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

Lex Fridman 0:00 The following is a conversation with Sean Kelly, a philosopher at Harvard, specializing in existentialism and the philosophy of mind. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, here's my conversation with Sean Kelly.

Lex Fridman 0:20 Your interests are in post-continent European philosophy, especially phenomenology and existentialism. So let me ask, what to you is existentialism?

Sean Kelly 0:34 So it's a hard question. I'm teaching a course on existentialism right now.

Lex Fridman 0:38 You are?

Sean Kelly 0:39 I am, yeah. Existentialism in literature and film, which is fun. Uh, I mean, the traditional thing to say about what existentialism is, is that it's a movement in mid-20th century, mostly French, some German philosophy, and some of the major figures associated with it are people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Camus, um, Simone de Beauvoir, maybe Martin Heidegger. But that's a weird thing to say about it, because most of those people denied that they were-

Lex Fridman 1:11 (laughs)

Sean Kelly 1:11 ... existentialists.

Lex Fridman 1:13 Yeah.

Sean Kelly 1:13 And, um, and in fact, I- I think of it as a- a movement that has a- a much longer history. So when I try to describe what the core idea of existentialism is, it's an idea that you find expressed in different ways in a bunch of these people. One of the ways that it's expressed is that Sartre will say that existentialism is the view that there is no God, and at least his form of existentialism, he calls it atheistic existentialism. There is no God, and since there's no God, there must be some other being around who does something like what God does. Otherwise, there wouldn't be any possibility for significance in life, and that being is us, and the feature of us, according to 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- that's the catchphrase for existentialism, and then you have to try to figure out what it means.

Lex Fridman 2:22 Mm-hmm. What is existence, what is presence, and what does precedes mean?

Sean Kelly 2:26 Yeah, exactly. What is existence-

Lex Fridman 2:28 (laughs)

Sean Kelly 2:28 ... 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 a way of, here's the way Sartre thinks about it. This is not, I think, the most interesting way to think about it, but it gets you started. Sartre says there's nothing true about what it is to be you until you start existing, until you, till you start living. And for Sartre, the core feature of what it is to be existing the way we do is to be making decisions, to be making choices in your life, to be, uh, sort of taking a stand on what it is to be you by deciding to do this or that.

Lex Fridman 3:10 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 3:11 And the key feature of how to do that right for Sartre is to do it in the full recognition of the fact that when you make that choice, nobody is responsible for it other than you. So you don't make the choice because God tells you to. You don't make the choice because some utilitarian calculus about what- what it's right to do tells you to do. You don't make the choice because some other philosophical theory tells you to do it. There's literally nothing on the basis of which you make the choice, other than the fact that in that moment, you're- you're the one making it. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 3:50 You are a conscious, thinking being that made a decision. So all of the questions about physics and free will are- are out the window.

Sean Kelly 3:59 Yeah, that's right. If you were a determinist about the mind, if you were a physicalist about the mind, if you thought there was nothing to your choices other than the activity of the brain, um, that's governed by physical laws, then there's some sense in which it would seem, at- at any rate, like, um, you're not the ground of that choice. The ground of that choice was the physical universe and the laws that govern it, and then you'd have no responsibility. And so 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 simultaneously empowering, I mean, it practically puts us in the place of God.

Lex Fridman 4:45 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 4:46 And also terrifying, because what responsibility? How can you possibly take on that responsibility? And he thinks it's worse than that. He thinks that it's always happening. Everything that you do, uh, is the result of some choice that you've made. The posture that you sit in.

Lex Fridman 5:06 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 5:06 The way you hold someone's gaze when you're having a conversation with them or not.

Lex Fridman 5:11 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 5:11 The choice to make a note (laughs) when someone says something, uh, or not make a note. Uh, everything that you do presents you as a being who makes decisions, and you're responsible for all of them. So-

Lex Fridman 5:24 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 5:25 ... it's constantly happening, and furthermore, there's no fact about you independent of the choices and actions you've performed. So you don't get to say, it's a hard example, "I really am a great writer, I just haven't written my great book yet."

Lex Fridman 5:42 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 5:43 If you haven't written your great book, you're not a great writer. And so it's- it's terrifying, it puts a huge burden on us, and, um, and that's why 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, to make these choices and to become someone through making them, and we can't get, we can't get away from that.

Lex Fridman 6:08 But to him, it's terrifying, not liberating in the positive meaning of the word liberating.

Sean Kelly 6:14 Well, so he, he thinks it should be liberating, but he thinks that it takes a very courageous individual to be liberated by it.

Lex Fridman 6:22 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 6:22 Um, Nietzsche, I think, thought something similar. I think Sartre is r- really coming out of a Nietzschean sort of tradition. But what's liberating about it, if it is, is also terrifying, because it means, in a certain way, you're the ground of your own being. You become what you do through, through existing. So, that's one form of existentialism. That's a stark, atheistic version of it. There's lots of other versions. But it's somehow, um, 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.

Lex Fridman 7:01 But then (sighs) if there's no God in that view, does any of the decisions matter? So, how does existentialism differ from nihilism?

Sean Kelly 7:14 Good. Okay, great question. There's two different ways that you're, you're asking it. Um, let me leave nihilism to the side for just a second-

Lex Fridman 7:23 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 7:23 ... and think about mattering.

Lex Fridman 7:25 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 7:25 Or is there any way that you can criticize someone for m- for doing, for living the way they do if you're an existentialist?

Lex Fridman 7:32 Including yourself.

Sean Kelly 7:33 Including yourself, yeah. Sartre addresses that and he says, um, yes. He says there is a, a criticism that you can make of yourself or of others, and it's the criticism of living in such a way as to fail to take responsibility for your choices. He gives these two sort of amazing examples. One doesn't, I don't know if it reads as well as, for us, as it d- uh, as it did-

Lex Fridman 7:58 (laughs)

Sean Kelly 7:59 ... in sort of mid-20th century Paris. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 8:01 Yes.

Sean Kelly 8:01 But it's about a waiter. He gives this in, in his big book, Being and Nothingness. And he says, um, so waiters play- played, still do I think in, in a certain way in, in Paris, a big role in, in Parisian society. To be a waiter involved having a certain kind of identity, being-

Lex Fridman 8:19 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 8:19 ... a certain way. Uh, taking control of, in charge of, the experience of the people that you're-

Lex Fridman 8:25 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 8:26 ... you're waiting on, but also, you know, really being the authority. (laughs) Like-

Lex Fridman 8:30 Yeah.

Sean Kelly 8:30 ... knowing that this is the, the way it's supposed to go. And so, Sartre imagines a waiter who does everything that a waiter is supposed to do, sort of 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.

Lex Fridman 8:53 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 8:53 Not... So, when there's some sense in which he's passing off the responsibility for his actions onto some idea of what those actions should be. He's not taking responsibility for it. He's sort of playing a role, and the contours of the role are predetermined by someone other than him.

Lex Fridman 9:12 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 9:12 So, he start- says, "Acting in bad faith." And that's, um, criticizable because it's acting in such a way as to fail to take responsibility for the kind of being Sartre thinks you are. So, you're not taking responsibility. So, that's one example. And I think, you know, I think any teenager (laughs) , if you've ever met a teenager, you've known someone who, who does that. Teenagers try on roles.

Lex Fridman 9:36 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 9:37 They think, "If I dressed like this, I would be cool, so I'll dress like this."

Lex Fridman 9:42 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 9:42 Or, "If I spoke like this or acted like this." And it's natural for a teenager who's trying to figure out what their, you know, what their identity is, to go through a phase like that.

Lex Fridman 9:52 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 9:52 But if you continue to do that, then you're, you're really passing it. So, that's one example. And the other example he gives i- is an example, uh, not of passing off responsibility by, um, 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.

Lex Fridman 10:16 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 10:16 So, he says you're always r- everything you do is a result of your choices. And so, he gives this other example. There you are on the first date.

Lex Fridman 10:25 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 10:26 First date. And the date, the evening reaches a moment when might be appropriate for one person to hold the hand of the other.

Lex Fridman 10:40 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 10:40 That's the moment in the date where you are, and so you make a choice. You decide, "I think it's, 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.

Lex Fridman 10:53 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 10:54 Either they reject the hand, "It's not that time and I'm taking responsibility for that."

Lex Fridman 10:59 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 10:59 Or they grasp the hand back.

Lex Fridman 11:02 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 11:02 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. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 11:15 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 11:15 And Sartre says that's also bad faith. That's also acting as if we're a kind of being that we are not-

Lex Fridman 11:22 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 11:23 ... 'cause it pretends that it's possible not to make a choice, and we're the beings who are always making choices. That was a choice, and you're pretending as if it's the kind of thing that you don't have to take responsibility for.

Lex Fridman 11:36 So, in 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 of the other person. And, uh, for the waiter, if you exist in a society, you are-... generally trying on a role. I mean, they, uh, y- e- all of us are trying on a role. Me wearing clothes-

Sean Kelly 12:17 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 12:17 ... is me trying on a role that I was told try, uh, as opposed to walking around naked all the time. Like, there's, there's like, uh, standards of how you operate, and that's not... that's a decision that's not my own. That's me seeing what everyone else is doing and copying them.

Sean Kelly 12:34 Yeah, exactly. So, Sartre thinks that in the ideal you should try to resist that.

Lex Fridman 12:43 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 12:43 Other existentialists think that that's actually a clue to how you should live well.

Lex Fridman 12:51 Yeah.

Sean Kelly 12:51 So, S- Sart-, Sartre says somewhere else, "Hell is other people."

