:38.580 | of the contemporary world was this constant temptation

02:09:42.340 | to diversion through entertainment.

02:09:44.940 | That's a different story than Heidegger's story

02:09:47.180 | about efficiency and optimization,

02:09:49.780 | but it's the other side of it.

02:09:51.340 | What is this temptation sort of diverting us from?

02:09:55.660 | The ability to be more efficient.

02:09:58.500 | So you're tempted to go watch some stupid film

02:10:03.380 | or television show or something that's dumb

02:10:06.220 | and not really very interesting,

02:10:08.220 | but you read that temptation as a temptation

02:10:10.940 | precisely in virtue of it's taking you away

02:10:13.080 | from your optimizing your existence.

02:10:15.900 | And so I think they're two sides of the same coin.

02:10:18.100 | I think he's brilliant at describing it.

02:10:20.420 | I think he thought it was a desperate position to be in,

02:10:23.860 | that it was something that we needed to confront

02:10:27.780 | and find a way out of.

02:10:29.980 | And his characters are trying to do that.

02:10:32.940 | And I think there's two different David Foster Wallace's.

02:10:36.700 | One, I mean, David Foster Wallace committed suicide.

02:10:40.700 | And when I, and it's very sad.

02:10:42.700 | And he clearly did have sort of,

02:10:47.060 | there was a physiological basis to his condition.

02:10:49.620 | He knew it.

02:10:50.460 | He was treating it for decades with medication.

02:10:53.300 | He had electroshock therapy a number of times.

02:10:56.780 | It's just very, very sad story.

02:11:00.100 | When I decided that we were gonna write

02:11:01.660 | about David Foster Wallace,

02:11:03.780 | the first thing I was worried about is,

02:11:06.420 | can you, like obviously a motivating factor,

02:11:11.420 | maybe the motivating factor in his committing suicide

02:11:14.280 | was his physiological condition.

02:11:16.460 | But there was a question.

02:11:21.020 | Could you think, I mean, he's obsessed with the condition,

02:11:24.460 | with what we need to do to achieve our salvation,

02:11:28.020 | to live well, to make our lives worth living.

02:11:31.940 | And he clearly in the end felt like he couldn't do that.

02:11:36.940 | So in addition to the physiological thing,

02:11:39.260 | which probably most of it,

02:11:41.380 | the question for me was, could you find in his writing

02:11:45.380 | what his, what he was identifying

02:11:48.940 | as the thing we needed to be doing

02:11:51.540 | that he nevertheless felt we couldn't be doing?

02:11:54.660 | And he talks as if that's the difficulty for him.

02:11:58.720 | So that's one side of him.

02:12:01.660 | And I did wanna find that.

02:12:03.900 | I think there's another side of him that's very different,

02:12:06.100 | but you were gonna ask.

02:12:06.980 | No, please, what's the other side?

02:12:08.900 | I mean, what I write about in the chapter mostly

02:12:13.820 | is what I think he's got as our saving possibility.

02:12:20.940 | He thinks our saving possibility,

02:12:22.900 | he says this in a graduation speech that he gave to Kenyon,

02:12:26.000 | is that we have the freedom to interpret situations

02:12:31.860 | however we like.

02:12:33.500 | So what's the problem case for him?

02:12:36.380 | He says, look, the problem case, we have it all the time.

02:12:40.380 | You get pissed off at the world.

02:12:42.600 | Some big SUV cuts you off on the highway

02:12:47.660 | and you're pissed off.

02:12:49.180 | And you might express your anger

02:12:51.900 | with one finger or another, right?

02:12:54.740 | Directed at that person.

02:12:56.420 | And he says, but actually,

02:12:58.660 | you're being pissed off as the result

02:13:02.820 | of your having made an assumption.

02:13:05.100 | And the assumption is that that action was directed at you.

02:13:08.580 | Like the assumption is that

02:13:10.260 | you're the center of the universe

02:13:12.580 | and you shouldn't assume that.

02:13:14.860 | And the way to talk yourself out of it, he says,

02:13:18.580 | is to recognize the possibility

02:13:21.820 | that maybe that wasn't an action directed at you.

02:13:25.060 | Like maybe that guy is racing to the hospital

02:13:29.580 | to take care of his dying spouse

02:13:33.700 | who's been there suffering from cancer.

02:13:36.900 | Or maybe he's on the way to pick up a sick child.

02:13:41.580 | Or maybe he's, and it's not an action directed,

02:13:44.860 | that was your assumption,

02:13:46.540 | not something that was inherent in the situation.

02:13:49.220 | And I think there's something interesting about that.

02:13:52.220 | I think there's something right about that.

02:13:54.940 | At the same time, I don't think,

02:13:58.380 | he speaks as if we can just spin out these stories

02:14:03.380 | and whether they're true or not doesn't matter.

02:14:06.860 | What matters is that they free us from this assumption.

02:14:10.540 | Yes.

02:14:11.380 | And I think they only free us from this assumption

02:14:13.400 | if they're true.

02:14:14.240 | (laughs)

02:14:15.940 | Sometimes the guy really did direct it at you

02:14:18.420 | and that's part of the situation.

02:14:20.060 | And you can't pretend that it's not part of the situation.

02:14:23.200 | You have to find the right way

02:14:24.100 | of dealing with that situation.

02:14:25.420 | So you have to listen to what's actually happening

02:14:29.160 | and then you have to figure out how to make it right.

02:14:32.020 | And I think he thinks that we have too much freedom.

02:14:35.100 | He thinks that you don't have to listen to the situation.

02:14:37.620 | You can just tell whatever story you like about it.

02:14:40.860 | And I think that's actually too tough.

02:14:43.820 | I don't think we have that kind of freedom.

02:14:46.660 | And he writes these sort of incredibly moving letters

02:14:50.360 | when he's trying to write "The Pale King,"

02:14:52.460 | which is the unfinished novel

02:14:55.340 | that really sort of drove him to distraction.

