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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:19 - Existentialism
20:27 - Nietzsche and nihilism
38:03 - Dostoevsky
53:30 - Camus and suicide
1:12:00 - The Big Lebowski
1:19:49 - Ayn Rand
1:29:57 - Evil
1:40:31 - Heidegger
1:52:11 - Hubert Dreyfus
1:58:04 - Moby Dick
2:09:19 - David Foster Wallace
2:29:31 - Can AI make art?
2:49:15 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Sean Kelly, a philosopher at Harvard specializing in existentialism and the philosophy of mind.

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?

I'm teaching a course on existentialism right now.

Existentialism in literature and film, which is fun.

The traditional thing to say about what existentialism is, is that it's a movement in mid 20th century, mostly French, some German philosophy.

And some of the major figures associated with it are people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, maybe Martin Heidegger.

But that's a weird thing to say about it because most of those people denied that they were existentialists.

And in fact, I think of it as a movement that has a much longer history.

So when I try to describe what the core idea of existentialism is, it's an idea that you find expressed in different ways in a bunch of these people.

1 of the ways that it's expressed is that Sartre will say that existentialism is the view that there is no God, and at least his form of existentialism, he calls it atheistic existentialism.

There is no God, and since there's no God, there must be some other being around who does something like what God does, otherwise there wouldn't be any possibility for significance in a life.

And that being is us, and the feature of us, according to Sartre and the other existentialists, that puts us in the position to be able to play that role is that we're the beings for whom, as Sartre says it, existence precedes essence.

That's the catchphrase for existentialism and then you have to try to figure out what it means.

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

What is existence, what is essence, and what is precedes?

And in fact, precedes is Sartre's way of talking about it and other people will talk about it differently.

But here's the way Sartre thinks about it.

This is not, I think, the most interesting way to think about it, but I'll get you started.

Sartre says, there's nothing true about what it is to be you until you start existing, and still you, till you start living.

And for SART, the core feature of what it is to be existing the way we do is to be making decisions, to be making choices in your life, to be sort of taking a stand on what it is to be you by deciding to do this or that.

And the key feature of how to do that right for SART is to do it in the full recognition of the fact that when you make that choice, nobody is responsible for it other than you.

So you don't make the choice because God tells you to, you don't make the choice because some utilitarian calculus about what it's right to do tells you to do.

You don't make the choice because some other philosophical theory tells you to do it.

There's literally nothing on the basis of which you make the choice other than the fact that in that moment, you are the 1 making it.

You are a conscious thinking being that made a decision.

So all of the questions about physics and free will are out the window.

If you were a determinist about the mind, if you were a physicalist about the mind, if you thought there was nothing to your choices other than the activity of the brain that's governed by physical laws, then there's some sense in which it would seem at any rate like you're not the ground of that choice.

The ground of that choice was the physical universe and the laws that govern it, and then you'd have no responsibility.

And so Sartre's view is that the thing that's special about us, used to be special about God, is that we're responsible for becoming the being that makes the choices that we do.

And Sartre thinks that that's simultaneously empowering, I mean, it practically puts us in the place of God, and also terrifying because what responsibility?

How can you possibly take on that responsibility?

Everything that you do is the result of some choice that you've made.

The posture that you sit in, the way you hold someone's gaze when you're having a conversation with them or not, the choice to make a note when someone says something or not make a note.

Everything that you do presents you as a being who makes decisions and you're responsible for all of them.

And furthermore, there's no fact about you independent of the choices and actions you've performed.

So you don't get to say, Sartre's example, I really am a great writer, just haven't written my great book yet.

If you haven't written your great book, you're not a great writer.

And so it's terrifying, it puts a huge burden on us.

And that's why Sartre says on his view of existentialism, human beings are the beings that are condemned to be free.

Our freedom consists in our ability and our responsibility to make these choices and to become someone through making them, and we can't get away from that.

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

Well, So he thinks it should be liberating, but he thinks that it takes a very courageous individual to be liberated by it.

Nietzsche, I think, thought something similar.

I think Sartre is really coming out of a Nietzschean sort of tradition.

But what's liberating about it, if it is, is also terrifying because it means in a certain way you're the ground of your own being.

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?

There's 2 different ways that you're asking it.

Let me leave nihilism to the side for just a second and think about mattering, or is there any way that you can criticize someone for living the way they do if you're an existentialist.

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

He gives these 2 sort of amazing examples.

1, I don't know if it reads as well for us as it did in sort of mid 20th century Paris, but it's about a waiter.

He gives this in his big book, Being in Nothingness.

And he says, so waiters played, still do, I think, in a certain way in Paris, a big role in Parisian society to be a waiter involved having a certain kind of identity, being a certain way, taking control of and charge of the experience of the people that you're waiting on, but also really being the authority, knowing that this is the way it's supposed to go.

