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

1. 0:00 – 7:03

   The Mind is a Collection of Modules

   1. JFJoe Folley0:00

      So, one of the things that, uh, in some ways, Nietzsche really comes up with a very naturalistic view of what it means to be a human, which I think kind of, uh, jives relatively well, um, with the kind of spirit of a lot of modern empirical research into, well, into- into psychology. I mean, Nietzsche is, um, considered by, uh, people, like, kinda... He- he was a huge influence on people like Freud and- and Jung and stuff like that. I mean, I wouldn't, I wouldn't go so far as to say that Nietzsche was an evolutionary psychologist, but I think that he might be worth reading if you're interested in evolutionary psychology. It's kind of a very different perspective. The thing that Nietzsche has, as- as I say, a kind of picture of the human, which ends up really influencing the psychologists immediately after him, but also just kind of... It's still a- a- a broad view of the human that, um, still is around today, is, uh, that Nietzsche conceives of the mind as basically a collection of drives, or the will as basically a collection of drives. And so it's- it... As opposed to a lot of thinkers before him who sort of conceived of the will as, like, one object, so they're kind of... I don't know, if you want an image, it's like the little man driving our bodies, if that makes sense. Nietzsche kind of throws out this- this picture and he says, "No, they're kind of... If I think about how a human being works, they tend not to work quite like that." They tend to think, okay, I've got this kind of quite chaotic series of drives, and it's very difficult to pinpoint exactly what the me drive is in there. And so he comes up with this image of human psychology which is of, we all have... We... Our mind just is a series of drives, and some people have those drives kind of roughly pointing in one direction. Other people are kind of completely scattered to the, to the four winds, and, you know, the drives are pulling them this way and that way, and they- they can't act, they can't get anything done, they can't prioritize. And so this is kind of the view of the mind that I would say is kind of... then ends up in a lot of, in a lot of late 19th century and right through the 20th century in terms of, in terms of psychological ideas and theorizing and- and research. 'Cause, you know, if you think about, um, how a therapist might conceive of the- the human will today, um, they tend to talk roughly in terms of- of different drives, different facets of the mind, but this kind of fragmentary view of the human will, where it's not just kind of one set thing, it's this collection of different ideas and drives and- and- and desires, and that- that kind of comes from Nietzsche. I mean, he's building off earlier thinkers, but that, for instance, is- is where a lot of early psychoanalysts kind of credit where their view of the mind has come from. And then this, as I say, ends up filtering through right, right, even to, e- even to today. I mean, you know, I- I know you've mentioned before that you- you're kind of in... You- you have had therapy and stuff. So I- I think that, you know, I don't know how similar that was to- to how some of the therapy that you've undergone has conceived of the human mind.

   2. CWChris Williamson2:44

      Mm. You know what? I think Robert Wright in Why Buddhism is True, evolutionary psychologist who then pivoted to do mindfulness, a lot of retreats, and sort of have a take on Buddhism with an evolutionary lens, he's got this wonderful idea about the mind as a collection of modules. And that's not too dissimilar to what you're talking about, that there is a module for this and a module for that and a module for the other, and trying to get the right module to go at the right time, and the fact that these are kind of compartmentalized off and they don't necessarily communicate very well. So yeah, the difference between there being one train driver at the front that's pulling this big locomotive or kind of like a racetrack with shit tons of different drivers and they've all got their own desire. One's going backwards, one's driving the car upside down, and yeah. The... I- I think what I'm fascinated by, um, my point at the very beginning, you have a- a area of expertise, something that you're very familiar with, and you start to see the world through this lens. And then when you start to learn a new topic, your anchoring bias inevitably starts, "Oh, that's- that's similar to the will to power. Oh, that's similar to notes from the .......................... You know, that's similar to such and such a thing." Like, you- you have your own framing. But when I read anything from your world, I then start to think about, "Oh, well, that's- that's, uh, the difference between proximate and ultimate reasons for behavior. Oh, well, that's an adaptive, uh, ancestral explanation for this thing. Oh, well, this is the- the balance and the trade-off you have to have between survival and reproduction." So kind of whatever your, uh, topic area of choice is, whatever you know best, everything else kind of acts in relativity to that. And, uh, it's so funny just when you've got one area you know well, you learn something new and- and you start to sort of pull these threads out in reference to the first one.

   3. JFJoe Folley4:34

      Oh yeah, I think that's, uh, I think that's one of the reasons why I really enjoy, um, like, kind of looking at a lot of different topics, kind of reading as- as widely as possible. I think one of the- one of the real privileges of- of being in sort of, I don't know, public communication of philosophy as opposed to, like, academic philosophy, is the... It kind of gives me the scope to sort of read a- a bit of this and a bit of that, and actually I quite often find these kind of connections emerging. Like, I was reading, um, a book, uh, I think Peter Godfrey-Smith. He kind of has a... Is a... You know, he's a philosopher but works mainly in philosophy of biology, and he writes an entire book on- on the octopus and cuttlefish and this kind of divergent evolutionary path where they're... You end up with these kind of radically different looking neurological structures. And, you know, it's again, it kind of... It- it- it- it's nice having that to draw from when I then talk about something like Nietzsche. You know, for exa- for example, I mean, this is kind of a- a tenuous link, but nonetheless I think it kind of illustrates that quite well-

   4. CWChris Williamson5:24

      (laughs)

   5. JFJoe Folley5:25

      ... is that, is that in, um, octopuses, and I've checked, apparently that is the correct plural. Uh-

   6. CWChris Williamson5:30

      It's not octopi, I know.

   7. JFJoe Folley5:31

      Yeah. I- I kind of... I've been saying octopi for years, and it turns out I was just being-

   8. CWChris Williamson5:33

      We've been double psyoped. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   9. JFJoe Folley5:36

      Yeah, exactly. Turns out I was just being pretentious. God, what a- what a shock.

   10. CWChris Williamson5:39

       (laughs)

   11. JFJoe Folley5:39

       But, um, octopuses have this kind of incredibly disparate, uh, neurological system. So their arms are kind of semi-autonomous.

   12. CWChris Williamson5:47

       Mm-hmm.

   13. JFJoe Folley5:47

       And that again, you know, reminded me a little bit of... You know, you've got... You know, Nietzsche has this picture of the human will as- as a bunch of, you know, semi-autonomous drives, and you kind of... You find yourself sort of in the midst of this situation. There is no, there is no kind of point separate from that where you can sit there and you can, like, quite calmly and patiently dictate all of your drives to be this way and that way. You're kind of... You- you are inescapably in the midst of your own life and you're just gonna have to deal with that.

   14. CWChris Williamson6:09

       Mm.

   15. JFJoe Folley6:09

       And, um, one of the things he becomes increasingly concerned with, and you find this especially in his notebooks...... is, he becomes very concerned about the organization of the will. So, uh, again, a, a kind of, a concept that comes up a lot in his notebooks is the notion of the organized will, where all of these drives are kind of roughly pointing in- in- in a single direction, and the disorganized will, where they're kind of, again, scattered to the four winds. And I think, I think that this is... I- I wanted to, to kind of start on this point because I think that this is, um... One of the things I really like about, about thinkers like Nietzsche and Dostoevsky is that they've got all this kind of, like, highfalutin, uh, philosophical side to them, um, and that kind of is- is what they're- they're known for. But also, as you're reading them, you find a lot of, a lot of insight that is- is just surprisingly down to earth, and sort of, you know, is- is immediately translatable into your, into your map of- of how you see the world and navigate it.

2. 7:03 – 16:50

   Why is Existential Philosophy So Alluring?

   1. CWChris Williamson7:03

      Why is it that existential philosophy is so alluring? Like, I wouldn't think... If you were to just tell me from first principles, if you were to say, "Here, here's the books. This is kind of what they're about. This is the level of difficulty. This is the level of length. This is the sort of level of accessibility. These are the kind of takeaways. This is what it was built for. This is the era it came out of. This is the demeanor of the people who wrote it," I would not put existential philosophy that high on my list of potential matches, and yet it seems to be very attractive, very seductive, very alluring to a lot of people, very life-changing to a lot of people. What, what's going on there? Why- why?

   2. JFJoe Folley7:45

      I think part of it is this sort of coherence between a set of quite abstract ideas by quite abstract thinking people, and also... And, and the coherence between that and then a series of very, very down to earth issues that you just encounter every day. I mean, something like Dostoevsky, for example. He's got lots and lots of, um, themes in his book that are about kind of religion and a particular conception of theology and- and- and active love, which is a- a sort of, uh, an idea of kind of being self-sacrificial in your- in your love and that sort of thing. Um, but he's also got these kind of sudden, incredibly insightful, um, psychological ideas, like the idea that you can't run from guilt, or- or Notes From Underground is sort of one of the most, uh, troubling and most e- most detailed examinations of resentment, um, that I've ever come across. And I think that there's something about, say, uh, reading something in Notes From Underground, and... You know, there are- there are plenty of passages in that that are very, very abstract. There's also troublingly relatable habits of behavior that you'll be able to spot, or at least I'll be able to spot in myself. Maybe it's just 'cause I'm a bastard and everyone else is wonderful.

   3. CWChris Williamson8:53

      (laughs)

   4. JFJoe Folley8:53

      The, um... But- but at the very least, I would imagine that most of us would be able to spot in ourselves. And, um, and I think that's part of what makes it so appealing, you know? And if you read Nietzsche, amongst all of the kind of impenetrable pros or maybe stuff that you're not necessarily interested in, there will be these kind of offhand psychological insights. Like, um, you know, a really good example. One of the, one of Nietzsche's, uh, you know, analyses that has, that has ended up being a bit more popular is, again, to do with resentment, or Ressentiment as he calls it. And that, for Nietzsche, is- is sort of a cross between a conscious feeling, you know, resentment, and an unconscious drive to sort of recoup a sense of power when you're feeling powerlessness. And this is in his, uh, book, The Genealogy of Morals, where essentially he's trying to give an analysis of Christian morality from his perspective, and he's broadly very anti-Christian. He kind of, he really doesn't like it. Um, (laughs) this, h- his analysis of Christianity has been pretty heavily criticized. But I'm more interested in the kind of angle he takes. So, his argument is that, uh, Christian morality, which it is- is- is incredibly, um, concerned with sort of suffering and compassion and pity and, uh, concern for the weak, in Nietzsche's terms. He basically asks, "Well, how could this kind of thing come about?" And he makes the claim that Christian morality stemmed from, uh, a resentful feeling of powerlessness, and that as- and, uh, uh, as a- as an attempt to recoup a sense of power, these powerless people defined a morality whereby people would have to take pity upon them and- and- and-

   5. CWChris Williamson10:26

      Oh, what-

   6. JFJoe Folley10:27

      ... be compassionate and stuff like that. And so-

   7. CWChris Williamson10:28

      Yes.

   8. JFJoe Folley10:28

      ... regardless of what you think of that particular story, because, you know, as a, as a kind of historical narrative, it's at the very least quite questionable. Nonetheless, that approach of taking something that almost seems common-sensically right... You know, what- what could be more intuitive than the idea of being compassionate or- or- or- or taking pity upon somebody vulnerable who's in a difficult situation? And Nietzsche kind of takes that and says, "Okay, well, if we interrogated what was underneath this, would we find something really quite reprehensible?" Would it be, would it be kind of, um... Would it not live up to its own expectations as a moral system in its origins? And I- I find that that kind of approach is very fascinating, um, even if you don't necessarily agree with his conclusions.

   9. CWChris Williamson11:10

      Let me give you an equivalent from my world of evolutionary psychology.

   10. JFJoe Folley11:14

       Yeah, okay.

   11. CWChris Williamson11:14

       So, uh, sympathy is investment advice, is, uh, a way of summarizing the adaptive reason for why we feel sympathy toward other people. Now, it's pro-social, uh, it is highlighting somebody who needs help, and it sort of engenders this sense of unfairness, um, uh, an imperative to action, uh, a softness, caring-ness, um, toward this person. That all seems fantastic. You're living in a small tribe. You're probably somehow related to them or are going to be at some point in the n- near future. Good to keep everybody alive. That's probably a pretty good idea. The self-serving... Uh, that would be the, um... That would be one layer of analysis. Another layer of analysis would be, this person is so down on their luck, they are so bereft that- their bank account is so low, that even a penny to them would be a large, uh, contribution, which means that you can invest in them a small amount and they will owe you the maximum amount.

   12. JFJoe Folley12:18

       (laughs)

   13. CWChris Williamson12:18

       ... to a starving man, a scrap of food is worth a lot. To a person who is pretty well-fed, that doesn't mean much at all. So sympathy is investment advice, not too dissimilar to what you're talking about there, that somebody who has been, uh, has struggled in order to gain dominance or prowess or prestige in society, well, perhaps it's not that they didn't contribute, couldn't contribute, didn't have the capacity, didn't do the things right. Perhaps it's that they're inherently more noble. Like, that's happening, the call is coming from inside of the house with regards to that thinking, that they've turned the bar stool upside down themselves, whereas this one is you on the outside looking at them and saying, "Oh, this poor, meek person that really needs my help. I should, I, um, this would be a great idea." And also, the back of your mind is saying, "And if you help them, you don't need to give them much, and they'll really owe you."

   14. JFJoe Folley13:15

       (laughs) That's very interesting. Yeah, I think that to a certain extent, um, Nietzsche kind of tells the story from the other perspective. So he's, he's account of the origin of, like, a compassion-based morality is, is from the perspective of the powerless, and he says, "Well, you know, imagine that you're..." You know, it, it... I suppose one important kind of preliminary to this story is that Nietzsche thinks that a, a feeling of overcoming resistance or a feeling of power is just incredibly important for, for want of a better term, existential fulfillment. So arguably, I mean, there's a, an interpretation of Nietzsche by a guy called Bernard Reginster. Uh, one thing I should say is that pretty much everything about Nietzsche is controversial. It's, not only did he say lots of controversial things. Also, what he meant is really controversial. So, you know, take all of this with a grain of salt. But in this Bernard Reginster interpretation, um, Nietzsche effectively identifies overcoming resistance as one of, if not the primary source of human fulfillment or existential fulfillment. And so in that, under that kind of mode, um, feeling powerless is, is sort of like living in hell, you know. You're, you're really, you're really in a bad way, and which is, I think, kind of jives with a certain common sense view of if you're powerless, you feel very vulnerable, that can be very, very unpleasant. Um, and so his story of how, his idea of how Christian morality came about was that these powerless people thought, "Right, we're very powerless. How are we going to recoup a sense of power? Because we need-"

   15. CWChris Williamson14:34

       Mm-hmm.

   16. JFJoe Folley14:34

       "... to feel powerful. That's one of our intrinsic psychological needs." Again, if we wanted to draw a, a kind of line to where this has ended up in modern cognitive psychology, you might, you might talk about agency or something like that, you know. These people feel they, they've got no power over their own lives. They, they, they have no feeling of strength. And so according to Nietzsche, they play a kind of twofold trick. One is to say, um, something along the lines of, "I chose this, you know. I chose to be powerless," and the other is to say, "Actually, being powerless is really good." And, you know, I, I kind of think that, again, whether this is a, a good account of how kind of Pauline Christian morality came about aside, I think that when most people read that, they're probably not, they probably take it out of that context and say something like, "Oh, yeah. Actually, I can think about the times where I couldn't achieve something because of lack of power. I didn't have the strength to overcome resistance, or I felt powerless, or, or I felt weak, and as a result, I basically went, no, I don't want that thing anyway. Like, I can't get it, so I don't want it."

   17. CWChris Williamson15:32

       Mm.

   18. JFJoe Folley15:32

       That kind of, um, s- son of sour grapes, I suppose, is the, um, the kind of common expression for that sort of thing. So I think that's what kind of like, there's a kind of divergence between what kind of Nietzsche's interested in and what most people take away from Nietzsche, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. You know-

   19. CWChris Williamson15:46

       Hmm.

   20. JFJoe Folley15:46

       ... it's, it's, there's nothing wrong with, with reading a philosopher outside of their original context and asking, you know, "How can I build upon these ideas?" Arguably, that's closer to doing philosophy than just sort of parroting exactly what they say.

   21. CWChris Williamson15:57

       Passively taking it, yeah, very interesting. Are you familiar with Isaiah Berlin's Inner Citadel? Do you know this?

   22. JFJoe Folley16:03

       Oh, God, I've heard of it, but I don't, I don't know any of that.

   23. CWChris Williamson16:05

       Yeah, so it's, it's very similar, or at least it sounds pretty similar to what you're talking about. So he, he basically says, "If you can't get what you want, you have to teach yourself to want what you can get." So a good example would be, uh, your leg gets injured in a battle. You try to treat the leg, and if you do, that's fine. But if you can't, then you chop your leg off and denounce that the desire for legs is misguided and must be subdued. So he talks about retreating into yourself when, when the fated ills of the world do not deliver to you that which you deny, uh, which you desire, you retreat into yourself, you wall yourself off into sort of spiritual depth, and he refers to this as the inner citadel. "If you can't get what you want, you have to teach yourself to want what you can get." And this sounds, this sounds super

3. 16:50 – 22:47

   Why are Resentment and Resistance So Important?

   1. CWChris Williamson16:50

      similar to this. So I guess, hmm, why is resentment, what, resentment and resistance, why are these two key themes? Like, what, what, what makes this so important? Why are they such big drivers?

   2. JFJoe Folley17:03

      So, um, partly, Nietzsche has a problem with resentment because he thinks it's dishonest. He just sort of thinks, "No, you're, you're lying about what you want. You, you want this, but you're denying yourself even the, the ability to, to go and get it or, or try and become more powerful," in his terms. The, the resistance thing's important because Nietzsche has... The framing for a lot of Nietzsche's project around the will to power is that he's very worried about the death of God, um, but at the same time, sees in this a kind of opportunity. So one of, um, Nietzsche's primary ideas, and I think that, um, uh, this is what draws a lot of people to Nietzsche and to existential philosophy in general, is that he wants to make sense of and help us deal with suffering. This was particularly acute for Nietzsche because he had a really quite debilitating chronic pain condition, so he used to get these kind of splitting headaches and kind of, that would put him in basically months and months of agony, and he... So this kind of idea of suffering and how to overcome suffering in a kind of internal sense, how to deal with it, how to, how to not hate life because life is kicking you in the head, was really quite pertinent to him, and for him, a lot of the way that people have dealt with that before was using some kind of religion. So Nietzsche's an atheist, but he doesn't really argue for atheism in any meaningful sense. He kind of takes it as read. Um, his-... philosophical project is more sort of, okay, if you're an atheist, what now? So, because he thinks that a lot of the ways that people have dealt with suffering beforehand have been in some way religious. You know, imagine that you're a Christian, you can think something like, "Well, sure, I'm- I'm a kind of medieval peasant starving to death, but I'm going to inherit eternal life, and moreover, eternal bliss, so things aren't that bad." There's a sense in which life can still be made meaningful even if it's really unpleasant, and Nietzsche wants to figure out how to do this in a sort of post-religious or post-Christian world. And what he comes up with is, he sort of sits back and thinks, "Right, I need to make suffering not something that is undesirable, but I need to in- somehow- somehow incorporate it into my kind of meaning scheme of the world. I need to take suffering and turn it into something that is desirable." And he- this is kind of- the- the kind of underlying themes in his construction of the will to power. The will to power for Nietzsche is, you know, when he first introduces it, he largely talks about it as a feeling of overcoming resistance. So again, I think this, you know, that sounds very abstract. It's also very easy to bring down to earth, you know, you've... I mean, I don't know how long you've been running this podcast, but I imagine it was an awful lot of work. I imagine it was ver- still is very, very difficult, right? And Nietzsche's point, um, if we kind of bring it more down to the everyday level, is that how some- how fulfilling or how, um, good in a very broad sense something is going to feel, uh, once you've done it is partly a function of how difficult it is, how much resistance you've had to overcome to do it. And Nietzsche spots in this a potential way to re-enchant suffering, a- a way to make suffering not the absolute end of the world, uh, even if you're experiencing an awful lot of it as Nietzsche was, is that he sort of goes, "Right, okay. What if we constructed our kind of philosophy of the world alongside this idea of overcoming resistance?" Because then he sort of goes, "Right, in that case, even if you're suffering a lot, you can in some s- you- or at least you stand half a chance of finding a way to celebrate that, because you- if your aim is to overcome resistance, you must also want resistance."

   3. CWChris Williamson20:31

      Mm.

   4. JFJoe Folley20:31

      So that's kind of his- his... So that was how he kind of wanted to- to incorporate suffering into the way that, you know, people looked at the world post-God. Um, but again, I- I feel like, you know, regardless of what you think about the very kind of abstract picture there, um, this is a- an insight that has trickled down into... There's, well, at the very least you can see it manifest on an everyday level, right? I think that, you know, arguably you can find it in, um, modern psychological concepts like flow, you know, part of the- part of the- the necessary ingredients of flow is that you encounter a certain level of resistance. That's part of what makes it meaningful. And for Nietzsche, resistance is, and- resistance and specifically overcoming resistance, is what makes something meaningful. And, um, part of what this allows him to do is say, "Well, whereas before we want- we were aiming at heaven, we were aiming at a- a changeless, blissful state, now, in fact, in order to achieve what we want out of life, we need to encounter resistance and we need to encounter suffering." And this is a kind of image that- that- that is scattered all the way through his philosophy. So, um, at the very kind of... Well, uh, in Thus Spake Zarathustra... Actually no, before that, it- a- the- one of his first published works is called The Birth of Tragedy and it's about art, and he's talking there about, um, how he thinks certain ancient Greek playwrights learnt to make the very, very harsh life of ancient Greece something that was to be celebrated, something that didn't tear them down, something that actually made them rejoice in life. And so he talks about Greek tragedy as a- as a means to which they did that, and then, you know, this- this theme reemerges in Thus Spake Zarathustra, though the- the first s- metamorphosis of Nietzsche's übermensch is- is called the camel, and Nietzsche defines the camel as- as a being that takes on load and also celebrates the fact that they're taking on load. So we have this idea of, you know, challenge as not just a kind of an incidental thing to be compensated for later. The resistance is the point, and the overcoming...

   5. CWChris Williamson22:25

      Mm-hmm.

   6. JFJoe Folley22:25

      ... of the resistance is the thing that's being aimed at. But again, like I say, it's all very abstract, but I think one of the reasons why Nietzsche really appeals to people is that that's a very abstract way of putting things. It's also very applicable to your everyday life. If you can find a way to celebrate suffering and celebrate resistant- or celebrate overcoming resistance, that's gonna be pretty handy for- for when you do encounter challenges, as we all inevitably

4. 22:47 – 35:27

   Looking for Joy When Overcoming Resistance

   1. JFJoe Folley22:47

      do.

   2. CWChris Williamson22:48

      What's the role of play, or joy, or pleasure, or sort of moment-to-moment happiness? It sounds a lot li- here like meaning long-term, um, uh, deferred gratification, uh, the acceptance of challenge, almost the reveling in it, um, but this is largely deriving pleasure from meaning, not deriving pleasure from pleasure. So is there a- is there a more sort of hedonic, uh, uh, element of this at all, or is that kind of discarded as flimsy?

   3. JFJoe Folley23:24

      So Nietzsche doesn't focus as much on the hedonic element, but it is there. It's not sort of... I think partly because he's less concerned about the pleasurable sides of life because the pleasurable sides of life aren't that hard to get through. It's actually very nice. Um, but, uh, he does touch upon this, um, a fair amount. He often uses metaphors of dancing and joy and laughing. I think that the way you could incorporate this into, uh, this kind of, uh, idea of overcoming resistance, it's a little bit like sort of competitive sport I think's a really good example of that, right? Or- or even, you know, weightlifting or something like that. You know, that it's not just- it's not just that, um, the overcoming of resistance is something that's, you know, you really suffer through and you think is horrible and then you get to the other side and you're allowed to feel joy. Nietzsche thinks that ideally he wants to be in a situation where you're celebrating that- that process of overcoming resistance as well. So again, I think competitive sport is a good analogy for this, right? Like, um...... players enjoy winning a game, but they also enjoy the process of winning a game. And Nietzsche- Nietzsche's philosophy is very, is, uh, in a lot of ways, taking joy in process. Because again, if your, if your fundamental goal is to continue to overcome resistance, then as soon as you've overcome one bit of resistance, or like in layman's terms, as soon as you, like, accomplish one challenge, then you've got to find another one. If- if your whole aim in life is to continue to- to overcome resistance or beat challenges or however you want to put it, then it is a very kind of process-based philosophy. It's- it's, Nietzsche's very keen on-

   4. CWChris Williamson24:54

      It was atomic habits for the 1800s.

   5. JFJoe Folley24:56

      ... yeah, a little bit. I- I, interestingly, I always thought that, um, I- I, atomic habits reminds me very much of, like this- this cha- sorry, I'm going off-topic now, this chapter in Aristotle. So Aristotle's entire philosophy is based around habits, and like his- his whole, like picture of the virtuous human, is based around habituated behavior. So I've always thought, you know, there- there's a chapter in Nicomachean Ethics that whenever I'm- I'm sort of teaching it, in case you go speak at schools and teach it, and, yeah, and teach things, um, and one of the... I always refer to one of the chapters as sort of Ni- um, atomic habits in the kind of fourth century BC. But anyway, but yeah, it is, it's... I think that, again, Nietzsche's philosophy is very, is very kind of taking joy in the journey sort of way, um, but it- it's, but again, it's- it's significantly less, um... uh, how do I want to put it? It's significantly less fun than I just put it.

   6. CWChris Williamson25:47

      (laughs)

   7. JFJoe Folley25:48

      It is, he's- he's- he's really into the- the nitty-gritty of suffering, which you can imagine, you know, this is a man who spends, like a good portion of his life in really unbearable pain, so you can see how this was a really i- i- imperative question for him to answer.

   8. CWChris Williamson25:59

      Mm-hmm.

   9. JFJoe Folley25:59

      But, nonetheless, he does, um, also eventually conceive of overcoming resistance and the process of overcoming resistance as a joyful activity.

   10. CWChris Williamson26:08

       Right. So, what would be, what would be his advice to somebody who keeps getting kicked in the nuts over and over-

   11. JFJoe Folley26:16

       (laughs)

   12. CWChris Williamson26:16

       ... and is, and- and is regularly, or keeps having a splitting headache that lasts for months on end? What would his sort of layperson advice be to them, uh, about how to, how to deal with that?

   13. JFJoe Folley26:27

       So, Nietzsche's ultimate goal for all of his philosophy is this concept of Ɛmāl fara, which I think is a, is a phrase that he borrowed from stoic philosophy but is using it in- in a very different way. So, his, the kind of culmination of um, of his philosophical project is the idea of loving literally everything that happens to you, and not merely kind of being content or- or kind of accepting it, but- but truly loving it. And it's kind of... I mean he definitely never got there because, uh, you know, if you read his letters he's not necessarily a- a happy bunny a lot of the time. But that's... so the advice that he, all... he, when he's writing about how he deals with his own pain, he largely talks about it as- as- as a kind of resistance to overcome, so something that he's, in some twisted way, enjoying overcoming. He uses, and he kind of channels it into his writing, so he has these splitting headaches and he has this, I can't remember the exact metaphor, but he talks about how it was so painful that it kind of focused his mind in a strange sense, and so he channeled that pain into his writing or into his work. And although that's not a kind of bit of his formal philosophy, it is nonetheless kind of reminiscent of some of the stuff he does say in his formal philosophy where he talks about kind of sublimating pain or suffering or sublimating your drives towards this kind of organized will that, whose aim is fundamentally to overcome resistance and as a result must will resistance for themselves.

   14. CWChris Williamson27:52

       Would that mean that a life without resistance would be kind of like a hell?

   15. JFJoe Folley27:56

       Yeah, essentially. He- he's very worried about human potential. So one of the images from Nietzsche's philosophy that really sticks out to a lot of people is the figure of The Last Man, which is a- a character in Thus Spake Zarathustra, where The Last Man is sort of a kind of passive nihilist, but the thing that they're hankering after, um, is contentment. So can- not contentment in the kind of, I don't know, like Buddhist sense, I suppose, of kind of reaching nirvana, although Nietzsche also has a problem with that. This sort of, "All right, I'm going to avoid challenge and resistance as much as I possibly can." And there are two reasons why Nietzsche was opposed to this. The first is that he's got this sort of... I don't want to call it sentimental, but he's got this real investment in the idea of humans achieving their potential. You see this, um, kind of again all through his works, even... he has an essay called Schopenhauer as Educator, where he's kind of reflecting on the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, and in that he has this kind of like almost mini rant in the middle of the essay, which is like really fascinating, about how he just like absolutely cannot stand it when people don't, in his words, kind of embrace what they could uniquely be as them, and instead allow these other pressures to interfere with, again, to- to kind of invoke his terms, to bit, uh, interfere with them becoming who they are. If resistance isn't there, he's worried that humanity will just kind of decay into this, like sludge that doesn't do anything. Um, he's, you know, he's- he's worried that all we'll do is kind of, we'll sit around on our sofas, um, pursuing comfort, avoiding pain, and as a result we will also never feel for him the kind of joys of actually ending up overcoming resistance. So I mean, again, it still sounds very abstract when you put it like this. It's actually quite a- quite an intuitive thought where, you know, imagine that, imagine that you'd literally never struggled in life. Like, I under- you know, I'm sure that Nietzsche wouldn't, like actually wish his headache upon himself, but we could imagine a- a person who literally never encounters any struggle. Well, if we all recognize that there's a- a real feeling of achievement, um, in overcoming some kind of struggle or resistance, even if it's just a- a small one, um, then for Nietzsche, this person will never experience that sort of, they will never experience the- the kind of fulfillment that comes with having overcome something.

   16. CWChris Williamson30:14

       Hmm. Does that mean that he hates weak people? Was he not a fan of sort of cowardly or weak people?

   17. JFJoe Folley30:20

       Yeah. It's- it's interesting because, I mean in a lot of ways, arguably Nietzsche...... wasn't, like, a massively strong person. You know, he was a, a nervous wreck for much of his life. Again, he suffered from a, from a, a terrible chronic pain condition. And so, there's this, um, sort of back and forth that goes, uh, goes on in a lot of kind of popular discussions on Nietzsche where people s- sort of quite understandably pose the question of, does Nietzsche really live up to his own ideal here? And again, if we, if we perceive of power as overcoming resistance, then arguably he, he gets, he gets some of the way there. But, you know, I think that, um, it is perfectly plausible to turn Nietzsche's challenge back on him and say, "Well, hang on a second, man. Y- you got rejected by a, by a couple of girls and then you decided you hated, like, women as a whole. And, and, you know, you spent, you kind of ran from basically any criticism that you got and you kind of retreated to your, your cavern and went on walks in the Alps, and that doesn't sound like it's overcoming resistance all that much." So, to bring it back to Nietzsche's view on weak people, yeah, he has a real, he has a real contempt for them. Like, in a way that I think, um, it's very easy to run from when you're reading Nietzsche because, you know, we've had 70 years of, you know, so well- was it? Yeah. Since the end of World War II, so 80 years now, of people going, "Okay, the Nazis were real fan of Nietzsche. This seems a bit... We... Have they misinterpreted him? What, what, what's been going on here?" And basically everyone agrees that yeah, okay, they have misinterpreted him some key ways. This does sometimes lead to the creation of what I call fluffy bunny Nietzsche, which is where-

   18. CWChris Williamson31:52

       (laughs)

   19. JFJoe Folley31:52

       ... you sort of, you sort of imbue Nietzsche with whatever you personally think is a really good thing and pretend that he said it, which is, uh, kind of relatively easy to do on the basis that Nietzsche himself says an awful lot of things, a lot of which contradict one another. It let- y- you can actually, you can kind of pick and choose little bits and create your own sort of model Nietzsche that says everything that you want him to say. But nonetheless, Nietzsche does have a, have a real, um, contempt for what he sees as weakness, and I kind of, I often sort of wonder to what extent he turned that contempt on himself. I think that, um, he kind of, he, he t- has this view for a number of reasons. The first is that he sort of thinks that, that weakness breeds dishonesty. So again, this coming back to that kind of sour grapes point. Um, but secondly, he thinks that, uh, in his view, a kind of unwillingness to overcome resistance, which is broadly how he defines weakness, kind of an unwillingness or, or an ina- inability to overcome resistance, is going to eventually lead this person to kind of become a, a nihilist. So, Nietzsche has this very confusing, um, way of talking about, like, weak people, um, or quote unquote weak people, because again he has a kind of weird esoteric definition for it, whereby he quite often says, "Ah, yeah, man. Like, I hate them. I, I have scorn for them," or something like that, and then at other points he says, "No, no, no. I, I love all people." And you sit there and you think, well, what- y- these things are very difficult to go together, and, uh, a lot of the time this is resolved by interpreters by saying something like, well, if you imagine that Nietzsche's project is for everyone to become willing and able to overcome resistance, because he truly thinks, whether he's right or wrong, he truly thinks that that is the way that you can not become nihilistic in a world without God and without any kind of given meaning for yourself. Then, when he's kind of hard on weak people, uh, I think a lot of, a lot of interpreters will kind of try and reinterpret this. And, you know, I think that probably this thing is a broadly sensible interpretation as a kind of tough dad attitude.

   20. CWChris Williamson33:57

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   21. JFJoe Folley33:57

       A sort of, no, you know, it would be, it would be in some way condescending to extend pity to people when Nietzsche fully knows that they could become this kind of, this, this figure of uniquely themselves and they could overcome resistance. They... So that's his- the... One of his broad critiques of, of compassion, which is, uh, sort of very difficult to get your head around is that he thinks compassion is, is bad for the, for the person that is- the person that one is being compassionate towards. He thinks that-

   22. CWChris Williamson34:24

       Hmm.

   23. JFJoe Folley34:24

       ... you're in some way holding them back. Uh, which again is, is, again, it's like a, it's a very abstract point when Nietzsche puts it. But again, we, we kind of all recognize that whether you want to take it as extreme as Nietzsche does, that there are contexts where this attitude is appropriate, and I'm thinking of, of my own dad, right? Uh, my, my, my dad was sort of very you must overcome challenges type thing, and, and in hindsight I'm very, very grateful for that, uh, because it was. It kind of allowed, it kind of taught me how to be more independent, you know. I think of some people I know who had maybe much, um, and I quote unquote softer, uh, parents, and actually, I don't know. Are they... Did that, did that benefit them? I, I don't think it did. ............................ I mean, I think that, um, Nietzsche's way of putting this is probably far beyond anything that most people want to accept now, because he is really, really anti-compassion and anti-pity. There are, like, a couple of passages where he's talking about, oh, yeah, well, you can be magnanimous if you want. But on the whole, he's very, very, very hard on people that he perceives as weak.

5. 35:27 – 37:01

   What is the Role of the Ubermensch?

   1. JFJoe Folley35:27

   2. CWChris Williamson35:27

      What's the role of the Ubermensch then?

   3. JFJoe Folley35:31

      So the Ubermensch is, interestingly, despite the fact that it's, like, the thing that people know about Nietzsche, like, the Ubermensch is, is, is married to Nietzsche in popular consciousness. It only comes up in Thus Spake Zarathustra. And the purpose of the Ubermensch for Nietzsche is it's... At that point it's someone that is strong enough to make life seem meaningful and, you know, in his terms, create values, uh, even recognizing that, you know, there is no God. The world is, is in itself valueless. The Ubermensch is somebody that can look at that and say, "All right. Bring it on, man. Like, I'm, I'm going to create values for this world." And the actual term Ubermensch is very quickly abandoned in favor of other things, so this figure then evolves in later work into figures like the new philosophers, and the new philosophers are also creating value, so you can tell that they're doing a very similar job. Um-... but again, they're given a very different name. And eventually, you know, this ends up culminating, and his kind of final word for this is Dionysian wisdom, which again, is- it's the same kind of idea. It's this idea that you can look at the world, and most importantly, look at the really awful things in the world, you know, all of the stuff that you would hate to go through, and in some sense, learn to celebrate it. And Nietzsche sort of doesn't pretend that this is going to be an easy thing to do. As I say, I think it's, it's... I don't think that he would say that he accomplished that. Um, but it's something that he at least believes to be possible. And I don't know, I'm a bit more skeptical, but that's kind of his position on things.

6. 37:01 – 46:06

   Learning Lessons from Classic Fiction

   1. JFJoe Folley37:01

   2. CWChris Williamson37:01

      Mm. You said, uh, I've heard you say Dostoevsky changed you. Why-

   3. JFJoe Folley37:05

      Yeah, absolutely.

   4. CWChris Williamson37:06

      ... wha- why did that happen?

   5. JFJoe Folley37:09

      Partly because I think that it's very easy to compute ideas about, um, resentment or hatred or- and the ways that these kind of eat you up inside, right? So not, not just, not just that it's like a, a nasty thing to do to someone else, but it's a nasty thing to do to yourself. It's- there are some lessons, I find, where you can really learn them cognitively, um, by either, you know, you need to find them out for yourself through kind of, no matter how many times somebody has told you something. Or, and I think this is one of the, like, strange benefits of, of really, really good novels, is that because you get inside, as much as possible, the head of the protagonist or the characters, you can kind of feel the lesson in a way that you might have processed intellectually, but hasn't kind of, I don't know, for want of a better way of phrasing it, like sunk down to the bones. I don't know, again, it's very difficult to talk about this. It sounds really wooey, but I feel like-

   6. CWChris Williamson38:03

      (laughs)

   7. JFJoe Folley38:04

      ... most people kind of know roughly what I mean, right? You know, it's, it's- we've all had moments where we've learnt something, um, cognitively, maybe from a psychology paper, and it's, it's true, right? We know it's true. And we read it and we think, "Yeah, I'm definitely going to do that," right? Like, that's, that's, that's in the old, that's in the noggin now, and it's, it's never coming out. And then immediately, you just revert back to your old behaviors. And I think something, for me, reading Dostoevsky, now I, I, I kind of, I like talking about Dostoevsky just because I, I think that despite the fact that I'm, I'm an agnostic and he's a die-hard Orthodox Christian, we have a lot, a lot to agree upon. Um, I think one of the benefits of, of reading these Dostoevsky books and indeed any novels that kind of really resonate with you, is that they allow you to, they kind of speak directly to your emotions in a way that just makes it much more likely to stick with you. You know, if, um, I can kind of cognitively think, oh yeah, resentment is a, is a self-destructive emotion that I should try and expunge really at all costs, which is a very difficult thing to do. You know, I think we all end up feeling resentful sometimes. Um, but nonetheless, you know, it's very easy to think that. The idea of, okay, I've, I've spent sort of like three hours, you know, Notes from Underground is a pretty short book. So I've spent like three to five hours with this guy who's just a bastard, like just kind of a miserable prick for... like is, is (laughs) ... Really no other word for it, he's just kind of, you know, he's, he delights in the misery of others and delights in his own misery, but it's not true delight. It's this self-destructive, um, outlook on life. If I think about not becoming the Underground Man, that's much more likely to stick in my head. I think that, you know, Notes from Underground is a book that I would really recommend to everyone because, again, it's very difficult to put into words. Um, but you really come away from it thinking, "Oh, wow, I may have known before that, that, that not caring about other people and, and only being out for yourself and trying to be an egoist and, and feeling all resentful of, of the world, thinking the world hates me and hating the world in return, I kind of cognitively knew all those things were, were bad things to do. But this kind of really hammers it home in a way that is truly emotionally unforgettable."

   8. CWChris Williamson40:10

      Yeah, that's a lovely way to put it. Uh, it's interesting to me reading fiction. I, I, I'm not able to get through old fiction as easily as I can get through new sci-fi. Uh, if you put a, a fucking Blake Crouch or a Max Barry or a, a Pierce Brown book in front of me, I'll eat that up. If you put some Dostoevsky in front of me, it's gonna take, I'm gonna have to do this in five-page bites. But anyway, uh, my point being, getting lessons to sink below the neck are a pretty difficult thing to do, and it's definitely the curse of the sort of ruminative thinker to assume that you can just top-down dictate your system, that this is compelling. I should, I should pay attention to this. Pay attention to that. You're shouting at your own gut and system saying, "You will pay attention to this." And it goes, "Yeah, sure, I'll do that." And then as you say, you step out of the house and you forget it all. Um, whereas... Alex had this really lovely idea actually, which I, I think is related to this, with regards to a anti-atheist argument. The thing that's most real to humans is personification and narrative and story and archetype and good and evil and myth, uh, uh, and motivation and human psychology and relations, and that is what the world of atheism is telling everybody to let go of.

   9. JFJoe Folley41:38

      (laughs)

   10. CWChris Williamson41:38

       The thing which to them is most real and most true and most easy to understand and most compelling, and instead in its place saying, "Be compelled by statistics and data and theory." Now it's all sterile and gray-brown sludge and there's, there's no j- reason for it other than just raw data and this is what the spreadsheet says. And, uh, I think kind of the fiction versus non-fiction thing is, is not necessarily too dissimilar to that. We all love the idea of being as compelled by Atomic Habits as we would be by reading Dostoevsky. But...

   11. JFJoe Folley42:16

       (laughs)

   12. CWChris Williamson42:17

       ... you know, and, and this is, you, you even see this. Why is it the case, apart from, for, I guess, like explanatory depth, why is it the case-... that nonfiction books are filled with anecdotes and little portable stories, all because it's more engaging, but also because you know that this will hammer the point home better than the statistics can.

   13. JFJoe Folley42:39

       Mm. Absolutely. I think that, you know, whether... Again, it's- it's- it's- it's different, right, because narratives, especially, you know, fictional narratives, are, on their face, false. So, in some sense, this proposes a challenge to anyone reading them, right? Because you wanna learn from them, you know? I wanna pick up a Dostoevsky book and learn from it, but I can't just take everything that it-

   14. CWChris Williamson42:59

       Reading a lie.

   15. JFJoe Folley42:59

       ... has face value-

   16. CWChris Williamson42:59

       I know I'm reading a lie.

   17. JFJoe Folley43:00

       ... because you- you can write a story about anything, you know? I could write a story about- about whatever I wanted, and it w- it wouldn't make it have any lessons in. So you've kind of got this weird two-part division in what you're doing, where like, oh, one kind of, you know, critical side, you've gotta think, "Well, you know, this is a fiction book. I can't take everything it says as- as read." Like, even its allegorical lessons, I can't just kind of take them on board because this is the product of one person's mind, and one person's mind is eminently fallible. On the other hand, just approaching the world in this incredibly analytic, you know, "I'm never gonna put anything into any kind of narrative. I'm not going to talk to my emotions," if that makes sense. "I'm not- I'm not gonna appeal to them at all. I'm just gonna-"

   18. CWChris Williamson43:41

       Hmm.

   19. JFJoe Folley43:41

       "... I'm just gonna have propositions and relations between propositions." That's really hard to- that's really hard to learn from, and also, you know, again, learn from in this kind of emotional sense. I also think that it's- it's a... I think that it's quite a- like a- a- an empty-feeling way to live, and I think that, you know, part of the reason why we perhaps don't recognize this is actually we're very good at telling stories. Like, if you tell, if you've- give people some information, they will almost immediately sort it into a story if they can. Um, and it's 'cause, you know, this is fantastic. There are loads of, um, memory techniques and mnemonics that are just based on this idea, you know? You tell a story about something. And I might, again, so bring this back to Dostoevsky and even to tie in Nietzsche a little bit. I think one of the things that, um, reading a- a- a novel by Dostoevsky does is it takes these lessons that you may or may not have- have heard before about kind of psychology and- and- and- and the kind of the human condition, if you want to call it that, and all of a sudden, you are emotionally engaged with it. And kind of to use Nietzsche's terminology, it's not just, it's not just a p- uh, appealing to your cognitive side. It's appealing to kind of baser instincts, and they're- they're-

   20. CWChris Williamson44:44

       Hmm.

   21. JFJoe Folley44:44

       ... you know, they're a lot stronger. It's very hard to think yourself into motivation, into like real, consistent motivation, but if you really feel like something's meaningful and- and worth getting, you kind of naturally end up following it.

   22. CWChris Williamson44:55

       Hmm.

   23. JFJoe Folley44:55

       Um, I feel, I mean, my kind of path towards this way of thinking is very strange. At U- University, I kind of basically just did logic, like kind of formal logic, so I was like the- I did like the driest form of philosophy imaginable-

   24. CWChris Williamson45:06

       (laughs)

   25. JFJoe Folley45:06

       ... where you just sit there and you've got a proposition. They're like, "Well, prove this," and you sit there, and after 45 minutes, you go, "I give up," and you email the lecturer. But, in theory, you sit there and you finish proving it. And, um, I kind of, you know, as I got a little bit older, I say older, I'm like 25, but as I kind of, as- as the- the rest of my- my brain, my kind of grew into my mid-20s, I kind of thought, "Oh, yeah, no, there is really a- a place for this kind of slightly nebulous but nonetheless definitely there, um, idea of- of taking a- a really great book from the past and using that to learn a lesson that you know independently is- is a good lesson. But that, when it's presented in this narrative form, really sinks in, and all of a sudden, you can enact it."

   26. CWChris Williamson45:50

       It's interesting. Uh, propositions and relations between propositions is actually what Alex calls date night on a Friday.

   27. JFJoe Folley45:57

       (laughs)

   28. CWChris Williamson45:57

       Um, which I, uh, I- he- he-

   29. JFJoe Folley46:01

       Then I'm recording with Alex tomorrow about-

   30. CWChris Williamson46:03

       I'm-
7. 46:06 – 52:34

   What is the Danger of Hyperconsciousness?

   1. CWChris Williamson46:06

   2. JFJoe Folley46:06

      (laughs)

   3. CWChris Williamson46:06

      Uh, d- this- this sounds to me a little bit related to the- this sort of danger of hyperconsciousness, this-

   4. JFJoe Folley46:12

      Hmm.

   5. CWChris Williamson46:12

      ... sort of self-referential, uh, thinking. How does that play a role? Again, we've hinted here at the, uh, perils of the sort of ruminative, cerebral, prying at the cognitive horsepower alter thinker. W- what's the danger of hyperconsciousness?

   6. JFJoe Folley46:31

      So, again, this is re- a really prominent theme in Notes From Underground. Um, one of the- the things that the Underground Man is suffering from is what, yeah, what he calls the disease of hyperconsciousness, which is effectively that he can't act naturally, and by naturally, I- I sort of mean he sort of lives his entire life ever-so-slightly outside his own perspective. It's as if, it's as if he's moving through the world kind of viewing himself from a third-person perspective, like a video camera, like a video camera's following him around. And try as he might, he can't inhabit his own first-person perspective. He's like stuck in this third-person view. And again, I- I don't know, again (laughs) , this sort of one of the interesting things about reading Dostoevsky, it's very hard to, uh, to then go away and kind of go, oh, well, there- there's all of this empirical literature on kind of N equals 2,000 people that verifies this. But I'm willing to bet that at least a fair proportion of people have had this happen to them, especially if they're of the more kind of ruminaty type. Like one of the reasons why Notes From Underground really appeals to me is because we have a lot of narratives, and we're told as kids, right, you know, "Don't, you know, think before you act. Don't just, don't just act." And I think that a fair amount of the population, myself included, really ran with that and went, "Right, I'm gonna think, uh, I'm- I'm gonna keep thinking until I'm really sure what I'm gonna do, and I'm never gonna..." Like, all of those kind of instincts and- and more kind of, "I'm- I'm, you know, forget about those. Those are, those are complete nonsense. I'm gonna sit here, and I'm gonna calculate until I know exactly what's gonna happen." And one of the, um, one of the things that, or one of the kind of subarguments, I suppose, if you like, of- of Notes From Underground is that Dostoevsky's attempting to illustrate this is simply not how you can live your life in any kind of compelling fashion. He's not, you know, saying, "You need to act without thinking at all." Um, he's more trying to indicate that the- the needs that a person has can't simply be satisfied by cognition.... and he's largely responding to other thinkers at the time who were kind of proposing a theory of, of human fulfillment called rational egoism, which is where kind of y- you organize society around people rationally pursuing their own ends and everything turns out fine. And Dostoevsky's point is that, no, like if, if, people aren't rational enough for that. And moreover, like, they'd be miserable if they tried to be.

   7. CWChris Williamson48:46

      Mm. There's a, a line in Hamlet, "This conscience does make cowards of us all," this sort of idea that self-awareness is paralyzing, and, um, uh, i- it seems, it seems unbelievably linked here.

   8. JFJoe Folley49:01

      Yes. And again, it's one of those things where, like, I don't, I, I can't appeal to, like, airtight scientific evidence-

   9. CWChris Williamson49:06

      (laughs)

   10. JFJoe Folley49:06

       ... that this is a widespread phenomenon. I can only appeal to your, to your own experiences. But this is, again, one of the, one of the really nice things about reading a, a, uh, you know, a kind of psychological novelist like Dostoevsky, or like another example is the French thinker, uh, Stendhal. When you're reading a, a very, very broad study, like studying 2,000 people, by necessity, any conclusion that that study comes to is probably, it's probably going to apply to you. It also probably isn't going to be as detailed as you might like, um, just because, you know, this, this isn't, this isn't a, a fault. This is exactly what you want out of a generalizable conclusion, right? You want something that applies to everyone, but humans are very, very different to one another. And so one of the things that I think that psychological novels... And also, if, you know, there used to be journals that published, um, therapist's case notes, and they don't really exist anymore, but they were fantastic for this kind of thing-

   11. CWChris Williamson49:52

       Mm.

   12. JFJoe Folley49:53

       ... where if you pick up, you get, you get a very, very in-depth view of one person's perspective on the world, which might be completely useless, but it might... that, if that person's similar to you, that is like fucking gold. You know, if they, if they're facing the same problem as you, that's amazing, because it's, it's really, really detailed, and you, you know, you, you run through this, this novel and you think, "Oh my God, I'm exactly like this person. Their life's a mess and so is mine. And how am I, how am I gonna, how am I gonna deal with this?" And to a certain extent, you get, you get a lot more detail out of it. You just then have to make sure that your critical lenses is also fitted, so that you don't, you know, read novels-

   13. CWChris Williamson50:27

       That's... (laughs)

   14. JFJoe Folley50:27

       ... and then go, "Right, everything in this novel is, you know, by necessity true."

   15. CWChris Williamson50:31

       "I'm gonna go kill, I'm gonna go kill a woman," yeah.

   16. JFJoe Folley50:33

       Yes, exactly.

   17. CWChris Williamson50:35

       That's such a good point, the fact that by design, representative samples are important in order to be able to do studies. And because of that, you end up curbing off, you shave off outliers, because outliers get regressed back to the mean by there being a sufficiently big sample size that's representative enough.

   18. JFJoe Folley50:53

       Mm.

   19. CWChris Williamson50:53

       But given that even the most... th- the average of average person, the b- the most average person on the man- the, the, the planet, is going to have some idiosyncrasies that are abnormal or non-typical or quirky or different, you actually do need to find for them, okay, what is the person that's like yous thoughts about this thing and what did they learn? And that kind of requires you to either, I guess, do purposefully unrepresentative samples?

   20. JFJoe Folley51:25

       (laughs)

   21. CWChris Williamson51:26

       (laughs)

   22. JFJoe Folley51:27

       Good luck trying to get funding for that.

   23. CWChris Williamson51:29

       Yeah. Or, as you say, targeting individuals' experiences and going very deep.

   24. JFJoe Folley51:35

       Yeah, I think a good, a good analogy of this, um, is, you know, I, I, I'm like, I, you know, I go to the gym as a kind of hobby, but the gym that happens to be nearest to me is like a really intense gym, and so it's got lots of, like, powerlifters in there who do competitions, lots of bodybuilders in there who compete, and, you know, they're all pretty friendly, so I go up and natter to them while they're trying to get on with things.

   25. CWChris Williamson51:55

       (laughs)

   26. JFJoe Folley51:55

       And one of the things I ask them about is their training program. And something that I, uh, immediately find, and I'm sure, you know, you're, you're very into the gym so I'm sure that you've, you've kind of found this as well, is that they're all very different, because they all get to know themselves in such a, an in-depth level that all of the kind of, the everything that applies to the average person no longer applies to them. Or they, they can see themselves in such a higher resolution that they will take some of that on board, but also disregard other bits, because they just know it doesn't work for them. Think about, like, you know, like, was it Dorian Yates did, like, four sets for chest every two weeks or something like that?

   27. CWChris Williamson52:25

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   28. JFJoe Folley52:25

       You know, you think that's 99.9% of people that's not going to work for. It's not a representative kind of training plan. But it really works for him.

8. 52:34 – 54:48

   Is Existentialism Intellectualised Depression?

   1. JFJoe Folley52:34

   2. CWChris Williamson52:35

      What do you think... uh, could it be the case that existentialism is just intellectualized depression with better PR?

   3. JFJoe Folley52:42

      (laughs) Oh, yeah, certainly in some cases. Like, I think that, again, you can certainly, um, especially when you learn about some of these people's lives, you can, you can really see how, um, their personal struggles bleed through into their philosophies. I think that, again, it's a very controversial thing for me to say, but for me, um, the value in reading, say, Nietzsche isn't necessarily because I think that his view on the world is, is all that correct. I think it's because, you know, for me, I also have a chronic pain condition, so when I read Nietzsche, I, I read someone who is kind of going through a similar thing that I do. Like, I'm in pain for, like, pretty much all my waking hours, um, but... and so seeing him, kind of how he copes with that and the philosophy that emerged from that, is really, is very, very insightful for my own experiences as well. But, like, say your point about depression, you know, you really see this in, in the philosophy of someone like Camus, where a lot of his early novels, like The Stranger is, is kind of the novel that, that he's most known for, is sort of about a really depressed person, or somebody that, that really struggles to connect with reality or other people in any way, and sort of everything seems the same to them. And this has a philosophical aspect for Camus, um, but additionally, if you are, if you also feel similarly disconnected from life, and you struggle to relate to people and all of that kind of thing, then that can be far more valuable for you than it would be for, for your average person.

   4. CWChris Williamson54:09

      Mm.

   5. JFJoe Folley54:09

      You know, th- this is, I think that, I think that to a certain extent, a lot of existential philosophy is philosophers taking their own problems and really attempting to dig into them, and sometimes they hit upon something that's really generalizable, quite often they don't. I think that one of the, the valuable things about reading them-... is that if they happen to have a similar problem that you have, then that's, that's so valuable. So, you know, take this kind of, again, take the chronic pain thing. That kind of idea of, like, "I've got to find some, you know, I'm suffering already, I've got pain, and there's nothing I can do about it. I need to find some way to celebrate it." It's like, that's kind of the, the appeal of aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy for me.

9. 54:48 – 1:04:39

   Why Wasn’t Camus an Existentialist?

   1. JFJoe Folley54:48

   2. CWChris Williamson54:48

      Why didn't Camus consider himself an existentialist?

   3. JFJoe Folley54:52

      So, partly because he (laughs) fell out with all of the existentialists, but also because he has a slightly different philosophical approach. So, existentialism, to kind of really boil it down, um, as much as humanly possible, a lot of the existentialist solutions to nihilism or a sense of felt meaninglessness is authenticity in some way. And by authenticity, they don't exactly mean what your average person would mean by authenticity. They mean, in Sartre's case, like, a recognition of your radical freedom. So, Sartre, one of the, um, uh, one of the things Sartre thinks that people do is act in bad faith. And for him, bad faith isn't like, you know, approaching an argument wanting to show the other person to be a fool or something like that. It's when we go around the world denying our own free will. So he uses the example of a, of a waiter who in, when they are in a, when they're doing that, don't think of themselves as a person who's chosen to, to wait. They think of themselves as, like, a waiter and nothing more than that. They kind of reduce themselves to their social role. And then, you know, so Sartre's approach is, is very authenticity-focused. Camus is a little different. So whereas existentialism is about restoring, kind of creating meaning, a sense of, you know... Okay, if I was gonna boil it down, it's like creating meaning, um, reimbuing the world with meaning. Camus sort of wants to know if he can continue to live without appealing to meaning at all. He has had this phrase, you know, "Can I live without appeal?" Um, and that's kind of the, the insight out of which absurdism is, is born. So, Camus is very against the idea of retreating into meaning in any sense. He kind of wants you to keep the meaninglessness of life right at the front of your head and see if you can maintain the contradiction between you wanting meaning in some sense and there not being any meaning there and somehow still continue to live and in some sense enjoy life. And a lot of people have pointed out that Camus suffered from really quite severe bouts of depression, and maybe this was a, a causative factor in the particular way that he has, he has constructed this philosophy. Again, it's like, I think that, um, you know, while I think that a lot of these thinkers may have conceived of themselves as creating a, a semi-universal solution to nihilism and problems of meaninglessness, I think that today, um, certainly the way that I see them, is that they're very, very in-depth solutions to similar problems that the authors happened to have.

   4. CWChris Williamson57:28

      Mm. So, okay. How, how is... Uh, actually, just when it comes to Camus, sort of the story of Sisyphus seems very relevant to absurdism.

   5. JFJoe Folley57:42

      Mm.

   6. CWChris Williamson57:43

      How, w- what is the lesson to take away from that?

   7. JFJoe Folley57:48

      Yeah. So the myth of Sisyphus in Camus's writing is meant to symbolize this kind of, i- it's meant to stand in for us all. So in Camus's perspective, um, we are trudging along, a basically cyclical existence in the sense that there is no, there is nothing that we're doing anything for. You know, we're not, we're not, we're not ending up, you know, we're not obeying the will of God or the will of the universe. We are just trundling along in a kind of uncaring, unfeeling vacuum. And he compares this to the, to the, the, um, Greek king, Sisyphus, who is in and i- as punishment for his attempts to escape death, is damned to Hades where he has to roll a boulder up a hill and then watch it go all the way back down again and then start at the bottom and roll it all the way back up and just do that for eternity. It's a, it's an existence that complet- you know, to take this back to our, um, stuff about narrative earlier. If narratives are almost inherently meaning-inducing, you know, they have a resolution and that's lovely. Um, this is a, a structure of life that completely defies narrative resolution. It is like intensely fe- it's, you know, if you imagine doing that, it's like the most meaningless existence you can possibly think of. And on top of that, it probably really bloody hurts. So Camus, in his phrase, "We must imagine Sisyphus happy," is sort of... That's kind of, again, it's like the absurdist project in a nutshell, is can you maintain this view of life whereby you are kind of analogous to Sis- to... Analogous? Analogous or analogous? I don't... Analogous to Sisyphus and nonetheless enjoy it and, and embrace it and be happy? And it's kind of an open question whether you can. Like I, I think that, I, I think that, um, a lot of people will read, you know, Camus and, and Nietzsche or even, you know, Dostoevsky, 'cause Dostoevsky happens to chime with a lot of things that I think bring my life meaning, 'cause like, you know, loving others, that seems like a very, a very, that's very naturally meaning-inducing to me. Um, you know, a lot of people I think read these thinkers and sort of go, "Oh, yeah. That, that's great." But actually, it is an open question whether any of this works. Like as in w- you're allowed to say, "You know, I take your point, Camus, but frankly, I don't think I can imagine Sisyphus happy. I don't think anyone else can either, so..."

   8. CWChris Williamson59:54

      Mm.

   9. JFJoe Folley59:54

      "... you know, shut it." So-

   10. CWChris Williamson59:55

       Why, why, why was he, why was he concerned about trying to do that? What was the, what was he trying to solve for? What was the end goal he was trying to achieve?

   11. JFJoe Folley1:00:02

       So the end, well, the stated end goal of the myth of Sisyphus is that he wants to know whether he should kill himself or whether anyone should kill themselves, um, given that, in his view, life is completely meaningless. Um, and his end result is, no you shouldn't, because in some sense, you can learn to be happy despite i- despite yourself being analogous to Sisyphus. So that's kind of, that's what he's attemp- that's the problem he's attempting to solve, at least as he puts it, is the problem of suicide. You might instead call it the problem of meaninglessness or something like that, or the problem of how can you...... like, literally feel and think that your life has no meaning, and yet still continue to live, and potentially continue to enjoy life in some sense. And, you know, I kind of think that... I think that how compelling you find that overall narrative is going to depend on how much, like, the sting of the world potentially having no meaning really hits you. And I think that's gonna d- d- depend- um, that's gonna hit you differently at different points in your life. I think for- you know, for a lot of people, that they are just very happy to say, "Yeah, like, the world's meaningless, man." Like, that, like, that doesn't bother me in any sense. And like-

   12. CWChris Williamson1:01:15

       Mm-hmm.

   13. JFJoe Folley1:01:15

       ... I'm, I'm kind of not like that. That actually does kind of bother me.

   14. CWChris Williamson1:01:17

       (laughs)

   15. JFJoe Folley1:01:17

       But I think, you know, for a lot, for a lot, for a lot of people, it doesn't, and that's fine. Like, I, I kinda think that... And I also think that it's, it's... Camus talks about this moment where you kind of realize that life's meaningless, and he doesn't describe it as a cognitive event. Again, to tie back to our point earlier, he's basically describing this as, as one foot in cognition, one foot in emotion. You know, you recognize that life is meaningless, but also suddenly you feel it. And like, I think that's- again, to bring this kind of down to earth, I think that something like a, a, a midlife crisis or a quarterlife crisis is a really good example of this. Like, thinking about, you know, uh, uh, I remember before I kind of started the channel, I was just kind of sitting around being like, "Wow, like, I, I, I, I think that I feel like life is meaningless." Like, it's very kind of a, you know... You've got this kind of life to live, and you have no idea what to do with it, and you don't even know how you're going to prioritize. Like, I don't have an idea of what I even want to do.

   16. CWChris Williamson1:02:13

       Mm-hmm.

   17. JFJoe Folley1:02:13

       And I feel like, you know, that more commonly hits people. Um, a, a kind of midlife crisis is, I think, a, potentially a, a more widespread example of that, where, you know, somebody gets to, like... Or actually, one of my friends had a midlife crisis, and he described it as, like, he got to like 55, and he was like, "Oh my God, like, I'm actually gonna die at some point, and I feel like my entire life has been for nothing." And I can't, like... Again, I can't, like, intellectualize someone into that experience. Like, I don't, I don't think that I felt it nearly as, as much as, as my friend did. But you know, he was seriously in a dark place, kind of staring down th- th- the barrel of ending his own life, um, on the basis of this realization. And, you know, I imagine for a lot of people, it just never happens, and that's, like, great. Like, I, I, I don't think there's any reason to, like, induce it. Um, but I, I, I kind of think about my friend a lot with this sort of thing, where it's like, it's, it's very easy, especially because now, you know, I kind of, I have a lot of, like... You know, I kind of enjoy life. I'm kind of a natural optimist, so I, I kind of find it quite easy to kind of bumble along in a kind of, uh, sort of generally, like, quite happy state. Um, but, and so I think that sometimes I kind of look at these... look at something like Camus writes and says, "Ah, you know." Uh, he's talking about how the realization that life is meaningless is going to bring immense suffering, and it's going to make you question whether, uh, it's worth carrying on. I kind of think, "Uh, will it?" And then I remember my friend and think, "I just, I just don't think I've felt it yet."

   18. CWChris Williamson1:03:37

       Mm.

   19. JFJoe Folley1:03:38

       You know?

   20. CWChris Williamson1:03:38

       Well, I wonder how much of this kind of goes back to what you were saying before. So much of the work of philosophy or even YouTube channels, dude, everything is a thinly veiled autobiography-

   21. JFJoe Folley1:03:50

       (laughs)

   22. CWChris Williamson1:03:50

       ... as far as I can see.

   23. JFJoe Folley1:03:52

       That's a very Nietzschean idea. Nietzsche, uh, thought, thought that, that a lot of philo- that philosophers were just basically writing their own autobiographies.

   24. CWChris Williamson1:04:00

       Right. Well, I mean, it's-

   25. JFJoe Folley1:04:01

       Which of course the-

   26. CWChris Williamson1:04:01

       It, it certainly seems to be the case here, does it not?

   27. JFJoe Folley1:04:04

       Oh, absolutely. I think that it really applies to existential philosophy. You know, and I think that's, again, one of the reasons... I think, I think one of the reasons why it's very easy... You know, although existential philosophy pulls people in, it's also very easy to pick up a couple of books of existential philosophy and basically go, "This is, like, bollocks." But I think that a lot of the time, that feeling of this is like bollocks basically happens if you pick up a thinker who is just psychologically wired very differently to you. Like, I sometimes have that with, like, someone like... You know, I occasionally pick up Sartre, and I, I don't know, I just can't, like... There's something about it that just doesn't particularly resonate with me. I can't quite get inside the head of the problem. Um-

10. 1:04:39 – 1:09:53

    Walking the Line Between Meaningfulness and Meaninglessness

    1. CWChris Williamson1:04:39

       How would you advise then, or how would Camus advise somebody who is torn between the life is excruciatingly meaningful and life is excruciatingly meaningless? How do they sort of, "Aye, laughing my ass off," how do they thread the boat through the middle of that?

    2. JFJoe Folley1:05:01

       As in... Sorry, as in the idea of somebody, like, alternating between sometimes they feel like life's incredibly meaningful?

    3. CWChris Williamson1:05:06

       Have you seen, have you seen the image that I'm talking about? Do you know this? Let me-

    4. JFJoe Folley1:05:10

       Is this the thing on the train?

    5. CWChris Williamson1:05:12

       No. So this-

    6. JFJoe Folley1:05:14

       Oh.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:05:14

       This is (laughs) , this is one of my favorite images. I'll get Dean to put it up for the people that are watching. So it's a tiny little, uh, a, a tiny little boat, a drawing of a tiny little boat. I'll put it in the chat, so you should, you should be able to s-

    8. JFJoe Folley1:05:28

       Oh.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:05:29

       You should be able to see this here. It's a tiny little boat, and it's, uh, illustrated going along the water in between a whirlpool.

    10. JFJoe Folley1:05:36

        (laughs)

    11. CWChris Williamson1:05:36

        And on the left it says, "Life is devastatingly meaningless," and on the right is a one, two, three, four, five, six-headed dragon, and it says, "Life is excruciatingly meaningful." And there's this teeny tiny little sort of Greek-looking boat with oars coming out the side of it-

    12. JFJoe Folley1:05:51

        (laughs)

    13. CWChris Williamson1:05:51

        ... and it just goes, "Aye, LMAO." And-

    14. JFJoe Folley1:05:55

        I think that's, I think that's, like... You know the, I think that's Scylla and Charybdis-

    15. CWChris Williamson1:05:59

        Right.

    16. JFJoe Folley1:05:59

        ... that kind of... The, the, like, the, the, um... I actually think that the, the kind of an underexplored area in existential philosophy, which I think Camus touched upon a little bit, but I think is like, if somebody wants to go out and write, like, the next tract of existential philosophy, I'd love for it to be on this, would be that idea of excruciating meaning. Because it's very easy, I think, to romanticize the idea of, of a meaningful life, but it's totally possible for things to be, like, far too meaningful for comfort.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:06:31

        (laughs)

    18. JFJoe Folley1:06:31

        And, you know, Camus talks about this, um, in the context... Camus talks about this in the context of politics, uh, which I think is, is, is, is, you know, fascinating. So he's-He, after he finishes The Myth of Sisyphus, he sort of has this kind of, like, indifference about it. He's kind of, he's like, "Right, okay, so, you know, all the experience is roughly the same. There's no objective meaning. I'm somehow managing to muddle along, um, despite that. Um, but in theory, this should make me indifferent to all of the bad things that are happening around me." And Camus basically finds he can't do that, and he has this, this book called The Rebel, which is by far his, like, most impenetrable work, um, but it is, it is generally very, very interesting. And one of the points he makes of, in The Rebel is that, um, at a societal level, it is perfectly possible to become too imbued with meaning. You know, if you think about, um, any kind of, sort of, theocratic tyranny, uh, or like the, the, the terror of the French Revolution-

    19. CWChris Williamson1:07:22

        Mm.

    20. JFJoe Folley1:07:22

        ... or Camus' example is sort of Stalin's USSR, uh, he, his analysis of this, um, is that the, the issue is at least partly that if you have an ultimate meaning that you're willing to literally sacrifice everything else to, then you will sacrifice as many lives as humanly possible, or as, as, as, as you think is required to, to, to, um, fulfill this vision. What I think, um, and I, it, it occurred to me that this observation definitely works, not quite in the same kind of apocalyptic sense, but works at some sense on the individual level in that, you know, we all... I think that the, the sense of life being too meaningful is very, very natural. It's the sense of being under too much pressure. This idea of like, oh, everything that's happening to me counts an awful lot, what, what am I gonna do, is, I think a, a perfect example of somebody feeling too meaningful.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:08:11

        Mm-hmm.

    22. JFJoe Folley1:08:11

        Th- that, again, I think that that's a, that means that... Oh yeah, that's a really insightful meme actually. I- I'm, I'm gonna spend a long time on, 'cause I, again, I, I think that what a lot of people want is not an abundance of meaning nor a complete lack of meaning, but enough meaning to give them a general direction, but also enough meaninglessness that you can make arbitrary choices along that way. You know, you don't, you don't actually want every one of your decisions... I would argue at least, I think most people don't actually want all of their decisions to be dictated by a kind of set of values in advance, and I also think that that's kind of, I don't know, sort of vaguely robotic. And also, I think that that kind of approach doesn't do justice to just how difficult some decisions are. I think that, um, you know, certain moral dilemmas you kind of... You know, i- imagine that, imagine that I, you know, you spoke to someone... The, de, the Sartre has an idea of like an insoluble moral dilemma and his example is that, um, you know, somebody's torn between staying home and looking after their, their elderly mother or going to fight the Nazis in the French Resistance, and I don't know, I'd be, you know... And the, the, his mum could really suffer from this. She could even pass away while he's gone, and, and at the moment it's uncertain whether the French Resistance will be victorious at all. And Sartre's point is that this seems pretty indeterminate, and you know, I, I don't know if, if somebody's value system was so well organized that they could give me like an instant answer to that dilemma, I don't know if I'd like that. I think that would be like, I think that, you know, there, there, there's a sense, there's a sense in which their, their choices would be so determined, um, that I don't know. I don't know if it would do justice to how excruciating real moral dilemmas and real just decisional dilemmas are.

11. 1:09:53 – 1:14:17

    How to Keep Philosophy Down to Earth

    1. CWChris Williamson1:09:53

       I wonder how much of this is a challenge of communication, that it's so fl- it sounds so flimsy to sort of talk about emotion and desire and being pulled in different ways and gut instinct and this ephemeral w- like flaky sense of something.

    2. JFJoe Folley1:10:13

       (laughs)

    3. CWChris Williamson1:10:13

       But it's, it's, you know, how, show me, let me grab a hold of it, put it into language that is testable, that's re- you, does this make sense?

    4. JFJoe Folley1:10:20

       Yeah, absolutely.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:10:20

       This sort of desire to communicate things in a much more concrete, verifiable way?

    6. JFJoe Folley1:10:25

       Mm-hmm, and I do think that's a, that's a pretty good instinct because at the same time, you know, I, I, I, I alwa- I do think that philosophical discussions can quickly go into territory that is, you know, so abstract that I don't think anyone could plausibly give a shit. But you know, there, there's... I think that one of the ways to sort of keep this down to earth, um, is to link things like meaning back down into things like motivation and action and affect. So, I think that, you know, it, it... When somebody says, you know, "What's the meaning of life?" there's a reason why that, that, um, question can strike us as really, uh, like pointless, like, you know, what's the meaning of life? Like how, how do I even go about parsing that? Um, and I think that instead of asking questions like what- what- what's the meaning of life, I find that people are often a lot more enthusiastic if, um, you phrase an existential question just in terms of, you know, what gets you up in the morning? What, what, what actually is the kind of motivating force behind your action? What, what, if you removed it, would you then struggle to do anything with? Like, and, you know, I think that this allows people to get a grip on what they find meaningful, which is quite a, a useful thing to learn. You know, if, if, if, if you find out that, um, actually, like, I would really not know what to do without my group of friends, that might tell you need to... you might wanna invest more of your time and effort into that area of life. Um, and so this is getting kind of quite a way away from these particular existential philosophers, but I think that's one of the, one of the, the values in asking existential questions is that it does force you to confront what matters to you, and I think that it's very easy to forget what matters to you. I mean, you know, to take, tie this back to fiction, I know that, um, a book that you like is The Alchemist.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:12:08

       Mm-hmm.

    8. JFJoe Folley1:12:09

       And I feel like a lot of, you know, the, the same kind of lesson occurs there, right? This sort of idea of like it's very easy to forget the kind of things that are intuitively and instinctively meaningful. I think that, um, one of the real, one of the real flaws, I think, in approaching questions of meaning in the way that I do, which is to go away and read lots of existential philosophers and see what they think, um, is that there's a tendency that you can just become really ruminative about it. And, you know, occasionally I get a comment under one of my videos that's like, "You're just overthinking it." And sometimes if I'm in the right mood, I look at it and I'm like, "You're probably right."

    9. CWChris Williamson1:12:42

       Yep.

    10. JFJoe Folley1:12:42

        You know, there, there, there is a sense in which you can get so, um-... so, uh, deep into what this person's particular interpretation of nature is or, or this person's particular interpretation of Camus or Sartre or Kierkegaard, and I really, I find that stuff naturally interesting. Um, but there is a, a, there is a sense in which, um, for th- the way that just you would want to approach an existential question if you don't necessarily want to go in and read a bunch of this stuff is that i- i- it's, it's... I think that part of it is recognizing that, um, meaning is at least partly extra-cognitive. It may involve cognition, but it's not merely cognition.

Episode duration: 1:23:03