Sean Kelly: Existentialism, Nihilism, and the Search for Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #227
the following is a conversation with sean kelly a philosopher at harvard specializing in existentialism and the philosophy of mind this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now here's my conversation with sean kelly your interests are in post-content european philosophy especially phenomenology and existentialism so let me ask what to you is existentialism so it's a hard question i'm teaching a course on existentialism right now you are i am yeah existentialism in literature and film which is fun uh i mean the traditional thing to say about what existentialism is is that it's a movement in mid 20th century mostly french some german philosophy and some of the major figures associated with it are people like jean-paul sartre and camus um simone de beauvoir maybe martin heidegger but that's a weird thing to say about it because most of those people denied that they were existentialists and um and in fact i i think of it as a movement that has a much longer history so when i try to describe what the core idea of existentialism is it's an idea that you find expressed in different ways in a bunch of these people one of the ways that it's expressed is that sartre will say that existentialism is the view that there is no god and at least his form of existentialism he calls it atheistic existentialism there is no god and since there's no god there must be some other being around who does something like what god does otherwise there wouldn't be any possibility for significance in life and that being is us and the feature of us according to sart and the other existentialists that puts us in the position to be able to play that role is that we're the beings for whom assart says it existence precedes essence that's that's the catchphrase for existentialism and then you have to try to figure out what it means what is existence what is presence and what does proceeds mean yeah exactly what is existence what is essence and what is proceeds and in fact precedes a start way of talking about it and other people will talk about it differently but here's a way of here's the way start thinks about it this is not i think the most interesting way to think about it but get you started sartre says there's nothing true about what it is to be you until you start existing and still use until you start living and for sartre the core feature of what it is to be existing the way we do is to be making decisions to be making choices in your life to be sort of taking a stand on what it is to be you by deciding to do this or that and the key feature of how to do that right for sartre is to do it in the full recognition of the fact that when you make that choice nobody is responsible for it other than you so you don't make the choice because god tells you to you don't make the choice because some utilitarian calculus about what what it's right to do tells you to do you don't make the choice because some other philosophical theory tells you to do it there's literally nothing on the basis of which you make the choice other than the fact that in that moment you're you're the one making it you are a conscious thinking being that made a decision so all the questions about physics and free will are out the window yeah that's right if you were a determinist about the mind if you were a physicalist about the mind if you thought there was nothing to your choices other than the activity of the brain that's governed by physical laws then there's some sense in which it would seem at any rate like um you're not the ground of that choice the ground of that choice was the physical universe and the laws that govern it and then you'd have no responsibility and so sart's view is that the thing that's special about us used to be special about god is that we're responsible for becoming the being that makes the choices that we do and sart thinks that that simultaneously empowering i mean it practically puts us in the place of god and also terrifying because what responsibility how can you possibly take on that responsibility and he thinks it's worse than that he thinks that it's always happening everything that you do uh is the result of some choice that you've made the posture that you sit in the way you hold someone's gaze when you're having a conversation with them or not the choice to make a note when someone says something or not make a note everything that you do presents you as a being who makes decisions and you're responsible for all of them so it's constantly happening and furthermore there's no fact about you independent of the choices and actions you've performed so you don't get to say search example i really am a great writer i just haven't written my great book yet if you haven't written your great book you're not a great writer and so it's it's terrifying it puts a huge burden on us and um and that's why sart says on his view of existentialism human beings are the beings that are condemned to be free our freedom consists in our ability and our responsibility to to make these choices and to become someone through making them and we can't get we can't get away from that but to him it's terrifying not liberating in the positive meaning of the word liberating well so he he thinks it should be liberating but he thinks that it takes a very courageous individual to be liberated by it um nietzsche i think thought something similar i think's artists really coming out of a nietzschean sort of tradition but what's liberating about it if it is is also terrifying because it means in a certain way you're the ground of your own being you become what you do through through existing so that's one form of existentialism that's a stark atheistic version of it there's lots of other versions but it's somehow organized around the idea that it's through living your life that you become who you are it's not facts that are sort of true about you independent of your living your life but then if there's no god in that view does any of the decisions matter so how does existentialism differ from nihilism good okay great question there's two different ways that you're you're asking it um let me leave nihilism to the side for just a second and think about mattering or is there any way that you can criticize someone for me for doing for living the way they do if you're in existence including yourself including yourself yeah start addresses that and he says um yes he says there is a criticism that you can make of yourself or of others and it's the criticism of living in such a way as to fail to take responsibility for your choices he gives these two sort of amazing examples one doesn't i don't know if it reads as well as for us as it uh as it did in sort of mid 20th century paris but it's about a waiter he gives this in in his big book being in nothingness and he says um so waiters play played still do i think in a certain way in paris a big role in in parisian society to be a waiter involved having a certain kind of identity being a certain way uh taking control of in charge of the experience of the people that you're you're waiting on but also you know really being the authority like knowing that this is the the way it's supposed to go and so sartre imagines a waiter who does everything that a waiter is supposed to do the perfect form of the waiter except that you can somehow see in the way he's doing it that he's doing it because he believes that's the way a waiter should act not so there's some sense in which he's passing off the responsibility for his actions onto some idea of what those actions should be he's not taking responsibility for it he's sort of playing a role and the contours of the role are predetermined by someone other than him so he starts as acting in bad faith and that's criticizable because it's acting in such a way as to fail to take responsibility for the kind of being sart thinks you are so you're not taking response so that's one example and i think you know i think any teenager if you've ever met a teenager you've known someone who who does that teenagers try on roles they think if i dressed like this i would be cool so i'll dress like this or if i spoke like this or acted like this and it's natural for a teenager who's trying to figure out what their you know what their identity is to go through a phase like that but if you continue to do that then you're you're really passing it so that's one example the other example he gives is an example uh not of passing off responsibility by pretending that someone else is the ground of your choice but passing off responsibility by pretending that you might be able to get away with not making a choice at all so he says you're always everything you do is a result of your choices and so he gives this other example there you are on the first date first date and the date the evening reaches moment when might be appropriate for one person to hold the hand of the other that's the moment in the date where you are and so you make a choice you decide i think it's think it's that time and you hold the hand and what should happen is that the other person also makes a choice on sart's view either they reject the hand not that time and i'm taking responsibility for that or they grasp the hands back that's a choice but there's a thing that sometimes happens which is that the other person leaves the hand there cold dead and clammy neither rejecting it nor embracing it and start says that's also bad faith that's also acting as if we're a kind of being that we're not because it pretends that it's possible not to make a choice and we're the beings who are always making choices that was a choice and you're pretending as if it's the kind of thing that you don't have to take responsibility for so both of the examples you've given there's some sense in which the social interactions between humans is the kind of moving away from the full responsibility that you as a human in the view of existentialism should take on so like isn't all isn't the basic conversation a delegation or responsibility just holding a hand there you're putting the response some of the responsibility into the court of the other person and for the waiter if you exist in a society you are generally trying on a roll i mean like all of us are trying on a roll me wearing clothes yeah it's me trying on a roll that i was told to try uh as opposed to walking around naked all the time like there's there's like standards of how you operate and that's not that's a decision that's not my own that's me seeing what everyone else is doing and copying them yeah exactly so sart thinks that in the ideal you should try to resist that other existentialists think that that's actually a clue to how you should live well yeah so sarge says somewhere else hell is other people why is hell other people for start well because other people are making choices also and when other people make choices they put some pressure on me to think that the choice they made is one that i should uh copy or one that i should sort of promote but if i do it because they did it then i'm in bad faith for sorry so it's it is as if sart's view is like we would be better if we were all alone i mean this this is this is really simplifying starts position and this is really just mostly start in a certain period of his of his formation but anyhow we can imagine that view and i think there's something to the idea that's art is attracted to it at least in the mid 40s can you dig into hell as other people is there some obviously it's kind of a almost like a literary like you push the point strongly to really explore that point but is there some sense in that other people ruin the experience of what it means to be human i think for start the phenomenon is this like it's not just that you wear clothes because people wear clothes in our society like you have a particular style you wear a particular kind of clothes right and for sartre like to have that style authentically in good faith rather than in bad faith it has to come from you you have to make the choice but other people are making choices also and like you're looking at their choices and you're thinking that guy looks good maybe i could try that one on and if you try it on because you were influenced by the fact that you thought that guy was doing it well then there's some important sense in which although that's a resource for a choice for you it's also acting in bad faith so so god and god wouldn't do that right god wouldn't be influenced by others decisions and if that's the model then that's i think that's the sense in which he thinks hell is other people what do you think parenting is then it's like what because god doesn't have a parent yeah so aren't we significantly influenced first of all in the first few years of life um and in the even even the teenager is resisting again learning through resistance so absolutely i mean i think what you're pushing on is the intuition that the ideal that starts aiming at is a kind of inhuman ideal i mean we're we're there's many ways in which we're not like the traditional view of what god was one is that we're not self-generating we have parents we we're raised into traditions and social norms and we're raised into an understanding of what's appropriate and inappropriate to do and i think that's a deep intuition i think that's exactly right martin heidegger who's the who's the philosopher that's art thinks he's sort of taking this from but i think starts a kind of brilliant french misinterpretation of eideker's german phenomenological view heidegger says a crucial aspect of what it is to be us is our throneness we're thrown into a situation we're thrown into history we're thrown into our parental lineage we're and we don't choose it that's stuff that we don't choose we couldn't choose if we were god and we existed outside of time maybe but we're not we're finite in the sense that we have a beginning that we never chose we have an end that we're con you know often trying to resist or put off for something and in between there's a whole bunch of stuff that organizes us without our ever having made the choice and without our being the kind of being that could make the choice to allow it to organize us we have a complicated relationship to that stuff and i i think we should talk about that at a certain point but the the first move is to say zara's just got a sort of descriptive problem he's missed this basic fact that um there's an awful there has to be an awful lot about us that's settled without our having made the choice to settle it that way right the throneness of life yeah you have that's a fundamental part of life you can't just escape it exactly you can't escape it all together all together yeah exactly you can't escape it all together but nevertheless you are riding a wave and you make a decision of the in the writing of the way you can't control the wave but you should be uh like as you ride it you should be making certain kinds of decisions and take responsibility for it so why does this matter at all the the chain of decisions you make good well because they constitute you they make you the person that you are so you here's what's the opposite view what's what's this view against uh this view is against most of philosophy from plato forward plato plato says in the republic it's a kind of myth but you know he he says people will understand their their condition well if they if we tell them this myth he says look when you're born there's just a fact about you your soul is either gold silver or bronze that's those are the three kinds of people there are and you're born that way and if your soul is gold then we should identify that and make you a philosopher king yeah and if your soul is silver well you're not going to be a philosopher king you're not capable of it but you could be a good warrior and we should make you that and if your soul is bronze then you should be a farmer laborer or something like that and that's a fact about you that identifies you forever and for always independent of anything you do about it and so that's the alternative view and you you could have modern versions of it you could say the thing that identifies you is your iq or your genetic makeup or the percentage of fast twitch muscle fibers you've got or whatever it could be something it's totally independent of any choice that you've made independent of the kind of thing about which you could make a choice and it and it categorizes you it makes you the person that you are that's the that's the thing that started and the existentialists are against uh so this idea that something about you is forever limiting the space of possible decisions you can make sarcha says no the space is unlimited start is the the philosopher of radical freedom radical freedom yeah radical freedom and then you could have other existentialists who say look we are free but we gotta we gotta understand what the way in which our freedom is limited by certain aspects of the kind of being that we are if we were radically free we really would be like god in the traditional medieval sense and and not sort of these folks start with the idea that look whatever we are that's a kind of limit point that we're not going to reach so what what are the ways in which we're constrained that that that being the way the medievals understood him wasn't constrained so can you maybe comment on what is nihilism and is it at all a useful other sort of group of ideas that you resist against in defining existentialism yes good excellent so nihilism the the philosopher who made the term popular although it was used before him is nietzsche nietzsche's writing in the end of the 19th century in various places where he he published things but largely in his unpublished works he identifies the condition of the modern world as nihilistic and that's a descriptive claim he's looking around him trying to figure out what it's like to be us now and he says it's a lot different from what it was like to be human in 1300 or in the fifth century bce in 1300 like what people believed what they the the way they lived their lives was in the understanding that to be human was to be created in the image and likeness of god that's the way they understood themselves and also to be created sinful because of you know adam and eve's transgression in the garden of eden and to have the project of trying to understand how as a sinful being you could nevertheless live a life a virtuous life how could you do that and it had to do with for them getting in the right relation to god he just says we we that doesn't make sense to us anymore in the end of the 19th century god is dead says nietzsche famously and what does that mean well it means something like the role that god used to play in our understanding of ourselves as a culture isn't a role that that god can play anymore and so nietzsche says the role that god used to play was the role of grounding our existence he was what it is in virtue of which we are who we are and nietzsche says the idea that there is a being that makes us what we are doesn't make sense anymore that's like atheism so artists taking that from nature and so the question is what does ground our existence and the answer is knee hill nothing and so nihilism is the idea that there's nothing outside of us that grounds our existence and then nietzsche asks the question well what are we supposed to do about that how do we live and i i you know i think nietzsche has a different story than start about that nietzsche doesn't say doesn't emphasize this notion of radical freedom nietzsche emphasizes something else he says we're artists of life and artists are interesting because the natural way of thinking about artists is that they're responding to something they find themselves in a situation and they say this is what's going to make sense of the situation this is what i have to write this is the way i have to dance this is the way i've got to play the music and nietzsche says we should live like that there are constraints but like understanding what they are is complicated aspect of of living itself and there's a great story i think uh from music that maybe helps to understand this i i think nietzsche of course jazz didn't exist when nietzsche was writing but i think nietzsche really think is thinking of something like jazz improvisation i mean he he he talks about improvisation there's classical improvisation nietzsche was by the way a musician i mean he was a composer and a pianist not a great one really to be fair but but he loved music and herbie hancock who's a pianist a jazz pianist who played with miles davis for quite a while in the 60s tells this kind of incredible story that i think exemplifies nietzsche's view about the way in which we bear some responsibility for being creative and that gives us a certain kind of freedom but we don't have the the radical response the radical freedom that's art thinks so what's the story herbie hancock says they're they're they i think they were in stuttgart he says playing it playing a show and things were great he says i'm pl he's a young pianist and miles davis is the master and he says i'm i'm playing the i'm back in the solo and i'm playing these chords and he says i played this chord and it was the wrong chord [Laughter] he's like it just like that's what you got to say it didn't work right there and i thought holy mackerel i screwed up you know i screwed up we were tight everything was working and i blew it for miles who's doing his solo and he said miles uh paused for a moment and then all of a sudden he went on in a way that made my cord right [Laughter] and i think that idea that like you could be an artist who responds to what's thrown at you in such a way as to make it right by what measure everyone could hear it is all you can say right everyone knew wow that really works and i think that's not like there are constraints not anything would have worked there he couldn't have just played anything most of what anyone would have played would have sounded terrible but the constraints aren't like pre-existing they're sort of what's happening now in the moment for these listeners and these performers and i think that's what nietzsche thinks the right response to nihilism is we're involved but we're not radically free to make any choice and just stand behind it the way sart thinks our choices have to be responsive to our situation and they have to make the situation work they have to make it right and there's there's something about music too so you basically have to make music of all the moments of life and there is something about music why is music so compelling and when you listen to it something about certain kinds of music it connects with you it doesn't make any sense but in that same way for nietzsche you should be a creative force that creates a musical masterpiece exactly and i think what's interesting is the question what does it mean to be a creative force there there's a traditional notion of creation that we associate with with god god creates ex nihilo out of nothing and you might think that nihilism thinks that we should do that create ex nihilo because it's about how there's nothing at our ground but i think the right way to read nietzsche is to recognize that we don't create out of nothing miles davis wasn't nothing that situation pre-existed him it was given to him maybe by accident maybe it was a mistake whatever but he was responding to that situation in a way that made it right he wasn't just creating out of nothing he was creating out of what was already there so that makes that first date with the climbing hand even more complicated because you're giving a climbing hand you're gonna have to make art and music out of that exactly and that's the responsibility for both for both of them wow that's a lot of responsibility for a first date because you have to create it's just the emphasis isn't just on making decisions it's on um creating and but also on listening right i mean miles davis was listening he heard that he knew it was wrong and the question was what do i play that makes it right so let me ask about nietzsche [Music] is god dead what did he mean by that statement yeah what's in your sons the truth behind the question and the possible set of answers that our world today provides good so i i mean i i think that there's something super perceptive about nietzsche's diagnosis of the condition at the end of the 19th century so not so far from the condition that i think we're currently in and i think there's an interesting question what we're supposed to respond what we're supposed to do in response but what what is the condition that we're currently in when nietzsche says god is dead i think like i was saying before he he means something like the role that god used to play in grounding our existence is not a role that works for us anymore as a culture and when people talk about a view like that nowadays they use a different terminology but i think it's roughly what nietzsche was aiming at they say we live in a secular age our age is a secular age and so what what do people mean when they say that i think first of all it's a descriptive claim it could be wrong the question is does this really describe the way we experience ourselves as a culture or as a culture in the west or wherever it is that we are so what does it mean to say that we live in a secular age an age in which god is dead well it first thing is it doesn't mean there are no religious believers because there are plenty there are lots of people who go to church or synagogue or mosque you know every week or more and there are people who really find that to be an important aspect of the way they live their lives but it does mean that for those people the role of their religion the role that the religious their religious belief plays in their life isn't the same as it used to be in previous ages so what's that role we'll go back to the high middle ages that was clearly not a secular age that was a religious age and so there we are in 1300 dante is writing the divine comedy or something and what did it what did it mean then to live in a sacred age well it meant not just that the default was that you were were a christian in the west but that your christianity your religious belief your religious affiliation justified certain assumptions about people who didn't share that religious belief so you're a christian in the west in 1300 and you meet someone who's a muslim and the fact that they don't share your religious belief justifies the conclusion that they're less than human and that's that was the ground of the you know the crusades that was the religious wars of the high middle ages we live in it to say that we live in a secular age is to say that not that we don't have there aren't a lot of people who have religious belief there are but it's to say that their religious belief ju doesn't justify that conclusion if you're a religious believer and you meet me and suppose i'm not a religious believer learning that about me doesn't justify your concluding that i'm less than human right and that's the kind of liberalism of the of the modern age most of the time we think that's a good thing we let a thousand flowers bloom there are lots of ways to live a good life and there's some way in which that that is a nice progressive kind of liberal thought but it's also true that it's an undermining thought because it means if you're a religious believer now your belief can't ground your understanding of what you ought to be aiming at in the life in the way it used to be able to you can't say as a religious believer i know it's right to do this because you also know that if you meet someone who doesn't share that religious belief and so doesn't think it's right to do that necessarily or does but for different reasons you you can't conclude that they've got it wrong so there's this sort of unsettling aspect to it well isn't it true that uh you you can't conclude as a as a public statement to others but within your own mind it's almost like an existentialist version of uh belief which is like it's you create the world and around you like it doesn't matter what others believe you don't there's not it's actually almost like um empowering thought so as opposed to the more traditional view of religion where it's like a tribal idea like where you share that idea together here you have the full back disartry a full responsibility of your beliefs as well good good but what you're describing is not a religious believer right you're describing someone who's found in themselves the ground of their existence rather than in something outside of themselves so the religious belief i mean if you go full sartrean then uh well you're not in a position to criticize others for the choices that they make but you are in a position to criticize them for the way in which they make them either taking responsibility or not taking responsibility but the but the religious believer used to be able to say look the choices that i make are right because god demands that i make them and nowadays like and so it would be wrong to make any others and nowadays are kind of to say that we live in a secular age say well you you can't quite can't quite do that and be a religious believer your religious belief can't can't justify that move and so it can't ground your life in the way it does so it's sort of unsettling i think that's one of the interpretations of what nietzsche might have meant when he said god is dead god can't play the role for religious believers in our world that he used to but we nevertheless find meaning i mean you don't see nihilism as a prevalent set of ideas that are overtaken modern culture so a secular world is still full of meaning good well i think that's the interesting question i i think i think it's certainly possible for a secular world to be a world in which we live meaningful lives worthwhile lives lives that uh are sort of um worthy of respect and that we can be proud of of aiming to live but but i think it is a hard question what we're doing when we do that and that's the that is the question of existence sort of what does it mean to exist in a way that brings us out at our best as the beings that we are that's the question for existentialism so besides sartre who do you is the most important existentialist to understand for others what ideas in particular of theirs do you like maybe other existential it's not just one yeah so sartre is the grounding strong atheistic existentialism statement who else is uh there so in i'm teaching an existentialism course now and i think the tradition goes back at least to the 17th century um and i'll just tell you some of the figures that that i'm teaching there we could talk about any of them that you like the the figure i start with is pascal pascal french mathematician uh from the 17th century he died i'm terrible with dates but i think 1661 or something like that middle of the 17th century brilliant polymath sort of we have computer languages named after him he built the first mechanical calculating machine he's but he he was also deeply invested in his understanding of what christianity was and he thought that everyone before him had really misunderstood what christianity was that they'd really um attempted to think about it not as a way of living a life but as a set of beliefs that you can have and which you can justify and i think that's the first move that's kind that's really pretty interesting and then figures like kierkegaard and dostoyevsky um developed that move and and they're all of those are take themselves to be defending an interpretation of a certain kind of christianity an existential interpretation of christianity and then i think there are other figures other theistic figures uh figures like um camus and uh fanon who mid 20th century figures and then i'll just mention the figure who i think is the most interesting is martin heidegger he's a complicated figure uh because by the way when you said uh sorry to interrupt that when you said camus you meant atheistic i think that camus is an atheistic existentialist yeah i'm happy to talk about that so okay so we got it's like sports cards yeah yeah the different exercises so maybe let's go to uh you know what let's go to dusty yes all right okay let's do it so my favorite novel of his is uh the idiot first of all i see myself as the idiot and an idiot and i love the optimism and the love the main character has for the world so that just deeply connects with me as a novel uh notes from underground as well but what ideas of this yes do you think are existentialists what ideas are formative to the whole existentialist movement excellent so let me talk about the brothers karamazov yes partly because that's the last novel that dostoevsky wrote i think it's certainly one of the greatest novels of the 19th century uh maybe the best and i'm about to teach it in a few weeks so i'm super excited about it but what's what is the brothers karamazov about i mean without you know without spoiling the ending for anyone spoiler alert yeah i mean look it's it's a murder mystery right i mean the father gets murdered and the question is who did it who's responsible for it so there's a notion of responsibility here like consort but it's responsibility for a murder that's what we're talking about and there's a bunch of brothers each of whom has pretty good motivation for having murdered the father the father's a jerk i mean he's you know if anybody is worthy of being murdered he's the guy he's he's he's a force of chaos and he's nasty in all sorts of ways but still it's not not good to murder people so so what's the what's the view of dostoevsky i mean it's this intense exploration of what it means to be involved in various ways with an activity that everyone can recognize is atrocious and what the right way is to take responsibility for that what the right way is to relate to others in the face of it and how even through this kind of action you can achieve some kind of salvation that's dostoyevsky's word for it you can le and but salvation here and now not like you live some afterlife where you're you know paradise for eternity who cares about that says one of the characters that doesn't make my life now any good and it doesn't justify any of the bad things that happen in my life now what matters is can we live well in the face of these things that we do and have to take responsibility for so it's this intense exploration of notions and gradations of guilt and responsibility and the possibility of love and salvation in the face of those it is incredibly human work and hit but i think dostoevsky is the opposite of sartre and let me just i think it's so fascinating i don't know anybody else who notices this but sart in sard actually quotes a passage from dostoevsky when he's developing his view it's close to a passage it doesn't appear quite in this way but the passage that sartre quotes is is this it's it's in the form of an argument sorry puts it in the form of an argument he says um look there's a a conditional statement is true if there is no god then everything is permitted and then there's a second premise there is no god that's sart's view i mean he's an atheist there is no god conclusion everything is permitted and that starts radical freedom and if you think about the structure of the brothers karamazov i think dostoevsky though he never says it this way would run the argument differently it's a modus tollens instead of a modus ponens the argument for dostoevsky would go like this yeah conditional statement if there is no god then everything is permitted but look at your life not everything is permitted you do horrible atrocious things like be involved in the death of your father