And so Sartre imagines a waiter who does everything that a waiter is supposed to do, the perfect form of the waiter, except that you can somehow see in the way he's doing it, that he's doing it because he believes that's the way a waiter should act.

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.

And the contours of the role are predetermined by someone other than him.

And that's criticizable because it's acting in such a way as to fail to take responsibility for the kind of being Sartre thinks you are.

And I think, you know, I think any teenager, If you've ever met a teenager, you've known someone who does that.

They think, if I dressed like this, I would be cool, so I'll dress like this.

Or if I spoke like this, or acted like this.

And it's natural for a teenager who's trying to figure out what their identity is to go through a phase like that.

But if you continue to do that, then you're really passing it.

And the other example he gives is an example not of passing off responsibility by pretending that someone else is the ground of your choice, but passing off responsibility by pretending that you might be able to get away with not making a choice at all.

So he says, everything you do is a result of your choices.

There you are on the first date, first date.

And the date, the evening reaches a moment when might be appropriate for 1 person to hold the hand of the other.

That's the moment in the date where you are.

You decide, I think it's that time and you hold the hand.

And what should happen is that the other person also makes a choice on Sartre's view.

Either they reject the hand, not that time, and I'm taking responsibility for that.

Or they grasp the hand back, That's a choice.

But there's a thing that sometimes happens, which is that the other person leaves the hand there cold, dead, and clammy, neither rejecting it nor embracing it.

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.

And you're pretending as if it's the kind of thing that you don't have to take responsibility for.

So both of the examples you've given, there's some sense in which the social interactions between humans is a kind of moving away from the full responsibility that you as a human in the view of existentialism should take on.

So like, isn't all, isn't the basic conversation a delegation of responsibility, just holding a hand there?

You're putting the response, some of the responsibility into the court or the other person.

And for the waiter, if you exist in a society, you are generally trying on a role.

Me wearing clothes is me trying on a role that I was told to try, as opposed to walking around naked all the time.

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

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

So Sartre thinks that in the ideal, you should try to resist that.

Other existentialists think that that's actually a clue to how you should live well.

So Sartre says somewhere else, hell is other people.

Well, because other people are making choices also.

And when other people make choices, they put some pressure on me to think that the choice they made is 1 that I should copy or 1 that I should sort of promote.

But if I do it because they did it, then I'm in bad faith for Sartre.

So, it is as if Sartre's view is like, we would be better if we were all alone.

I mean, this is really simplifying Sartre's position, and this is really just mostly Sartre in a certain period of his formation.

But anyhow, we can imagine that view, and I think there's something to the idea that Sartre is attracted to it, at least in the mid 40s.

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

I think for Sartre, the phenomenon is this, like it's not just that you wear clothes because people wear clothes in our society, like you have a particular style, you wear a particular kind of clothes.

And for Sartre, like to have that style authentically in good faith rather than in bad faith, it has to come from you.

But other people are making choices also.

And you're looking at their choices, And you're thinking, that guy looks good.

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.

God wouldn't be influenced by other's decisions.

And if that's the model, then I think that's the sense in which he thinks how those

It's like what, because God doesn't have a parent.

So aren't we significantly influenced, first of all, in the first few years of life?

And even the teenager is resisting, learning through resistance.

I mean, I think what you're pushing on is the intuition that the ideal that Sartre's aiming at is a kind of inhuman ideal.

I mean, there's many ways in which we're not like the traditional view of what God was.

1 is that we're not self-generating, we have parents.

We're raised into traditions and social norms and we're raised into an understanding of what's appropriate and inappropriate to do.

Martin Heidegger, who's the philosopher that Sartre thinks he's taking this from, but I think Sartre's a brilliant French misinterpretation of Heidegger's German phenomenological view.

Heidegger says a crucial aspect of what it is to be us is our thrownness.

If we were God and we existed outside of time, maybe, but we're not.

We're finite in the sense that we have a beginning that we never chose, we have an end that we're often trying to resist or put off or something.

And in between, there's a whole bunch of stuff that organizes us without our ever having made the choice and without our being the kind of being that could make the choice to allow it to organize us.

We have a complicated relationship to that stuff.

And I think we should talk about that at a certain point.

But the first move is to say, so it's just got a sort of descriptive problem.

He's missed this basic fact that There has to be an awful lot about us that's settled without our having made the choice to settle it that way.

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

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

But nevertheless, you are riding a wave and you make a decision in the riding of the wave.

You can't control the wave, but you should be, like, as you ride it, you should be making certain kinds of decisions and take responsibility for it.

So why does this matter at all, the chain of decisions you make?

This view is against most of philosophy from Plato forward.

Plato says in the Republic, it's a kind of myth, but he says people will understand their condition well if we tell them this myth.

He says, look, when you're born, there's just a fact about you.

Your soul is either gold, silver, or bronze.

Those are the 3 kinds of people there are, and you're born that way.

And if your soul is gold, then we should identify that and make you a philosopher king.