02:14:58.420 | At the center of the novel is this character

02:15:01.980 | who, or one of the characters at the center of the novel

02:15:04.420 | is a guy who's doing the most boring thing

02:15:09.380 | you could possibly imagine.

02:15:11.260 | He is an IRS tax examiner.

02:15:14.180 | He's going over other people's tax returns,

02:15:17.540 | trying to figure out whether they followed the rules or not.

02:15:20.540 | And like just the idea of doing that for eight hours a day

02:15:24.140 | is just terrifying.

02:15:26.880 | And he puts this guy in a enormous warehouse

02:15:31.740 | that extends for miles,

02:15:33.400 | where person after person after person

02:15:36.300 | is in rows of desks, sort of nameless,

02:15:39.900 | each of them doing this task.

02:15:42.440 | So he's in nowhere doing nothing,

02:15:45.720 | and it's gotta be intensely boring.

02:15:47.980 | And now the main character's trying to teach himself

02:15:51.740 | to do that.

02:15:53.400 | And the question is, how do you put up with the boredom?

02:15:56.420 | How do you put up with this onslaught of meaninglessness?

02:16:01.020 | And the main character is able to confront that condition

02:16:07.500 | with such bliss that he literally levitates from happiness

02:16:12.500 | while he's going over other people's tax returns.

02:16:17.180 | And that's my metaphor for what I think

02:16:20.300 | Wallace must've imagined we have to try to aspire to.

02:16:23.400 | And I think that's unlivable.

02:16:25.820 | I think that's not an ambition that we could achieve.

02:16:29.500 | I think there's something else we could achieve.

02:16:31.740 | And the other thing that we can achieve

02:16:34.060 | that I think is something that he also is onto,

02:16:38.340 | but doesn't write about as often,

02:16:40.780 | is something more like achieving peak moments of significance

02:16:45.780 | in a situation when something great happens.

02:16:50.820 | And he writes about this in an article about Roger Federer.

02:16:54.180 | He loved tennis.

02:16:55.740 | Are you a tennis lover?

02:16:57.580 | I'm not a lover of tennis,

02:16:58.780 | but I played tennis for 15 years and so on.

02:17:01.260 | I don't love it the way people love baseball, for example.

02:17:05.620 | I see the beauty in it, the artistry.

02:17:07.860 | I just liked it as a sport.

02:17:09.500 | Good, okay, well, I didn't play much tennis,

02:17:11.820 | but I hit a ball around every once in a while as a kid.

02:17:14.540 | And I always thought it was boring to watch.

02:17:17.500 | But reading David Foster Wallace on Roger Federer,

02:17:20.780 | you're like, wow, I've been missing something.

02:17:23.300 | And the article,

02:17:24.140 | which appeared in the New York Times Magazine,

02:17:25.860 | was called "Roger Federer as Religious Experience."

02:17:28.620 | Oh, wow, there you go.

02:17:30.820 | And he says, look, there's something astonishing

02:17:33.740 | about watching someone who's got a body like us.

02:17:37.900 | And having a body is a limitation.

02:17:40.460 | It's like the sight of sores and pains

02:17:44.220 | and agony and exhaustion.

02:17:46.740 | And it's the thing that dies in the end.

02:17:50.580 | And so it's what we have to confront.

02:17:53.940 | I mean, there's also joys that go along with having a body.

02:17:56.820 | Like if you didn't have a body, there'd be no sex.

02:17:58.740 | If you didn't have a body,

02:17:59.580 | there'd be no sort of physical excitement and so on.

02:18:03.660 | But somehow having a body is essentially a limitation.

02:18:08.660 | (laughing)

02:18:09.540 | That when you watch someone who's got one

02:18:11.820 | and is extraordinary at the way they use it,

02:18:14.860 | you can recognize how that limitation

02:18:17.420 | can be to some degree transcended.

02:18:20.380 | And that that's what we can get when we watch Federer

02:18:24.020 | or some other great athlete sort of doing these things

02:18:27.220 | that transcend the limitations of their bodies.

02:18:30.940 | And that that's the kind of peak experience

02:18:34.100 | that we're capable of that could be a kind of salvation.

02:18:37.940 | That's a very different story.

02:18:40.060 | And I think that's a livable story.

02:18:42.220 | And I don't know if it would have saved him,

02:18:45.380 | but I feel like I wish he'd developed

02:18:48.340 | that side of the story more.

02:18:50.780 | - Can we talk about, and first of all,

02:18:52.180 | let me just comment that I deeply appreciate

02:18:55.060 | that you said you were gonna say something.

02:18:59.180 | The fact that you're listening to me is amazing,

02:19:01.500 | like that you care about other humans.

02:19:03.220 | I really appreciate that.

02:19:05.700 | We should be in this way listening to the world.

02:19:08.100 | That's a meta comment about many of the things

02:19:12.780 | we're talking about.

02:19:13.940 | But you mentioned something about levitating

02:19:16.220 | and a task that is infinitely boring

02:19:19.580 | and contrasting that with essentially levitating

02:19:23.740 | on a task that is great,

02:19:26.380 | like the highest achievement of this physical limiting body

02:19:31.380 | in playing tennis.

02:19:33.300 | Now, I often say this,

02:19:34.860 | I don't know where I heard David Foster Wallace say this,

02:19:38.460 | but he said that the key to life is to be unboreable.

02:19:42.100 | That is the embodiment of this philosophy.

02:19:44.540 | And when people ask me for advice,

02:19:47.900 | like young students, you know,

02:19:50.740 | I don't find this interesting,

02:19:51.700 | I don't find this interesting.

02:19:52.580 | How do I find the thing I'm passionate for?

02:19:55.500 | This would be very interesting to explore

02:19:57.500 | because you kind of say that

02:19:59.220 | that may not be a realizable thing to do,

02:20:02.860 | which is to be unboreable.

02:20:04.220 | But my advice usually is life is amazing.

02:20:07.340 | Like you should be able to,

02:20:09.940 | you should strive to discover the joy,

02:20:13.380 | the levitation in everything.

02:20:17.220 | And the thing you get stuck on for a longer period of time,

02:20:21.380 | that might be the thing you should stick to,

02:20:23.380 | but everything should be full of joy.

02:20:26.460 | So that kind of cynicism of saying life is boring

02:20:31.460 | is a thing that will prevent you from discovering the thing

02:20:35.740 | that will give you deep meaning and joy.

02:20:38.340 | But you're saying being unboreable

02:20:42.140 | is not actionable for a human being.

02:20:45.580 | - So, okay, excellent question, deep question.

02:20:48.860 | And you might think, because of the title of the book

02:20:53.860 | that Bert and I wrote, "All Things Shining,"

02:20:57.660 | that I think all things are shining.

02:20:59.300 | (both laughing)

02:21:02.060 | But actually, I think it's an unachievable goal

02:21:06.220 | to be unboreable.

02:21:07.580 | I do believe that you're right,

02:21:10.340 | that a lot of times when people are bored with something,

02:21:14.380 | it's 'cause they haven't tried hard enough.

02:21:16.480 | And I do think quite a lot of what makes people bored

02:21:20.780 | with something is that they haven't paid attention

02:21:22.580 | well enough, and that they haven't listened,

02:21:25.380 | as you were saying.

02:21:26.700 | So I do think there's something to that.

02:21:30.220 | I think that's a deep insight.

02:21:32.300 | On the other hand, the perfection of that insight

02:21:36.740 | is that nothing is ever anything less than joyful.

02:21:42.260 | And I actually think that Dostoevsky and Melville both agree,

02:21:47.260 | but in very different ways,

02:21:50.880 | that life involves a wide range of moods,

02:21:55.880 | and that all of them are important.

02:21:59.680 | It involves grief.

02:22:01.360 | I think when someone dies, it's appropriate to grieve.

02:22:05.400 | And it's not, in the first instance, joyful.

02:22:09.640 | It's related to joy, because it makes the joys you feel

02:22:13.680 | when you feel them more intense.

02:22:17.280 | But it makes them more intense by putting you

02:22:20.760 | in the position of experiencing the opposite.

02:22:23.880 | And it's only because we're capable of a wide range

02:22:28.240 | of passionate responses to situations

02:22:31.660 | that I think the significances

02:22:33.820 | can be as meaningful as they are.

02:22:36.480 | So Melville, again, has this sort of interest.

02:22:40.080 | I mean, let's just say the guilt and the grief

02:22:43.760 | in the Brothers Karamazov.

02:22:45.480 | Alyosha loses his mentor, Father Zosima.

02:22:48.880 | He's grieving.

02:22:50.000 | It's super important that he's grieving.

02:22:52.520 | He has a religious conversion on the basis of grieving,

02:22:55.880 | where he sees the sort of deep sort of beauty

02:22:59.300 | of everything that is, but it comes through the grief,

02:23:02.280 | not by avoiding the grief.

02:23:04.360 | And Melville says something like,

02:23:06.880 | Ishmael says something like,

02:23:08.640 | he says, "I'm like a Catskill mountain eagle,"

02:23:11.280 | the Catskills mountains nearby, he says,

02:23:14.000 | "who's sort of flying high above the earth,

02:23:17.480 | "going over the peaks and down into the valleys.

02:23:20.540 | "I have these ups and these downs."

02:23:23.040 | But they're all invested with a kind of significance.

02:23:26.480 | They all happen at an enormously high height,

02:23:29.840 | 'cause it's through the mountains that I'm flying.

02:23:31.880 | And even when I'm down, it's a way of being up.

02:23:35.080 | But it's really down.

02:23:36.340 | It's just that it's a way of being up

02:23:38.720 | 'cause it makes the ups even upper.

02:23:40.760 | - Well, I guess then the perfectionism of that

02:23:43.440 | can be destructive.

02:23:44.720 | I mean, I tend to see, for example, grief,

02:23:50.520 | loss of love as part of love in that it's a celebration

02:23:55.520 | of the richness of feelings you had when you had the love.

02:24:01.980 | So it's all part of the same experience.

02:24:04.220 | But if you turn it into an optimization problem

02:24:07.300 | where everything can be unbearable,

02:24:09.820 | then that can in itself be destructive.

02:24:11.900 | - Yeah. - Yeah.

02:24:13.540 | I heard this interview with David Foster Wallace

02:24:16.540 | on the internet, where it's a video of him

02:24:20.380 | and there is a foreign sounding reporter

02:24:23.020 | asking him questions.

02:24:24.300 | There's an accent of some sort, German, I think,

02:24:27.740 | something like that.

02:24:28.820 | And I don't know, it just painted a picture

02:24:31.540 | of such a human person.

02:24:33.260 | We were talking about listening.

02:24:35.060 | The interviewer, if I may say,

02:24:37.020 | wasn't a very good one in the beginning.

02:24:41.340 | So she kind of walked in doing the usual journalistic things

02:24:45.260 | of just kind of generic questions

02:24:47.060 | and just kind of asking very basic questions.

02:24:50.700 | But he brought out something in her over time.

02:24:53.780 | And he was so sensitive and so sensitive to her

02:24:56.980 | and also sensitive to being a thinking

02:25:00.700 | and acting human in this world.

02:25:02.700 | That's just painted such a beautiful picture

02:25:04.580 | that people should go definitely check out.

02:25:07.020 | It made me really sad that we don't get this kind of picture

02:25:10.220 | of other thinkers, all of the ones we've been talking about.

02:25:15.620 | Just that almost this little accidental view

02:25:19.180 | of this human being.

02:25:20.740 | I don't know.

02:25:21.580 | It was a beautiful one and I guess there's not many

02:25:23.960 | like that, even of him.

02:25:25.700 | - Yeah, yeah.

02:25:26.920 | No, I think he was more than his writing ability,

02:25:31.920 | which was extraordinary.

02:25:34.020 | He had developed a style that was, I think,

02:25:35.860 | unlike anyone else's style.

02:25:38.260 | Was his sensitivity to other people

02:25:43.780 | and to sort of what he was there to pay attention to.

02:25:48.780 | In one of his essays, I think it's the one called

02:25:55.700 | an incredibly fun thing I'll never do again.

02:25:58.080 | I didn't know that one about cruise ships.

02:26:00.720 | I think he describes himself as this sort of roving eyeball

02:26:04.440 | that just sort of walks around the ship, noticing things.

02:26:09.440 | And he was incredibly good at that.

02:26:12.320 | But I also worry that that reflects something

02:26:18.160 | that you find in Ivan in the Brothers Karamazov.

02:26:21.400 | Ivan, I don't know if you remember this part,

02:26:23.720 | when he's away at school, at college, as a young boy,

02:26:27.420 | he makes money by going around town

02:26:32.420 | to where tragic events have occurred.

02:26:35.140 | Someone just got run over by a carriage

02:26:37.060 | or something just happened.

02:26:39.560 | And being the first one there, he always knows somehow

02:26:44.140 | where these things are gonna happen.

02:26:45.860 | And writing about it, giving this really good description

02:26:49.860 | and then signing it, "I witness."

02:26:53.020 | And it's as if Ivan's understanding of his life

02:26:58.020 | is that he was supposed to be a witness to it.

02:27:02.020 | He was supposed to see others but not get involved.

02:27:05.780 | He never is interested in trying to keep

02:27:08.020 | the bad things from happening.

02:27:09.340 | He just wants to report on them when he sees them.

02:27:12.420 | And I think that he's an incredibly isolated person,

02:27:16.420 | character, and it's his isolation from others,

02:27:21.140 | from the love of others, and his inability,

02:27:24.100 | his desire not to love others,

02:27:27.140 | 'cause that attaches him to someone,

02:27:29.580 | that I think is really at the ground of his condition.

02:27:34.260 | And I think that aim to be isolated,

02:27:37.460 | which many people have nowadays.

02:27:39.240 | I mean, you see it in "The Underground Man" too,

02:27:40.860 | just sort of taking yourself out of the world

02:27:44.140 | because you don't wanna have to take responsibility

02:27:48.420 | for being involved with others.

02:27:50.820 | I think that's a bad move.

02:27:52.380 | And I do worry that maybe,

02:27:55.380 | I mean, I never knew David Foster Wallace.

02:27:57.060 | I have no right to comment on his life.

02:28:00.940 | But he portrays himself in that one episode

02:28:05.680 | as a person who does that.

02:28:07.660 | And I think that's dangerous.

02:28:09.260 | Yeah, there's some sense in which being sensitive

02:28:11.340 | to the world, like I find myself,

02:28:12.860 | the source of joy for me is just being really sensitive

02:28:15.980 | to the world, to experience.

02:28:19.100 | There's some way, it's quite brilliant

02:28:21.460 | what you're saying that that could be isolating.

02:28:25.100 | It's like Darwin studying a new kind of species

02:28:30.100 | on an island, you don't want to interfere with it.

02:28:32.380 | You find it so beautiful that you don't want

02:28:34.120 | to interfere with its beauty.

02:28:35.620 | So there is some sense in which that isolates you.

02:28:41.740 | And then you find yourself deeply alone,

02:28:44.080 | away from the experiences that bring you joy.

02:28:48.380 | - Yeah.

02:28:49.220 | - And that could be destructive.

02:28:50.940 | It's fascinating how that works.

02:28:54.780 | And in his case, of course, some of it is just chemicals

02:28:59.780 | in his brain, but some of it is the path,

02:29:04.940 | his philosophy of life led him down.

02:29:09.060 | And that's the danger with Nietzsche too,

02:29:11.100 | in gazing into the abyss.

02:29:15.900 | - Your job is a difficult one,

02:29:17.820 | 'cause doing philosophy changes you.

02:29:21.420 | - Yeah.

02:29:22.620 | - And you may not know how it changes you

02:29:26.740 | until you're changed and you look in the mirror.

02:29:29.440 | You wrote a piece in MIT Tech Review

02:29:35.100 | saying that AI can't be an artist.

02:29:38.260 | Creativity is and always will be a human endeavor.

02:29:44.420 | You mentioned Bert and criticism of symbolic AI.

02:29:47.460 | Can you explain your view of criticizing the possible,

02:29:53.040 | the capacity for artistry and creativity

02:29:55.780 | in our robot friends?

02:29:58.820 | - Yeah, I can try.

02:30:00.940 | So to make the argument, you have to have in mind

02:30:09.860 | what counts as art, what counts as a creative artistic act.

02:30:14.860 | I take it that just doing something new isn't sufficient.

02:30:22.180 | I mean, we say that good art is original,

02:30:26.760 | but not everything that's never been done before

02:30:29.500 | is good art.

02:30:30.320 | So there has to be more than just doing something new.

02:30:35.960 | It has to be somehow doing something new

02:30:39.560 | in a way that speaks to the audience

02:30:43.420 | or speaks to some portion of the audience at least.

02:30:47.820 | It has to be doing something new in such a way

02:30:52.140 | that some people who see or interact with it

02:30:56.660 | can see themselves anew in it.

02:31:00.040 | So I think that art is inherently a creative act.

02:31:04.460 | Sorry, a kind of communicative act

02:31:08.720 | that it involves a relation with other people.

02:31:13.340 | So think about the conditions for that working.

02:31:18.340 | Someone, I talk in that article, I can't remember,

02:31:22.260 | something about new music.

02:31:23.380 | I think I don't talk about Stravinsky,

02:31:24.900 | but let's say Stravinsky.

02:31:26.420 | Stravinsky performs the "Rite of Spring"

02:31:31.860 | and there's riots.

02:31:34.740 | It is new and people hate it.

02:31:39.520 | People can't, it sounds like a cacophony.

02:31:42.340 | It sounds awful.

02:31:43.620 | It's written according to principles

02:31:45.980 | that are not like the principles of music composition

02:31:48.700 | that people are familiar with.

02:31:50.880 | So in some ways it's a failed communicative act.

02:31:53.760 | But as Nietzsche says about his own stuff,

02:31:58.060 | I mean, we now can recognize

02:32:00.620 | that it wasn't a failed communicative act.

02:32:03.300 | It just hadn't reached its time yet.

02:32:06.940 | And now that way of composing music is like,

02:32:13.460 | it's in Disney movies.

02:32:15.660 | It's so part of our musical palette

02:32:19.300 | that we don't have that response.

02:32:21.900 | It changed us.

02:32:23.660 | It changed the way we understand what counts as good music.

02:32:27.500 | So that's a deep communicative act.

02:32:29.620 | It didn't perform its communication in that opening moment,

02:32:34.620 | but it did ultimately establish a new understanding

02:32:40.260 | for all of us of what counts as good art.

02:32:42.300 | And that's the kind of deep communication

02:32:45.140 | that I think good art can do.

02:32:47.180 | It can change our understanding of ourselves

02:32:52.060 | and of what a good manifestation of something of ourselves

02:32:55.940 | in a certain domain is.

02:32:57.620 | - And you use the term socially embedded,

02:33:00.420 | that art is fundamentally socially embedded.

02:33:04.260 | And I really like that term

02:33:05.860 | because I see my love for artificial intelligence

02:33:10.260 | and the kind of system that we can bring to the world

02:33:12.460 | that could make for an interesting and more lively world

02:33:17.460 | and one that enriches human beings

02:33:19.860 | is one where the AI systems are deeply socially embedded.

02:33:24.060 | - Good, yeah.

02:33:26.060 | And that actually is in contrast

02:33:27.540 | to the way artificial intelligence

02:33:30.220 | have been talked about throughout its history

02:33:32.220 | and certainly now, both on the robotic side and the AI side,

02:33:35.460 | especially on the tech sector

02:33:38.580 | where the businesses around AI,

02:33:41.740 | they kind of want to create systems

02:33:45.220 | that are like servants to humans.

02:33:48.380 | And then humans do all the beautiful human messiness

02:33:52.740 | of where art would be part.

02:33:55.500 | I think that there is no reason

02:33:58.540 | why you can't integrate AI systems

02:34:01.580 | in the way you integrate new humans to the picture.

02:34:04.800 | There are just the full diversity and the flaws,

02:34:07.540 | all of that adds to the thing.

02:34:10.040 | Some people might say that AlphaZero

02:34:15.500 | is this system from DeepMind that was able to achieve,

02:34:22.260 | solve the game, it beat the best people in the world

02:34:24.180 | at the game of Go with no supervision from humans.

02:34:27.980 | But more interestingly to me, on the side of creativity,

02:34:30.780 | it was able to surprise a lot of grandmasters

02:34:34.380 | with the kind of moves they came up with.

02:34:36.580 | Now, to me, that's not the creativity,

02:34:40.380 | the magic that's socially embedded

02:34:42.180 | that we're talking about.

02:34:43.460 | That is merely revealing the limitations

02:34:47.760 | of humans to discover.

02:34:50.760 | It's like to solve a particular aspect of a math problem.

02:34:55.040 | I think creativity is not just even socially embedded,

02:35:00.940 | it's the way you're saying,

02:35:04.820 | is this part of the communicative act.

02:35:07.460 | It's the interactive, it's the dance with the culture.

02:35:11.140 | And so it has to be like for AlphaZero

02:35:15.220 | to be creative, truly creative,

02:35:17.780 | it would have to be integrated in a way

02:35:20.180 | where it has a Twitter account

02:35:22.200 | and it becomes aware of the impact

02:35:26.260 | it has on the other grandmasters

02:35:28.100 | with the moves that's coming up.

02:35:30.100 | And one of the fascinating things about AlphaZero,

02:35:33.440 | which I just love so much,

02:35:37.020 | is I don't know if you're familiar with chess.

02:35:39.020 | - I am, yeah.

02:35:39.860 | - Okay, so it does certain things

02:35:43.140 | that most chess players, even at the highest level,

02:35:45.880 | don't do, which is it sacrifices pieces,

02:35:49.260 | it gives pieces away,

02:35:50.820 | and then waits like 10 moves before it pays you back.

02:35:55.500 | So to me, that's beautiful.

02:35:57.800 | That's art if only AlphaZero understood

02:36:01.900 | the artistry of that,

02:36:03.360 | which is I'm going to mess with you psychologically

02:36:07.140 | because I'm going to do two things.

02:36:09.860 | One, make you feel overconfident that you're doing well,

02:36:14.280 | but actually also once you realize

02:36:16.360 | you are playing AlphaZero that is much better than you,

02:36:19.220 | you're going to feel really nervous about what's on the way.

02:36:22.420 | Like this is the calm before the storm.

02:36:24.540 | And that creates a beautiful psychological masterpiece

02:36:28.800 | of this chess game.

02:36:29.960 | If only AlphaZero was then messing with you

02:36:33.620 | additionally to that,

02:36:34.980 | like was cognizant of this doing that,

02:36:37.480 | then it becomes art.

02:36:38.940 | And then it's integrated into society in that way.

02:36:42.860 | And I believe it doesn't have to actually have

02:36:45.780 | an understanding of the world in the way that humans have.

02:36:50.780 | It can have a different one.

02:36:52.660 | It can be like a child is as clueless

02:36:55.620 | about so many aspects of the world and it's okay.

02:36:58.540 | And that's part of the magic of it.

02:37:00.720 | Just being flawed,

02:37:01.740 | being lacking understanding all interesting kinds of ways,

02:37:05.420 | but interacting.

02:37:06.620 | And so to me, it's possible to create art for AI,

02:37:10.660 | but exactly as you're saying

02:37:12.980 | in a deeply socially embedded way.

02:37:16.300 | - Good.

02:37:17.140 | Well, I think we agree,

02:37:18.780 | but let me just highlight the thing

02:37:20.980 | that makes me think that we agree.

02:37:23.560 | Which is that I think for people,

02:37:26.820 | for a community to allow themselves

02:37:30.900 | to recognize in a certain kind of creative act,

02:37:35.900 | I'm thinking of Stravinsky here,

02:37:37.780 | but we could think of a chess thing.

02:37:40.260 | To recognize in a certain kind of creative act,

02:37:43.300 | a new and admirable worthy way of thinking

02:37:47.380 | about what's significant in the situation.

02:37:50.020 | You have to believe that it wasn't random.

02:37:54.300 | You have to believe that Stravinsky wrote that way

02:37:58.720 | because he was receptive to what needed to be said now.

02:38:03.720 | And so you said,

02:38:06.420 | if only AlphaZero could do all this

02:38:11.420 | by virtue of recognizing

02:38:13.900 | that this was the thing that needed to be done,

02:38:16.420 | then it would be socially embedded in the right way.

02:38:19.580 | And I think I agree with that.

02:38:21.580 | First of all, it's possible to do in a constrained domain,

02:38:26.100 | a game playing domain, Go or chess.

02:38:29.100 | Go is more complicated than chess,

02:38:30.380 | but either one of them,

02:38:32.480 | because there really are only a finite range

02:38:34.900 | of possibilities if you make the game end

02:38:38.140 | at a certain point.

02:38:39.060 | It's a combinatorial problem in the end.

02:38:43.500 | Now, obviously, AlphaZero doesn't solve the problem

02:38:48.500 | in a combinatorial way.

02:38:50.220 | That would be sort of take too much energy.

02:38:53.100 | You couldn't do it.

02:38:54.140 | It sort of explodes the problem.

02:38:58.780 | So it does it in this other way that's interesting,

02:39:00.900 | this pattern recognition way, roughly.

02:39:03.420 | And in that context, it may well be

02:39:06.460 | that it can see having had lots and lots of experience

02:39:11.460 | in the training stuff against itself

02:39:14.580 | or against another version of itself.

02:39:17.020 | It can see that the sacrifice here

02:39:18.860 | is gonna pay dividends down the road.

02:39:20.960 | See, I put that in quotation marks.

02:39:25.140 | That's to say it's got a high weight to this move here

02:39:30.140 | as a result of experience in the past

02:39:33.060 | where that move down the line led to this improvement.

02:39:38.060 | So in that finite context, I think,

02:39:42.260 | you know, the game players can trust it.

02:39:44.780 | And they talk that way.

02:39:46.420 | That it's got a kind of authority.

02:39:48.320 | They say, I've read some people who said about AlphaZero

02:39:53.180 | when it played Go, it's like it's playing from the future.

02:39:58.420 | It's making these moves that are just outlandish.

02:40:03.420 | And there's a kind of brilliance to them

02:40:06.140 | that we can't really understand.

02:40:07.740 | We'll be catching up to it forever.

02:40:09.820 | I think in that context, like it's mapped the domain

02:40:13.580 | and the domain is mappable

02:40:15.020 | 'cause it's a combinatorial problem, roughly.

02:40:18.140 | But in something like music or art of a non-finite form,

02:40:26.420 | it feels to me like it's a little harder for me

02:40:31.060 | to understand what the analog of our trusting

02:40:34.620 | that Stravinsky has recognized something about us

02:40:38.780 | that demands that he write this way.

02:40:41.180 | That doesn't seem like a finite thing

02:40:43.900 | in quite the same way.

02:40:45.220 | Now we could ask, we could ask the system,

02:40:47.940 | why did you do it?

02:40:48.780 | We could ask Stravinsky, why did you do it?

02:40:52.180 | And maybe it will have answers.

02:40:55.360 | But then it's involved in a kind of communicative act.

02:40:59.040 | And I think lots of times artists will often say,

02:41:02.740 | look, I can't communicate better

02:41:05.300 | than what I've done in the piece of work.

02:41:07.500 | That is the statement.

02:41:08.700 | Yeah, yeah.

02:41:09.540 | So yeah, we humans aren't able to answer the why either.

02:41:13.340 | But I do think the question here is,

02:41:16.480 | well, first of all, language is finite.

02:41:20.420 | Certainly when expressed through a tweet.

02:41:23.100 | So it is also a combinatorial problem.

02:41:25.640 | The question is how much more difficult it is than chess.

02:41:29.300 | And I think all the same ways that we see the solutions

02:41:34.300 | to chess is deeply surprising when it was first addressed

02:41:40.200 | with IBM Deep Blue and then with AlphaGo

02:41:44.240 | and AlphaGo Zero, AlphaZero.

02:41:46.800 | I think in that same way, language can be addressed

02:41:51.360 | and communication can be addressed.

02:41:53.380 | I don't see, having done this podcast,

02:41:56.680 | many reasons why everything I'm doing,

02:41:59.700 | especially as a digital being on the internet,

02:42:02.740 | can't be done by an AI system eventually.

02:42:05.360 | So I think we're being very human-centric

02:42:10.840 | and thinking we're special.

02:42:11.980 | I think one of the hardest things is the physical space.

02:42:14.920 | Actually operating like touch and the magic

02:42:19.180 | of body language and the music of all of that

02:42:21.820 | because it's so deeply integrated

02:42:23.980 | through the long evolutionary process

02:42:26.780 | of what it's like to be on earth.

02:42:29.300 | What is fundamentally different and AI can catch up on

02:42:34.300 | is the way we apply our evolutionary history

02:42:39.940 | on the way we act on the internet,

02:42:42.340 | on the way we act online.

02:42:43.940 | And as more and more of the world becomes digital,

02:42:46.580 | you're now operating in a space where AI

02:42:50.380 | is behind much less so.

02:42:53.340 | Like we're both starting at zero.

02:42:55.140 | - I think that's super interesting.

02:42:57.660 | Do you know this author, Brian Christian?

02:43:01.260 | Is that someone you've ever heard of?

02:43:02.820 | - That sounds familiar.

02:43:03.660 | - He's a guy who competed in the,

02:43:07.620 | what is it called, the Loebner competition?

02:43:09.420 | - The Loebner Prize, yeah.

02:43:10.260 | - Yeah, the Turing test thing.

02:43:11.780 | And I'll just tell you the story,

02:43:14.420 | but I think it's directly related to the last thing you said

02:43:17.460 | about where we're starting in the same place.

02:43:19.980 | He competed in this competition,

02:43:24.300 | but he didn't enter a program

02:43:27.300 | that was supposed to try to pass the Turing test.

02:43:30.580 | The Turing test, there's three people.

02:43:32.500 | There's the judge, there's the program,

02:43:34.500 | and then there's someone who's a human the way they do it.

02:43:38.380 | And the judge has got to figure out by asking questions,

02:43:41.040 | which is the computer and which is the human.

02:43:43.100 | So little known fact,

02:43:45.020 | there's two prizes in that competition.

02:43:47.340 | There's the most human computer prize.

02:43:49.820 | That's the computer that wins the most.

02:43:51.820 | And then there's the most human human prize.

02:43:54.780 | And he competed for the most human human prize.

02:43:57.780 | And he won it, he kept winning it.

02:43:59.740 | And so he tried to think about what it is

02:44:04.100 | that you have to be able to do

02:44:07.380 | in order to convince judges

02:44:08.780 | that you're human instead of a computer.

02:44:10.980 | And that's an interesting question, I think.

02:44:13.500 | And when he came to,

02:44:16.580 | my takeaway from his version of this story

02:44:19.660 | is that it is true that computers

02:44:23.820 | are winning these contests more and more,

02:44:26.460 | as technology progresses.

02:44:29.820 | But there's two possible explanations for that.

02:44:32.620 | One is that the computers are becoming more human.

02:44:35.120 | And the other is that the humans

02:44:37.980 | are becoming more like computers.

02:44:41.460 | And he says, actually,

02:44:43.460 | the more we live our lives in this world

02:44:47.660 | where in this sort of technological world,

02:44:50.460 | where we have to moderate our behavior

02:44:54.820 | so that it's readable by something

02:44:58.060 | that's effectively a computer,

02:45:02.060 | the more we become like that.

02:45:04.700 | And he says, it happens even when you're

02:45:07.780 | not interacting with a computer.

02:45:09.300 | He says, have you ever been to the,

02:45:11.140 | on the phone with the call center?

02:45:14.580 | And they're going through their script.

02:45:16.380 | And that's what they've got to do.

02:45:17.940 | They've got to go through their script

02:45:19.620 | because that's how they keep their job.

02:45:21.580 | And they ask you this question,

02:45:22.860 | you've got to answer it.

02:45:24.180 | And it's as if you're no longer interacting with a person,

02:45:27.260 | even though it's a person.

02:45:29.060 | Because they've so given up

02:45:30.820 | everything that's involved normally

02:45:33.020 | with being able to make judgments and decisions

02:45:36.020 | and act in situations and take responsibility.

02:45:38.740 | And so I think that's the other side of it.

02:45:42.660 | It is true that technology is amazing

02:45:46.500 | and can solve huge ranges of problems

02:45:49.940 | and do fantastic things.

02:45:52.580 | But it's also true that we're changing ourselves

02:45:56.060 | in response to it.

02:45:57.740 | And the one thing I'm worried about

02:45:59.500 | is that we're changing ourselves

02:46:01.860 | in such a way that the norms for what we're aiming at

02:46:06.300 | are being changed.

02:46:08.500 | To move in the direction of this sort of efficiently

02:46:11.420 | and in an optimized way solving a problem

02:46:14.620 | and move away from this other kind of thing

02:46:17.460 | that we were calling aliveness or significance.

02:46:21.620 | And so that's the other side of the story.

02:46:24.980 | - And that's the worry.

02:46:25.940 | But it's very possible that there is,

02:46:28.000 | for you and I, the ancient dinosaurs,

02:46:31.340 | we may not see the aliveness in TikTok.

02:46:35.820 | The aliveness in the digital space.

02:46:38.700 | That you see it as us being dragged

02:46:41.020 | into this over-optimized world.

02:46:43.700 | But that may be,

02:46:45.100 | in fact, it is a world that opens up opportunities

02:46:51.840 | to truly experience life.

02:46:54.780 | And there's interesting to think about

02:46:56.900 | all the people growing up now

02:46:58.940 | who their early experience of life

02:47:02.340 | is always mediated through a digital device.

02:47:05.020 | Not always, but more and more often

02:47:06.940 | mediated through that device.

02:47:08.580 | And how we're both evolving.

02:47:10.820 | The technology is evolving, the humans are evolving.

02:47:13.620 | To then maybe open a door to a whole world

02:47:16.440 | where the humans and the technology or AI systems

02:47:20.380 | are interacting as equals.

02:47:22.780 | - So now I'm gonna agree with you.

02:47:24.060 | You might be surprised that I'm gonna agree with you.

02:47:26.660 | But I think that's exactly right.

02:47:28.260 | I don't wanna be the person who's saying

02:47:30.980 | our job is to resist all of this stuff.

02:47:34.340 | I don't wanna be a Luddite, that's not my goal.

02:47:37.140 | The goal is to point out

02:47:40.420 | that in the supreme danger lies the saving power.

02:47:44.460 | - Yes. (both laughing)

02:47:46.780 | - The point is to get in the right relation

02:47:49.100 | to that understanding of what we are.

02:47:51.200 | That allows us to find the joy in it.

02:47:54.420 | And I think that's a hard thing to do.

02:47:56.940 | It's hard to understand even what we're supposed

02:47:58.500 | to be doing when we do it.

02:48:00.220 | I'm maybe high more than you.

02:48:02.140 | I'm not of the right generation to be able to do that.

02:48:06.100 | But I do think that's gotta be the move.

02:48:07.620 | The move is not to resist it.

02:48:09.260 | It's not a nostalgic move.

02:48:11.220 | It's an attempt to push people to get in the relation to it.

02:48:15.920 | That's not the relation of it controlling you

02:48:18.740 | and depriving you of stuff.

02:48:20.500 | But of your recognizing some great joy

02:48:22.960 | that can be found in it.

02:48:24.700 | - When I interact with legged robots,

02:48:27.580 | I see there's magic there.

02:48:29.540 | And I just feel like the person who hears the music

02:48:32.940 | when others don't.

02:48:34.020 | And I don't know what that is.

02:48:35.500 | And I'd love to explore that.

02:48:37.100 | - Yeah.

02:48:37.940 | - And because it seems to,

02:48:39.780 | it's almost like the future talking.

02:48:42.820 | And I'm trying to hear what it's saying.

02:48:45.180 | Is this a dangerous world or is this a beautiful world?

02:48:48.240 | - Well, I can certainly understand

02:48:50.500 | your enthusiasm for that.

02:48:51.740 | Those used to be things that I found overwhelmingly exciting.

02:48:56.180 | And I'm not sort of closed off from that anymore.

02:49:00.440 | I mean, I'm not now closed off from that

02:49:03.900 | even though my views are changed

02:49:06.000 | and I don't work in that world.

02:49:07.960 | But I do think, I think it's interesting

02:49:11.180 | to figure out what's at the ground of that response.

02:49:14.260 | Yeah.

02:49:15.300 | - We talked about meaning quite a bit throughout

02:49:19.100 | in a secular age.

02:49:20.580 | But let me ask you the big ridiculous question,

02:49:22.660 | almost too big.

02:49:23.860 | What is the meaning of this thing we got going on?

02:49:27.860 | What is the meaning of life?

02:49:29.320 | - You're saving the softball for the end.

02:49:33.980 | - Easy one.

02:49:34.820 | Easy one.

02:49:35.780 | - I don't know what the meaning of life is.

02:49:37.940 | I think there's something that characterizes us

02:49:41.600 | that's not the thing that people normally think

02:49:44.380 | characterizes us.

02:49:46.540 | The traditional thing to say

02:49:48.020 | in the philosophical tradition,

02:49:49.500 | even in the AI tradition,

02:49:51.260 | which is a kind of manifestation of philosophy

02:49:56.060 | from Plato forward.

02:49:57.300 | The traditional thing to say is that what characterizes us

02:49:59.540 | is our rationality, that we're intelligent beings,

02:50:03.540 | that we're the ones that think.

02:50:06.660 | And I think that's certainly part of what characterizes us.

02:50:11.060 | But I think there's more to it too.

02:50:14.860 | I think we're capable of experiencing simultaneously

02:50:19.860 | the complete and utter ungroundedness of everything

02:50:27.260 | that's meaningful in our existence,

02:50:29.980 | and also the real significance of it.

02:50:34.380 | And that sounds like a contradiction.

02:50:37.900 | Like how could it really be significant

02:50:39.860 | and not be based on anything?

02:50:41.320 | But I think that's the contradiction

02:50:43.640 | that somehow characterizes us.

02:50:45.780 | And I think that we're the being

02:50:47.900 | that sort of has to hold that weird mystery before us

02:50:52.380 | and live in the light of it.

02:50:55.580 | That's the thing that I think is really at our core.

02:50:59.180 | And so how do we do that?

02:51:00.460 | I will say this one thing,

02:51:02.220 | and I learned it from a philosopher,

02:51:05.100 | from a guy named Albert Borgman,

02:51:07.060 | who's a German philosopher,

02:51:08.900 | lived in Montana now,

02:51:09.940 | taught in Montana for his whole career.

02:51:13.020 | And I say this to my students at Harvard now,

02:51:16.800 | he said, "This is the way that I think about my life,

02:51:19.860 | "and I hope you'll think about your life too."

02:51:22.700 | He said, "You should think about your life

02:51:24.860 | "hoping that there will be many moments in it

02:51:31.200 | "about which you can say,

02:51:33.340 | "there's no place I'd rather be,

02:51:36.020 | "there's no thing I'd rather be doing,

02:51:41.540 | "there's nobody I'd rather be with,

02:51:44.320 | "and this I will remember well."

02:51:47.660 | And I think if you can aim to fill your life

02:51:52.160 | with moments like that, it will be a meaningful one.

02:51:54.420 | I don't know if that's the meaning of life,

02:51:56.820 | but I think if you can hold that before you,

02:51:59.300 | it'll help to clarify this mystery

02:52:01.820 | and this sort of bizarre situation

02:52:04.180 | in which we find ourselves.

02:52:05.540 | - Sean, this conversation was incredible,

02:52:09.040 | and those four requirements

02:52:11.020 | have certainly been fulfilled for me.

02:52:13.680 | This was a magical moment in that way,

02:52:17.420 | and I will remember it well.

02:52:18.980 | Thank you so much.

02:52:19.980 | It's an honor that you spend your valuable time with me.

02:52:22.780 | This was great, thank you.

02:52:24.180 | - Thank you for having me, Lex.

02:52:25.420 | I really, really enjoyed it.

02:52:27.560 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

02:52:29.200 | with Sean Kelly.

02:52:30.400 | To support this podcast,

02:52:31.780 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:52:34.780 | And now, let me leave you with some words

02:52:36.660 | from Albert Camus.

02:52:38.900 | In the depth of winter,

02:52:40.460 | I finally learned that within me,

02:52:43.140 | there lay an invincible summer.

02:52:45.400 | Thank you for listening,

02:52:47.300 | and hope to see you next time.

02:52:49.060 | (upbeat music)

02:52:51.640 | (upbeat music)

02:52:54.220 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Sean Kelly: Existentialism, Nihilism, and the Search for Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #227

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