Existential Philosophy, Nietzsche, Suffering & Self-Awareness - Joe Folley

So one of the things that in some ways nature really comes up with a very naturalistic view of what it means to be a human which I think kind of jives relatively well um with the kind of spirit of a lot of modern empirical research into well into into psychology. I mean nature is um considered by uh people like kind of he was a huge influence of people like Freud and and Jung and stuff like that. I mean, I wouldn't I wouldn't go so far as to say that nature was an evolutionary psychologist, but I think that he might be worth reading if you're interested in evolutionary psychology. It's kind of a very different perspective. The thing that nature has as a as I say, a kind of picture of the human, which ends up really influencing the psychologists immediately after him, but also just kind of it's still a a broad view of the human that um still is around today is the nature conceives of the mind as basically a collection of drives or the will as basically a collection of drives. And so it's it as opposed to a lot of thinkers before him who sort of conceived of the will as like one object. So the kind of I know if you want an image it's like the little man driving our bodies if that makes sense. Nature kind of throws out this this picture and he says no that kind of if I think about how a human being works they tend not to work quite like that. I tend to think, okay, I've got this kind of quite chaotic series of drives, and it's very difficult to pinpoint exactly what the MI drive is in there. And so he comes up with this image of human psychology which is of we all have we our mind just is a series of drives and some people have those drives kind of roughly pointing in one direction. Other people are kind of completely scattered to the to the four winds and you know the drives are pulling them this way and that way and they they can't act. They can't get anything done. they can't prioritize. And so this is kind of the view of the mind that I would say is kind of then ends up in a lot of in a lot of late 19th century and right through the 20th century in terms of in terms of psychological ideas and theorizing and research because you know if you think about um how a therapist might conceive of the the human will today. um they tend to talk roughly in terms of of different drives, different facets of the mind, like this kind of fragmentaryary view of the human will where it's not just kind of one set thing. It's this collection of different ideas and drives and and and desires and that that kind of comes from nature. I mean he's building off earlier thinkers but that for instance is is where a lot of early psychoanalysts kind of credit where their view of the mind has come from and then this I say ends up filtering through right right even to even to today I mean you know I I know you've mentioned before that you you're kind of in you have had therapy and stuff so I I I think that you know I don't know how similar that was to to how some of the therapy that you've undergone has conceived of the human mind. >> Yeah. I I think Robert Wright in why Buddhism is true evolutionary psychologist who then pivoted to do mindfulness a lot of retreats and sort of have a take on Buddhism with an evolutionary lens. He's got this wonderful idea about the mind as a collection of modules and that's not too dissimilar to what you're talking about that there is a module for this and a module for that and a module for the other and trying to get the right module to go at the right time and the fact that these are kind of compartmentalized off and they don't necessarily communicate very well. So yeah, the difference between there being one train driver at the front that's pulling this big locomotive or kind of like a racetrack with [ __ ] tons of different drivers and they've all got their own desire. One's going backwards, one's driving the car upside down. And yeah, the I I think what I'm fascinated by and my point at the very beginning, you have a a area of expertise, something that you're very familiar with and you start to see the world through this lens and then when you start to learn a new topic, your anchoring bias inevitably starts. Oh, that's that's similar to the will to power. Oh, that's similar to notes from the indig, you know. Oh, that's similar to such and such a thing. like you you have your own framing, but when I read anything from your world, I then start to think about, oh, well, that's that's uh the difference between approximate and ultimate reasons for behavior. Oh, well that's an adaptive ancestral explanation for this thing. Oh, well, this is the the balance and the trade-off you have to have between survival and reproduction. So kind of whatever your uh topic area of choice is, whatever you know best, everything else kind of acts in relativity to that. And uh it's so funny just when you've got one area you know well, you learn something new and and you start to sort of pull these threads out in reference to the first one. >> Oh yeah. I think that's I think that's one of the reasons why I really enjoy um like kind of looking at a lot of different topics kind of reading as as widely as possible. I think one of the one of the real privileges of of being in sort of I don't know public communication of philosophy as opposed to like academic philosophy is that it kind of gives me the scope to sort of read a bit of this and a bit of that and actually I quite often find these kind of connections emerging like I was reading um a book uh I think Peter Godfrey Smith he kind of has a is you know he's a philosopher but works mainly in philosophy of biology and he writes an entire book on on the octopus and cuttlefish and this kind of divergent evolutionary path where there you end up with this kind of radical different looking neurological structures and you know it's again it kind of it it's nice having that to draw from when I then talk about something like nature you know for for example I mean this is kind of a tenuous link but nonetheless I think it kind of illustrates quite well is that is that in um octopuses and I've checked apparently that is the correct plural >> it's not octopi I know >> yeah I I kind of I've been saying octopi for years >> we've been double yeah >> yeah exactly turns out I was just being pretentious what a what a shot but um octopuses have this kind of incredibly disperate neurological system. So their arms are kind of semi-autonomous and that again you know reminded me a little bit of you know you've got you know nature has this picture of the human will as as a bunch of you know semi-aututonomous drives and you kind of you find yourself sort of in the midst of this situation. There is no there is no kind of point separate from that where you can sit there and you can like quite calmly and patiently dictate all of your drives to be this way and that way. You're kind of you you are inescapably in the midst of your own life and you just kind of have to deal with that. And um >> one of the things he becomes increasingly >> concerned with and you find this especially in his notebooks >> is he becomes very concerned about the organization of the will. So uh again a kind of a concept that comes up a lot in his notebooks is the notion of the organized will where all of these drives are kind of roughly pointing in in in a single direction and the disorganized will where they're kind of again scattered to the fourth winds. And I think I think that this is I I wanted to to kind of start on this point because I think that this is um one of the things I really like about about thinkers like Litra and Dostki is that they've got all this kind of like highulutin uh philosophical side to them. Um and that kind of is is what they're they're known for. But also as you're reading them, you find a lot of a lot of insight that is is just surprisingly down to earth and sort of, you know, is is immediately translatable into your into your map of of how you see the world and navigate it. Why is it that existential philosophy is so alluring? Like I wouldn't think if you were to just tell me from first principles if you would say, "Hey, here's the books. This is kind of what they're about. This is the level of difficulty. This is the level of length. This is the sort of level of accessibility. These are the kind of takeaways. This is what it was built for. This is the era it came out of. This is the demeanor of the people who wrote it." I would not put existential philosophy that high on my list of potential matches. And yet, it seems to be very attractive, very seductive, very alluring to a lot of people, very life-changing to a lot of people. What What's going on there? Why? I think part of it is this sort of coherence between a set of quite abstract ideas by quite abstract thinking people and also and and the coherence between that and then a series of very very downto-earth issues that you just encounter every day. I mean something like dsstepski for example, he's got lots and lots of um themes in his book that are about kind of religion and a particular conception of theology and and and active love which is a sort of an idea of kind of being self-sacrificial in your in your love and that sort of thing. Um but he's also got these kind of sudden incredibly insightful um psychological ideas like the idea that you can't run from guilt or or not from underground is sort of one of the most troubling and most most detailed examinations of resentment um that I've ever come across. And I think that there's something about say uh reading something that looks from underground. And you know there there are plenty of passages in that that are very very abstract. There's also troublingly relatable habits of behavior that you'll be able to spot or at least I'll be able to spot in myself. Maybe it's just because I'm a bastard and everyone else is wonderful. The but at the very least I would imagine that most of us will be able to spot in ourselves. And um and I think that's part of what makes it so appealing, you know, and if you read nature amongst all of the kind of impenetrable pros and maybe stuff that you're not necessarily interested in, there will be these kind of offhand psychological insights like um you know really good example one of the one of nature's uh you know analyses that has that has ended up being a bit more popular is again to do with resentment or resant as he calls it and that for nature is is sort of a cross between a conscious feeling you know resentment and an unconscious drive to sort of recoup a sense of power when you're feeling powerlessness. And this is in his book, The Genealogy of Morals, where essentially he's trying to give an analysis of Christian morality from his perspective. And he's broadly very anti-Christian. You kind of he really doesn't like it. Um this his analysis of Christianity has been pretty heavily criticized. But I'm more interested in the kind of angle he takes. So his argument is that uh Christian morality which you know is is incredibly um concerned with sort of suffering and compassion and pity and uh concern for the weak in nature's terms. He basically asked, "Well, how could this kind of thing come about?" And he makes the claim that Christian morality stemmed from a resentful feeling of powerlessness and that as and that as a as an attempt to recoup a sense of power, these powerless people defined a morality whereby people would have to take pity upon them and and and compassions and stuff like that. And so regardless of what you think of that particular story because you know as a as a kind of historical narrative it's the very least quite questionable. Nonetheless that >> approach of taking something that almost seems common sensically right you know what what could be more intuitive than the idea of being compassionate or or or taking pity upon somebody vulnerable or who's in a difficult situation. And kind of takes that and says okay well if we interrogated what was underneath this would we find something really quite reprehensible? would it be would it be kind of um would it not live up to its own expectations as a moral system in its origins? And I find that that kind of approach is very fascinating um even if you don't necessarily agree with his conclusions. >> Let me give you an equivalent from my world of evolutionary psychology. So uh sympathy is investment advice is uh a way of summarizing the adaptive reason for why we feel sympathy toward other people. Now it's pro-social. Uh it is highlighting somebody who needs help and it sort of engenders this sense of unfairness um an imperative to action uh a softness caringness um toward this person. That all seems fantastic. You're living in a small tribe. You're probably somehow related to them or are going to be at some point in the near future. Good to keep everybody alive. That's probably a pretty good idea. the self-s serving that would be the um that would be one layer of analysis. Another layer of analysis would be this person is so down on their luck. They are so bereft that their bank account is so low that even a penny to them would be a large uh contribution which means that you can invest in them a small amount and they will owe you the maximum amount. To a starving man, a scrap of food is worth a lot. To a person who is pretty well fed, that doesn't mean much at all. So sympathy is investment advice. Not too dissimilar to what you're talking about there, that somebody who has been has struggled in order to gain dominance or prowess or prestige in society. Well, perhaps it's not that they didn't contribute, couldn't contribute, didn't have the capacity, didn't do the things right. Perhaps it's that they're inherently more noble. Like that's happening. The call is coming from inside of the house with regards to that thinking that they've turned the bar stool upside down themselves. Whereas this one is you on the outside looking at them and saying, "Oh, this poor meek person that really needs my help. I should I I'm this would be a great idea." And also the back of your mind is saying and if you help them you don't need to give them much and they'll really owe you. >> That's very interesting. Yeah. I think that to a certain extent um nature kind of tells the story from the other perspective. So he's his account of the origin of like a compassion based morality is is from the perspective of the powerless and he says well you know imagine that you're you know it I suppose one important kind of preliminary to this story is that nature thinks that a feeling of overcoming resistance or a feeling of power is just incredibly important for for font of a better term existential fulfillment. So arguably I mean there's a an interpretation of nature by a guy called Bernard Register. One thing I should say is that pretty much everything about nature is controversial is not only did he say lots of controversial things also what he meant is really controversial. So you know take all of this with a grain of salt but in this burner register interpretation um nature effectively identifies overcoming resistance as one of if not the primary source of human fulfillment or existential fulfillment. And so in that under that kind of mode um feeling powerless is is sort of like living in hell you know that you're really you're really in a bad way and which is I think kind of jives with a certain common sense view of if you're powerless you feel very vulnerable that can be very very unpleasant um and so his story of how his idea of how Christian reality came about was that these powerless people thought right we're very powerless how are we going to recoup a sense of power because we need to feel powerful that's one of our intrinsic psychological needs again if we wanted to draw a kind of line to where this has ended up in modern cognitive psychology. You might you might talk about agency or something like that. You know, these people they've got no power over their own lives. They they have no feeling of strength. And so according to nature, they play a kind of two-fold trick. One is to say um something along the lines of I chose this, you know, I chose to be powerless and the other is to say actually being powerless is really good. And you know, I kind of think that again whether this is a good account of how kind of Paul and Christian morality came about aside, I think that when most people read that, they're probably not they probably take it out of that context and say something like, "Oh yeah, actually I can think about the times where I couldn't achieve something because of lack of power. I didn't have the strength to overcome resistance or I felt powerless or or I felt weak." And as a result, I basically went, "No, I don't want that thing anyway." Like I can't get it, so I don't want it. that kind of um son of sour grapes I suppose is the >> um >> the kind of common expression for that sort of thing. So I think that's what kind of like there's a kind of divergence between what kind of nature's is interested in and what most people take away from nature. But I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. You know it's there's nothing wrong with with reading a philosopher outside of their original context and asking you know how can I build upon these ideas. Arguably that's closer to doing philosophy than just sort of paring exact >> passively taking it. Yeah. Very interesting. Are you familiar with Isaiah Berlin's Inner Citadel? Do you know this? >> Oh god, I've heard of it, but I don't I don't >> Yeah. So, it's it's very similar or at least sounds pretty similar to what you're talking about. So, he basically says if you can't get what you want, you have to teach yourself to want what you can get. So, a good example would be uh your leg gets injured in a battle, you try to treat the leg, and if you do, that's fine. But if you can't, then you chop your leg off and denounce that the desire for legs is misguided and must be subdued. So he talks about retreating into yourself. When when the fated ills of the world do not deliver to you that which you deny that which you desire, you retreat into yourself. You wall yourself off into sort of spiritual depth. And he refers to this as the inner citadel. If you can't get what you want, you have to teach yourself to want what you can get. This sounds this sounds super similar to this. So I guess why is resentment what resentment and resistance why are these two key themes like what what makes us so important why this such big drivers so um partly Nisha has a problem with resentment because he thinks it's dishonest he just sort of thinks no you're lying about what you want you want this but you're denying yourself even the the ability to to go and get it or or try and become more powerful in his terms the the resistance thing is important because nature has the framing for a lot of nature's project around the will to power is that he's very worried about the death of god um but at the same time sees this a kind of opportunity so one of um nature's primary ideas and I think that um this is what draws a lot of people to nature and to existential philosophy in general is that he wants to make sense of and help us deal with suffering this was particularly acute for nature because he had a really quite debilitating chronic pain condition so he used to get these kind of split ing headaches and kind of that would put him in basically months and months of agony. And he so this kind of idea of suffering and how to overcome suffering in a kind of internal sense, how to deal with it, how to how to not hate life because life is kicking you in the head was really quite personal to him and for him a lot of the way that people had dealt with that before was using some kind of religion. So ner is an atheist but he doesn't really argue for atheism in any meaningful sense. he kind of takes it as red. Um his philosophical project is more sort of okay if you're an atheist what now? So because he thinks that a lot of the ways that people have dealt with suffering beforehand have been in some way religious. You know imagine that you're a Christian you can think something like well sure I'm I'm a kind of medieval peasant starving to death but I'm going to inherit eternal life and moreover eternal bliss. So things aren't that bad. There's a sense in which life can still be made meaningful even if it's really unpleasant. And nature wants to figure out how to do this in a sort of post-religious or post-Christian world. And what he comes up with is he sort of sits back and thinks right I need to make suffering not something that is undesirable but I need to in somehow somehow incorporate it into my kind of meaning scheme of the world. I need to take suffering and turn it into something that is desirable. And he this is kind of the kind of underlying themes in his construction of the will to power. The will to power for nature is you know when he first introduces it he largely talks about it as a feeling of overcoming resistance. So again I think this you know that sounds very abstract. It's also very easy to bring down to earth. You know you've I mean I don't know how long you've been running this podcast but I imagine it was an awful lot of work. I imagine it was it still is very very difficult. Right. And nature's point um if we kind of bring it more down to the everyday level is that how some how fulfilling or how um good in a very broad sense something is going to feel uh once you've done it is partly a function of how difficult it is, how much resistance you've had to overcome to do it. And nature spots in this a potential way to re-enchant suffering, a way to make suffering not the absolute end of the world. uh even if you're experiencing an awful lot of it as nature was is that he sort of goes right okay what if we constructed our kind of philosophy of the world alongside this idea of overcoming resistance because then he sort of goes right in that case even if you're suffering a lot you can in some s you or at least you stand half a chance of finding a way to celebrate that because you if your aim is to overcome resistance you must also want resistance. So that's kind of his his so that was how he kind of wanted to to incorporate suffering into the way that you know people looked at the world postgard. Um but again I feel like you know regardless of what you think about the very kind of abstract picture there. Um this is an insight that has trickled down into this well at the very least you can see it manifest on an everyday level right I think that you know arguably you even find it in um monsychological concepts like flow. You know, part of the part of the the necessary ingredients of flow is that you encounter a certain level of resistance. That's part of what makes it meaningful. And for nature, resistance is and resistance and specifically overcoming resistance is what makes something meaningful. And um part of what this allows him to do is say well whereas before we want we were aiming at heaven we were aiming at a changeless blissful state. Now in fact in order to achieve what we want out of life we need to encounter resistance and we need to encounter suffering. And this is a kind of image that that is scattered all the way through his philosophy. So um at the very kind of well in dusbake zarathustra actually no before that it the one of his first published works is called the birth of tragedy. about art and he's talking there about um how he thinks certain ancient Greek playrs learned to make the very very harsh life of ancient Greece something that was to be celebrated something that didn't tear them down something that actually made them rejoice in life and so he talks about Greek tragedy as as a means to which they did that and then you know this this theme reemerges and thus big arthusra the the the first metamorphosis of nature's uber mench is is called the camel and nature defines the camel as as a being that takes on load and also celebrates the fact that they're taking on load. So we have this idea of you know challenge is not just kind of an incidental thing to be compensated for later. The resistance is the point and the overcoming of the resistance is the thing that's being aimed at. But again it's all very abstract but >> I think one of the reasons why nature really appeals to people is that that's a very abstract way of putting things. It's also very applicable to your everyday life. If you can find a way to celebrate suffering and celebrate resistance or celebrate overcoming resistance, that's going to be pretty handy for for when you do encounter challenges as we all inevitably do. What's the role of play or joy or pleasure or sort of momentto- moment happiness? It sounds a lot like here like meaning long-term um deferred gratification. Uh the acceptance of challenge almost the reveling in it. Um but this is largely deriving pleasure from meaning not driving pleasure from pleasure. So is there a is there a more sort of hydonic uh element of this at all or is that kind of discarded as flimsy? So nature doesn't focus as much on the hydonic element but it is there. It's not sort of I think partly because he's less concerned about the pleasurable sides of life because the pleasurable sides of life aren't that hard to get through. It's actually very nice. Um but uh he does touch upon this um a fair amount. He often uses metaphors of dancing and joy and laughing. I think that the way you could incorporate this into this kind of idea of overcoming resistance is a little bit like sort of competitive sport I think is a really good example of that, right? Or or even, you know, weightlifting or something like that. You know, it's it's not just it's not just that um the overcoming of resistance is something that's, you know, you really suffer through and you think it's horrible and then you get to the other side and you're allowed to feel joy. Ner thinks that ideally he wants to be in a situation where you're celebrating that that process of overcoming resistance as well. So again I think competitive sport is a good analogy for this right like um players enjoy winning a game but they also enjoy the process of winning a game. Nisha nature's philosophy is very is in a lot of ways taking joy in process because again if your if your fundamental goal is to continue to overcome resistance then as soon as you've overcome one bit of resistance or like in layman's terms as soon as you like accomplish one challenge then you've got to find another one. If if your whole aim in life is to continue to to overcome resistance or beat challenges or however you want to put it then it is a very kind of processbased philosophy. It's nature's very keen on >> was atomic habits for the 1800s. >> Yeah, a little bit. I I interestingly I always thought that um I I atomic habits reminds me very much of like this this ch sorry I'm going off topic now. This chapter in Aristotle. So Aristotle's entire philosophy is based around habits and like his his whole like picture of the virtuous human is based around habituated behavior. So I've always thought you know there there's a chapter in Nicaraminian ethics that whenever I'm I'm sort of teaching I occasionally go speak at schools and teach it and yeah and teach things. Um and one of the I always refer to one of the chapters as sort of um atomic habits in the kind of 4th century BC. But anyway, but yeah, it is it's I think that again nature's philosophy is very is very kind of taking joy in the journey sort of way. Um but it's but again it's it's significantly less um I don't know how else to put it. It's significantly less fun than I just put it. He is he's he's really into the the nitty-gritty of suffering which you can imagine you know this is a man who spends like a good portion of his life in really unbearable pain. So you can see how this was a really imperative question for him to answer but nonetheless he does >> um also eventually conceive of overcoming resistance and the process of overcoming resistance as a joyful activity. >> Right? So what would be what would be his advice to somebody who keeps getting kicked in the nuts over and over and is and and is regularly or keeps having a splitting headache that lasts for months on end. What would his sort of lay person advice be to them uh about how to how to deal with that. So Nichze's ultimate goal for all of his philosophy is this concept of amalati which I think is a is a phrase that he borrowed from stoic philosophy but is using it in a very different way. So his the kind of culmination of um of his philosophical project is the idea of loving literally everything that happens to you and not merely kind of being content or or kind of accepting it but but truly loving it. And it's kind of I mean he definitely never got there because you know if you read his letters he's not necessarily a happy bunny a lot of the time but that's so the advice that he or he when he's writing about how he deals with his own pay he largely talks about it as as as a kind of resistance to overcome. So something that he's in some twisted way enjoying overcoming. He uses and he kind of channels it into his writing. So he has these splitting headaches and he has this I can't remember the exact metaphor but he talks about how it was so painful that it kind of focused his mind in a strange sense and so he channeled that pain into his writing or into his work. And although that's not a kind of bit of his formal philosophy, it is nonetheless kind of reminiscent of some of the stuff he does say in his formal philosophy where he talks about kind of sublimating pain or suffering or sublimating your drives towards this kind of organized will that whose aim is fundamentally to overcome resistance and as a result must will resistance for themselves. Would that mean that a life without resistance would be kind of like a hell? Yeah, essentially he he's very worried about human potential. So one of the images from nature's philosophy that really sticks out to a lot of people is the figure of the last man which is a character in thus zarustra where the last man is sort of a kind of passive nihilist but the thing that they're hankering after um is contentment so not contentment in the kind of I don't know like Buddhist sense I suppose of kind of reaching nana although nature also has a problem with that this sort of all right I'm going to avoid challenge and resistance as much as I possibly at and there are two reasons why nature is opposed to this. The first is that he's got this sort of I don't want to call it sentimental but he's got this real investment in the idea of humans achieving their potential. you see this um and of again all through his works even he has an essay called Choppenhower as educator where he's kind of reflecting on the work of Arthur Schopenhau and in that he has this kind of like almost mini rant in the middle of the essay which is like really fascinating about how he just like absolutely cannot stand it when people don't in his words kind of embrace what they could uniquely be as that and instead allow these other pressures to interfere with again to to kind of invoke his terms to be to interfere with them becoming who they are if resistance isn't there, he's worried that humanity will just kind of decay into this like sludge that doesn't do anything. Um he's, you know, he's worried that all we'll do is kind of we'll sit around on our sofas um pursuing comfort, avoiding pain, and as a result, we will also never feel for him the kind of joys of actually ending up overcoming resistance. So I mean again, it all sounds very abstract when you put like this. It's actually quite a quite an intuitive thought where you know imagine that imagine that you literally never struggled in life like I you know I'm sure that nature wouldn't like actually wish his headache upon himself but we can imagine a a person who literally never encounters any struggle. Well, if we all recognize that there's a a real feeling of achievement um in overcoming some kind of struggle or resistance, even if it's just a small one, um then for nature, this person will never experience that sort of they will never experience the the kind of fulfillment that comes with having overcome something. >> Does that mean that he hates weak people? Was he not a fan of sort of cowardly weak people? Yeah, it's it's interesting because I mean in a lot of ways arguably nature wasn't like a massively strong person. You know, he was a a nervous wreck for much of his life. Again, he suffered from a from a a terrible chronic pain condition. And so there's this um sort of back and forth that goes uh goes on in a lot of kind of popular discussions on nature where people sort of quite understandably pose the question of does nature really live up to his own ideal here? And again, if we if we perceive of power as overcoming resistance, then arguably he he gets he gets some of the way there. But, you know, I think that um it is perfectly plausible to turn NE's challenge back on him and say, "Well, hang on a second, Matt. You got rejected by by a couple of girls and then you decided you hated like women as a whole and and you know, you spent you kind of ran from basically any criticism that you got and you kind of retreated to your your cabin and went on walks in the Alps." that doesn't sound like it's overcoming resistance all that much. So, let's bring it back to NZ's view on weak people. Yeah, he has a real he has a real contempt for them like in a way that I think um it's very easy to run from when you're reading each other because you know we've had 70 years of you know well was it yeah since the end of World War II so 80 years now of people going okay the Nazis were a real fan of nature this seems a bit we have they misinterpreted him what what what's been going on here and basically everyone agrees that yeah okay they have misinterpreted him in some key ways this does sometimes lead to the creation of what I call fluffy bunny nature, which is where you sort of you sort of imbue nature with whatever you personally think is a really good thing and pretend that he said it, which is kind of relatively easy to do on the basis that nature himself says an awful lot of things, a lot of which contradict one another. It let you actually you can kind of pick and choose little bits and create your own sort of model nature that says everything that you want him to say. But nonetheless, nature does have a have a real um contempt for what he sees as weakness. And I kind of I of sometimes wonder to what extent he turned that contempt on himself. I think that um he kind of he has this view for a number of reasons. The first is that he sort of thinks that that weakness breeds dishonesty. So again this come back to that kind of sour grapes point. Um but secondly he thinks that uh in his view a kind of unwillingness to overcome resistance which is broadly how he defines weakness kind of an unwillingness or an inability to overcome resistance is going to eventually lead this person to kind of become a nihilist. So Nisha has this very confusing um way of talking about like weak people um or quote unquote weak people because again he has a kind of weird esoteric definition for it whereby he quite often says oh yeah man like I hate them I I have scorned for them or something like that and then at other points he says no no no I love all people and you sit there and you think well what these things are very difficult to go together and a lot of the And this is resolved by interpreters by saying something like, well, if you imagine that nature's project is for everyone to become willing and able to overcome resistance because he truly thinks, whether he's right or wrong, he truly thinks that that is the way that you can not become nihilistic in a world without God and without any kind of given meaning for yourself. Then when he's kind of hard on weak people, uh I think a lot of a lot of interpreters will kind of try and reinterpret this. And you know I think that probably this thing is a broadly sensible interpretation as a kind of tough dad attitude a sort of no you know it would be it would be in some way condescending to extend pity to people when nature fully knows that they could become this kind of >> this this figure of uniquely themselves and they could overcome resistance they so that's his one of his broad critiques of of compassion which is sort of very difficult to get your head around is that he thinks compassion is is bad for the for the person that is the person that one is being compassionate towards. He thinks that you're in some way holding them back. >> Uh which again is is again it's like a it's a very abstract point where nature puts it. But again we we kind of all recognize that where do you want to take it as extreme as nature does that there are contexts where this attitude is appropriate. And I'm thinking of of my own dad right and my my my dad was sort of very you must overcome challenges type thing. And and in hindsight, I'm very very grateful for that. Uh because it was it kind of allow it kind of taught me how to be more independent. You know, I think of some people I know who had maybe much um I know quote unquote softer uh parents and actually I don't know they did that did that benefit them? I don't think it did. Don't get me wrong. I mean, I think that um Nichze's way of putting this is probably far beyond anything that most people want to accept now because he is really really anti-compassion and anti-pity. There are like a couple of passages where he's talking about oh yeah well you can be magnanimous if you want but on the whole he's very very very hard on people that he perceives as weak. >> What's the role of the uber mench then? So the uber mench is interestingly despite the fact that it's like the thing that people know about nature like the uber mench is is is married to nature in popular consciousness it only comes up in thus speak zarathustra and the purpose of the uber mench for nature is it's at that point it's someone that is strong enough to make life seem meaningful and you know in his terms create values uh even recognizing that you know there there is no god. The world is is in itself valueless. The uber mench is somebody that can look at that and say, "All right, bring it on, man." Like, I'm I'm going to create values for this world. And the actual term uber mench is very quickly abandoned in favor of other things. So, this figure then evolves in later work into figures like the new philosophers. And the new philosophers are also creating value. So, you can tell that they're doing a very similar job. Um, but again, they're given a very different name. And eventually, you know, this ends up culminating in his kind of final word for this is Dionian wisdom, which again is it's the same kind of idea. It's this idea that you can look at the world and most importantly look at the really awful things in the world. You know, all of the stuff that you would hate to go through and in some sense learn to celebrate it. An sort of doesn't pretend that this is going to be an easy thing to do. As I say, I think it's it's I don't think that he would say that he accomplished that. Um, but it's something that he at least believes to be possible. And I don't know, I'm a bit more skeptical, but that's kind of his position on things. >> You said uh I've heard you say dsttofki changed you. Why? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Why why did that happen? >> Partly because I think that it's very easy to compute ideas about um resentment or hatred or and the ways that these kind of eat you up inside. Right? So not not just not just that it's like a nasty thing to do to someone else, but it's a nasty thing to do to yourself. It's there are some lessons I find where you can really learn them cognitively. Um, but either you know you need to find them out for yourself through kind of no matter how many times somebody has told you something or and I think this is one of the like strange benefits of of really really good novels is that because you get inside as much as possible the head of the protagonist or the characters, you can kind of feel the lesson in a way that you might have processed intellectually but hasn't kind of I want a better way of phrasing it like sunk down to the bones. I don't know. Again, it's very difficult to talk about this. It sounds really wooey, but I feel like most people kind of know roughly what I mean, right? You know, it's it's we've all had moments where we've learned something >> um cognitively maybe from a a psychology paper and it's it's true, right? We know it's true and we read it and we think, "Yeah, I'm definitely going to do that, right?" Like that's that's that's in the old that's in the noggin now and it's it's never coming out. And then immediately you just revert back to your old behaviors. And I think something for me reading DSTVski now I I I kind of I like talking about DSTVski just because I I think that despite the fact that I'm I'm an agnostic and he's a diehard Orthodox Christian, we have a lot a lot to agree upon. Um I think one of the benefits of of reading these Dossioski books and and indeed any novels that kind of really resonate with you is that they allow you to they kind of speak directly to your emotions in a way that just makes it much more likely to stick in. you know, if um I can kind of cognitively think, oh yeah, resentment is a is a self-destructive emotion that I should try and expune really at all costs, which is very difficult thing to do. You know, I think we all end up feeling resentful sometimes. Um but nonetheless, you know, it's very easy to think that the idea of okay, I've spent sort of like 3 hours, you know, not on the ground is pretty short book. So I spent like three to five hours with this guy who's just a bastard. Like just kind of a miserable prick for again is is really no other word for it. He's just kind of, you know, he's he delights in the misery of others and delights in his own misery, but it's not true delight. It's this self-destructive um outlook on life. If I think about not becoming the underground man, that's much more likely to stick in my head. I think that, you know, Notes from Underground is a book that I would really recommend to everyone because again, it's very difficult to put into words. Um, but you really come away from it thinking, "Oh, wow. I may have known before that that that not caring about other people and and only being out for yourself and trying to be an egoist and and and feeling all resentful of the world, thinking the world hates me and hating the world in return." I kind of cognitively knew all those things were were bad things to do, but this kind of really hammers it home in a way that is truly emotionally unforgettable. Yeah, that's a lovely way to put it. I It's interesting to me reading fiction. I I I'm not able to get through old fiction as easily as I can get through new sci-fi. Uh if you put a a [ __ ] Blake Crouch or a Max Barry or a Pierce Brown book in front of me, I'll eat that up. If you put some Dossioski in front of me, it's gonna take I'm gonna have to do this in five page. But anyway, uh my point being getting lessons to sink below the neck are a pretty difficult thing to do and it's definitely the curse of the sort of ruminative thinker to assume that you can just top down dictate your system like this is compelling. I should I should pay attention to this. Pay attention to that. You're shouting at your own gut and system saying you will pay attention to this and it goes yeah sure I'll do that. And then as you say, you step out of the house and you forget it all. Um whereas Alex had this really lovely idea actually which I I think is related to this with regards to a anti- atheist argument. The thing that's most real to humans is personification and narrative and story and archetype and good and evil and myth and motivation and human psychology and relations. And that is what the world of atheism is telling everybody to let go of. the thing which to them is most real and most true and most easy to understand and most compelling and instead in its place saying be compelled by statistics and data and theory. and it's all sterile and gray brown sludge and there's there's no reason for it other than just raw data and this is what the spreadsheet says and uh I think kind of the fiction versus non-fiction thing is not necessarily too dissimilar to that we all love the idea of being as compelled by atomic habits as we would be by reading dstayetski but you know and this is you you even see this why is it the case apart from for I guess like explanatory depth. Why is it the case that non-fiction books are filled with anecdotes and little portable stories or because it's more engaging, but also because you know that this will hammer the point home better than the statistics can? >> Absolutely. I think that you know where the again it's it's it's it's different right because narratives especially you know fictional narratives are on their face false. So in some sense this proposes a challenge to anyone reading them, right? Because you want to learn from them. You know, I want to pick up a dosteps book and learn from it. But I can't just take everything that a lie. I know I'm reading a lie. >> You can write story about anything. You know, I could write a story about about whatever I want in it. It wouldn't make it have any lessons in. So you've kind of got this weird two-part division in what you're doing where like at one kind of, you know, critical side, you've got to think, well, you know, this is a fiction book. I can't take everything it says as read. like even its allegorical lessons I can't just kind of take them on board because this is the product of one person's mind and one person's mind is eminently fallible on the other hand just approaching the world in this incredibly analytic you know I'm never going to put anything into any kind of narrative I'm not going to talk to my emotions if that makes sense I'm not I'm not going to appeal to them at all I'm just going to I'm just have propositions and relations between propositions that's really hard to that's really hard to learn from and also, you know, again, learn from in this kind of emotional sense. I also think that it's it's a I think that it's quite a like an empty feeling way to live. And I think that, you know, part of the reason why we perhaps don't recognize this is actually we're very good at telling stories. Like if you tell if you give people some information, they'll almost immediately sort it into a story if they can. Um it's because, you know, this is fantastic. There are loads of um memory techniques and pneumonics that are just based on this idea. you know, you tell a story about something. And I might again to bring this back to Dosyki and even to tie in nature a little bit. I think one of the things that um reading a novel by Doski does is it takes these lessons that you may or may not have have heard before about kind of psychology and and and and the kind of the human condition, if you want to call it that, and all of a sudden you are emotionally engaged with it. In kind of to use nature's terminology, it's not just it's not just appealing to your cognitive side, it's appealing to your kind of basic instincts. and they're, you know, they're a lot stronger. It's very hard to think yourself into motivation into like real consistent motivation, but if you really feel like something's meaningful and worth getting, you kind of naturally end up following it. >> Um, I feel I mean my kind of >> path towards this way of thinking is very strange. At university, I kind of basically just did logic, like kind of formal logic. So, I was like the I did like the driest form of philosophy imaginable, where you just sit there and you've got a proposition. They're like, "Well, prove this." And you sit there and after 45 minutes, you go, I give up. And you email the lecturer. But in theory, you sit there and you finish proving it. And um I kind of, you know, as I got a little bit older, I say older, I'm like 25. But as I kind of as as the the rest of my my brain my kind of grew into my mid20s, I kind of thought, yeah, know there is really a place for this kind of slightly nebulous but nonetheless definitely there um idea of of taking a really great book from the past and using that to learn a lesson that you know independently is is a good lesson, but that when it's presented in this narrative form really sinks in and all of a sudden you can enact it. It's interesting. Propositions and relations between propositions is actually what Alex calls date night on a Friday. Um, which I uh I >> I'm recording with Alex tomorrow about the history of I'm very sorry to hear that. >> It's this sounds to me a little bit related to the this sort of danger of hyperconsciousness, this sort of self-referential uh thinking. How does that play a role? Again, we've hinted here at the uh perils of the sort of ruminative cerebral praying at the cognitive horsepower alter thinker. What's the danger of hyperconsciousness? So again, this is a really prominent theme in notes from underground. Um, one of the the things that the underground man is suffering from is what Yeah. what he calls the disease of hyperconsciousness, which is effectively that he can't act naturally. And by naturally, I I sort of mean he sort of lives his entire life ever so slightly outside his own perspective. It's as if it's as if he's moving through the world kind of viewing himself from a third person perspective like a video camera. Like a video camera is following him around. and try as he might, he can't inhabit his own first person perspective. He's like stuck in this third person view. And again, I I don't know this sort of one of the interesting things about reading Dossioski, it's very hard to to then go away and kind of go, "Oh, well, there's all of this empirical literature on kind of n equals 2,000 people that verifies this." But I'm willing to bet that at least a fair proportion of people have had this happen to them, especially if they're of the more kind of ruminaty type. Like one of the reasons why not monogram really appeals to me is because we have a lot of narratives. And we're told as kids, right? You know, don't, you know, think before you act. Don't just don't just act. And I think that a fair amounts of the population, myself included, really ran with that and went, "Right, I'm going to think. I'm going to keep thinking until I'm really sure what I'm going to do and I'm never going to like all of those kind of instincts and and more kind of I'm, you know, forget about those. Those are those are complete nonsense. I'm gonna sit here and I'm gonna calculate until I know exactly what's going to happen. And one of the um one of the things that or one of the kind of subarguments I suppose if you like of of notion underground is that Dosski is attempting to illustrate this is simply not how you can live your life in any kind of compelling fashion. He's not you know saying you need to act without thinking at all. um he's more trying to indicate that the the needs that a person has can't simply be satisfied by cognition. Um and he's largely responding to other thinkers at the time who are kind of proposing a theory of of human fulfillment called rational egoism which is where kind of you organize society around people rationally pursuing their own ends and everything turns out fine. And Dossi's point is that no like people aren't rational enough for that and moreover like they'd be miserable if they tried to be. M there's a a line in Hamlet, thus conscience does make cowards of us all. This sort of idea that self-awareness is paralyzing. And um I it seems it seems unbelievably linked here. >> Yes. And again, it's one of those things like I don't I I can't appeal to like airtight scientific evidence that this is a widespread phenomenon. I can only appeal to your to your own experiences. But this is again one of the one of the really nice things about reading a you know a kind of psychological novelist like Dosski or like another example is the French thinker Standard. When you're reading a a very very broad study like studying 2,000 people by necessity any conclusion that that study comes to is probably it's probably going to apply to you. It also probably isn't going to be as detailed as you might like. Um just because you know this this isn't this isn't a fault. This is exactly what you want out of a generalizable conclusion, right? You want something that applies to everyone, but humans are very very different to one another. And so one of the things that I think that psychological novels and also if you know there used to be journals that published um therapist's case notes and they don't really exist anymore, but they were fantastic for this kind of thing where >> if you pick up you get you get a very very in-depth view of one person's perspective on the world, which might be completely useless, but it might that if that person's similar to you, that is like [ __ ] gold. you know, if they if they're facing the same problem as you, that's amazing because it's it's really really detailed and you you know, you run through this this novel and you think, "Oh my god, I'm exactly like this person. Their life's a mess. So is mine and how am I how am I going to how am I going to deal with this?" And to a certain extent, you get you get a lot more detail out of it. You just then have to make sure that your critical lens is is also fitted so that you don't, you know, read novels and then go, "Right, everything in this novel is, you know, by necessity. >> I'm going to go kill I'm going to go kill a woman." Yeah. >> Yes. Exactly. That's such a good point. The fact that by design representative samples are important in order to be able to do studies and because of that you end up curbing off you shave off outliers because outliers get regressed back to the mean by there being a sufficiently big sample size that's representative enough. But given that even the most the the average of average person the most average person on the man the the planet is going to have some idiosyncrasies that are abnormal or non-typical or quirky or different. you actually do need to find for them, okay, what is the person that's like you's thoughts about this thing and what did they learn? And that kind of requires you to either, I guess, do purposefully unrepresentative samples. Um, >> good luck trying to get funding for that. >> Yeah. Or as you say, targeting individuals experiences and going very deep. >> Yeah. I think a good a good analogy of this um is you know I I I'm like you know I go to the gym as a kind of hobby but the gym that happens to be nearest to me is like a really intense gym and so it's got lots of like powerlters in there who do competitions lots of bodybuilders in there who compete and you know they're all pretty friendly so I go up and n to them while they're trying to get on with things and one of the things I ask them about is their training program and something that I you immediately find I'm sure you know you're you're very into the gym so I'm sure that you you've kind of find this as well is that they're all very different because they all get to know themselves in such a an in-depth level that all of the kind of that everything that applies to the average person no longer applies to them or they they can see themselves in such a higher resolution that they will take some of that on board but also disregard other bits because they just know it doesn't work for them. think about, you know, like was it Dorian Yates did like four sets for chest every two weeks or something like that, you know? You think that's >> 99.9% of people that's not going to work for. It's not a representative kind of training plan, but it really works for him. >> What do you think? Oh, could it be the case that existentialism is just intellectualized depression with better PR? >> Oh, yeah. Certainly in some cases like I think that again you can certainly um especially when you learn about some of these people's lives you can you can really see how um their personal struggles bleed through into their philosophies. I think that again it's very controversial thing for me to say but for me um the value in reading say nature isn't necessarily because I think that his view on the world is is all that correct. I think it's because you know for me I also have a chronic pain condition. So when I read Nieter, I I read someone who is kind of going through a similar thing that I do. Like I'm in pain for like pretty much all my waking hours. Um but and so seeing him kind of how he copes with that and the philosophy that emerged from that is really is very very insightful for my own experiences as well. But like say your point about depression, you know, you really see this in in the philosophy of someone like Kamu where a lot of his early novels like The Stranger is is kind of the novel that that he's most known for. It's sort of about a really depressed person or somebody that really struggles to connect with reality or other people in any way and sort of everything seems the same to them. And this has a philosophical aspect for Camu. Um but additionally if you are if you also feel similarly disconnected from life and you struggle to relate to people and all of that kind of thing then that can be far more valuable for you than it would be for for your average person. You know this is I think that I think that >> to a certain extent a lot of existential philosophy is >> philosophers taking their own problems and really attempting to dig into them and sometimes they hit upon something that's really generalizable. quite often they don't. I think that one of the the valuable things about reading them is that if they happen to have a similar problem that you have, then that's that's so val. So, you know, take this kind of again, take the chronic pain thing. That kind of idea of like I've got to find some, you know, I'm suffering already. I've got pain and there's nothing I can do about it. I need to find some way to celebrate it is like that's kind of the appeal of aspects of nature's philosophy for me. >> Why didn't Kamu consider himself an existentialist? So partly because he fell out with all of the existentialists, but also because he has a slightly different philosophical approach. So existentialism to kind of really boil it down um as much as humanly possible. A lot of the existentialist solutions to nihilism or a sense of felt meaninglessness is authenticity in some way. And by authenticity, they don't exactly mean what your average person would mean by authenticity. They mean in Satra's case like a recognition of your radical freedom. So Satra, one of the um one of the things Satra thinks that people do is act in bad faith. And for him, bad faith isn't like, you know, approaching an argument wanting to show the other person to be a fool or something like that. It's when we go around the world denying our own free will. So he uses the example of a of a waiter who in when they are in when they're doing that don't think of themselves as a person who's chosen to to wait. They think of themselves as like a waiter and nothing more than that. They kind of reduce themselves to their social role and and you know so Santra's approach is is very authenticity focused. Kimu is a little different. So whereas existentialism is about restoring kind of creating meaning a sense of you know if I was going to boil it down it's like creating meaning um reimbuing the world with meaning Kamu sort of wants to know if he can continue to live without appealing to meaning at all. He has this phrase you know can I live without appeal um and that's kind of the the insight out of which absurdism is is bought. So, Kimu is very against the idea of retreating into meaning in any sense. He kind of wants you to keep the meaninglessness of life right at the front of your head and see if you can maintain the contradiction between you wanting meaning in some sense and there not being any meaning there and somehow still continue to live and in some sense enjoy life. And a lot of people have pointed out that Kamu suffered from really quite severe bouts of depression. And maybe this was a a causitative factor in the particular way that he has he has constructed this philosophy. Again, it's like I think that um you know, while I think that a lot of these thinkers may have conceived of themselves as creating a semi-universal solution to nihilism and problems of meaninglessness, I think that today um certainly the way that I see them is that they're very very in-depth solutions to similar problems that the authors happen to have. M. So, okay. How how is actually just when it comes to Kamu sort of the story of Seisphus seems very relevant to absurdism. >> How what is the lesson to take away from that? >> Yeah. So the myth of Cisphus in Kamu's writing is meant to symbolize this kind of it's meant to stand in for us all. So in Kamu's perspective um we are trudging along a basically cyclical existence in the sense that there is no there is nothing that we're doing anything for. You know we're not we're not we're not ending up you know we're not obeying the will of God or the will of the universe. We are just trundling along in a kind of uncaring unfeilling vacuum. And he compares this to the to the the um Greek king Seephopus who is in his punishment for his attempts to escape death is damned to Hades where he has to roll a boulder up a hill and then watch it go all the way back down again and then start at the bottom and roll it all the way back up and just do that for eternity. It's a it's an existence that complet you know to take this back to our um stuff about narrative earlier. If narratives are almost inherently meaninginducing you know they have a resolution and that's lovely. Um, this is a a structure of life that completely defies narrative resolution. It is like intensely fel it's, you know, if you imagine doing that, it's like the most meaningless existence you can possibly think of. And on top of that, it probably really bloody hurts. So Kamu in his phrase we must imagine sisfus happy is sort of that's kind of again it's like the absurdest project in a nutshell is can you maintain this view of life whereby you are kind of analogous to analogous analogous to analogous analogous to sophus and nonetheless enjoy it and and embrace it and be happy and it's kind of an open question whether you can like I I think that I I think that um a lot of people will read you know kamu and a nature even you know dossier doses happens to chime with a lot of things that I think bring my life meaning because you know loving others that seems like a very very that's very naturally meaning inducing to me um you know a lot of people I think read these thinkers and sort of go oh yeah that that's great but actually it is an open question whether any of this works like in we you're allowed to say you know I take your point camu but frankly I don't think I can imagine cis was happy and I don't think anyone else can either so shove it >> why why why was he why was he concerned about trying to do that what was he what was he trying solve for what was the end goal he was trying to achieve. >> So the well the stated end goal of the myth of Sophus is that he wants to know whether he should kill himself or whether anyone should kill themselves. Um given that in his view life is completely meaningless. Um and his end result is no you shouldn't because in some sense you can learn to be happy despite despite yourself being analogous to cis. That's kind of that's what he's attemp that's a problem he's attempting to solve at least as he puts it is the problem of suicide. You might instead call it the problem of meaninglessness or something like that or the problem of how can you like literally feel and think that your life has no meaning and yet still continue to live and potentially continue to enjoy life in some sense. And you know, I kind of think that I think that how compelling you find that overall narrative is going to depend on how much like the sting of the world potentially having no meaning really hits you. And I think that's going to depend at um that's going to hit you differently at different points in your life. I think for you know for a lot of people they are just very happy to say yeah like the world's meaningless man. Like that like that doesn't bother me in any sense. And like I'm I'm kind of not like that. It actually does kind of bother me. But I think for a lot for a lot of people it doesn't. That's fine. Like I I kind of think that and I also think that it's it's Kimu talks about this moment where you kind of realize that life's meaningless and he doesn't describe it as a cognitive event. Again, tie back to our point earlier. He's basically describing this as as one foot in cognition, one foot in emotion. You know, you recognize that life is meaningless, but also suddenly you feel it. And like I think that again to bring this kind of down to earth, I think that something like a a midlife crisis or a quarterlife crisis is a really good example of this. Like thinking about, you know, I remember before I kind of started the channel, I was just kind of sitting around being like, "Wow, like I I I I think that I feel like life is meaningless." like it's very kind of a, you know, you got this kind of life to live and you have no idea what to do with it. You don't even know how you're going to prioritize. Like I don't have an idea of what I even want to do. And I feel like, you know, that more commonly hits people. Um, a kind of midlife crisis is I think a potentially a more widespread example of that where you know somebody gets to like well actually one of my friends had midlife crisis and he described it as like he got to like 55 and he was like oh my god like I'm actually going to die at some point and I feel like my entire life has been for nothing. And I can't like again I can't like intellectualize someone into that experience. Like I don't I don't think that I felt it nearly as as much as as my friend did. you know, he was seriously in a dark place kind of staring down the barrel of ending his own life um on the basis of this realization. And you know, I imagine for a lot of people it just never happens and that's like great. Like I I I don't think there's any reason to like induce it. Um but I I I kind of think about my friend a lot with this sort of thing where it's like it's very easy especially because now you know I kind of I have a lot of you know I kind of enjoy life of kind of a natural optimist. So I I kind of find it quite easy to kind of bumble along in a kind of sort of generally like quite happy state. Um but and so I think that sometimes I kind of look at these look at something like Kamu writes and says ah you know uh he's talking about how the realization that life is meaningless is going to bring immense suffering and it's going to make you question whether uh it's worth carrying on. I kind of think will it and then I remember my friend and think I just I just don't think I felt it yet. M well I wonder how much of this kind of goes back to what you were saying before so much of the work of philosophy or even YouTube channels dude everything is a thinly veiled autobiography as far as I can see >> that's a very nichian idea ner uh thought thought that that a lot of philosophers were just basically writing their own autobiographies >> right well I mean it it certainly seems to be the case here does it not >> oh absolutely I think that it really applies to existential philosophy you know and I I think that's again one of the reasons I think I think one of the reasons why it's very easy you know although extential philosophy pulls people in it's also very easy to pick up a couple of books of extent philosophy and basically go this is like bollocks but I think that a lot of the time that feeling of this is like bollocks basically happens if you pick up a thinker who is just psychologically wired very differently to you like I sometimes have that with like someone like you know I occasionally pick up Satra and I don't know I just can't like there's something about it that just doesn't particularly resonate with me I can't quite get inside the head of the problem. Um, >> how would you advise then or how would Camu advise somebody who is torn between the life is like excruciatingly meaningful and life is excruciatingly meaningless? How do they sort of I laughing my ass off? How do they thread the boat through the middle of that? >> As in sorry as in the idea of somebody like alternating between sometimes they feel like life's incredibly meaningful. Have you seen Have you seen the image that I'm talking about? Do you know this? >> Is this the thing on the train? >> No. So, this this is this is one of my favorite images. I'll get Dean to put it up for the people that are watching. So, it's a tiny little uh a tiny little boat, a drawing of a tiny little boat. I'll put it in the chat. So, you should you should be able to you should be able to see this here. It's a tiny little boat and it's illustrated going along the water in between a whirlpool and on the left it says life is devastatingly meaningless and on the right is a 1 2 3 4 5 six headed dragon and it says life is excruciatingly meaningful and there's this teeny tiny little sort of Greek looking boat with oes coming out the side of it and it just goes I lmao and >> I think that's I think that's like you know the I think that's siller and caribbdus right >> the kind the the um I actually think that the the kind of an underexplored area in existential philosophy which I think Kamu touched upon a little bit but I think is like if somebody wants to go out and write like the next tract of existential philosophy I'd love for it to be on this would be that idea of excruciating meaning because it's very easy I think to romanticize the idea of of a meaningful life but it's totally possible for things to be like far too meaningful for comfort. You know, Kamu talks about this um in the context of Kamu talks about this in the context of politics uh which I think is is is is you know fascinating. So he's he after he finishes the myth of Cisphus, he sort of has this kind of like indifference about it. He's kind of he's like right okay so you know all the experience is roughly the same. There's no objective meaning. I'm somehow managing to muddle along um despite that. Um but in theory this should make me indifference to all of the bad things that happening around me. Kamu basically finds he can't do that and he has this this book called the rebel which is by far his like most impenetrable work. Um but it is is generally very very interesting and one of the points he makes of in the rebel is that um at a societal level it is perfectly possible to become too imbued with meaning. you know, if you think about um any kind of sort of theocratic tyranny uh or like the the terror of the French Revolution or Kamu's example is sort of Stalin's USSR. >> Uh he his analysis of this um is that the the issue is at least partly that if you have an ultimate meaning that you're willing to literally sacrifice everything else to then you will sacrifice as many lives as humanly possible or as as as you think is required to to to um fulfill this vision. what I think um and I it occurred to me that this observation definitely works not quite in the same kind of apocalyptic sense but works at some sense on the individual level in that you know we all I think that the the sense of life being too meaningful is very very natural the sense of being under too much pressure this idea of like oh everything that's happening to me counts an awful lot of what what am I going to do is I think a a perfect example of somebody feeling too meaningful >> again I think that's that that means that yeah, that's a really insightful meme. Actually, I I'm I'm going to spend a long time because I again I I think that what a lot of people want is not an abundance of meaning nor a complete lack of meaning, but enough meaning to give them a general direction, but also enough meaninglessness that you can make arbitrary choices along that way. You know, you don't you don't actually want every one of your decisions. I would argue at least. I think most people don't actually want all of their decisions to be dictated by a kind of set of values in advance. And I also think that that's kind of I don't know of vaguely robotic and also I think that that kind of approach doesn't do justice to just how difficult some decisions are. I think that um you know certain moral dilemmas you kind of you know imagine that imagine that I you know you spoke to someone the satra has an idea of like an insoluble moral dilemma and his example is that um you know somebody's torn between staying home and looking after their their elderly mother or going to fight the Nazis in the French resistance. And I know I be you know his mom could really suffer from this. She could even pass away while he's gone. And at the moment it's uncertain whether the French resistance would be victorious at all. And Satra's point is that this seems pretty indeterminate. And you know I I don't know if if somebody's value system was so well organized that they could give me like an instant answer to that dilemma. I don't know if I'd like that. I think that would be like I think that you know there there's a sense there's a sense in which their their choices would be so determined um that I don't know. I don't know if it would do justice to how excruciating real moral dilemmas and real just decisional dilemmas are. I wonder how much of this is a challenge of communication that it's so it sounds so flimsy to sort of talk about emotion and desire and being pulled in different ways and gut instinct and this ephemeral like flaky sense of something. But it's it's you know how you show me. let me grab a hold of it, put it into language that is testable, that's you does this make sense this sort of desire to communicate things in a much more concrete, verifiable way. >> And I do think that's a that's a pretty good instinct because at the same time, you know, I I I always I do think that philosophical discussions can quickly go into territory that is, you know, so abstract that I don't think anyone could plausibly give a [ __ ] But you know there there's I think that one of the ways to sort of keep this down to earth um is to link things like meaning back down into things like motivation and action and a effect. So I think that you know it's it when somebody says you know what's the meaning of life there's a reason why that that um question can strike us as really like pointless like you know what's the meaning of life like how how do we even go about passing that um and I think that instead of asking questions like what what what's the meaning of life I find that people are often a lot more enthusiastic if um you phrase an existential question just in terms of you know what gets you up in the morning what what what actually is the kind of motiv ating force behind your action. What what if you removed it would you then struggle to do anything with like and you know I think that this allows people to get a grip on what they find meaningful which is quite a useful thing to learn. You know if if if you find out that um actually like I would really not know what to do without my group of friends that might tell you you need to you might want to invest more of your time and effort into that area of life. Um, and this is getting kind of quite a way away from these particular existential philosophers. But I think that's one of the one of the the values in asking existential questions is that it does force you to confront what matters to you. And I think that it's very easy to forget what matters to you. I mean, you know, to take tie this back to fiction. I know that um a book that you like is The Alchemist. >> Mhm. >> And I feel like a lot of, you know, the same kind of lesson occurs there, right? this sort of idea of like it's very easy to forget the kind of things that are intuitively and instinctively meaningful. I think that um one of the one of the real flaws I think in approaching questions of meaning in the way that I do which is to go away and read lots of existential philosophers and see what they think. Um is that there's a tendency that you can just become really ruminative about it. And you know occasionally I get a comment under one of my videos that's like you're just overthinking it. And sometimes if I'm in the right mood, I look at it and I'm like, you're probably right. >> You know, there there is a sense in which you can get so um so uh deep into what this person's particular interpretation of nature is or or this person's particular interpretation of Kamu or Satra or Kgard and I really I find that stuff naturally interesting. Um but there is a there is a sense in which um for the way that just you would want to approach an existential question if you don't necessarily want to go away and and read a bunch of this stuff is that it's it's I think that part of it is recognizing that um meaning is at least partly extra cognitive. It may involve cognition but it's not merely cognition. >> It's all vibes man just comes down. >> I think that you know I I think that I think that vibes are really important. Like I I >> do not undervalue the vibes. >> Yeah. I I think so, you know, think about like what you come away with from a a social set like a a kind of hang out with friends or hang out with someone. You know, you might not remember exactly what was said, but you remember the vibe. I think that you know that we we kind of um again I don't want to get kind of too woowoo, but I feel like we are far beyond that point. Mhm. >> Um, one of the I think that um something that one of the valuable insights in nature's kind of prioritizing of the instinct or kind of dstyky's novelistic approach to to existential questions is that they are both essentially saying you know this isn't merely a a cognitive issue. This is this is something that you also need to feel and enact. And you know they disagree on a lot but I think it's nice when they agree on something. M yeah I this this sort of balance between what the cerebral ruminative thinker loves which is to ask the why question and the realization that there is such a thing as too much reflection. There is a there is a golden mean for [ __ ] everything, right? >> And uh >> rumination is one of them. I'm kind of obsessed by this idea at the moment that advice which is made and works for most people will be widely distributed because on average it's most it's effective. It's an effective meme and it'll continue to spread. But the problem is because it's so popular, it's got it's got such a bull run behind it that even people who that advice is not for, who already have too much of the thing that it's pushing them to do more of tempted to take it on because it works so well for everybody else. So one of the good examples here is something like uh just work harder. Now just working harder will reliably give everybody almost everybody on the planet will benefit from that. There there are very few scenarios that I can think of where working harder is not going to make the outcomes better. >> But there is a particular cohort of people for whom working harder is something they already do too much of and what they actually need is a good rest ethic rather than a good work ethic. >> And think that oh sorry go >> no no no just just that the same thing comes for reflection rumination that there are many people think before you act young Joseph think before you act. This is very important. Oh, I must think before I act. Thank you, mom. Thank you, Dad. I go, if you are a perennial thinker, maybe think a bit less. Maybe follow your gut. But the problem is thinking before you act, even for the overinker, is likely to give them from an objective metric sense, better outcomes in life. They're going to be more careful. They're going to be more considered. They're going to make fewer failures. But what is it that they've lost? All of the losses here are hidden and all of the successes tend to be pretty observable. So the losses of time uh of the quality of peace of the the inner texture of your mind uh of lost opportunity because it took you so long to be able to arrive at this particular thing. And the same thing for hard work. Well, how much are you tearing yourself up? What about the state of your health? What about your blood pressure? What about how much time you're spent thinking about this thing and obsessing when you should have just been eating a sandwich or playing with your friends or doing whatever? Well, objectively it's made you more successful. But again, I I I think this is why widespread rough hune advice should always go through a filter. And it's also why I find the criticisms that kind of treat audience members, you know, the the podcast election with with Rogan last year. It is so [ __ ] patronizing to say look at these agentic unwashed peeons watching this man just shovel like radical dogma down their throat. They voted exclusively because of what he said. It's okay. Right. So you're saying that these people have no ability to discern anything that they see and there's no filter between what they watch on YouTube on Joe Rogan's channel or uh this advice from David Gogins saying to work harder or you know the [ __ ] camu saying you need to ref whatever like there is no degree of filter and in the same sentence I know that if the advice is sufficiently seductive and if it's sufficiently popular that people do tend to embibe that. So there's like a big tension going on there. But yeah, I think I'm I'm pretty obsessed with this idea. Popular advice gets taken on unquestioningly and for some people they already have too much of it, so they probably need less. >> Absolutely. I think the other the other side to that is a lot of the a lot of popular advice just kind of generally is going to be maximized towards sort of minimizing social harm. So I actually the thing that reminded me of this was a clip by David Mitchell on would I lie to you? Um and he sort of says, you know, children, broadly speaking, are divided into reckless children and timmerous children. And he sort of says, you know, in order to keep the reckless children from jumping off of things and killing themselves by virtue of their, you know, untethered love for life, uh you need to tell all children, stop what you're doing. You know, think and slow down and be more afraid. And if you're already naturally fearful, as David Mitchell was, this is terrible advice and is actually going to harm you. But because the harm is significantly more hidden, as you say, it's less likely to end up on the news and have more guard rails. >> Oh, that's so good. You you explained what I was explaining much more succinctly than than I managed to do it. >> Yeah, that's brilliant. >> I I think that the Yeah, but I to take your point about popular advice. I think again, you know, one of the benefits of reading um novels is Yeah. you kind of laser in on if you really relate to a particular novel then you laser in on a vice that is almost tailor made for you and lessons that are almost tailor made for you you know and you know I go about dski all the time because that's a novelist that I really like and who really resonates with me because you know a lot of a lot of the a lot of the you know he resonates with me far more than someone like ner for example because a lot of dsvki's advice for or kind of lessons for for living meaningfully are to do with this this notion he has of active love you know he's he's very religious but He the the way in which this religiosity often manifests in his work is through the idea that um of of loving others. But he's pretty he's pretty kind of clear that loving others is going to be really hard work. He has this um wonderful kind of offhand brilliant insight um from a doctor in the brothers Karamazov where uh the doctor says ah you know it's very easy to love mankind in general and it's very hard to love people in particular. And I think that's brilliant. That's amazing. Like that's so true. And um and and I think yeah, the Dossi kind of outlining that act of love is is going to make your life incredibly meaningful, but also is going to be really really really tough is, you know, that that that's that's an approach to life that very much resonates with me. Um that's why I kind of go on about Doski all the time. I find that all of the stuff that Doski criticizes people for are applicable to me. And I find that all of his lessons are also applicable to me. So that's kind of but but my point is that other people might find authors or um philosophers or or anyone really um who who really resonates with them. You know I think I think that we kind of again we we have a tendency and I I have this tendency as well you know recovering logic students and all that to only to only ever um take on lessons that are universalizable. And the trouble is that that kind of if we you know if we you're talking about the mean earlier um the kind of level of standard deviation of human properties is absolutely massive. Um so so you know you go off the mean there's a good chance that you might end up you you might end up severely down the wrong path especially in the kind of details and that's where I think this kind of novel stuff can come in. I'm still you know don't I feel like I'm feel like I sound like I'm really down on empirical psychology. I'm really not. I think it's brilliant. Um, but I I also think that, you know, I'm going to kind of trying to make the case for the kind of psychological novel, which is that you absolutely won't learn anything about humankind, but you might learn something about a few people, and one of them might be you. >> Oh, dude, that is so good. Hey, man, let's bring this one home. Uh, I I love your work. I love your channel. Everyone should go and subscribe. Uh, where should people go? They're going to want to keep up to date with the stuff you're doing. >> Oh, yeah. I suppose I'm I'm unsolicited advice on YouTube. Um, I may change the name at some point. That was kind of a name that I I basically put on to to to acknowledge the fact that nobody asked me to do this. And as a result, everything I do is is deeply >> un pro I am very pro using your own name. If you ask Alex when you see him tomorrow, ask Alex for the war zone that he made me crawl through in order to convince him to change his channel name from Cosmic Skeptic. Well, just get him to explain to you because he's he he could >> he could make me breakfast for the next six months and still owe me every single day. He can make me breakfast. Uh I'm so bullish on you make making a change. Make it your name, dude. Capture that [ __ ] personal accountability. But everyone should go and watch it. You've got great breakdowns of of tons of different books and ideas and and like even stuff that I wouldn't have expected on there. Ideas about masculinity and and and and love and and and crushes and stuff. It's sick. So, I'm uh I'm I'm very bullish on uh Joe Folly and uh dude, I'm I'm looking forward to speaking again, man. >> Oh, thanks. As am I. >> Congratulations. You made it to the end of the episode. And if you want more, well, why don't you press right here? Come on.