Lex Fridman 12:55 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 12:56 Why is hell other people for Sartre? Well, 'cause other people are making choices also, and when other people make choices, they put some pressure on me to think that the choice they made is one that I should, uh, copy, or one that I should sort of promote. But if I do it because they did it, then I'm in bad faith for Sartre. (laughs) So, it's, it's, it is as if Sartre's view is like, we would be better if we were all alone. I mean, th- this is, this is really simplifying Sartre's position, and this is really just mostly Sartre in a certain period of his, of his formation. But, anyhow, we can imagine that view, and I think there's something to the idea that Sartre is attracted to it, at least in the mid '40s.

Lex Fridman 13:44 Can you dig into "hell is other people"? Is there some... obviously, it's kind of a, almost like a literary, like you push the point strongly-

Sean Kelly 13:53 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 13:53 ... to, to really explore that point. But is there some sense in that other people ruin the experience of what it means to be human?

Sean Kelly 14:03 I think for Sartre the phenomenon is this, like, it's not just that you wear clothes because people wear clothes in our society. Like, you have a particular style. You-

Lex Fridman 14:12 Right.

Sean Kelly 14:12 ... wear a particular kind of clothes.

Lex Fridman 14:14 Right.

Sean Kelly 14:15 And for Sartre, like, to have that style authentically, in good faith rather than in bad faith, it has to come from you. You have to make the choice. But other people are making choices also, and l- like, you're looking at their choices, and you're thinking, "That guy looks good. Maybe I could try that one on." And if you try it on because you were influenced by the fact that you thought that guy was doing it well, then there's some important sense in which, although that's a resource for a choice for you, it's also acting in bad faith. So-

Lex Fridman 14:49 Right, yeah.

Sean Kelly 14:50 So, God... And God wouldn't do that, right? (laughs)

Lex Fridman 14:52 Right. Right.

Sean Kelly 14:52 God wouldn't be influenced by others' decisions, and if that's the model, then that's, I think that's the sense in which he thinks hell is other people.

Lex Fridman 15:00 W- what do you think parenting is, then? It's like what... 'Cause God doesn't have a parent.

Sean Kelly 15:05 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 15:05 So, aren't we significantly influenced, first of all, in the first few years of life?

Sean Kelly 15:11 Absolutely.

Lex Fridman 15:11 Um, and in the f- even, even the teenager is resisting aga- learning through resistance, (laughs) so.

Sean Kelly 15:19 Absolutely. 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, we're n-, we're... There's many ways in which we're not like the traditional view of what God was. One is that we're not self-generating. We have parents. We, we're raised into traditions and social norms, and we're raised into an understanding of what's appropriate and inappropriate to do. And I think that's a deep intuition. I think that's exactly right. Martin Heidegger, who's the, who's the philosopher that Sartre thinks he's sort of taking this from-

Lex Fridman 16:06 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 16:06 ... but I think Sartre's a kind of brilliant French misinterpretation (laughs) of Heidegger's German pho- phenomenological view. Heidegger says a, a crucial aspect of what it is to be us is our thrownness. We're thrown into a situation. We're thrown into history. We're thrown into our parental lineage. We are... And we don't choose it. That's stuff that we don't choose, we couldn't choose. If we were God and we existed outside of time, maybe, but we're not. We're finite in the sense that we have a beginning that we never chose. We have an end that we're cons- you know, often trying to resist or put off or something. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 16:49 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 16:49 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.

Lex Fridman 16:59 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 17:00 We have a complicated relationship to that stuff. And I'm, I, I think we should talk about that at a certain point. But the f- the first move is to say, "Sartre's just got a, a, a sort of descriptive problem. He's missed this basic fact that," um, there's an awful... "there has to be an awful lot about us that's settled without our having made the choice to settle it that way."

Lex Fridman 17:25 Right, the thrownness of life.

Sean Kelly 17:28 Yeah, exactly.

Lex Fridman 17:28 You have... That's a fundamental part of life. You can't just escape it.

Sean Kelly 17:32 Exactly. You can't escape it altogether.

Lex Fridman 17:34 Altogether.

Sean Kelly 17:35 Yeah, exactly. You can't escape it altogether.

Lex Fridman 17:37 But nevertheless, you are riding a wave, and you make a decision of the... in the riding of the wave. You can't control the wave, but you should be, uh, like... O- 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 d- the chain of decisions you make?

Sean Kelly 17:59 Good. Well, because they constitute you. They make you the person that you are. So, you, you... here's... what, what's the opposite view? What's, what's this view against? Uh, this view is against most of philosophy from Plato forward. Plato, uh-Plato says in The Republic, it's a kind of myth, but you know, he, he says people will understand their, their condition well if, if they, if we tell them this myth. He says, "Look, when you're born, there's just a fact about you. Your soul is either gold, silver, or bronze." That's, those are the three kinds of people there are, and you're born that way.

Lex Fridman 18:36 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 18:36 And if your soul is gold, then we should identify that, and make you a, a philosopher king.

Lex Fridman 18:41 Yeah.

Sean Kelly 18:42 And if your soul is silver, well, you're not gonna be a philosopher king. You're not capable of it, but you could be a good warrior.

Lex Fridman 18:48 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 18:48 And we should make you that. And if your soul is bronze, then you should be a farmer, a laborer, something like that.

Lex Fridman 18:53 Yeah.

Sean Kelly 18:53 And that's a fact about you that identifies you, forever and for always, independent of anything you do about it.

Lex Fridman 19:02 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 19:02 And so that's the alternative view. And you, you could have modern versions of it. You could say the thing that identifies you is your IQ...

Lex Fridman 19:10 Hmm.

Sean Kelly 19:10 ...or your genetic makeup, or the percentage of fast twitch muscle fibers you've got, or whatever. It could be something that's totally independent of any choice that you've made, independent of the kind of thing about which you could make a choice.

Lex Fridman 19:26 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 19:26 And it, and it categorizes you. It makes you the person that you are. That's the, that's the thing that Sartre and the existentialists are against. Uh...

Lex Fridman 19:35 Uh, so this idea that something about you is forever limiting the space of possible decisions you can make, Sartre says, "No, the space is unlimited."

Sean Kelly 19:46 Sartre is the, the philosopher of radical freedom. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 19:49 Radical freedom. (laughs) Okay.

Sean Kelly 19:50 Yeah, radical freedom. And then you could have other existentialists who say, "Look, we, we are free."

Lex Fridman 19:56 (laughs)

Sean Kelly 19:56 "But we gotta, we gotta understand what, the way in which our freedom is limited by certain aspects of the kind of being that we are. If we were radically free, we really would be like God in the traditional medieval sense." And, and that, uh, sort of these folks start with the idea that, "Well, whatever we are, that's a kind of limit point that we're not gonna reach."

Lex Fridman 20:17 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 20:17 (laughs) So, h- what, what are the ways in which we're constrained that, that that being the way the medievals understood him wasn't a constraint?

Lex Fridman 20:27 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 ex- existentialism?

Sean Kelly 20:37 Yes, good. Excellent. So nihilism, the, the philosopher who made the term popular, although it was used before him, is Nietzsche. Nietzsche's writing at the end of the 19th century, in various places where he, he published things, but largely in his unpublished works he identifies the condition of the modern world as nihilistic, and that's a descriptive claim. He's looking around him, trying to figure out what it's like to be us now...

Lex Fridman 21:12 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 21:13 ...and he says it's a lot different from what it was like to be human in 1300 or in the fifth century BCE. In 1300, like, what people believed, what they, the, the way they lived their lives was in the understanding that to be human was to be created in the image and likeness of God. That's the way they understood themselves, and also to be created sinful because of, you know, Adam and Eve's transgression in the Garden of Eden, and to have the project of trying to understand how, as a sinful being, you could nevertheless live a life, a virtuous life. How could you do that?

Lex Fridman 21:57 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 21:57 And it had to do with, for them, getting in the right relation to God. Nietzsche says, "We, we, we, that doesn't make sense to us anymore," in the end of the 19th century. "God is dead," says Nietzsche famously. And what does that mean? Well, it means something like the role that God used to play in our understanding of ourselves as a culture isn't a role that, that God can play anymore. And so Nietzsche says, "The role that God used to play was the role of grounding our existence. He was what it is in virtue of which we are who we are." And Nietzsche says, "The idea that there is a being that makes us what we are doesn't make sense anymore." That's like Sartre's atheism. Sartre is taking that from Nietzsche. And so the question is, what does ground our existence? And the answer is nihil, nothing.

Lex Fridman 22:48 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 22:49 And so nihilism is the idea that there's nothing outside of us that grounds our existence. And then Nietzsche asks the question, "Well, what are we supposed to do about that? How do we live?" (laughs) And I, I, you know, I think Nietzsche has a different story than Sartre about that. Nietzsche doesn't say, doesn't emphasize this notion of radical freedom. Uh, Nietzsche emphasizes something else. He says, "We're artists of life," and artists are interesting because the natural way of thinking about artists is that they're responding to something. They find themselves in a situation and they say, "This is what's gonna make sense of the situ- this is what I have to write. This is the way I have to dance. This is the way I've gotta play the music." And Nietzsche says we should live like that. There are constraints, but, like, understanding what they are is a complicated aspect of, of, of living itself.

Lex Fridman 23:49 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 23:50 And there's a great story, uh, I think, uh, from music, that maybe helps to understand this. Uh, I think Nietzsche... Of course, jazz didn't exist when Nietzsche was writing.

Lex Fridman 24:01 (laughs)

Sean Kelly 24:01 But I think Nietzsche really thin- is thinking of something like jazz improvisation. I mean, he, he, he talks about improvisation. There's classical improvisation. Niche was, by the way, a, um, a musician. I mean, he was a composer and a pianist. Not a great one, really, (laughs) uh, to be fair, but, but he loved music. And Herbie Hancock, who's a pianist, a jazz pianist, uh...... who played with Miles Davis for quite a while in the '60s, tells this kind of incredible story that I think exemplifies Nietzsche's view about the way in which we bear some responsibility for being creative, and that gives us a certain kind of freedom. But we don't have the, the radical respon- the radical freedom that Sartre thinks. So, what's the story? Uh, Herbie Hancock says, there, there they... I think they were in Stuttgart, he says, (laughs) playing a, playing a, a show, and things were great, he says. I'm, I'm pla- he's the young pianist, and Miles Davis is the master. (laughs) And he says, "I'm, I'm playing the... I'm back in the, the solo and I, I'm playing these chords," and he says, "I played this chord, and it was the wrong chord."

Lex Fridman 25:20 (laughs)

Sean Kelly 25:22 (laughs) He's like, "It just..." Like, that's what you gotta say. "It didn't work right there. And I thought, 'Holy mackerel, I screwed up.' You know? I screwed up. We were tight, everything was working, and I blew it for Miles, who's doing his solo." And he said, "Miles, uh, paused for a moment, and then all of a sudden, he went on in a way that made my chord right." (laughs) And I think that idea that like, you could be an artist who responds to what's thrown at you-

Lex Fridman 25:57 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 25:58 ... in such a way as to make it right, by what measure? Everyone could hear it, is all you can say.

Lex Fridman 26:07 Yeah.

Sean Kelly 26:07 Right? Everyone knew, wow, that really works. And I think that's not... Like, there are constraints, not anything would have worked there. He couldn't have just played anything. Most of what anyone would have played would have sounded terrible. But the constraints aren't like, preexisting. 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. They have to make it right. In-

Lex Fridman 26:50 And there's, there's something about music too. So, you basically have to make music of all the moments of life. And there is something about musi- why is music so compelling? And when you listen to it, something about certain kinds of music, it connects with you. It doesn't make any sense, but in that same way, for Nietzsche, you should be a creative force that creates a musical masterpiece.

Sean Kelly 27:14 Exactly. And I, 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 Go- with God.

Lex Fridman 27:25 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 27:26 God creates ex nihilo, out of nothing.

Lex Fridman 27:29 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 27:30 And you might think that nihilism thinks that we should do that, create ex nihilo, (laughs) 'cause 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, it 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.

Lex Fridman 27:57 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 27:57 He wasn't just creating out of nothing. He was creating out of what was already there.

Lex Fridman 28:01 So, that makes that first date with the clammy hand even more complicated, 'cause you're given a clammy hand, you're gonna have to make art and music out of that.

Sean Kelly 28:10 Exactly. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 28:11 And that's the responsibility for both, for both of them. Wow, that's a lot of responsibility for a first date 'cause you have to-

Sean Kelly 28:17 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 28:17 ... create. It's, uh, so, so the emphasis isn't just on making decisions. It's on, um, creating.

Sean Kelly 28:25 And, but also on listening, right? I mean-

Lex Fridman 28:28 Right.

Sean Kelly 28:28 ... Miles Davis was listening. He heard that. He knew it was wrong, and the question was, "What do I play that makes it right?"

Lex Fridman 28:37 So, let me ask about Nietzsche, "Is God dead?" What did he mean by that statement?

Sean Kelly 28:43 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 28:43 What's, in your sense, the truth behind the question and the possible set of answers that our world today provides?

Sean Kelly 28:52 Good. So, I, I mean, I, I think that there's something super perceptive about Nietzsche's diagnosis of the condition at the end of the 19th century. It's not so far from the condition that I think we're currently in. And I think there's an interesting question, what we're supposed to respon- what we're supposed to do in response. But what, what is the condition that we're currently in? When Nietzsche says, "God is dead," that I think, like I was saying before, he me- he means something like, "The role that God used to play in grounding our existence is not a role that works for us anymore as a culture." And when people talk about a view like that nowadays, they use a different terminology, but I think it's roughly what Nietzsche was aiming at. They say we live in a secular age. Our age is a secular age. And so, what, what do people mean when they say that? I think, first of all, it's a descriptive claim, it could be wrong. The question is, does this really describe the way we experience ourselves as a culture or as-

Lex Fridman 29:53 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 29:53 ... a culture in the West or wherever it is that we are? So, what does it mean to say that we live in a secular age, an age in which God is dead? Well, it, first thing is it doesn't mean there are no religious believers, 'cause there are plenty.

Lex Fridman 30:05 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 30:05 There are lots of people who go to church or synagogue or mosque, you know, every week or more. And there are people who really find that to be an important aspect of, of the way they live their lives. But it does mean that, for those people...... the role of their relig- the role that the religious- their religious belief plays in their life, isn't the same as it used to be in previous ages. So, what's that role? Well, go back to the High Middle Ages. That was clearly not a secular age. (laughs) That was a religious age. And so there we are in 1300, Dante is writing The Divine Comedy or something. And what did it, what did it mean then to live in a sacred age? Well, it meant, not just that the default was that you were, were, were a Christian in the West, but that your Christianity, your religious belief, your religious affiliation, justified certain assumptions about people who didn't share that religious belief. So, you're a Christian in the West in 1300 and you meet someone who's a Muslim, and the fact that they don't share your religious belief, justifies the conclusion that they're less than human.

Lex Fridman 31:26 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 31:27 And that's- that was the ground of the, you know, of the Crusades. That was the re- the religious wars of the- of the High Middle Ages. We live in a... To say that we live in a secular age, is to say that, not that we don't ha- there aren't a lot of people who have religious belief, there are. But it's to say that, their religious belief ju- doesn't justify that conclusion. If you're a religious believer and you meet me, and suppose I'm not a religious believer, learning that about me doesn't justify your concluding that I'm less than human.

Lex Fridman 32:01 Right.

Sean Kelly 32:02 And that's the kind of liberalism of the- of the modern age. Mo- most of the time we think that's a good thing. We let a thousand flowers bloom. There are lots of ways to live a good life. And there's some way in which that- that is a nice, progressive, kind of Liberal thought. But it's also true that it's an undermining thought, because it means if you're a religious believer now, your belief can't ground your understanding of what you oughta be aiming at in a life, in the way it used to be able to. You can't say, "As a religious believer, I know it's right to do this." Because you also know that if you meet someone who doesn't share that religious belief, and so doesn't think it's right to do that necessarily, or does but for different reasons, you- you can't conclude that they've got it wrong.

Lex Fridman 32:52 Right.

Sean Kelly 32:52 So, there's this sort of unsettling aspect to it.

Lex Fridman 32:56 Well, isn't it true that, uh, you- you can't conclude as a s- as a public statement to others, but within your own mind, it's almost like an existentialist version of, uh, belief. Which is like, it's- you create y- the world and around you. Like, it doesn't matter what others believe, y- you don't, uh, there's no- It's actually almost like, um, empowering thought so- As opposed to the more traditional view of religion, where it's like a tribal idea. Like, where you share the idea together. Here, you have the full, back to Sartre, full responsibility of your beliefs as well. (laughs)

Sean Kelly 33:38 Good, good. But what you're describing is not a- a religious believer, right? You're describing someone who's found in themselves the ground of their existence, rather than in something outside of themselves. So, the religious belief- I mean, i- if you go full Sartrean, then, uh, well, you're not in a position to criticize others for the choices that they make. But you are in a position to ch- criticize them for the way in which they make them.

Lex Fridman 34:06 Sure.

Sean Kelly 34:06 Either taking responsibility or not taking responsibility.

Lex Fridman 34:10 Right.

Sean Kelly 34:10 But the- but the religious believer used to be able to say, "Look, the choices that I make are right because God demands that I make them."

Lex Fridman 34:17 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 34:19 And nowadays, like a- and so it would be wrong to make any others. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 34:25 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 34:25 And nowadays, our kind of- th- to say that we live in a secular age is to say, "Well, you- you can't quite- can't quite do that and be a religious believer." Your religious belief can't- can't justify that move, and so it can't ground your life in the way it does. So, it's sort of unsettling. I think that's one of the interpretations of what Nietzsche might have meant when he said, "God is dead." God can't play the role for religious believers in our world that he used to.

Lex Fridman 34:52 But we nevertheless find meaning. I mean, you don't see nihilism as a prevalent set of ideas that are overtaking modern culture, so a secular world is still full of meaning.

Sean Kelly 35:04 Good. Well, I think that's the interesting question. I- I think- I think it's certainly possible for a secular world to be a world in which we live meaningful lives, worthwhile lives, lives that, uh, are s- are- are sort of, um, worthy of respect and that we can be proud of- of aiming to live. But- but I think it is a hard question, what we're doing when we do that. And that's the- that is the question of existence. So, what does it mean to exist in a way that brings us out at- at our best as the beings that we are? That's the question for existentialism.

Lex Fridman 35:40 So, besides Sartre, who to you is the most important existentialist to understand for others? What ideas in particular of theirs do you like? Maybe other existentialists, not just one.

Sean Kelly 35:55 Yeah. Good.

Lex Fridman 35:55 So, Sartre is the grounding, strong, atheistic, existentialism statement.

Sean Kelly 36:00 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 36:00 Who else is, uh, there?

Sean Kelly 36:02 So, in- I'm- I'm teaching an existentialism course now, and I think the tradition goes back at least to the 17th century. Um, and I'll just tell you some of the figures that- that I'm teaching there. We can talk about any of them that you like.... the, the figure I start with is Pascal. Pascal, French mathematician, uh, from 17th century. He died, I'm terrible with dates, but I think 1661 or something like that, middle of the 17th century. Brilliant polymath, sort of, we have computer languages named after him, he built the first mechanical calculating machine, he, he's... But he, he was also deeply invested in his understanding of what Christianity was, and he thought that everyone before him had really misunderstood what Christianity was, that they'd really, um, attempted to think about it, not as a way of living a life, but as a set of beliefs-

Lex Fridman 37:02 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 37:02 ... that you can have, and which you can justify, and I think that's the first move that's kind... That's really pretty interesting. And then figures like Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, um, developed that move and it... And they're, all of those are, take themselves to be defending an interpretation of a certain kind of Christianity, uh, an existential interpretation of Christianity. Uh, and then I think there are other figures, other theistic figures, uh, figures like, um, Camus and, uh, Fanon, who, who are mid-20th century figures. And then I'll just mention the figure who I think is the most interesting, is Martin Heidegger.

Lex Fridman 37:42 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 37:43 He's a complicated figure, uh, 'cause-

Lex Fridman 37:45 By the way, when you said, uh... Sorry to interrupt.

Sean Kelly 37:48 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 37:48 When you said Camus, you meant atheistic?

Sean Kelly 37:51 I think that Camus is an atheistic existentialist. Yeah, I'm happy to talk about that.

Lex Fridman 37:56 So, okay, so we got... It's like sports cards.

Sean Kelly 37:58 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman 37:58 We have, we have the different existen- So maybe let's go to, um...

Lex Fridman 38:04 You know what? Let's go to Dostoevsky.

Sean Kelly 38:05 All right, okay, let's do it.

Lex Fridman 38:07 So my favorite novel of his is, uh, The Idiot. First of all, I see myself as the idiot and an idiot, and I, I love the optimism and the love he, the main character has for the world. So that just deeply connects with me as a novel, uh, Notes from Underground as well, but what ideas of Dostoevsky's do you think are existentialist? What ideas are formative to the whole existentialist movement?

Sean Kelly 38:36 Excellent. So let me talk about The Brothers Karamazov.

Lex Fridman 38:39 Yes.

Sean Kelly 38:40 Partly because that's the last novel that Dostoevsky wrote. I think it's certainly one of the greatest novels of the 19th century, uh, maybe the best, and I'm about to teach it in a few weeks, so I'm super excited about it. But what's, what is The Brothers Karamazov about? I mean, without, you know, without spoiling the ending for anyone.

Lex Fridman 38:58 (laughs) Spoiler alert.

Sean Kelly 38:59 Yeah. I mean, look, it's, it's a murder mystery, right?

Lex Fridman 39:02 Yeah.

Sean Kelly 39:03 I mean, the father gets murdered. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 39:06 Yeah.

Sean Kelly 39:06 And the question is, who did it? Who's responsible for it? So there's, there's a notion of responsibility here, like in Sartre, but it's responsibility for a murder, that's what we're talking about. And there's a bunch of brothers, each of whom (laughs) has pretty good motivation for having murdered the father. The father's a jerk. I mean, he's... You know? If anybody is w- worthy of being murdered, he's the guy. He's, he's, he's a force of chaos and he's nasty in all sorts of ways, but still, it's not, not good to murder people. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 39:43 (laughs)

Sean Kelly 39:43 So, so what's the, what's the view of Dostoevsky... I mean, it's this intense exploration of what it means to be involved in various ways with an activity that everyone can recognize is atrocious, and what the right way is to take responsibility for that, what the right way is to relate to others in the face of it, and how, even through this kind of action, you can achieve some kind of salvation. That's Dostoevsky's word for it. You can li- And, but salvation here and now, not like you live some afterlife where you're, you know, paradise for eternity. "Who cares about that?" says one of the characters. (laughs) "That doesn't make my life now any good, and it doesn't justify any of the bad things that happen in my life now." What matters is, can we live well in the face of these things that we do and have to take responsibility for? So it's this intense exploration of notions and gradations of guilt and responsibility and the possibility of love and salvation in the face of those. It is an incredibly human work. And he- but I think Dostoevsky is the opposite of Sartre.

Lex Fridman 41:02 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 41:03 And let me just... I think it's so fascinating, I don't know anybody else who notices this, but Sartre, in... Sartre actually quotes a passage from Dostoevsky when he's developing his view.

Lex Fridman 41:13 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 41:14 It, it's close to a passage, it doesn't appear quite in this way, but the passage that Sartre quotes is, is this. It's, it's in the form of an argument, Sartre puts it in the form of an argument. He says, um, "Look, there's a... A conditional statement is true. If there is no God, then everything is permitted."

Lex Fridman 41:32 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 41:33 "And then there's a second premise. There is no God." That's Sartre's view. I mean, he's an atheist. "There is no God. Conclusion, everything is permitted." (laughs) And that's Sartre's radical freedom, and if you think about the structure of The Brothers Karamazov, I think Dostoevsky, though he never says it this way, would run the argument differently. It's a modus tollens instead of a modus ponens. The argument for, for Dostoevsky would go like this, "Yeah, conditional statement, 'If there is no God, then everything is permitted,' but look at your life."... not everything is permitted. (laughs) You do horrible, atrocious things, like be involved in the death of your father, and there is a price to pay. That's not a livable moment. You, to take, to have to take responsibility, to have to recognize that you're at fault, or you're somehow guilty for having been involved in whatever way you were in letting that happen, or bringing it about that it does happen, is to pay a price. So we're not beings that are constituted in such a way (laughs) that everything is permitted. Look at the facts of your existence. So not everything is permitted, therefore there is a God. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 42:53 (laughs)

Sean Kelly 42:54 That's... Uh, and, and, and, and the, and the, and the presence of a God for Dostoevsky, I think is just found in this fact that when we do bad things, we feel guilty for them. We, that we find ourselves to be responsible for things, even when we didn't intend to do them, but we just allowed ourselves to be involved in them.

Lex Fridman 43:10 And the nature of God for Dostoevsky is, I mean, unclear. (laughs) I mean, it's a very-

Sean Kelly 43:15 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 43:15 ... complex exploration in itself. And he, basically God speaks through several of his characters in, in complicated ways.

Sean Kelly 43:22 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 43:22 So it's not like a trivial, uh, version of God.

Sean Kelly 43:26 It's totally not trivial. It's totally not trivial, and it's not a, a being that exists outside of time, and-

Lex Fridman 43:31 Right.

Sean Kelly 43:31 None of that is sort of relevant for Dostoevsky. For him, it's a question about how we live our lives. Do we live our lives in the mood that Christianity says it makes available to us, which is the mood of joy?

Lex Fridman 43:42 Is there, um... Maybe this is a bit of a tangent, but... So I'm a Russian speaker, and one of the... I kinda listen to my heart, and what my heart says is I need to take on this project. So, there's a couple of famous translators of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy that live in Paris currently. So I'm going to take the journey. We agreed to have a full conversation about Dostoevsky, about Tolstoy, and like ma- a series of conversations. And the reason I fell in love with this idea is I just realized, in translating from Russian to English, how m- deep philosophical, how much deep philosophical thinking is required. Just to get like single sentences, they spent like weeks debating single sentences. So, uh, and all of that is part of a journey, uh, to Russia for several reasons. But I, I just, I want to explore, uh, something in me that, uh, longs to understand and to connect with the roots where I come from. So, maybe can you comment, whether it's on the Russian side or the niche of the German side, uh, or other, French side, is there something in your own explorations of these philosophies that you find that you miss because you don't, uh, deeply know the language? Or like how important is it to understand the language?

Sean Kelly 45:14 Good. I think it's super important, and I'm always embarrassed that I don't know more languages (laughs) and don't know the languages I know as, as well as I would like to. But there's, um, but there's a way in. So I, I do think different languages allow you to think in different ways. And that there's a, a sort of, a mode of exist-, a way of being that's captured by a language, that it makes certain ways of thinking about yourself or others more natural, and it closes off other ways of thinking about yourself and others. And so I think languages are, are fascinating in that way. The, Heidegger who, who is this philosopher that I'm, I'm interested in says at one point, "Language is the house of being."

Lex Fridman 45:58 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 45:58 And I think that means something like, um, it's by living in a language that you come to understand, or that possibilities for understanding what it is to be you and others and anything are opened up. And different languages open up different possibilities.

Lex Fridman 46:16 And we had that discussion offline about James Joyce, how I took a course in James Joyce, uh, and how I don't think I understood anything besides The Dead and the short stories. And you suggested that it might be helpful to actually visit Ireland, visit Dublin, to truly, to help you understand, maybe fall in love with the words, or... And so that presumably is not purely about the understanding of the actual words of the language, it's understanding something much deeper. Uh-

Sean Kelly 46:47 Absolutely.

Lex Fridman 46:47 ... the music of the language or something. Music of the ideas. (laughs)

Sean Kelly 46:52 Absolutely, something like that. It's very hard to say exactly what that is, but when you hear an Irish person who really understands Joyce read some sentences, they have a different cadence. They have-

Lex Fridman 47:03 Yeah.

Sean Kelly 47:03 ... a different tonality. They have different music, uh, to use your word. And all of a sudden you, you think about them differently, and this, the sentences sort of draw different thoughts out of you when they're read in certain ways. That's what great actors can, can do. But I, I think language is, is rich like that. L- and, and the idea whi- which philosophers tend to have, that we're really studying the crucial aspects of language when we think about its logical form, when we think about the sort of claims of philosophical logic that you can make, or how do you translate this proposition into some symbolic form. Uh, I think that's part of what goes on in language, but I think the wha- that when language affects us in the deep way that it can, when great poets or great writers or great thinkers use it to great effect, it's way more than that. And, and that's the interesting form of language that I'm interested in.

Lex Fridman 48:01 It's kind of a challenge I'm hoping to take on is, I feel like some of the ideas that are conveyed through language are actually can be put outside of language. So one of the challenges I have to do is to have a conversation with people in Russian, but for an English audience.

Sean Kelly 48:19 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 48:19 And not rely purely on translators. There would, of course, be translators there that help-... me dance through this mess of language. But also, like my go- goal, my hope is to dance from Russian to English, back and forth, for an English-speaking audience and for a Russian-speaking audience. So not this pure, "This is Russian, it's going to be translated to English," or, "This is English, it's going to be translated to Russian." But dance back and forth, and try to share with people who don't speak one of the languages, the music that they're missing, and sort of almost hear that music as if you're sitting in another room, and you hear the music through the wall.

Sean Kelly 49:00 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 49:00 Like get a sense of it. I think that would be a waste if I don't try to pursue this, b- being a bilingual human being. And I wonder whether it's possible to capture some of the magic of the ideas in a way they can be conveyed to people who don't speak that particular language.

Sean Kelly 49:19 Uh, I think it's a super exciting project. I will, I look forward to following it. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 49:23 (laughs)

Sean Kelly 49:23 I'll, I'll tell you one thing that does happen. So we read Dostoevsky in translation. Occasionally I do have Russian speakers in the room, which is super helpful. Um, but I also encourage my students, um, to, you know, t- to, some, some of them will have different translations than others. And that can be really helpful for the non-native speaker (laughs) , because by paying attention to the places where translators diverge...

Lex Fridman 49:50 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 49:50 ... in their translations of a given word or a phrase or something like that, you can start to get the idea that somehow the words that we have in English, they don't have the same contours as the word in Russian that's being translated.

Lex Fridman 50:03 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 50:03 And then you can start to ask about what those differences are. And I, I think it's, I think it's, there's a kind of magic to it. I mean, it's astonishing how rich and affecting these languages can be for people who really, who grew up in them especially...

Lex Fridman 50:19 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 50:19 ... who speak them as native speakers.

Lex Fridman 50:20 And that's a really powerful thing that actually doesn't exist enough of, is, uh, for example, for Dostoevsky, most novels have been translated by, uh, two or three famous translators. And, uh, there's a lot of discussion about who did it better and so on. But I would love to, this, I'm a computer science person, I would love to do a diff, where you automatically detect all the differences in the translation, just as you're saying, and use that ... Like, somebody needs to publish literally just books describing the differences. In fact, I'll probably do a little bit of this. I heard the individual translators in interviews and in blog posts and articles discuss particular phrases that they differ on.

Sean Kelly 51:06 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 51:06 But like, to do that for an entire book, that's a fascinating exploration. As an English speaker, just read the differences in the translations.

Sean Kelly 51:14 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 51:15 You probably can get some deep understanding of ideas in those books by seeing the struggle of the translators to capture that idea.

Sean Kelly 51:26 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 51:26 That's a really interesting idea, yeah.

Sean Kelly 51:28 Absolutely. And, and you, you can do that in, for other projects in other languages too.

Lex Fridman 51:32 Right.

Sean Kelly 51:32 I mean, one of the, uh, I don't know, I have, I have this weird huge range of interests. And some, some days I'll find myself...

Lex Fridman 51:39 (laughs)

Sean Kelly 51:39 ... rea- reading about something. At one point, I was interested in, um, 14th century German mysticism.

Lex Fridman 51:45 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 51:46 Okay, turns out there's somebody who's written like volumes and volumes about this. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 51:50 Yes, of course.

Sean Kelly 51:50 He's fantastic. And I was, I was interested in reading, uh, Meister Eckhart.

Lex Fridman 51:55 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 51:55 I, I wanted to know what was interesting about him. And the, and the in- the, the sort of move that this guy, Bernard McGinn, who's the great scholar of this period, made, was to say, "What, what Eckhart did," and everybody knows this, "he translated Christianity into the vernacular." He started giving sermons in German to the pe- sermons used to be in Latin, and nobody could speak Latin. Can you imagine sitting there for a two-hour sermon in a language that you d- don't know? (laughs) So he translated it into, into German. But in doing it, the resources of the German language are different from the resources of the Latin language. And there's a word in Middle High German, grund, which is like, we, we translate it as ground, and it's got this earthy feel to it. It sort of invokes the notion of soil and what you stand on and what things grow out of, and, uh, sort of what you could run your fingers through that would have a kind of honesty to it.

Lex Fridman 52:54 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 52:54 And there's no Latin word for that. But in Eckhart's interpretation of Christianity, grund, that's like the fundamental thing. You don't understand God until you understand the way in which he is our ground.

Lex Fridman 53:06 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 53:07 And all of a sudden, this mysticism gets a kind of German cant that makes sense to the people who speak German, (laughs) and that reveals something totally different about what you could think that form of existence was, that was covered over by the fact that it had always been done in Latin.

Lex Fridman 53:26 (laughs)

Sean Kelly 53:27 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 53:27 Yeah, that's fascinating.

Sean Kelly 53:28 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 53:29 So,

Lex Fridman 53:30 so okay, we talked about Dostoevsky and, uh, the use of murder to explore human nature. Let's go to Camus, who is maybe less concerned with murder and more concerned with suicide... (laughs)

Sean Kelly 53:42 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 53:42 ... as a way to explore human nature. So he is, uh, probably my favorite existentialist, and probably one of the more accessible existentialists. And like you said, o- one of the people who didn't like to call himself an existentialist. So, what are your thoughts about Camus? What role does he play in the story of existentialism?

Sean Kelly 54:03 So, I find Camus totally fascinating. I re- I really do. And for years, I didn't teach Camus, because the famous thing that you're referring to, The Myth of Sisyphus...

Lex Fridman 54:15 Yeah.

Sean Kelly 54:15 ... which is a, a sort of essay, it's published as a book. Super accessible, really fascinating, he's a great writer, really engaging. The opening line is something like, "There is but one truly significant philosophical question."

Lex Fridman 54:31 Yes.

Sean Kelly 54:31 And that is the question of suicide.

Lex Fridman 54:33 Yeah.

Sean Kelly 54:34 And I thought, "I can't teach my poor-"

Lex Fridman 54:35 (laughs)

Sean Kelly 54:35 "... 18-year-olds of..." You know, like how... (laughs)

Lex Fridman 54:38 Yeah. (laughs)

Sean Kelly 54:39 I, I, I just thought, "That's terrible." Like, "How can I..." I mean, it's not wrong. I, like, that's a th- but do I want to bring that into the classroom?

Lex Fridman 54:47 Yeah.

Sean Kelly 54:47 And I, and, and so I read it. I read the, uh, the essay. I, I avoided it for a long time because, just because of that line, and I thought, "I'm not gonna be able to make sense of this in a way that will be helpful for anyone." But finally, one year, maybe seven or eight years ago, I, I sat down to read it. I thought, "I've, I've got to really confront it." And I read it, and it's incredibly engaging. I mean, it's really, really beautiful, and, and Camus is against suicide, which is, turns out to be good. (laughs) You know? Like, uh, I was happy about that. But he, he has a, a bit of a bleak understanding of what human existence amounts to. And so, uh, in the end, he thinks that human existence is absurd, and, uh, it's being a... Absurd is a kind of technical term for him.

Lex Fridman 55:36 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 55:36 And it means that the episodes in your life, and your life as a whole, presents itself to you as if it's got a meaning.

Lex Fridman 55:48 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 55:49 But really, it doesn't. (sighs) So there's this tension between the way things seem to be on their s- surface, and what really turns out to be true about them. And, and he gives these great examples. Uh, like, you probably remember these. He says, um, there you are, you're walking, uh, along this, the street, and you, there's a plate glass window in a building, and through the window, uh, you, you see somebody talking on a telephone.

Lex Fridman 56:18 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 56:18 I mean, we, I imagine it as a phone, but Camus-

Lex Fridman 56:21 Right.

Sean Kelly 56:21 (laughs) ... for, didn't. (laughs) Uh, but you see somebody talking on a cellphone, and, and he's animated. He's talking, uh, a lot, as if things really meant something.

Lex Fridman 56:31 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 56:31 And yet, Camus says, "It's a dumb show."

Lex Fridman 56:35 (laughs)

Sean Kelly 56:35 (laughs) And it's not dumb in the sense, just in the sense that it's stupid. It's dumb in the sense that it's silent. It presents itself as if it's got some significance, and yet its significance is withheld from you. And he says, "That's what our lives are like. Everything in our lives presents themselves to us as if it's got a significance, but it doesn't. It's absurd." Uh, and, and then he says, "Really, what our lives are like are like, they're like the lives of Sisyphus." Just day after day, you do the same thing. You know, you wake up at a certain time. You get on the bus. You go to work. You take your lunch break. You get off. My, I have a colleague who once said to me something like this. It, it was ab- about October or so in the fall semester. I said, "How's, how's it going, Dick?" He said, "Well, you know how it is. I got on the conveyor belt at the beginning of (laughs) the semester, and I'm just going through, and that's, that's the way my life is." And Camus thinks that, that experience, which you can sometimes have, reveals something true about what human lives are like.

Lex Fridman 57:41 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 57:41 Our lives really just are like the life of Sisyphus, who rolls this boulder up the hill from morning 'til night, and then at night, he gets to the top, and it rolls back down to the bottom. Over the course of the night, he walks back down, and then he starts it all over again.

Lex Fridman 57:57 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 57:57 And he says, "Sisyphus is condemned to this life," like we're condemned to our lives, but we do have one bit of freedom, and it's the only thing that we can hang onto. It's the freedom to stick it to the gods who put us in this position. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 58:16 (laughs)

Sean Kelly 58:16 By embracing this existence-

Lex Fridman 58:19 Yeah.

Sean Kelly 58:19 ... rather than giving up and committing suicide, and, uh, I thought, "Well, it's, uh, kind of a happy ending." (laughs) Right?

Lex Fridman 58:25 (laughs)

Sean Kelly 58:26 But, but, but I also thought it, it, it's a dim view of what our, our existence amounts to, so, uh, I think there's something fascinating about that. But what I came to believe, and I tried to write about this once. I know you read the thing about aliveness-

Lex Fridman 58:44 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 58:44 ... that I published once. That's secretly a criticism of Camus. I don't think I mention Camus in there. But I think Camus has got the phenomenon wrong, or he's missed some important aspect of it, 'cause in Camus' view, when you experience your day as sort of going on in this deadening way, and you're just doing the things that you always do the way you always do them, for Camus, that reveals the truth about what our lives are. But I think there's some aspect, at least for me, and maybe, uh, maybe he just didn't feel this, or didn't s- have access to it. Maybe others don't. But for me, there's an extra part to it, which is somehow that, yes, that's the way things are, and it's inadequate. (laughs) And there's something that's missing from that aspect of our existence that could be there.

Lex Fridman 59:37 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 59:38 And it feels like our lives are not about just putting up with that and sticking it to the gods by embracing it, but seeking that absent part of it, the part that's recognizable in its absence in your experience of that. And that's, that's what I think, uh, I think we do have the experience of the presence of that in moments when you feel truly alive.

Lex Fridman 1:00:04 And that's what you mean by the word aliveness, which is a fascinating and a powerful word.

Sean Kelly 1:00:09 Yeah. That's what I mean by it. I mean, I think most people can recognize moments in their lives when they really felt alive, and it could happen in a moment when, you know, I don't know, maybe Miles Davis felt it in that moment when he was responding (laughs) to Herbie Hancock's chord, or maybe you feel it in that moment where you grab for the hand on the first date and the gesture is reciprocated.

Lex Fridman 1:00:33 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 1:00:34 ... or maybe you feel it in some moment when you are d- doing a kind of peak athletic thing, or, or watching somebody else do a peak athletic thing. Um, but I think there are moments when we... When it feels like it's not like the way Camus is describing things-

Lex Fridman 1:00:53 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 1:00:54 ... and it's better because of that.

Lex Fridman 1:00:56 So, I think one really powerful way to, uh... For me to understand aliveness is to think about, to go into a darker territory, is to think about suicide. And I've known people in my life who suffer from clinical depression.

Sean Kelly 1:01:11 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:01:12 And, you know, whatever the chemistry is in our brain, there is a certain kind of feeling that is to be depressed, where you look in the mirror and ask, "Do I want to kill myself today?" This is the question that Camus asks, this question, this philosophical question. And there is people who, uh, when they're depressed say... Not only do they say, "I want to kill myself," or, "I don't," they say, "It doesn't matter."

Sean Kelly 1:01:48 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:01:49 And that's chemistry. That's whatever that is, that's chemistry in our mind. And then on the flip side of that, for me, I've had some low points, but I've very... Been very fortunate to n- not suffer from that kind of depression. I am the opposite, which is not only moments of peak performance in athletics, or great music, or any of that, I'm just deeply joyful often by mundane things. Like, as you were saying it, I was drinking this thing and it's cold, and for some reason, the coldness of that was, uh, like, "Oh, great, like refrigeration." I don't know.

Sean Kelly 1:02:28 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:02:28 The- there was a joy in that, like I- I can't put it into words, but I just felt great. And then-

Sean Kelly 1:02:33 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:02:33 ... just so many things. You look out in nature, there- there's a nice breeze and it's just like, (sighs) it's amazing. So that, that doesn't feel, um, like I'm embracing the absurd. That seems like I'm getting some nice, like, dopamine hits, and whatever the chemistry is, from just the basics of life. And that is the source of aliveness. However my brain is built, it's gotten, uh, a natural sort of mechanism for, for aliveness.

Sean Kelly 1:03:05 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:03:05 And, and the... So, one nice way to see the absence of aliveness is to look at the chemical, the clinical depression.

Sean Kelly 1:03:14 Absolutely.

Lex Fridman 1:03:14 And so that... Camus doesn't seem to contend with that at all in asking the question of suicide. Because when you look in the mirror and ask... Like, if I ask myself, "Do I want to kill myself today?" I ask that question in a different way, more like a stoic way often, like basically every day, is, you know, "What if I die today?"

Sean Kelly 1:03:33 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:03:33 It's more like contemplating your mortality every single day. You know, uh, that excites me, the possibility that this is my last day.

Sean Kelly 1:03:44 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:03:44 That, you know, it just reminds me how amazing life is. And that's, that's chemistry, I don't know what that is, but that's not... That's certainly not some kind of philosophical decision I made. I am a little bit riding a wave of the chemistry of the genetics I've been given-

Sean Kelly 1:04:02 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:04:03 ... of the dopamine. So that, that question of suicide, um... By the way, do you, do you find that formulation of the question of existentialism... I know you didn't want to teach it, because obviously suicide is a very difficult word, especially for young minds, but do you think that's a useful formulation of the question of existentialism? Like him saying this is the most important question, of suicide.

Sean Kelly 1:04:29 I think, I think there is something to it. If, if you read the question as the question, what is it in virtue of which it ought to be desirable to cont- to live the lives that we're capable of, of living? That's, that's a deep question. Yeah, that's a question that gets focused when someone asks themselves whether they ought to continue to live that life. Who, w- with the, the famous line, "Nothing focuses the mind more than one's impending execution." (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:04:59 (laughs)

Sean Kelly 1:04:59 That's the... I, I mean, I think that's... I think there's something important about that, that recognizing the riskiness and the vulnerability of one's existence is super important. And the ide- a- and I think that if we didn't have that, our lives wouldn't be capable of being meaningful. If they weren't risky and vulnerable, there would be nothing to lose. And it's only because there are things to lose that they can come to have the significance that they do. So yeah, I, I think... I'm not against the idea that that's a, a deep way of approaching the questions at the core of, of existentialism. But as you said, I was worried for a while about (laughs) how I was gonna, how I was gonna teach it.

Lex Fridman 1:05:43 Well, I- I think there's a difference between suicide and not living. I... Because suicide is an action.

Sean Kelly 1:05:50 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:05:50 So it feels like, to me, uh, like suicide doesn't make sense, because y- (laughs) you know, imagine you're in like a hotel, and you're saying, "The room I'm in sucks." But like, there's other rooms. So, like, maybe explore those other rooms. Maybe you'll find m- meaning in those other rooms. Like, basically embracing the fact that you don't know everything.

Sean Kelly 1:06:16 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:06:17 And there's, uh... You need time to explore everything. It's like once you've explored everything, then maybe you can make a, a full decision. But it's, um...... unfair to make a decision. It's, I would say, unethical to make a decision until you've explored all the rooms in the hotel (laughs) .

Sean Kelly 1:06:36 Yeah. And this gets focused in, in The Brothers Karamazov, of course.

Lex Fridman 1:06:40 Yeah.

Sean Kelly 1:06:40 There's one brother who, uh, is really asking that question, is asking the question of suicide. He's asking the question whether the world that we live in is a world that's worth living in. And I think that character's, as you say, very ill. I mean, that, a- a- and, and it's possible, um, and often because, as you say, of, you know, brain chemistry, physiology, s- there's certainly a physical ground to that, to that situation, to that condition. Um, but, uh, I think it is, it is possible for someone to be in that situation. I think that Ivan Karamazov, who's the, who's the character who's asking this question, is chem- you know, maybe, let's say, chemically depressed (laughs) or something like that. But I think there's more to it too, and I think that Dostoevsky's real view is that the brain chemistry doesn't exist on its own. Like, the way we interact with one another, the way we care about or isolate ourselves from others, the way we, um, ca- uh, care for the lives that we lead, um, affects the chemistry (laughs) of our brain, which goes on and changes the mood that we're in. So, uh, I think Dostoevsky does think that, um, Ivan's salvation, if he's capable of being saved, um, is gonna come through the love of his brother, Alyosha.

Lex Fridman 1:08:10 Let me just bring, uh, maybe a bit of a tangent on you. D- do you ever... One of my other favorite authors is Herman Hesse.

Sean Kelly 1:08:16 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:08:16 Uh, does... Do you ever include him in our deck of, uh, sport cards that represent existentialism?

Sean Kelly 1:08:24 I haven't. Maybe I should. Should... What should I read? What should I think about including?

Lex Fridman 1:08:29 Oh, no, there's some kind of, uh, embrace of absurdism. Like, there's a existentialist kind of ideal pervading most of his work. Uh, but there's more of a... Like with Siddhartha-

Sean Kelly 1:08:45 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:08:46 ... there's more almost like a Buddhist-

Sean Kelly 1:08:48 Yeah, that sort-

Lex Fridman 1:08:49 ... sort of like watch the river and, like, become the river.

Sean Kelly 1:08:53 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:08:53 Like, this kind of idea that, uh, what it means to truly experience the moment. So, there is an experiential part of existentialism, where you want to not... It's not just about... We've been talking about kind of decisions and actions-

Sean Kelly 1:09:07 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:09:08 ... but also what it means to listen, like you said, from Nietzsche. Like, what it means to really take in the world and experience the moment. So, he's very good at writing about what it means to experience the moment and experience the full absurdity of the moment. And for him, uh, I'm starting to forget, Steppenwolf, I think, is, uh, humor.

Sean Kelly 1:09:29 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:09:30 Uh, it's part of the absurdity, which I think modern day internet explores very well with memes and so on.

Sean Kelly 1:09:37 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:09:37 Humor is a fundamental part of the existentialist ethic that's able to deal with absurdity.

Sean Kelly 1:09:45 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:09:45 You gotta, like, laugh at it (laughs) .

Sean Kelly 1:09:48 Yeah. I think there is some... Uh, let, let me just say something about humor, 'cause I think you're absolutely right. Kierkegaard, who is Danish, and, you know, most people think deeply depressed (laughs) and, and so on-

Lex Fridman 1:09:58 (laughs)

Sean Kelly 1:09:58 ... is actually an incredibly funny writer. And someone who was a classmate of mine in graduate school, who left philosophy to become a Hollywood comedy writer-

Lex Fridman 1:10:08 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 1:10:09 ... uh, he's a very successful guy, and then he came back 25 years later and wrote, finished his dissertation. And I was the, the reader on the dissertation. There may be a conflict of interest, I'm not quite sure (laughs) .

Lex Fridman 1:10:21 (laughs)

Sean Kelly 1:10:21 But, but, uh, his dissertation was about h- well, he called it Kierkegaard and the Funny-

Lex Fridman 1:10:25 (laughs) Good title.

Sean Kelly 1:10:26 ... which is a k- kind of a funny title, yeah. But, but Kier- Kierkegaard, according to Eric Kaplan's reading, um, Kierkegaard has, um, does have this idea that there's something destabilizing about humor that's crucial to the sort of the important possibilities for us. And, and-

Lex Fridman 1:10:48 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 1:10:48 ... so he... The, the, there's the idea that, like, there's a moment when a joke is being set up, when you're sort of proceeding as if you're on stable ground-

Lex Fridman 1:10:58 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 1:10:59 ... and then the punchline comes, and the rug is pulled out from under you. And for a moment, it's like you're falling. You don't... Like, you, you... There's nothing supporting you (laughs) until you're captured by your totally new understanding of what was going on. And that humor necessarily has that kind of destabilizing feature to it.

Lex Fridman 1:11:23 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 1:11:23 And that's like the riskiness. That's like the riskiness that you were, you were pointing to. If, if there aren't risks in your life, if your life is totally safe, then there's no possibility of significance. And so I think on Eric's reading, Kierkegaard sort of wants to line up the importance of the riskiness and vulnerability in your life to its having meaning-

Lex Fridman 1:11:45 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 1:11:45 ... with the experience of destabilization that you get in jokes and comedy, um, which then becomes significant, right? That when you, he- when you remember having heard a joke for the first time, it's got a kind of salience for you.

Lex Fridman 1:12:00 Speaking of jokes-

Sean Kelly 1:12:01 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:12:02 ... and speaking of, uh, you mentioned film and literature-

Sean Kelly 1:12:05 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:12:06 So, existentialism in film and literature.

Sean Kelly 1:12:08 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:12:09 I think for, um, a lot of, uh, people, especially nihilism, was experienced in the great work of art, modern work of art called Big Lebowski. I don't know if you've ever seen that film.

Sean Kelly 1:12:21 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:12:21 But there's, uh, a, a group of nihilists in that, that film. They're just like, they don't care about anything. I think they happen to be German. At least they have-

Sean Kelly 1:12:29 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:12:29 ... German accents.

Sean Kelly 1:12:30 Uh-huh.

Lex Fridman 1:12:31 So, maybe can you talk about notable-... uh, appearances of existentialism in film. And if, if you at all ever bring up Big Lebowski, uh-

Sean Kelly 1:12:42 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:12:42 ... if, if that ever comes into play.

Sean Kelly 1:12:45 So, I know that people think about The Big Lebowski in this, in this context.

Lex Fridman 1:12:48 Yeah.

Sean Kelly 1:12:48 I, and I did actually rewatch it not so long ago. We have kids.

Lex Fridman 1:12:52 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 1:12:52 And I thought, "Maybe it's time."

Lex Fridman 1:12:54 (laughs)

Sean Kelly 1:12:54 It just wasn't really time for (laughs) , for the 11-year-old.

Lex Fridman 1:12:57 No.

Sean Kelly 1:12:57 (laughs) So, somewhat inappropriate. But I, but I have never taught that film, so I'd have-

Lex Fridman 1:13:02 Yeah.

Sean Kelly 1:13:02 ... to think more. We could talk about it. I'd be happy-

Lex Fridman 1:13:04 Yeah.

Sean Kelly 1:13:04 ... to try to think on the fly about it.

Lex Fridman 1:13:06 Okay, so I would love to because there is a, feels like there's a philosophical depth to that film.

Sean Kelly 1:13:12 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:13:12 So, there's, uh, there's a person that just, uh, the main character.

Sean Kelly 1:13:17 The Jeff Bridges character. Is that right? Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:13:19 Jeff Bridges character, yeah. He, he kind of, um, he drinks like these White Russians and-

Sean Kelly 1:13:24 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:13:24 ... he just kinda walks around in a very relaxed way. And, uh, he radiates both a, a, a love for life, but also just an acceptance of, like, it-is-what-it-is k- uh, kind of philosophy. And then there's a bunch of characters that have, are, have very busy lives, uh, trying to do some big projects that, uh, are dramatic in some way, make some huge amounts of money. So, it kind of actually reminds me of The Idiot by Dostoevsky-

Sean Kelly 1:13:57 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:13:57 ... in, in a certain kind of sense. And then there's these players, I mean, they're phrased as nihilists, but they kind of don't care to enjoy life, they wanna mess with life in some kind of way.

Sean Kelly 1:14:09 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:14:09 And of course, there's, uh, interesting personalities that, uh, what is it? Uh, Jesus, like, the bo-

Sean Kelly 1:14:16 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:14:16 ... the, uh, the Bowler, and then there's like Donny, who is a bit clueless.

Sean Kelly 1:14:23 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:14:23 And then there's the, uh, the always-

Sean Kelly 1:14:26 John Goodman character.

Lex Fridman 1:14:27 John Goodman character-

Sean Kelly 1:14:27 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:14:27 ... is talking about, uh, Vietnam and just takes life way too seriously, too intensely, and so on.

Sean Kelly 1:14:32 Right.

Lex Fridman 1:14:33 So, it just paints a full sort of spectrum of characters that are operating in this world, and perhaps most importantly for existentialism, are thrown into absurdity.

Sean Kelly 1:14:42 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:14:43 And, uh, hence the humor.

Sean Kelly 1:14:45 Okay. All right, good. Well, that's helpful. Thank you for reminding me of all that. And I, I, I think, so one thing to say is that the nihilists, the group of nihilists who call themselves nihilists (laughs) , I think they've got a bad misinterpretation of what nihilism is supposed to be.

Lex Fridman 1:15:02 Yeah.

Sean Kelly 1:15:03 (laughs) Uh, I, and there, you know, this, this happened actually. In the '20s, there was a famous case, um, of a couple of German students, Leopold and Loeb, who'd r- read a lot of Nietzsche. Nietzsche, you know, was a, a kind of hero for the Nazis, e- even. I think based on a pretty bad misunderstanding of what he was up to. But Leopold and Loeb had the b- uh, the bad understanding first, and they were students, they'd read a lot of Nietzsche, and they thought, "Okay, nothing means anything. The only way that, um, there's any significance in life is through our will to sort of powerfully bring something about."

Lex Fridman 1:15:44 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 1:15:44 "And, um, if we're gonna do that in a way that reflects the fact that nothing means anything, then what we should do is take these things, these actions that people always thought were bad, and do them and show that there's nothing wrong with doing them."

Lex Fridman 1:16:02 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 1:16:02 And so they decided they would murder someone. Not because they were angry at them, just someone they'd never met. It was important that it was someone they'd never met.

Lex Fridman 1:16:10 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 1:16:10 It was totally unmotivated act. And they thought, "We'll embrace nihilism by showing that we can act in such a way as to do something that, you know, morality thinks is bad, uh, and through our will, bring it about that we desire to do it."

Lex Fridman 1:16:28 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 1:16:28 "For no reason that has anything to do with it potentially being interpretable as good."

Lex Fridman 1:16:33 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 1:16:34 And I think that's a terrible misreading of, of what Nietzsche thinks the response to, to nihilism is. I mean, I think, read that against the Miles Davis thing.

Lex Fridman 1:16:44 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 1:16:44 Miles Davis' aim is to creatively bring it about that something works well in a situation where he is kind of constrained. So, they thought two things. One, there are no constraints at all, not even the constraints of the situation that we find ourselves in. And two, we only become the beings that we really are when we act in what, you know, what you might, against what you might have thought the constraints were.

Lex Fridman 1:17:09 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 1:17:10 And I just think that's a bad misreading of what that kind of nihilism is up to. And I think maybe that group in The Big Lebowski (laughs) has got that kind of, that kind of bad misreading. But then the, the major characters are, are may- are much more interesting. Go ahead.

Lex Fridman 1:17:23 Yes, thanks.

Sean Kelly 1:17:23 You were gonna say something.

Lex Fridman 1:17:24 So, there's some kind of apathy to that, their particular nihilism. Th- could you comment on whether you see sort of apathy as a philosophy part of that nihilism? Sort of like, um, from an existentialist perspective, how important is it to care about stuff? Like, really take on life? What, what does existentialism have to say about just sitting back, uh, and just not caring?

Sean Kelly 1:17:56 Excellent. So, apathy is like a really important word. The Greek word is apatheia, it means without passions. And the Stoics, who you mentioned earlier, really thought that, you, you know, passions are what get in the way of your living well. Because to live well, you have to think clearly about what you should do, and you shouldn't let your resentments and your angers and your petty animosities direct your behavior. You should release yourself from those kinds of passions. So, stoicism...... you know, again, huge caricature. But, you know, it's, it's an aim not to care, because caring is bad. And there's certain forms of existentialism, certainly in Pascal and Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky and Heidegger, uh, and Sartre in his own way, uh, so it's not, uh, just a theistic or atheistic thing, where what's, what's crucial about us is that we do care. Heidegger says, "Care is the being of Dasein." Dasein is his name for us. That what it is to be us is to be the being that already cares, and you can't not do that. You can pretend you're not doing it, uh, but you're just caring in a different way. It's like Sartre saying you can pretend you're not taking responsibility, or y- you, (laughs) you could pretend that you don't have to make a decision. That is making a decision.

Lex Fridman 1:19:22 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 1:19:23 Not caring is a way of caring. And so, I think the existentialists that I'm interested in think that we do care. That's, that's constitutive of what it is to be us.

Lex Fridman 1:19:34 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 1:19:34 And so they'll, they'll think that the Stoics got it wrong, but then that leaves open a huge range of moves about how we inhabit that existence well.

Lex Fridman 1:19:48 (inhales deeply)

Lex Fridman 1:19:49 Let me ask about Ayn Rand.

Sean Kelly 1:19:52 Okay. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:19:53 So, it just so happens that I've gotten ... she's entered a, uh, a few conversations in this podcast, and just looking at academic philosophy or just philosophers in general, they seem to ignore Ayn Rand. Do you have a sense of why that is? Does she ever come into play, her ideas of, uh, objectivism come into play of discussions of, um, a good life, uh, from the perspective o- of, uh, existentialism, i- in how you teach it and how you think about it? Is she s- somebody who you find at all interesting?

Sean Kelly 1:20:30 So, no, I don't think she is. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:20:34 (laughs)

Sean Kelly 1:20:34 But it's been a long time since I've read her stuff. I read it in high school. I read The Fountainhead in high school and Atlas Shrugged, but that's, at this point, a very long time ago. I think I read something about objective epistemology or something too. So, you know, my, my view about her could be based on a total misunderstanding of, of what she's up to.

Lex Fridman 1:20:53 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 1:20:53 But sort of my, my caricature of her, and tell me if I've, I've got it wrong-

Lex Fridman 1:20:58 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 1:20:59 ... is that she's sort of motivated by a kind of, I think it's maybe sometimes you call it libertarianism, but eco- like, uh, maybe let's, in the context of our discussion, um, tie it back to Sartre, a kind of view according to which we're the being who has to contend with the fact that we're radically free to do stuff, and we're just not being courageous or brave enough when we don't do that, and the people to admire are the people who make stuff out of nothing.

Lex Fridman 1:21:32 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 1:21:32 Um, so maybe that's a bad caricature.

Lex Fridman 1:21:34 No, no, no. Uh, I, I think, uh, I ... uh, no, I think that's pretty accurate. I'm not, again, very knowledgeable about her, the full depth of her philosophy, but I think she takes a view of the world that's similar to Sartre in, in the conclusions, but makes stronger statements about epistemology, that first of all, everything is knowable-

Sean Kelly 1:21:59 Hm.

Lex Fridman 1:21:59 ... and there's some, you should always operate through reason.

Sean Kelly 1:22:02 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:22:03 Like, reason is very important. Like, uh, it's like, uh, you start with a few axioms and you build on top of that, and, uh, uh, the axioms that everybody should operate on are the same. Ag- again, reality is objective, it's not subjective. And so from that, you can derive the entirety of how humans should behave at the individual level and at the societal level. And there's a few conclusions. Um, she would talk about virtue of selfishness, and sort of a lot of people use that to dismiss her, "Look, she's very selfish," and so on, but she m- actually meant something very different. It's like, it's, it's more like the Sartre thing, take responsibility for yourself, understand what, uh, forces you're operating under, and make the best of this life, and that's how you can be the best member of society is by making the best life you can.

Sean Kelly 1:22:58 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:22:58 And just focus on yourself, like fix your own problems first-

Sean Kelly 1:23:01 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:23:01 ... and then, uh, and that, that will make you the best, uh, member of society, of your family, of loved ones, of friends and so on. I think the reason she's disliked, uh, obviously on the philosophy side, she's disliked because, a little bit like Nietzsche, she's like, she's literary.

Sean Kelly 1:23:20 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:23:21 Uh, I think and the reason she's publicly disliked, uh, in sort of public conversations is because of how sure she is of herself. So there, uh, which is ... some of the philosophers have been known to do, like make very strong statements, like, "Hell is other people," where she was making very strong statements about basically everything. And, but it, it's, uh, the, the reason I bring her up is, you know, she is an influential, uh, thinker that is not, for some reason, often brought up as such. It's not acknowledged how influential she is. You know, I w- I was recently looking at like, a list of the most important women of the 20th century, in terms of thought. Not science or any- but like, thought.

Sean Kelly 1:24:09 Hm.

Lex Fridman 1:24:10 And she wasn't in that list. And I just, I've seen this time and time again, and it doesn't make sense to me why she's so kind of dismissed, because clearly she's an author of some of the mo- most read books, like ever-

Sean Kelly 1:24:25 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:24:25 ... and she clearly had very strong ideas that should be contended with, you know. Um, and that, that's why it kind of didn't make sense to me w-... because she's, uh, also a creature of her time, and an important one. Uh, uh, she's a creation of the Soviet Union.

Sean Kelly 1:24:43 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:24:43 Somebody who left because of that. And so, some of her- the strength of her ideas has to do with how much she dislikes that particular, uh-

Sean Kelly 1:24:52 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:24:52 ... philosophy and, uh, way of life. But also, she's a creature of, like, Sartre and, like, that whole, like, niche, and- and so on. Now, one of the other criticisms is she doesn't integrate herself into this history. She keeps basically, kind of implying that she's purely original in all her thoughts, even though she's kind of citing a lot- a lot of, uh, other people. But again, many philosophers do this kind of thing, as if- as if they've, uh, they are truly original and they're not. It is interesting. And also, what's interesting about her is she is a woman, she is a strong feminist, and, uh, it- it feels like with Simone de Beauvoir that, you know... Like, it seems like she's a very important person in- in this moment of history that shouldn't be fully forgotten.

Sean Kelly 1:25:43 Interesting. Yeah. Well, so I- I mean, I don't have a lot to add.

Lex Fridman 1:25:46 Yeah.

Sean Kelly 1:25:46 I- I will just say, um, this. I mean, the way... She and Beauvoir seem to me, from your description of her, and remembering what I remember from 35 years ago, um, they seem pretty opposite from one another. Like, one of the things I find interesting about Beauvoir is that she takes seriously the thing that Sartre didn't, which is our thrownness, which is our, um, the sense in which we're born into a situation that's already got a significance for her. Our... I think it was easier for her to- to recognize that than Sartre because she was a woman, and Sartre seems to act as if, you know, there are no constraints or at least there shouldn't be.

Lex Fridman 1:26:32 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 1:26:32 We're- we're pretty close as, you know, privileged white males. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:26:36 Yeah, exactly.

Sean Kelly 1:26:36 If we could just get rid of the last bits of them, we would be God like we're supposed to be.

Lex Fridman 1:26:41 Yeah, yeah.

Sean Kelly 1:26:41 Uh, and I think Beauvoir sort of sees things differently. I think she recogni-... One does not- one's not born, but becomes a woman, she says. So, how does that happen? Well, you're thrown into your culture, and your culture starts treating you in a certain way because of your gender, and that starts to form your understanding and your experience of things. And by the time you're grown up, well, you're- you're pretty well-formed by that. That seems a fact. It's a fact about Sartre too, though it was harder for him to notice it because-

Lex Fridman 1:27:13 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 1:27:13 ... uh, he was formed into the- into his privilege, but-

Lex Fridman 1:27:17 But the world reminds us of our thrownness for some more than others.

Sean Kelly 1:27:22 Yes, absolutely. And- and for people who have to contend on a daily basis with the fact that the social position they're thrown into is one that, um, negates them, or one that oppresses them, or one that sort of pushes them to the side in some way or another. I mean, the Black experience is- is interesting in this respect, too. I mean, Frantz Fanon, who's a contemporary of Sartre and Beauvoir's, w- writes about it. And it's very familiar the things that he's saying now, but, you know, he- he writes back in the '50s about being a Black man in Paris and getting on- getting on an elevator with a woman alone, and how, like, you know, her reaction to him, not knowing him, not having any views about, any reason to have any views about him, sort of puts him in a particular social position with respect to her. And that- that's, um... If you- if you don't have that experience, it's much harder to recognize the, um, the way in which what we're thrown into, something we might not have chosen.

Lex Fridman 1:28:28 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 1:28:29 So, the idea that- that it- that that's not an aspect of our existence, um, which as you describe Ayn Rand's views, it's, she sounds more like Sartre. She sounds more like-

Lex Fridman 1:28:41 Mm-hmm.

Sean Kelly 1:28:41 ... it- uh, either it's not an aspect of our existence, or at least we ought to a- sort of aim at it's not being, and that's what happens.

Lex Fridman 1:28:47 Yeah, almost act as if it's not.

Sean Kelly 1:28:49 Yeah, exactly.

Lex Fridman 1:28:50 Act as if it's not.

Sean Kelly 1:28:51 And so I- I think from my point of view, I don't- I don't pretend that I'm explaining the public reception of her. I'm just sort of trying to- trying to say how I understand her in this, um, intellectual context. From my point of view, that's- that's something big- big to miss. And the ambition to think that really what's happening is that we're all the same, we're all rational beings, we're all beings who, if we just