And if your soul is silver, well, you're not going to be a philosopher king.

You're not capable of it, but you could be a good warrior and we should make you that.

And if your soul is bronze, then you should be a farmer, laborer, something like that.

And that's a fact about you that identifies you forever and for always, independent of anything you do about it.

And you could have modern versions of it.

You could say the thing that identifies you is your IQ or your genetic makeup or the percentage of fast-switch muscle fibers you've got or whatever.

It could be something totally independent of any choice that you've made, independent of the kind of thing about which you could make a choice, and it categorizes you.

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

So this idea that something about you is forever limiting the space of possible decisions you can make.

Sartre is the philosopher of radical freedom.

And then you could have other existentialists who say, look, we are free, but we gotta understand the way in which our freedom is limited by certain aspects of the kind of being that we are.

If we were radically free, we really would be like God in the traditional medieval sense.

And these folks start with the idea that whatever we are, that's a kind of limit point that we're not gonna reach.

So what are the ways in which we're constrained that that being the way the medievals understood him wasn't constrained?

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?

So nihilism, the philosopher who made the term popular, although it was used before him as Nietzsche, Nietzsche's writing in the end of the 19th century in various places where he published things, but largely in his unpublished works, he identifies the condition of the modern world as nihilistic, And that's a descriptive claim.

He's looking around him, trying to figure out what it's like to be us now.

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

like what people believed, the way they lived their lives was in the understanding that to be human was to be created in the image and likeness of God.

That's the way they understood themselves.

And also to be created sinful because of, you know, Adam and Eve's transgression in the Garden of Eden, and to have the project of trying to understand how as a sinful being you could nevertheless live a virtuous life.

And it had to do with, for them, getting in the right relation to God.

Nietzsche says, that doesn't make sense to us anymore in the end of the 19th century.

Well, it means something like the role that God used to play in our understanding of ourselves as a culture isn't a role that God can play anymore.

And so Nietzsche says, the role that God used to play was the role of grounding our existence.

He was what it is in virtue of which we are who we are.

And Nietzsche says, the idea that there is a being that makes us what we are doesn't make sense anymore.

And so the question is, what does ground our existence?

And so nihilism is the idea that there's nothing outside of us that grounds our existence.

And then Nietzsche asked the question, well, what are we supposed to do about that?

And I think Nietzsche has a different story than Sartre about that.

Nietzsche doesn't emphasize this notion of radical freedom.

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 the way I've got to play the music.

And Nietzsche says we should live like that.

There are constraints, but understanding what they are is a complicated aspect of living itself.

And There's a great story, I think, from music that maybe helps to understand this.

I think Nietzsche, of course, jazz didn't exist when Nietzsche was writing.

But I think Nietzsche really is thinking of something like jazz improvisation.

Not a great 1, really, to be fair, but he loved music.

And Herbie Hancock, who's a pianist, a jazz pianist, who played with Miles Davis for quite a while in the 60s, tells this kind of incredible story that I think exemplifies Nietzsche's view about the way in which we bear some responsibility for being creative, and that gives us a certain kind of freedom, but we don't have the radical freedom that Sarth thinks.

Herbie Hancock says, I think they were in Stuttgart, he says, playing a show and things were great, he says.

He's a young pianist and Miles Davis is the master.

And he says, I'm back in the solo and I'm playing these chords.

And he says, I played this chord and it was the wrong chord.

And I thought, holy mackerel, I screwed up.

We were tight, everything was working, and I blew it for Miles, who's doing his solo.

And he said, Miles paused for a moment, and then all of a sudden, he went on in a way that made my chord right.

And I think that idea that like you could be an artist who responds to what's thrown at you in such a way as to make it right, by what measure?

Everyone could hear it is all you can say.

Most of what anyone would have played would have sounded terrible.

They're sort of what's happening now in the moment for these listeners and these performers.

And I think that's what Nietzsche thinks the right response to nihilism is.

We're involved, but we're not radically free to make any choice and just stand behind it the way Sartre thinks.

Our choices have to be responsive to our situation And they have to make the situation work.

So you basically have to make music of all the moments of life.

And when you listen to it, something about certain kinds of music, it connects with you.

But in that same way for Nietzsche, you should be a creative force that creates a musical masterpiece.

And I think what's interesting is the question, what does it mean to be a creative force there?

There's a traditional notion of creation that we associate with God.

And you might think that nihilism thinks that we should do that, create ex nihilo because it's about how there's nothing at our ground.

But I think the right way to read Nietzsche is to recognize that we don't create out of nothing.

Miles Davis wasn't nothing, that situation preexisted him.

It was given to him, maybe by accident, maybe it was a mistake, whatever.

But he was responding to that situation in a way that made it right.

He was creating out of what was already there.

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

And that's the responsibility for both of them.

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Sean Kelly: Existentialism, Nihilism, and the Search for Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #227