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

The following is a conversation with Sean Kelly, a philosopher at Harvard, specializing in existentialism and the philosophy of mind. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, here's my conversation with Sean Kelly. Your interests are in post-continent European philosophy, especially phenomenology and existentialism. So let me ask, what to you is existentialism?

So it's a hard question. I'm teaching a course on existentialism right now.

You are?

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

(laughs)

... existentialists.

Yeah.

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.

Mm-hmm. What is existence, what is presence, and what does precedes mean?

Yeah, exactly. What is existence-

(laughs)

... 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.