and there is a price to pay that's not a livable moment you to take to have to take responsibility to have to recognize that you're at fault or you're somehow guilty for having been involved in whatever way you were and letting that happen or bringing it about that it does happen is to pay a price so we're not beings that are constituted in such a way that everything is permitted look at the facts of your existence so not everything is permitted therefore there is a god and and and the and the presence of a god for dostoevsky i think it's just found in this fact that when we do bad things we feel guilty for them with that we find ourselves to be responsible for things even when we didn't intend to do them but we just allowed ourselves to be involved in them and the nature of god for just the yeski is i mean unclear i mean it's a very complex exploration in itself and he basically god speaks through several of his characters in in complicated ways yeah so it's not like a trivial it's totally not trivial and it's not a a being that exists outside of time and none of that is sort of relevant for dostoevsky for him it's a question about how we live our lives do we live our lives in the mood that christianity says it makes available to us which is the mood of joy is there um maybe this is a bit of a tangent but so i'm a russian speaker and one of the i kind of listen to my heart and what my heart says is i need to take on this project so there's a couple of famous translators of dostoyevsky and tolstoy that live in paris currently so i'm going to take the journey we agreed to have a full conversation about dostoevsky about tolstoy and like a series of conversations and the reason i fell in love with this idea is i just realized in translating from russian to english how deep philosophical how much deep philosophical thinking is required just to get like single sentences they spent like weeks debating single sentences so uh and all of that is part of a journey into russia for several reasons but i just i want to explore uh something in me that uh longs to understand and to connect with the roots where i come from so maybe can you comment whether it's on the russian side or the niche of the german side or other french side is there something in your own explorations of these philosophies that you find that you miss because you don't deeply know the language or like how important is it to understand the language good i think it's super important and i'm always embarrassed that i don't know more languages and don't know the languages i know as as well as i would like to but there's um but there's a way in so i i do think different languages allow you to think in different ways and that there's a sort of a mode of exist a way of being that's captured by a language that it makes certain ways of thinking about yourself or others more natural and it closes off other ways of thinking about yourself and others and so i think languages are fascinating in that way the heidegger who who is this philosopher that i'm i'm interested in says at one point language is the house of being and i think that means something like um it's by living in a language that you come to understand or that possibilities for understanding what it is to be you and others and anything are opened up and different languages open up different possibilities and we had that discussion offline about james joyce how i took a course in james joyce and how i don't think i understood anything besides the dead and the short stories and you suggested that it might be helpful to actually visit ireland visit dublin to truly to help you understand maybe fall in love with the words and so that presumably is not purely about the understanding of the actual words of the language it's understanding something much deeper the music of the language or something music of the ideas absolutely something like that it's very hard to say exactly what that is but when you hear an irish person who really understands joyce read some sentences they have a different cadence they have a different tonality they have different music to use your word and all of a sudden you think about them differently and the sentences sort of draw different thoughts out of you when they're read in certain ways that's what great actors can can do but i i think language is is rich like that and and the idea which philosophers tend to have that we're really studying the crucial aspects of language when we think about its logical form when we think about the sort of claims of philosophical logic that you can make or how do you translate this proposition into some symbolic form i think that's part of what goes on in language but i think that when language affects us in the deep way that it can when great poets or great writers or great thinkers use it to great effect it's way more than that and and that's the interesting form of language that i'm interested in it's kind of a challenge i'm hoping to take on is i feel like some of the ideas that are conveyed to language are actually can be put outside of language so one of the challenges i have to do is to have a conversation with people in russian but for an english audience and not rely purely on translators there would of course be translators there that help me dance through this mess of language but also like my goal my hope is to dance from russian to english back and forth for an english-speaking audience and for a russian speaking audience so not this pure this is russian it's going to be translated to english or this is english it's going to be translated to russian but dance back and forth and try to share with people who don't speak one of the languages the music that they're missing and sort of almost hear that music as if you're sitting in another room and you hear the music through the wall like get a sense of it i think that would be a waste if i don't try to pursue this being a bilingual human being and i wonder whether it's possible to capture some of the magic of the ideas in a way that can be conveyed to people who don't speak that particular language i think it's a super exciting project i look forward to following it i'll tell you one thing that does happen so we read dostoevsky in translation occasionally i do have russian speakers in the room which is super helpful but i also encourage my students um to you know to some some of them will have different translations than others and that can be really helpful for the non-native speaker because by paying attention to the places where translators diverge in their translations of a given word or a phrase or something like that you can start to get the idea that somehow the words that we have in english they don't have the same contours as the word in russian that's being translated and then you can start to ask about what those differences are and i i think it's i think it's there's a kind of magic to it i mean it's astonishing how rich and affecting these languages can be for people who really who grew up in them especially who speak them as leaders and that's a really powerful thing that actually doesn't exist enough of is uh for example for this dayofsky most novels have been translated by uh two or three famous translators and uh there's a lot of discussions about who did it better and so on but i would love to this i'm a computer science person i would love to do a diff where you automatically detect all the differences in the translation just as you're saying and use that like somebody needs to publish literally just books describing the differences in fact i'll probably do a little bit of this i heard the individual translators and interviews and in blog posts and articles discuss particular phrases that they differ on but like to do that for an entire book that's a fascinating exploration as an english speaker just read the differences in the translations yeah you probably can get some deep understanding of ideas in those books by seeing the struggle of the translators to capture that idea that's a really interesting idea yeah absolutely and and you you can do that in for other projects in other languages too i mean one of the i don't know i have this weird huge range of interests and some some days i'll find myself reading about something at one point i was interested in um 14th century german mysticism okay turns out there's somebody who's written like volumes and volumes about this he's fantastic and i was i was interested in reading uh meister eckhart i i wanted to know what was interesting about him and the and the the the sort of move that this guy bernard mcginn who's the great scholar of this period made was to say what what eckhart did and everybody knows this he translated christianity into the vernacular he started giving sermons in german to the people used to be in latin and nobody could speak latin can you imagine sitting there for a two-hour sermon in a language that you don't know so he translated it into into german but in doing it the resources of the german language are different from the resources of the latin language and there's a word in middle high german grunt which is like we translate it as ground and it's got this earthy feel to it it sort of invokes the notion of soil and what you stand on and what things grow out of and uh sort of what you could run your fingers through that would have a kind of honesty to it and there's no latin word for that but in eckart's interpretation of christianity that's like the fundamental thing you don't understand god until you understand the way in which he is our ground and all of a sudden this mysticism gets a kind of german can't that makes sense to the people who speak german and that reveals something totally different about what you could think that form of existence was that was covered over by the fact that it always been done in latin yeah that's fascinating so so okay we talked about dostoevsky and uh the use of murder to explore human nature let's go to camus who is maybe less concerned with murder and more concerned with suicide as a way to explore human nature so he is uh probably my favorite existentialist probably one of the more accessible existentialists and like you said one of the people who didn't like to call himself an existentialist so what are your thoughts about camus what role does he play in the story of existentialism so i find kamu totally fascinating i really i really do and for years i didn't teach camus because the famous thing that you're referring to the myth of sisyphus which is a sort of essay it's published as a book super accessible really fascinating he's a great writer really engaging the opening line is something like there is but one truly significant philosophical question yes and that is the question of suicide yeah and i thought i can't teach my 18 year olds you know like yeah i i just thought that's terrible like how can i i mean it's not wrong like that's a but do i want to bring that into the classroom and and so i read it i read the the essay i avoided it for a long time because just because of that line and i thought i'm not going to be able to make sense of this in a way that will be helpful for anyone but finally one year maybe seven or eight years ago i sat down to read it i thought i've i've gotta really confront it and i read it and it's incredibly engaging i mean it's really really beautiful and and kamu is against suicide which just turns out to be good you know i was happy about that but he he has a bit of a bleak understanding of what human existence amounts to and so uh in the end he thinks that human existence is absurd and it's being absurd as a kind of technical term for him and it means that the episodes in your life and your life as a whole presents itself to you as if it's got a meaning but really it doesn't so there's this tension between the way things seem to be on their surface and what really turns out to be true about them and and he gives these great examples like you probably remember these he says um there you are you're walking uh along the street and you there's a plate glass window in a building and through the window uh you you see somebody talking on a telephone i mean i imagined it as a cell phone but camus for didn't uh but you see somebody talking on a cell phone and and he's animated he's talking a lot as if things really meant something and yet camus says it's a dumb show [Laughter] and it's not dumb in the scent just in the sense that it's stupid it's dumb in the sense that it's silent it presents itself as if it's got some significance and yet its significance is withheld from you and he says that's what our lives are like everything in our lives presents themselves to us as if it's got a significance but it doesn't it's absurd uh and and then he says really what our lives are like are like they're like the lives of sisyphus just day after day you do the same thing you know you wake up at a certain time you get on the bus you go to work you take your lunch break you get off my i have a colleague who once said to me something like this it was about october or so in the fall semester i said how's how's it going dick he said well you know how it is i got on the conveyor belt at the beginning of the semester and i'm just going through and that's that's the way my life is and camus thinks that that experience which you can sometimes have reveals something true about what human lives are like our lives really just are like the life of sisyphus who rolls this boulder up the hill from morning till night and then at night he gets to the top and it rolls back down to the bottom over the course of the night he walks back down and then he starts it all over again and he says sisyphus is condemned to this life like we're condemned to our lives but we do have one bit of freedom and it's the only thing that we can hang on to it's the freedom to stick it to the gods who put us in this position by embracing this existence rather than giving up and committing suicide and i thought well it's kind of a happy ending but but but i also thought it it's a dim view of what our our existence amounts to so i i think there's something fascinating about that but what i came to believe and i tried to write about this once i know you read the thing about aliveness that i published once that's secretly a criticism of camus i don't think i mentioned camu in there but i think camus has got the phenomenon wrong or he's missed some important aspect of it because in camus view when you experience your day as sort of going on in this deadening way and you're just doing the things that you always do the way you always do them for camus that reveals the truth about what our lives are but i think there's some aspect at least for me and maybe maybe he just didn't feel this or didn't have access to it maybe others don't but for me there's an extra part to it which is somehow that yes that's the way things are and it's inadequate and there's something that's missing from that aspect of our existence that could be there and it feels like our lives are not about just putting up with that and sticking it to the gods by embracing it but seeking that absence part of it the part that's recognizable in its absence in your experience of that and that's that's what i think i think we do have the experience of the presence of that in moments when you feel truly alive and that's what you mean by the word aliveness which is a fascinating and a powerful word yeah that's what i mean by it i mean i think most people can recognize moments in their lives when they really felt alive and it could happen in a moment when you know i don't know maybe miles davis felt it in that moment when he was responding to herbie hancock's cord or maybe you feel it in that moment where you grab for the hand on the first date and the gesture is reciprocated or maybe you feel it in some moment when you are doing a kind of peak athletic thing or watching somebody else do a peak athletic thing um but i think there are moments when we when it feels like it's not like the way camus is describing things and it's better because of that so i think one really powerful way to uh for me to understand aliveness is to think about to go into a darker territory is to think about suicide and i've known people in my life who suffer from clinical depression yeah and you know whatever the chemistry is in our brain there is a certain kind of feeling that is to be depressed where you look in the mirror and ask do i want to kill myself today this is the question that camus asks this question this philosophical question and there is people who when they're depressed say not only do they say i want to kill myself or i don't they say it doesn't matter and that's chemistry that's whatever that is that's chemistry in our mind and then on the flip side of that for me i've had some low points but i've very been very fortunate to not suffer from that kind of depression i am the opposite which is not only moments of peak performance in athletics or great music or any of that i'm just deeply joyful often by mundane things like as you were saying it i was drinking this thing and it's cold and for some reason the coldness of that was uh like oh great like refrigeration i don't know there was a joy in that like i can't put it into words but i just felt great and then just so many things you look out in nature there's a nice breeze and just like it's amazing so that that doesn't feel like i'm embracing the absurd that seems like i'm getting some nice like dopamine hits in whatever the chemistry is from just the basics of life and that is the source of aliveness however my brain is built it's gotten a natural sort of mechanism for for aliveness and and so the one nice way to see the absence of aliveness is to look at the chemical the clinical depression and so that camus doesn't seem to contend with that at all in asking the question of suicide because when you look in the mirror and ask like if i ask myself do i want to kill myself today i ask that question in a different way more like a stoic way often like basically every day is you know what if i die today it's more like contemplating your mortality every single day you know uh that excites me the possibility that this is my last day that you know it just reminds me how amazing life is and that's that's chemistry i don't know what that is but that's not that's certainly not some kind of philosophical decision i made i am a little bit riding a wave of the chemistry of the genetics i've been given of the dopamine so that that question of suicide um by the way do you find that formulation of the question of existentialism i know you didn't want to teach it because obviously suicide is a very difficult word especially for young minds but do you think that's a useful formulation of the question of existentialism like him saying this is the most important question of suicide i think i think there is something to it if you read the question as the question what is it in virtue of which it ought to be desirable to conti to live the lives that we're capable of of living that's that's a deep question yeah that's a question that gets focused when someone asks themselves whether they ought to continue to live that life who would the famous line nothing focuses the mind more than one's impending execution i mean i think that's i think there's something important about that that recognizing the riskiness and the vulnerability of one's existence is super important and the idea and i think that if we didn't have that our lives wouldn't be capable of being meaningful if they weren't risky and vulnerable there would be nothing to lose and it's only because they're things to lose that they can come to have the significance that they do so yeah i think not against the idea that that's a deep way of approaching the questions at the core of of existentialism but as you say i was worried for a while about how i was gonna how i was gonna teach it well i think there's a difference between suicide and not living i because suicide is an action yeah so it feels like to me like suicide doesn't make sense because you know imagine you're in like a hotel and you're saying the room i'm in sucks but like there's other rooms so like maybe explore those other rooms maybe you'll find meaning in those other rooms like basically embracing the fact that you don't know everything and there's uh you need time to explore everything it's like once you've explored everything then maybe you can make a full decision but it's um unfair to make a decision it's i would say unethical to make a decision until you've explored all the rooms in the hotel yeah and this gets focused in in the brothers karamazov of course there's one brother who uh is really asking that question is asking the question of suicide he's asking the question whether the world that we live in is a world that's worth living in and i think that characters as you say very ill i mean that and and it's possible um and often because as you say of you know brain chemistry physiologies there's certainly a physical ground to that to that situation to that condition but i think it is it is possible for someone to be in that situation i think that ivan karamazov who's the who's the character who's asking this question is can you know maybe let's say chemically depressed or something like that but i think there's more to it too and i think that dostoevsky's real view is that the brain chemistry doesn't exist on its own like the way we interact with one another the way we care about or isolate ourselves from others the way we um uh care for the lives that we lead affects the chemistry of our brain which goes on and changes the mood that we're in so i think dostoevsky does think that um ivan's salvation if he's capable of being saved is going to come through the love of his brother alyosha let me spring uh maybe a bit of a tangent on you do you ever one of my other favorite authors is herman hesse uh does do you ever include him in our deck of uh sport cards that represent existentialism i haven't maybe i should what should i read what should i think about including oh no there's some kind of uh embrace of absurdism like there's a existentialist kind of ideal pervading most of his work uh but there's more of uh like with siddhartha there's more almost like a buddhist yeah sort of like watch the river and like become the river like this kind of idea that uh what it means to truly experience the moment so there is an experiential part of existentialism where you want to not it's not just about we've been talking about kind of decisions and actions but also what he means to listen like you said from nietzsche like what it means to really take in the world and experience the moment so he's very good at writing about what it means to experience the moment and experience the full absurdity of the moment and for him uh i'm starting to forget steppenwolf i think is uh humor it's part of the absurdity which i think modern day internet explores very well with memes and so on humor is a fundamental part of the existentialist ethic that's able to deal with absurdity you gotta like laugh at it i think there's something let me just say something about humor because i think you're absolutely right kierkegaard who is danish and you know most people think deeply depressed and then is actually an incredibly funny writer and someone who was a classmate of mine in graduate school who left philosophy to become a hollywood comedy writer a very successful guy and then he came back 25 years later and wrote finished his dissertation and i was the the reader on the dissertation but it may be a conflict of interest i'm not quite sure but but uh his dissertation was about he called it kierkegaard and the funny which is a kind of a funny title yeah but but kierkegaard according to eric kaplan's reading um kierkegaard has um does have this idea that there's something destabilizing about humor that's crucial to the sort of the important possibilities for us and and so he there's the idea that like there's a moment when a joke is being set up when you're sort of proceeding as if you're on stable ground and then the punch line comes and the rug is pulled out from under you and for a moment it's like you're falling you don't you you there's nothing supporting you until you're captured by your totally new understanding of what was going on and that humor necessarily has that kind of destabilizing feature to it and that's like the riskiness that's like the riskiness that you were you're pointing to if if there aren't risks in your life if your life is totally safe then there's no possibility of significance and so i think on eric's reading kierkegaard sort of wants to line up the importance of the riskiness and vulnerability in your life to its having meaning with the experience of destabilization that you get in jokes and comedy which then becomes significant right that when you when you remember having heard a joke for the first time it's got a kind of salience for you speaking of jokes and speaking of uh you mentioned film and literature so existentialism in film and literature i think for uh a lot of uh people especially nihilism was experienced in the great work of art modern work of art called big lebowski i don't know if you've ever seen that film but there's uh a group of nihilists in that that film they're just like they don't care about anything i think they happen to be german at least they have german accents so maybe can you talk about notable appearances of existentialism in film and if if you at all ever bring out big lebowski uh if that ever comes into play so i know that people think about the big lebowski in this in this context i and i did actually re-watch it not so long ago we have kids and i thought maybe it's time it wasn't really time for for the 11 year old so somewhat inappropriate but i but i have never taught that film so i'd have to think more we could talk about it i'd be happy to try to think on the fly about it okay so i would love to because there is a feels like there's a philosophical depth to that film so there's uh there's a person that just uh the main character the jeff bridges character jeff bridges character yeah he he kind of um he drinks like these white russians and he just kind of walks around in a very relaxed way and uh irradiates both a love for life but also just an acceptance of like it is what it is uh kind of philosophy and then there's a bunch of characters that have are have very busy lives uh trying to do some big projects that are dramatic in some way make some huge amounts of money so it kind of actually reminds me of the idiot but that's the esky in a certain kind of sense and then there's these players i mean they're phrased as nihilists but they kind of don't care to enjoy life they want to mess with life in some kind of way and of course there's interesting personalities uh what is it uh jesus the bo the uh the bowler and then there's like donny who is a bit clueless and then there's the john goodman character is talking about vietnam and just takes life way too seriously too intensely and so on so it just paints a full sort of spectrum of characters that are operating in this world and perhaps most importantly for existentialism are thrown into absurdity yeah and hence the humor okay all right good well that's helpful thank you for reminding me of all that and i i think so one thing to say is that the nihilist the group of nihilists who call themselves nihilists i think they've got a bad misinterpretation of what nihilism is supposed to be uh and they're you know this this happened actually in the 20s there was a famous case um of a couple of german students leopold and loeb who'd read a lot of nietzsche nietzsche you know was a kind of hero for the nazis even i think based on a pretty bad misunderstanding of what he was up to but leopold and loeb had the the bad understanding first and they were students they'd read a lot of nietzsche and they thought okay nothing means anything the only way that um there's any significance in life is through our will to sort of powerfully bring something about and um if we're gonna do that in a way that reflects the fact that nothing means anything then what we should do is take these things these actions that people always thought were bad and do them and show that there's nothing wrong with doing them and so they decided they would murder someone not because they were angry at them just someone they'd never met it was important that it was someone they'd never met it was totally unmotivated act and they thought we'll embrace nihilism by showing that we can act in such a way as to do something that you know morality thinks is bad uh and through our will bring it about that we desire to do it for no reason that has anything to do with it's potentially being interpretable as good and i think that's a terrible misreading of what nietzsche thinks the response to nihilism is i mean i think read that against the miles davis thing miles davis aim is to creatively bring it about that something works well in a situation where he is kind of constrained so they thought two things one there are no constraints at all not even the constraints of the situation that we find ourselves in and two we only become the beings that we really are when we act in what you know what you might against what you might have thought the constraints were and i just think that's a bad misreading of what that kind of nihilism is up to and i think maybe that group in the big lebowski has got that kind of that kind of bad misreading but then the the major characters are or maybe are much more interesting go ahead and say something so there's some kind of apathy to that their particular nihilism could you comment on whether you see sort of apathy as a philosophy part of that nihilism so like um from an existentialist perspective how important is it to care about stuff like really take on life what what does existentialism have to say about just sitting back uh and just not caring excellent so apathy is like a really important word the greek word is apathe it means without passions and the stoics who you mentioned earlier really thought that you know passions are what get in the way of your living well because to live well you have to think clearly about what you should do and you shouldn't let your resentments and your angers and your petty animosities direct your behavior you should release yourself from those kinds of passions so stoicism you know again huge caricature but you know it's it's an aim not to care because caring is bad and there's certain forms of existentialism certainly in pascal and kierkegaard and dostoyevsky and heidegger and sartre in his own way uh so it's not just a theistic or atheistic thing where what's what's crucial about us is that we do care heidegger says care is the being of dozen dozen is his name for us that what it is to be us is to be the being that already cares and you can't not do that you can pretend you're not doing it uh but you're just carrying in a different way it's like start saying you can pretend you're not taking responsibility you you you could pretend that you don't have to make a decision that is making a decision not caring as a way of caring and so i think the existentialists that i'm interested in think that we do care that's that's constitutive of what it is to be us and so they'll they'll think that the stoics got it wrong but that that leaves open a huge range of moves about how we inhabit that existence well let me ask about ein rand okay so it just so happens that i've gotten she's entered a few conversations in this podcast and just looking at academic philosophy or just philosophers in general they seem to ignore ayn rand do you have a sense of why that is does she ever come into play her ideas of objectivism come into play of discussions of a good life from the perspective of existentialism in how you teach it how you think about it is she somebody who you find it all interesting so no i don't think she is [Laughter] but it's been a long time since i've read her stuff i read it in high school i read the fountainhead in high school and atlas shrugged but that's at this point a very long time ago i think i read something about objective epistemology or something too so you know my my view about her could be based on a total misunderstanding of of what she's up to but sort of my my caricature of her and tell me if i've got it wrong is that she's sort of motivated by a kind of i think it's maybe sometimes you call it libertarianism but maybe let's in the context of our discussion um tie it back to sartre a kind of view according to which we're the being who has to contend with the fact that we're radically free to do stuff and we're just not being courageous or brave enough when we don't do that and the people to admire are the people who make stuff out of nothing um so maybe that's a bad caricature no no but i i think uh no i think that's pretty accurate i'm not again very knowledgeable about the full depth of her philosophy but i think she takes a view of the world that's similar to saturate in in the conclusions but makes stronger statements about epistemology that first of all everything is knowable and there's some you should always operate through reason like reason is very important like uh it's like uh you start with a few axioms and you build on top of that and the axioms that everybody should operate on are the same again reality is objective it's not subjective and so from that you can derive the entirety of how humans should behave at the individual level and at the societal level and there's a few conclusions she would talk about virtue of selfishness and sort of a lot of people use that to dismiss her look she's very selfish and so on she actually meant something very different is like it's it's more like the sartre thing take responsibility for yourself understand what uh forces you're operating under and make the best of this life and that's how you can be the best member of societies by making the best life you can and just focus on yourself like fix your own problems first and then and that that will make you the best member of society of your family of loved ones of friends and so on i think the reason she's disliked obviously on the philosophy side she's disliked because a little bit like nietzsche she's like she's literary uh i think and the reason she's publicly disliked uh in sort of public conversations is because of how sure she is of herself so that which is some of the philosophers have been known to do like make very strong statements like hell is other people but she was making very strong statements about basically everything and but it is the reason i bring her up is you know she is an influential thinker that is not for some reason often brought up as such it's not acknowledged how influential she is you know i was recently looking at like a list of the most important women of the 20th century in terms of thought not science or but like thought and she wasn't in that list and i just i see this time and time again and it doesn't make sense to me why she's so kind of dismissed because clearly she's an author of some of the most read books like ever and she clearly had very strong ideas that should be contended with you know um and that that's why it kind of didn't make sense to me because she's also a creature of her time and an important one she's a creation of the soviet union somebody who left because of that and so some of her the strength of her ideas has to do with how much she dislikes that particular uh philosophy and uh way of life but also she's a creature of like sartre and like death whole like nietzsche and so on now one of the other criticisms is she doesn't integrate herself into this history she keeps basically kind of implying that she's purely original in all her thoughts even though she's kind of citing a lot of other people but again many philosophers do this kind of thing as if as if they've uh they are truly original and they're not it is interesting and also what's interesting about her is she is a woman she is a strong feminist and it feels like with simone de beauvoir you know like she seems like she's a very important person in this moment of history that shouldn't be fully forgotten interesting yeah well so i i mean i don't have a lot to add i i will just say um this i mean the way she and beauvoir seem to me from your description of her and remembering what i remember from 35 years ago they seem pretty opposite from one another like one of the things i find interesting about beauvoir is that she takes seriously the thing that sartre didn't which is our throneness which is our um the sense in which we're born into a situation that's already got a significance for her i think it was easier for her to to recognize that than sartre because she was a woman and sartre seems to act as if you know there are no constraints or at least there shouldn't be we're pretty close as you know privileged white males yeah exactly if we could just get rid of the last bits of them we would be god like we're supposed to be yeah uh and i think beauvoir sort of sees things differently i think she reckons one does not one's not born but becomes a woman she says so how does that happen well you're thrown into your culture and your culture starts treating you in a certain way because of your gender and that starts to form your understanding and your experience of things and by the time you're grown up well you're you're pretty well formed by that that seems a fact it's a fact about too though it was harder for him to notice it because uh he was formed into the into his privilege but the world reminds us of our throneness for some more than others yes absolutely and and for people who have to contend on a daily basis with the fact that the social position they're thrown into is one that um negates them or one that oppresses them or one that sort of pushes them to the side in some way or another i mean the black experience is is interesting in this respect too franz fanon who's a contemporary of sarton both wars writes about it and it's very familiar the things that he's saying now but you know he he writes back in the 50s about being a black man in paris and getting on getting on an elevator with a woman alone and how like you know her reaction to him not knowing him not having any views about any reason to have any views about him sort of puts him in a particular social position with respect to her and that that's um if you if you don't have that experience it's much harder to recognize the um the way in which what we're thrown into something we might not have chosen so the idea that that that that's not an aspect of our existence um which as you'd describe in rand's views it's she sounds more like sorry she sounds more like it either it's not an aspect of our existence or at least we ought to sort of aim at its not being and yeah almost act as if it's not yeah exactly if it's not and so i i think from my point of view i don't i don't pretend that i'm explaining the public reception of her i'm just sort of trying to trying to say how i understand her in this um intellectual context from my point of view that's not something big big to miss and the ambition to think that really what's happening is that we're all the same we're all rational beings we're all beings who if we just got the axioms of our existence right and made good judgments and reasoned in an appropriate way would optimize ourselves that feels to me like a kind of natural end point of the philosophical tradition i mean plato starts off with a view that helps us in that direction and the enlightenment moves us further in that direction but from my point of view that movement has led us astray because it's missed something really important that's crucial to the kind of being that that we are yeah and this is the music exactly that's just abuse let's talk about throneness and i think you mentioned that in the context of heidegger yeah so can we talk about heidegger okay who is this philosopher what are some fascinating ideas that he brought to the world okay so martin heidegger was a german philosopher he he i do know when he was born in 1889 but i don't know that only by accident it's because it's the same year that wittgenstein an austrian philosopher was born and the same year that hitler was born so if i've remembered my dates right and someone will call in and correct me otherwise uh but that's the way it it sort of sits in my memory bank and it's interesting that the three of them were born at the same time uh wittgenstein and heidegger share some similarities but then it's also interesting that heidegger was was a nazi i mean this is a very disturbing fact about his personal political background um and so it's something that anyone who thinks that things that he said might be interesting has got to contend with heidegger was born in germany hitler and austria that's right wittgenstein is austria also but so you have to when when you call heidegger nazi you have to remember i mean there's millions of nazis too so like there are parts of their that's the history of the world you know there's a lot of communists marxists and uh nazis in that part of history absolutely and you know one of the discussion points is well was he just a kind of social nazi you know [Laughter] i mean you know he went to parties with them and stuff or was he like did he really believe in the ideology and that's a choice point and and you know we could talk about it if you want he he held a political position that's one of the relevant parts in 1933 he was made rector of the university of freiburg that's like the president of the university um and that was in germany all the universities are um are state universities and so that's a political appointment can we just pause on this point yeah from an existentialist perspective what's the role for standing up to evil so i mean i think camus probably has something to say about these things because he was a bit of a political figure like do you have a responsibility not just for your decisions but you know if the world you see around you is um going against what you believe somewhere deep inside is ethical do you have to stand up to that even if it costs you your life or your well-being you ask from an existential perspective and there's lots of different positions that you could have so let me tell you something in the area of what i think i might believe which comes out of this tradition um and it's this uh if you live in a community where people are being dragged down by the norms of the community rather than elevated then there's two things that you have to recognize one is that you bear some responsibility for that not necessarily because you chose it maybe you reviled it maybe you were against it but there's some way in which we all act in accordance with the norms of our culture we all give in to them in some way or another and if those norms are broken then there's some way in which we've allowed ourselves to be responsible for for broken norms we've become responsible for broken norms and i i do think you have to face up to that i think that um let's just take gender norms maybe the gender norms are broken maybe the way men and women treat one another the way men treat women is broken you know maybe there's maybe it is maybe there's i'm not making a substantive claim i'm just saying you know lots of people say it is and if uh you're in a culture where uh those norms take root you you don't get to just isolate yourself and pull yourself out of the culture and think i don't have any responsibility um that's you're already a part of the culture even if you're isolating yourself from it that's a way of rejecting the sort of part you play in the culture but it's not a way of getting behind it you now you're playing that role differently you're saying i i don't i don't i don't want to take responsibility for what's going on around me and that's a way of taking responsibility by refusing to do it so i i think we're implicated in whatever whatever's going on around us and if we're going to do anything in our lives we ought to recognize that recognize that even in situations where you maybe didn't decide to do it you you could be part of bringing other people down and then devote yourself to trying to figure out how to act differently so that the norms update themselves and i and i think this is not a a criticism of people and the alyosha who we mentioned in the brothers karamazov he's a character he's a kind of saintly character um in the brothers karamazov but that one crucial moment in his in in that story when he realizes how awful he's been being to someone without ever even intending to do that it's grushanka who's this sort of fascinating woman and she's a very erotic woman she's sort of sexual and and and alyosha in my reading of it is kind of attracted to her but he's a young kid he's 20 or whatever and he's kind of embarrassed about it and he lives in the monastery and he's thinking maybe he wants to be a priest and he's kind of embarrassed by it so what does he do every time they run across one another in the street he averts his gaze and why is he doing that because he's kind of embarrassed you know but how does grishanka experience it well she knows she's a fallen woman and she knows that alyosha has this other position in society so her read on it is he's passing judgment on me he can see that he doesn't want to be associated with me he can see that i'm a fallen woman he knows that in order to maintain his purity he's got to res he's got to avoid me that that's not what alliosh intended to do but that's the way it's experienced and so there's this way he comes to recognize oh my god like what i'm supposed to do is love people in dostoevsky's view of things and what i'm doing instead is dragging this poor woman down i'm making her life worse i'm making her feel terrible about herself and if i actually came to know her i'd recognize her condition is difficult she's living a difficult life she's making hard choices and why don't i you know why don't i see that in her face instead of this other thing that's making me want to avoid her and that's a huge moment so but the idea is that we're implicated in bringing other people down whether we want to be or not and that's our condition so the requirement to understand that is to be almost to a radical degree be empathetic and to listen uh to the world and i mean you you brought up sort of gender roles it's not so simple all of this is messy for example this is me talking it's clear to me that for example the woke culture has bullying built into it has some elements of the same kind of evil built into it and when you're part of the wave of wokeness standing up for social rights you also have to listen and think are we going too far are we hurting people are we doing the same things that others that we're fighting against that others were doing in the past so it's not simple uh once you see that there's evil being done that is easy to fix no in in our society it's uh there's something about our human nature that just too easily stops listening to the world to empathizing with the world and we label things as evil this is through human history this is evil you mentioned tribes this religious belief is evil and so we have to fight it and we become certain and dogmatic about it and then in so doing commit evil onto the world it seems like a life that accepts and responsibility for the norms we're in has to constantly be sort of questioning yourself and questioning like listening to the world fully and richly without being weighed down by any one sort of uh realization you just always constantly have to be thinking about the world am i wrong am i wrong in seeing the world this way i mean the very last thing you said you've constantly got to be thinking about the world you've constantly got to be listening you've constantly got to be attending and it's not simple all that sounds exactly right to me and the the phrase that rings through my head is another one from the brothers karamazov dimitri this passionate sort of sometimes violent brother who um who is also sort of deep deeply cares i mean he's because he's passionate he's sort of got care through and through but it's breaking him apart he says at one point um god and the devil are fighting and the battlefield is the heart of man and i just think yeah it's not simple and the idea that there might be a purely good way of doing things is just not our condition that where everything we do is going to be sort of undermined by some aspect of it there's not going to be a kind of pure good in in human existence and so it's it's sort of required that we're going to have to be um empathetic that we're going to have to recognize that others are dealing with that just as we are so i apologize for distracting us we were talking about heidegger okay that uh and the reason we were distracted is he happened to also be a nazi but he nevertheless has a lot of powerful ideas what are the ideas he's brought to the world okay so that's a big huge question so let me see how much of it i can get on the table i mean the the big picture is that heidegger thinks and he's not really wrong to think this that the whole history of philosophy from plato forward maybe even from the pre-socratics forward from like the 6th century bc to now has been motivated by a certain kind or has been grounded on a certain kind of assumption that it didn't have the right to make and that it's led us astray and that until we understand the way in which it's led us astray we're not going to be able to get to grips with the condition we now find ourselves in so let me start with what he thinks the condition we now find ourselves in is lots of periods to heidegger's fuse i'm not i'm just going to sort of mush it all together for the purposes of today uh heidegger thinks that one of the crucial things that we need to contend with when we think about uh what it is to be us now is that the right name for our age is a technological age and what does it mean for our age to be a technological age well it means that we have an understanding of what it is for anything at all to be at all that we never really chose that's sort of animating the way we live our lives that's animating our understanding of ourselves and everything else that is quite limited and it's organized around the idea that to be something is to be what's sitting there as an infinitely flexible reserve to be optimized and made efficient and heidegger thinks that uh that's that's not just the way we think of silicon circuits or you know the the river when we put a hydroelectric power plant on it we're optimizing the flow of the river so that it makes energy which is infinitely flexible and we can use in any way at all it's the way we understand ourselves too we think of ourselves as this reserve of potential that needs to be made efficient and optimized and when i when i talk with my students about it i ask them you know like what's your calendar look like you know what's the goal of your day is it to get as many things into it as possible is it to feel like i've i've failed unless i've uh i've made my life so efficient that i'm doing this and this and this and this and this that i can't let things go by the feeling uh that i think we all have that there's some pressure to do that to relate to ourselves that way is a clue to what heidegger thinks the technological age is about and he thinks that's different from every other age in history we used to think of ourselves in the 17th century at the beginning of the eli of the enlightenment as subjects who represent objects descartes thought that a subject is something some mental sort of realm that represents the world in a certain way and we are closed in on ourselves in the sense that um we have a special relation to our representations uh and that's that's what the realm of the subject but others you know in the middle ages we were created in the image and likeness of god in in in the pre-socratic age to be was to be what whooshes up and lingers for a while and fades away the paradigm of of what is where thunderstorms and the anger of the gods achilles battle fury and it overtakes everything and stays for a while and then leaves the the flowers blooming in spring and that's very different from the way we experience ourselves and so the so the question is um what are we supposed to do in the face of that and heidegger thinks that the the presupposition that's motivated everything from the pre-socratics forward is that there is some entity that's the ground of the way we understand everything to be for the middle ages it was god that was the entity that made things be the things that they are for the enlightenment it was us maybe first heart it's us and heidegger thinks um whatever it is that stands at the ground of what we are is not another thing it's not another entity and we're relating to it in the wrong way if we think of it like that there's some way and he this is partly why i was interested in meister eckhart he says what there is is there's giving going on in the world and we're the grateful recipient of it and the giving is like whatever it is it's the social norms that were thrown into we didn't choose them they were given to us and that's the ground that is what makes it possible for anything to be intelligible at all if we lived outside of communities if we lived in a world where there were no social norms at all nothing would mean anything nothing would have any significance nothing would be regular in the way that things need to be regular in order for there to be departures or manifestations of that regularity uh so so community norms are crucial but they're also always updating we place um we have some responsibility for what they are and the way in which they're updating themselves and yet we didn't ever choose it to be that way so those norms are somehow giving significance to us in a way that that we're implicated in we have some relation to and all that gets covered over if you think of us as efficient resources to be optimized is that a conflicting view that we are resources to be optimized is that is that somehow deeply conflicting with the fact that there's a ground that we stand on absolutely so what heidegger thinks is that this is this he calls this the supreme danger of the technological age is that without ever having chosen it without ever having decided it this is the way we understand what it is to be us but he thinks that um it's also he says quoting holderly in this 18th century german poet he says in in the supreme danger lies the saving possibility so what does that mean it means that we this is the this is the understanding that we've been thrown into that we've been given it's the gift that was given to us it's supremely dangerous if we let ourselves live that way we'll destroy ourselves but it's also the saving possibility because if we recognize that we never chose that that it was given to us but also we were implicated in its being given and we could find a way to supersede it that it's the ground but it's also updatable it calls the ground the groundless ground it's it's not like an entity which is there solid stable like god who's eternal and non-changing is always updating itself and we're always involved in it's being updated but we're only involved in it in the right way if we listen like miles davis so optimization is not a good way to live life if you thought that it was obviously clear that that was the relevant value so obviously clear that it never even occurred to you to ask whether it was right to think that then you would be in danger yeah got it so yeah there is some in this modern technological age in in the full meaning of the word technology that's updated to actual modern age with a lot more technology going on it uh it does feel like like colleagues of mine in tech space actually are somehow drawn to that optimization as if that's going to save us as if the thing that truly weighs us down is um the inefficiencies exactly and i think if you think about other other contexts like what what are the moments when i mean we're unique in this respect this this period in history is unlike any previous no nobody ever felt that way right but think about but it's also true that nobody no previous period in history was nihilistic so our condition is tied up that sort of thing is meant to be a response to the felt lack of a ground and so no no previous epoch in history felt that way they didn't have our problem but think so so they it was much more natural to them to experience moments in ways that feel um unachievable for us what we were calling moments of aliveness before think about where the context in which they felt them they weren't efficient optimized contexts think about the the greeks if you ever read homer it is a bizarre world back there but one of the things that's bizarre is that they're so unmotivated by efficiency and optimizing that the only thing that seems to run through all of the different greek cultures it's the idea that if some stranger comes by you better take care of them because zeus is the is the god of strangers and zeus will be angry that's what they say right but what is it but how does it manifest itself odysseus he's trying to get home and he gets shipwrecked on an island and you know he's trying to figure out he's been at sea for 10 days he's starving he's bedraggled and he sees uh now sissa the the princess who's beautiful and he's like boy i better you know i don't know guess to get get some clothes or something like i don't want them to beat me up and kill me and so they so she takes him to the palace they have three days of banquets and festivals before they even ask his name it's like here's a stranger our job is to celebrate the presence of a stranger because this is where significance lies now we don't have to feel that way but but the idea that that's one of the places where significance could lie is pretty strongly at odds with the idea that our salvation is going to come from optimization and efficiency now maybe something about the way we live our lives will have that integrated into it um but it's but it's at odds with other other moments let me ask you a question about uh hubert bert dreyfus he is a friend a colleague a mentor of yours unfortunately no longer with us you wrote with him the book titled all things shining reading the western classics to find meaning in a secular age first can you maybe speak about who that man was what you learned from him and then we could maybe ask how do we find through the classics meaning in a secular age okay so bert dreyfuss was a very important philosopher of the late 20th early 21st century he he died in um 2017 about a little over four years ago uh he was my teacher i met him in 1989 when i went away to graduate school in berkeley that's where he taught he plays an interesting and important role in the history of philosophy in america because uh in a period when most philosophers in america and in the english-speaking world were not taking seriously 20th century french and german philosophy he was and he was really probably the most important english-speaking interpreter of heidegger the the german philosopher that we're talking about we've been talking about he was an incredible teacher a lot of his influence came through his teaching and one of the amazing things about him as a teacher was his um sort of mix of intellectual humility with sort of deep insightful authority and he would stand up in front of a class of 300 students he taught huge classes because people love to go see him and i taught for him for many years and say you know i've been reading this text for 40 years but the question you asked is one i've never asked and it would be true like he would he would he would find in what people said things that were surprising and new to him and that's humility actually that is listening to the world absolutely absolutely he was always ready to be surprised by something that someone said yeah and there's something astonishing about that so his influence was you know for people who didn't know him through his interpretations of these texts he wrote about a huge range of stuff but for people who did know him it was through his presence it was through the way he carried himself in in his life and uh so in any case that that's who he was we i graduated after many years as a graduate student i i didn't start in philosophy i started in math math and computer science actually and then i did a lot of work in computational neuroscience for a few years it's a fascinating journey we'll we'll get to it through our friendly conversation about artificial intelligence okay i'm sure because you're you're basically fascinated with the philosophy of mind of the human mind but rooted in a curiosity of mind through the it's artificial through the engineering of mind yeah yeah that's right so bur so bert i mean the reason i was attracted to him actually is is because of his uh to begin with was because of his criticisms of what was called traditional symbolic ai in the 70s and 80s so i came to berkeley as a graduate student who'd done a lot of math and a lot of computer science a lot of computational neuroscience i i noticed that you had you interview a lot of a lot of people in this world and i had a teacher at brown as an undergraduate uh jim anderson who wrote with jeff hinton a big book on neural networks um so so i had i was interested in that not so interested in traditional ai like sort of lisp programmings things that went on in the 80s because it felt sort of you know when you made a system do something all of a sudden it was an un interesting thing to have done the fact that you'd solved the problem then made it clear that the problem wasn't an interesting one to solve that's right and i had that experience and and bert had criticisms of of um symbolic ai what he called good old-fashioned ai gofi and um and i was attracted to those criticisms because it felt to me that there was something lacking in in in that project and i didn't know what it was i i just felt its absence and uh then i learned that all his arguments came from his reading of this phenomenological and existential tradition and so i had to try to figure out what those folks were saying and it was a long road let me tell you it took me a long time but but it was because of birth that i was able to do that so i own that that huge debt of gratitude and eventually we went on to write a book together which was a great experience and yes we published all things shining in 2011. and that was that's a book that i definitely would not have had the hood spa to try to write if it weren't for bert because it was really about you know great literature in the history of the west from homer and virgil to and dante to melville there's a huge chapter on melville a big chapter on um david foster wallace who burt didn't care about it all but i was fascinated by it and so learning to think that way while writing that book with him uh was an amazing experience so i have to admit it's one of my failings in life one of many failings is i've never gotten through moby dick or or any of melville's works so maybe can you comment on before we talk about dave or david foster wallace who i have gotten through um what are some of the sources of meaning in these classics good so moby dick i think is the other great novel of the 19th century so the brothers karamazov and moby dick and and they're diametrically opposed which is one of the really interesting things so the brothers karamazov is a kind of in it's a kind of existential interpretation of russian orthodox christianity how do you live that way and find joy in your existence moby dick is not at all about christianity it's about it sort of starts with the observation that that that the form of christianity that uh that ishmael is is familiar with is is broken it's not gonna it's not gonna work in his living his life he has to leave it he has to go to sea in order to find what needs to happen and and and ishmael is the the boating captain the the the whaling boat captain so now he's not the captain that's ahab ahab is the captain yeah right let me back up the famous opening line to the book is call me ishmael and that's ishmael is the is the main character in the book he's a nobody he's you and me he's the everyday guy he's like a nobody on the ship he he's like you know not the lowest but certainly not the highest he's right in the middle he and and he's named ishmael which is interesting because ishmael is the illegitimate son of abraham in the old testament he is the the i think if i have it right again someone will correct me i think he's the he's the one he's the one that islam traces its its um genesis to and so islam is is an abrahamic religion like judaism and christianity but judaism and christianity trace their lineage through isaac the the quote-unquote legitimate son of abraham and ishmael is the other son of abraham who he had with a with a girlfriend uh and so so he's he's clearly outside of christianity in some way he's named after the non-christian sort of son of of abraham um and and he's the the book starts out with this what does he call it something like a dark and misty november mood he's walking along the street and he's overcome by his i can't remember what the word is but his hypos that's what he calls them he's in a mood he's depressed he's down things are not going well and that's where he starts and he he signs up to go on this whaling voyage with this captain ahab who is this incredibly charismatic deeply disturbing character who is a captain who's got lots of history and wants to go whaling wants to get whales that's what they do they harpoon these whales and bring them back and sell the blubber and the oil and so on um so he's he's kind of rich and he's and he's famous and he's powerful he's an authority figure and he is megalomaniacally obsessed with getting one particular whale which is called moby dick and moby dick is like the largest the whitest the sort of most terrifying of all the whales and ahab wants to get him because because a number of years earlier he had an encounter with moby dick where moby dick bit off his leg and he survived but he had this deeply religious experience in the wake of it and he needed to find out what the meaning of that was like what is the meaning of my suffering who am i such that the world and moby dick this leviathan at the center of it should treat me this way and so his task is not just to go whaling is to figure out the meaning of the universe through going wailing and having a confrontation with his tormentor this whale moby dick and the confrontation is so weird because melville points out that whales their faces are so huge their foreheads are so huge and their eyes are on the side of them that you can never actually look them in the eye and it's kind of a metaphor for god like you can't ever look god in the face that's the sort of traditional thing to say about god you can't find the ultimate meaning of the universe by looking god in the face and but ahab wants to he says he's got a pasteboard mask of a face but i'll strike through the mask and find out what's behind and so ishmael is sort of caught up in this thing and he's like going wailing because he's in a bad mood and maybe this will make things better and he makes friends with this guy queequeg and queequeg is a pagan he's from an island in the south pacific and he's got tattoos all over his body head to toe he's a party colored like every different color says says ishmael is these tattoos and they they are the the writing on his body he says of the immutable mysteries of the universe as understood through his culture and so somehow queequeg is this character who is like not christian at all um and he's powerful in a very different way than ahab is he's supposed to be the king he's the son of the king and probably his father's died by now and if he went home he'd be the king but he's off on a voyage too trying to understand who he is before he goes back and leads his people and he's a harpooner the bravest of the people on the ship and um he's got the mystery of the universe tattooed on his body but nobody can understand it and it's through his relation with queequeg that ishmael comes to get a different understanding of what we might be about so that's that's moby dick in a nutshell and and uh connected to a book i have read which is funny there's probably echoes that represent the 20th century now in old man in the sea by hemingway that also has similar i guess themes but more more personal more focused on the i mean i guess it's less about god is almost more like the existentialist version of moby dick yeah yeah and hence shorter and a lot shorter yeah well hemingway was brilliant that way yeah but do you see echoes and uh do you do you find old man in the sea interesting it's been since ninth grade that i've been in even longer ago than the fountain had uh so i didn't know we were gonna go there i mean i find hemingway interesting but hemingway my general sort of picture of him is that you know he's he's uh we have to confront the the dangers and the difficulties of our life we have to develop in ourselves a certain kind of courage and manliness and i think there's something interesting about that he's for risk in a certain way and i think that's important uh but i but i do i don't now i i don't have any right to say this since it's been so long since i read it i do feel like there's there's i don't remember a sense for the for the quite the tragedy of it maybe there is is it a melancholy novel i don't even remember no it's uh i mean it has a sense like the stranger by camus it has a sense of like this is how life is and it like it has more about old age and that uh you're not quite the man you used to be feeling of like this is how time passes and then the the passing of time and how you get old you get older and this is one last fish it's less about this is the fish it's more like this is one last fish like and asking who was i who was i as a man as a human being in this world and this one fish helps you ask that question fully wonderful but it's one fish which is just sort of all the other fish too right and and that is a big difference because for for ahab no other fish will do than moby dick it's got to be the biggest the most powerful the most tormenting it's got to be the one that you've got history with that has defiled you and it is it's a raucous ride moby dick what about david foster wallace so why is he important to you in the search of meaning uh in a secular age good so so i'll just just to finish the moby dick thing i think what's interesting about melville is that he thinks our salvation comes not if we get in the right relation to monotheism or christianity but if we get in the right relation to polytheism to the idea that there's not a unity to our existence but there are lots of little meanings and they don't cohere sometimes you know uh like in like in homer sometimes you're in love helen's in love with paris and they do crazy things they go off and run away and the trojan war begins and sometimes you're in a battle fury that for the love is aphrodite's realm and the battle fury that's ares realm and that's a totally different world and they're not even i mean they're related there's a kind of family resemblance but not much mostly you're just in different sort of local meaningful worlds and melville seems to think that that's that's a thing that we could aim to bring back he says we have to lure back the merry mayday gods of old and and lovingly enthroned them in the now egotistical sky the now unhaunted hill that's what we live in this world where hills aren't aren't haunted with significance anymore and the sky is just a bunch of stuff that we're studying with physics and astrophysics and stuff but but they used to be awe-inspiring and we have to figure out how to get in that relation to them but not by trying to give a unity to our existence through developing habits and practices that get written on our body and so his is about the end of judeo-christianity and the sort of roman appropriation of it in wallace i what one of the things i think is so interesting about him is that i think he's a great observer of the contemporary world and he's a very funny writer he's really funny but he's a great observer of the of the contemporary world and what he thought uh was at the core of the contemporary world was this constant temptation to diversion through entertainment that's a different story than heidegger's story about efficiency and optimization but it's the other side of it what like what is this tension temptation sort of diverting us from the ability to be more efficient so you know you're tempted to go you know watch some stupid film or television show or something that's dumb and not really very interesting but you read that temptation as a temptation precisely in virtue of it's taking you away from your optimizing your your existence and so i think they're two sides of the same coin i think he's brilliant at describing it i think he thought it was a desperate position to be in that it was it was something that we needed to confront and find a way out of and his characters are trying to do that and i think there's two different david foster wallaces one i mean david foster wallace committed suicide and when i and it's very sad and he clearly did have you know sort of there was a physiological basis to his condition he knew it he was treating it from decades with medication he had uh electroshock therapy a number of times it is just very very sad story when i decided that we were going to write about david foster wallace the first thing i was worried about is what can you can you like obviously a motivating factor maybe the motivating factor in his committing suicide was his physiological condition um but there was there's there's this there was a question could you think i mean he's obsessed with the condition with what we need to do to achieve our salvation to live well to make our lives worth living and he clearly in the end felt like he couldn't do that so in addition to the physiological thing which probably most of it the question for me was could you find in his writing what his what he was identifying as the thing we needed to be doing that he nevertheless felt we couldn't be doing and he and he talks as if that's that's the difficulty for him uh so so that that's one side of him and i i did want to find that i think there's another side of him that's very different but you were going to ask no please what's the other side i mean what i write about in the in the chapter mostly um is what i think he's got as our as as our saving possibility he thinks our saving possibility he says this in a graduation speech that he gave to kenyon is that we have the freedom to interpret situations however we like so what's the problem case for him he says look you know the problem case we have it all the time you get pissed off into the world you know some some big suv cuts you off on the highway and you're pissed off and you might express your anger with one finger or another directed at that person and he says but actually you know you're being pissed off as the result of your having made an assumption and the assumption is that that action was directed at you like the assumption is that you're the center of the universe and you shouldn't assume that and the way to talk yourself out of it he says is to recognize the possibility that maybe that wasn't an action directed at you like maybe that guy is racing to the hospital you know to take care of his dying spouse who's been there suffering you know from cancer or maybe he's you know on the way to pick up a sick child or maybe he's and it's not an action director that was your assumption not something that was inherent in the situation and i think there's something interesting about that i think there's something right about that at the same time i don't think he speaks as if we can just spin out these stories and whether they're true or not doesn't matter what matters is that they free us from this assumption yes and i think they only free us from this assumption if they're true like sometimes the guy really did direct it at you and that's part of the situation and like you can't pretend that it's not part of the situation you have to find the right way of dealing with that situation so you have to listen to what's actually happening and then you have to figure out how to make it right and i think he's he thinks that we have too much freedom he thinks that you don't have to listen to the situation you can just tell whatever story you like about it and i think that's actually too tough i don't think we have that kind of freedom and he and he writes these sort of incredibly moving letters when he's trying to write the pale king which is the end of which is the unfinished novel that really sort of drove him to distraction at the center of the novel is this character who one of the characters at the center of the novel is a guy who's doing the most boring thing you could possibly imagine he is an irs tax examiner he's going over other people's tax returns trying to figure out whether they follow the rules or not and like just the idea of doing that for eight hours a day is just terrifying and and he puts this guy in a enormous warehouse that extends for miles where person after person after person is in rows of desks sort of nameless each of them doing this task so he's in nowhere doing nothing and it's got to be intensely boring and now the main character's trying to trying to teach himself to do that and the question is how do you put up with the boredom how do you put up with this onslaught of meaninglessness and the main character is able to confront that condition with such bliss that he literally levitates from happiness while he's going over other people's tax returns and i i that's that's my metaphor for what i think wallace must have imagined we have to try to aspire to and i think that's unlivable i think that's not i think that's not an ambition that we could achieve i think there's something else we could achieve and the other thing that that we can achieve that i think is is a is something that he also is on to but doesn't write about as often is something more like achieving peak moments of significance in a situation when something great happens and he writes about this in an article about roger federer he he loved tennis are you a tennis lover i'm not a lover of tennis but i played tennis for 15 years and so on i don't love it the way people love baseball for example i see the beauty in it the artistry i just liked it as a sport good okay well i didn't play much tennis but i hit a ball around every once in a while as a kid and i always thought it was boring to watch but reading reading david foster wallace on roger federer you're like wow i've been missing and the article which appeared in the new york times magazine was called roger federer as religious experience oh wow there you go and he says look there's something astonishing about watching someone who's got a body like us and having a body is a limitation it's like the sight of sores and pains and agony and exhaustion and it's this it's the thing that dies in the end uh and so it's it's what we have to confront i mean there's also joys that go along with having a body like if you didn't have a body there'd be no sex if you didn't have a body there'd be no sort of physical excitement and so on but uh but somehow having a body is essentially a limitation that when you watch someone who's got one and is extraordinary at the way they use it you can recognize how that limitation can be to some degree transcended and that that's what we can get when we watch federer or some other great athlete sort of doing these things that transcend the limitations of their bodies and that that's the kind of peak experience that we're capable of that could be a kind of salvation that's a very different story and i think that's a livable story and i and i don't know if it would have saved him but i feel like i wish he developed that that side of the story more can we talk about and first of all let me just comment that i deeply appreciate that you said uh you were going to say something that the fact that you're listening to me is is amazing like that you care about other humans i i really appreciate that um we should be in this way listening to the world so um there's there's that's a meta comment about many of the things we're talking about but you mentioned something about levitating and a task that is infinitely boring and contrasting that with essentially levitating on a task that is great like uh the highest achievement of uh this physical limiting body in playing tennis now i often say this i don't know where i heard david foster wallace say this but he said that the key to life is to be unborable that is the embodiment of this philosophy and i when people ask me for advice like young students you know i don't find this interesting i don't find this interesting how do i find the thing i'm passionate for uh this would be very interesting to explore because you kind of say that that may not be a realizable thing to do which is to be unborable but my advice usually is life is amazing like you should be able to you should strive to discover the joy the levitation in everything and uh the thing you get stuck on for a longer period of time that might be the thing you should stick to but everything should be full of joy so that kind of cynicism of saying life is uh boring is a thing that will prevent you from discovering the thing that will give you deep meaning and joy but you're saying being unborable is not actionable for a human being so okay excellent question deep question and and the um you might think because of the title of that of the book that bert and i wrote all things shining that i think all things are shining [Laughter] and but actually i think it's an unachievable goal to be unborable i i do believe that you're right that a lot of times when people are bored with something it's because they haven't tried hard enough and i do think quite a lot of what makes people bored with something is that they haven't paid attention well enough and that they haven't listened as as you were saying um so i i do think there's something to that i think that's a deep insight on the other hand the perfection of that insight is that nothing is ever anything less than joyful and i actually think that dostoevsky and melville both agree but in very different ways that life involves a wide range of moods and that all of them are important it involves grief like i think when someone dies it's appropriate to grieve and it's not in the first instance joyful it's related to joy because it makes the joys you feel when you feel them more intense but it makes them more intense by putting you in the position of experiencing the opposite and it's only because we're capable of a wide range of passionate responses to situations that i think the significances can be as meaningful as they are so melville again has this has this sort of interest i mean let's just say the guilt and the grief in in the brothers karamazov alyosha loses his mentor father zasima he's grieving it's super important that he's grieving he has a religious conversion on the basis of grieving where he sees the sort of deep sort of beauty of everything that is but it comes through the grief not by avoiding the grief uh and and melville says something like ishmael says something like he says i'm like a catskill mountain eagle the catskills mountains nearby he says who's sort of flying high above the earth going over the peaks and down into the valleys i have these ups and these downs but they're all invested with a kind of significance they all happen at an enormously high height because it's through the mountains that i'm flying and even when i'm down it's a way of being up but it's really down it's just that it's a way of being up because it makes the ups even upper well i guess then the perfectionism of that can be destructive i mean i i tend to uh see for example grief a loss of love as part of love in that it's a celebration of the richness of feelings you had when you had the love so it's like it's all part of the same experience but if you turn it into an optimization problem where everything can be unboreable then that can in itself be destructive yeah yeah i heard this interview with david foster wallace on the internet where it's uh it's a video of him and there is like a a foreign sounding reporter asking him questions i think she's uh there's an accent of some sort of german i think something like that and i don't know it just i painted a picture such a human person we were talking about listening the interviewer if i may say uh wasn't a very good one in the beginning so she kind of walked in doing the usual journalistic things of just kind of generic questions and and just kind of asking very basic questions but he brought out something in her over time and he was so sensitive and so sensitive to her and also sensitive to being a thinking and acting human in this world that's just painted such a beautiful picture that people should go definitely check out they made me really sad that we don't get this kind of picture um of of other thinkers all of the ones we've been talking about just that almost this little accidental view of this human being i don't know it was a beautiful one and i guess there's not many like that even of uh him yeah yeah no i think he was more than his writing ability which was extraordinary he had developed a style that was i think unlike you know anyone else's style and it was his sensitivity to other people and to sort of what he was there to pay attention to he wants in one of his um essays i think it's the one called an incredibly fun thing i'll never do again do you know that one about cruise ships i think he describes himself as this sort of roving eyeball that just sort of walks around the walks around the ship noticing things and he's incredibly good at that but i also do but i also worry that that reflects something that you find in ivan in in the brothers karamazov ivan i don't know if you remember this part when he's away at school as a young ecologist as a young boy he makes money by going around town to where tragic events have occurred someone just got run over by a carriage or someone you know something just happened and being the first one there he always knows somehow where these things are going to happen and writing about it giving this really good description and then signing it eyewitness and it's as if ivan's understanding of his life is that he was supposed to be a witness to it he was supposed to see others but not get involved he never is interested in trying to keep the bad things from happening he just wants to report on them when he sees them and i think that he's an incredibly isolated person character and it's his isolation from others from the love of others and his inability his desire not to love others because that attaches him to someone that i think is really at the ground of his condition and and i think that aim to be isolated which many people have nowadays i mean you see it in the underground man too just sort of taking yourself out of the world because you don't want to have to take responsibility for being involved with others i think that's a bad move and and i and i do worry that maybe i mean i never knew david foster wallace i have no right to to comment you know on on his life but he portrays um himself in that one episode as a person who who does that and i think that's dangerous yeah there's some sense in which being sensitive to the world like i find myself the the source of joy for me is just being really sensitive to the world to to experience there's some way it's quite brilliant where you're saying that that could be isolating it's like darwin studying uh a new kind of species on an island you don't want to interfere with it you find it so beautiful that you don't want to interfere with this beauty so there is some sense in which that isolates you and then you find yourself deeply alone yeah uh away from the experiences that bring you joy yeah and that could be destructive it's it's um that's fascinating how that uh that works and in his case of course some of it is um just chemical chemicals in his brain but some of it is the the the path his uh philosophy of life let him down and that's the danger we need you too and gazing into the abyss that you can um your job is a difficult one because uh doing philosophy changes you yeah and you may not uh know how it changes you until you you're changed and you look in the mirror you wrote a piece in mit tech review saying that ai can't be an artist creativity is and always will be a human endeavor you mentioned burt and criticism of symbolic ai can you explain your view of criticizing the possible the capacity for artistry and creativity in uh our robot friends uh yeah i can try so to make the argument you have to have in mind what counts as art what counts as a creative artistic act i take it that just doing something new isn't sufficient i mean we say that good art is original but not everything that's never been done before is good art so there has to be more than just doing something new it has to be somehow doing something new in a way that speaks to the audience or speaks to some portion of the audience at least it has to be doing something new in such a way that some people who see or interact with it can see themselves anew in it so i think that art is inherently a creative act it it i'm sorry a kind of um communicative act that it it involves a relation with other people so think about the conditions for that working someone i talk in that article i can't remember something about new music i think i don't talk about stravinsky but let's say stravinsky um stravinsky you know performs the right of spring and there's riots it is new and people hate it people can't sounds like a cacophony it sounds awful it's it's written according to principles that are not like the principles of music composition that people are familiar with so in some ways it's a failed communicative act but as as nietzsche says about his own stuff i mean we now can recognize that it wasn't it wasn't a failed communicative act it just it just hadn't reached its time yet and and now that way of composing music is like you know it's in disney movies you know it's so part of our musical palette that we don't we don't have that response it changed us it changed the way we understand what counts as good music so that's a deep communicative act it didn't perform its communication in that opening moment but it did ultimately establish a new understanding for all of us of what counts as good art and that's the kind of deep communication that i think good art can can do it can change our understanding of ourselves and of what a good manifestation of something of ourselves in a certain domain is and he used the term socially embedded that art is fundamentally socially embedded yeah and i really like that term because um i see like my love for artificial intelligence and the kind of system that we can bring to the world that could uh make for an interesting and more lively world and one that enriches human beings is one where the ai systems are deeply socially embedded good yeah so so that and that actually is in contrast to the way artificial intelligence have been talked about throughout its history and certainly now both on the robotic side and the ai side it's especially on the uh the tech sector with the businesses around ai they kind of want to create um systems that are like servants to humans and then humans do all the beautiful human messiness of where art would be part i i think that there is no reason why you can't integrate ai systems in the way you integrate new humans to the picture they're just the full diversity and the flaws all of that adds to the thing yeah like you know some people might say that alpha zero is this uh system from deep mind that was able to achieve uh you know solve the game it beat the best people in the world at the game of go with no supervision from humans but more interestingly to me on the side of creativity it was able to surprise a lot of grand masters with the kind of moves they came up with now to me that's not the creativity the magic that's socially embedded that we're talking about that is merely um revealing the limitations of humans to discover it's it's like uh to solve a particular aspect of a math problem i think creativity is not just um not just even socially embedded it's the way you're saying is it's part of the communicative act it's the interactive it's the dance with the culture and so it has to be like for alpha zero to be creative truly creative it would have to be integrated in a way where it has a twitter account and it becomes aware of the impact it has on the other grand masters with the moves that's coming up and one of the fascinating things about alpha zero which i just love so much is uh i don't know if you're familiar with chess i am yeah okay so the it does certain things that most chess players even at the highest level uh don't do which is it sacrifices pieces it gives pieces away and then waits like 10 moves before it pays you back so it does to me that's beautiful that that's crazy that's art if only alpha 0 understood the artistry of that which is uh i'm going to mess with you psychologically because i'm going to do two things one make you feel overconfident that you're doing well but actually also once you realize you are playing alpha zero that is much better than you you're going to feel really nervous about what's on the like is this is the calm before the storm and that's that creates a beautiful psychological masterpiece of this chess game if only alpha zero is then messing with you additionally to that like and be was cognizant of this doing that then it becomes art and then it's integrated into society in that way and i believe it doesn't have to actually have an understanding of uh the world in the way that humans have it can have a different one it can be like a child is as clueless about so many aspects of the world and it's okay and that's part of the magic of it just being flawed being lacking understanding all interesting kinds of ways but interacting and so to me it's it's possible to create art for ai but exactly as you're saying in a deeply socially embedded way good well i think i i think we agree but let me just highlight the thing that makes me think that we agree yeah which is that i think for people for community to allow themselves to recognize in a certain kind of creative act let's i'm thinking of stravinsky here but we could think of a chess thing to recognize in a certain kind of creative act a new and admirable worthy way of thinking about what's significant in the situation you have to believe that it wasn't random you have to believe that stravinsky wrote that way because he was receptive to what needed to be said now and so you you said if only alpha zero could do all this by virtue of recognizing that this was the thing that needed to be done then it would be socially embedded in the right way and i think i agree with that first of all it's possible to do in a constrained domain a game-playing domain go or chess goes more complicated than chess but but either one of them because there really are only a finite range of possibilities if you you know make the game end at a certain point there's there um it's a combinatorial problem in the end now obviously alpha zero doesn't solve the problem in a combinatorial way that would be sort of take too much energy you couldn't do it it's too too it sort of uh explodes the problem um so it does it in this other way that's interesting this pattern recognition way roughly and and in that context it may well be that it that it can see having had lots and lots of experience on in the training stuff against itself or against another version of itself it can see that the sacrifice here is going to pay dividends down the road see i put that in in quotation marks that's to say uh it's got you know a high weight to this move here as a result of experience in the past where that move down the line led to this this improvement so so in that in that finite context i think you know the game players can trust it and they talk that way that it's got a kind of authority um they say i've read some people who said about alpha zero when i played go uh it's like it's playing from the future it's making these moves that are just out landish and there's a kind of brilliance to them that we can't really understand we'll be catching up to it forever i think in that context like it's mapped the domain and the domain is mappable because it's a combinatorial problem roughly but in something like music or art of a of a non-finite form it feels to me like i i it's a little harder for me to understand what the analog of our trusting that stravinsky has recognized something about us that demands that he write this way that doesn't seem like a finite thing in quite the same way now now we could ask we could ask the system why did you do it we could ask stravinsky why did you do it and maybe it will have answers but then it's involved in a kind of communicative act and i think lots of times artists will often say look i i can't communicate better than what i've done in the piece of work and that that is the statement yeah yeah so the yeah we humans aren't able to answer the why either yeah but i do think the the question here is uh well first of all language is finite uh certainly when expressed to a tweet uh so it is also a combinatorial problem the question is how much more difficult it is than chess and i think i think all the same ways that we see the solutions to chess is deeply surprising when it was first addressed with ibm d blue and then with alpha go and alpha go zero alpha zero i think in that same way language can be addressed and communication can be addressed i don't see having done this podcast many reasons why everything i'm doing especially as a digital being on the internet can't be done by an ai system eventually so like i think we're being very uh human-centric and thinking we're special i think one of the hardest things is the physical space actually operating like touch and the magic of body language and the music of all of that because it's so deeply integrated through the long evolutionary process of what it's like to be on earth what is fundamentally different and ai has can catch up on is the way we apply our evolutionary history on the way we act on the internet and the way we act online and as more and more of the world becomes digital you're now operating in a space where ai is is behind much less so like we're both starting at zero i think that's super interesting do you do you know this do you know this author brian christian is that someone you've ever heard of that sounds familiar he he's a guy who competed in the what is it called the loebner competition yeah the turing test thing so and i'll just tell you the story but i think it's directly related to the last thing you said about where we're we're starting in the same place uh he competed in this in this competition but not he didn't enter uh a program that was supposed to try to uh pass the turing test the turing test you know there's three people there's the judge there's the program and then there's there's a someone who's a human the way they do it and the judge has got to figure out by asking questions which is the computer and which is the human so little known fact there's two prizes in that competition there's the most human computer prize that's the computer that wins the most and then there's the most human human rights and he competed for the most human human props and he wanted he kept one winning it and and so he he tried to think about what it is that um you have to be able to do in order to convince judges that you're human instead of a computer and that's an interesting question i think um and when he came to this my takeaway from his version of this story is that it is true that computers are winning these contests more and more you know as technology progresses but there's two possible explanations for that one is that the computers are becoming more human and the other is that the humans are becoming more like computers and he says actually the more we live our lives in this world where in this sort of technological world where we have to moderate our behavior so that it's readable by something that's effectively you know a computer the more we become like that and he says it happens even when you're uh not interacting with a computer he says have you ever been to the you know on the phone with the call you know center and they're going through their script and that's what they've got to do they've got to go through their script because that's how they keep their job and they ask you this question you've got to answer it and it and it's as if you're no longer interacting with a person even though it's a person because they've so given up everything that's involved normally with being able to make judgments and decisions and act in situations and take responsibility and so i think that's that's the other side of it it it it is true that technology is amazing and can solve huge ranges of problems and and do fantastic things but it's also true that we're changing ourselves in response to it and the one thing i'm worried about is that we're changing ourselves in such a way that the norms for what we're aiming at are being changed to move in the direction of this sort of efficiently and up in an optimized way solving a problem and move away from this other kind of thing that we were calling alive and aliveness or or significance and and so that's the that's the other side of the story and that's the worry but it's very possible that there is uh for you and i the ancient dinosaurs we may not see the aliveness in tiktok the aliveness in the digital space that you see it as us being dragged into this over optimized world but that may be uh this is in fact it is a world that opens up opportunities to truly experience life and there's interesting to think about all the people growing up now who their early experience of life is always mediated through a digital device not always but more and more often mediated through that device and how we're both evolving the technology is evolving and the humans are evolving to them maybe open a door to a whole world where the humans and the technology or ai systems are interacting as equals so now i'm going to agree with you you might be surprised that i'm going to agree with you but i think that's exactly right i i don't want to be the person who's saying our job is to resist all of this stuff that i don't want to be a luddite that's not my goal the goal is to point out that in the supreme danger lies the saving power yes the point is to get in the right relation to that understanding of what we are uh that allows us to find the joy in it and that's i think that's a hard thing to do it's hard to understand even what we're supposed to be doing when we do it i'm maybe high more than you i'm not of the right generation to be able to to do that but i do think that's got to be the move the move is not to resist it it's not a nostalgic move it's an attempt to push people to get in the relation to it that's not the relation of it controlling you and depriving you of stuff but if you're recognizing some great joy that can be found in it when i interact with league of robots i see there's magic there and i just feel like the person who hears the music when others don't and i don't know what that is and i'd love to explore that yeah and because it seems to it's almost like a the future talking and i'm trying to hear what it's saying is this a dangerous world or is this a beautiful world hmm well i can certainly understand your enthusiasm for that those used to be things that i found overwhelmingly exciting and i'm not sort of closed off from that anymore i mean i'm not now closed off from that even though my views are are changed and i don't work in that world but i i do think i think it's interesting to figure out what's at the ground of that of that response yeah we talked about meaning quite a bit throughout in a secular age but let me ask you the big ridiculous question almost too big what is the meaning of this thing we got going on what is the meaning of life you're you're saving the softball for the end easy one i i don't know what the meaning of life is i i think there's something that characterizes us that's not the thing that people normally think characterizes us the traditional thing to say in the philosophical tradition even in the ai tradition which is a kind of manifestation of philosophy from plato forward the traditional thing to say is that what characterizes us is our rationality that we're intelligent beings that we're the ones that that think and i think that's certainly part of of what characterizes us but i think there's more to it too i think we're capable of experiencing simultaneously the complete and utter ungroundedness of everything that's meaningful in our existence and also the real significance of it and that sounds like it that sounds like a contradiction like how could it really be significant and not be based on anything but i think that's the contradiction that somehow characterizes us and i think that we're the being that sort of has to hold that weird mystery before us and live in the light of it that's the thing that i think is really at our core and so how do we do that i will say this one thing and i learned it from a philosopher from a guy named albert borgmon who's a german philosopher lives in montana now taught in montana for his whole career and when i i say this to my students at harvard now he said this is the way that i think about my life and i hope you'll think about your life too he said you should think about your life hoping that there will be many moments in it about which you can say there's no place i'd rather be there's no thing i'd rather be doing there's no buddy i'd rather be with and this i will remember well and i think if you can aim to fill your life with moments like that it will be a meaningful one i don't know if that's the meaning of life but i think if you can hold that before you it'll help to clarify this mystery and this sort of bizarre situation in which we find ourselves sean this conversation was incredible and those four requirements have certainly been fulfilled for me this was a magical moment in that way and i will remember it well thank you so much it's an honor that you spend your valuable time with me this is great thank you thank you for having me lex i really really enjoyed it thanks for listening to this conversation with sean kelly to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from albert camus in the depth of winter i finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you