#124 Sisyphus 55 - So You're Having an Existential Crisis

27:51He was very, no, you should not do things because of some higher level idea. So how do you develop an ethics where you're simultaneously loving things, justifying existence, but you're not really giving that why answer necessarily? One interpretation you can make with this, and I think it comes out in The Rebel, is that we're all inherently in this together. We're all struggling, we're all suffering, we're all kind of crawling in the dark. And just that sort of kind of empathy or that sort of shared struggle in itself is justifiable as a form of compassion of, you know, why we shouldn't murder and stuff like that.

28:34And I think on a smaller level, going back to his personal life, like with his wife, it's like, oh, you know, maybe I shouldn't cause like some sort of undue suffering and maybe consider other people when I'm doing these things. And it's interesting because Camus died at a fairly early age. And so I don't really think his system of philosophy fully developed, but he was kind of capturing a philosophy that I felt was very human. And it wasn't really concerned with like metaphysical claim. It was really trying to be on the ground. It was trying to be of the earth. And he had a trip planned to India at a certain point.

29:13And I do kind of wonder how much that would have affected his thinking if he did run into some Buddhist thought, Hindu thoughts, where he is slowly developing this kind of compassionate appreciation and acceptance. of suffering and the world without, um, really without like trying to rest it on any sort of abstraction. And, you know, it would just be cool if somebody, and I've seen some, some writings where people talk about like kind of Buddhism and absurdism. And I think Groundhog Day, that movie is probably one of the best representations. I don't know if you've seen it, um, with, uh, I don't think I have actually, no.

29:57Ben Thomas:It's, it's with Bill Murray and it's, it's, uh, Yeah, he lives the same day over and over and over. It's like Sisyphus. And it's also the notion of samsara, which is the kind of cycle of suffering, the karmic cycle that supposedly enlightenment or nirvana kind of gets you out of. and I've just always been interested in that sort of form of thinking because I don't think I could ever claim that Camus was the best at forming a full philosophical system but I totally believe that he was on to something a lot more than I think the existentialists even though I think all of them contributed substantially to the notion of the existential crisis and how to get like that's like the beauty of this it's like just the more you read the better um as long as you always have kind of an open mind and you're you know like as i just kind of gave some biographical details alongside the philosophy like you're also informed of the context of these thinkers too i think that's what's important it's like um okay so let's talk about some of these solutions and let's let's try and figure out whether they actually work for people so we've just talked about Albert Camus contra the existentialists.

31:15Ben Thomas:And you said that these guys are a bunch of people who sort of believe you can create your own meaning. Do you think you can create your own meaning? And what do people even really mean when they say such a thing? You can definitely create your own meaning. I mean, I almost feel to a certain degree, it's extremely difficult to not do this. I think I read a book recently called Buddha Socrates and us, and he is applying kind of both mindfulness practices and Socrates is sort of aporia, that state of confusion where you're really just endlessly questioning things until people just don't know what's going on.

31:54It's almost like a trained skill that you need to develop in order to not extract meaning from things. And I think in this circumstance, It's helpful and, you know, potentially like healing because it kind of creates that like impasse or kind of space where like you don't really know what's going on and you're kind of aimless. And I think that's maybe kind of the healthy side of the existential crisis is it frees up your thinking. Things kind of lose inherent meaning. But on the other hand, like trauma, for example, in a lot of clinical settings, that's considered kind of you're unable to apply meaning to a specific event.

32:36And then one of the healing properties of therapy, for example, and especially like narrative therapy, written therapy is you're giving meaning to things. And this is like an important point is that most of us really require stories or narratives to understand things. I think I'm not a huge fan of a lot of these people, but Peugeot and Peterson, they are emphasizing something that is cognitively relevant, which is we are living in an information age, but we as species very much rely on narrative structure because we are semantic. Like we actually need to make sense of things and we are constantly just blasted with information and data.

33:18And it's like, well, we need to actually know what it means. And we're constantly trying to do that. And I, you know, I, I, I could imagine this causes some burnout and like mental health issues is, is how do you make sense of all this when there's so much conflicting information? There's an abundance of information. Um, I, I think meaning is, is, uh, as the existentialists and Camus bring up, it's, it's like kind of an innate, uh, desire or like drive that we have, um, is to just try to understand things on, on some level. Um, and I totally think that we do create meaning if we just mean that in like the kind of, uh, sense of, of, you know, humans themselves can create meaning because it's like like a cognitive thing to the extent to which like we're creating meaning in some like metaphysical way where, you know, it means something to the, to the universe or to the world or to, you know, if God exists, like if it means something in that sense, I have no idea.

34:19I'm definitely like agnostic on that level. Like that's where I just can't, um, you know, there's definitely people have spiritual experiences. Uh, but I think it's, it's helpful enough. We can talk about the creation of meaning, meaning making without necessarily bringing that in to a certain degree.

34:37Ben Thomas:I suppose that an important question would be whether we're talking about objective or subjective meaning, so to speak, right? Because when people say, I create my own meaning, what they typically mean is something like, well, look, I started a family, I had children, I got a job, and that is where I find my meaning. Maybe I'm really into art or music and producing that fulfills me. And I think that someone who's having an existential crisis will look at that and say, you're confusing fulfillment with meaning, because you've created all of these things which make you feel warm and fuzzy inside.

35:13Ben Thomas:But the point is that it's completely arbitrary, that the universe does not dictate that you had to do those things, that somehow you were supposed to do those things. You just made it up, right? And if you are capable of literally just making your own meaning, then suppose I said, okay, I use this example sometimes, you know, maybe I decide to take meaning in my life by counting the blades of grass in my front garden every day. And, you know, whenever the wind comes and sweeps some of them away or someone steps on it, I have to start all over again. And I just decide that is, you know, that is my, I need something to do and that's what I'm going to choose to do.

35:50Ben Thomas:And so my life is now meaningful. The subjectivist would say, yeah, okay, you've chosen your own meaning and you're pursuing it, But it would seem absurd to say that that person's life is as meaningful as someone who spends their life dedicated to charity or alleviating suffering or trying to be the first society on Mars or something like that. It seems very strange. And I think people will want to resist that implication. And the two options you're left with is either to say, well, actually, there is some kind of standard which is outside of just what we invent, which gives one of those things more meaning than the other.

36:28Ben Thomas:Or you're committed to saying, well, because there is no such standard and the universe doesn't tell you what to do, kind of none of it is meaningful. And it's all just, you know, a massive cope. We just come up with stuff to make ourselves feel better. But to use the word meaning or purpose would be a bit of a mistake there. So I think that's the observation that somebody has that, okay, you can create your own meaning, but it's totally subjective and arbitrary, right? Yeah. And I mean, I would even clarify not just subjective, but intersubjective. I think there's probably like a distinction between the kind of intersubjective meaning because like wanting to have a family or, you know, pursue a line of work or something.

37:07It's probably a certain amount of variance is explained also by the fact that other people consider those things meaningful and you consider those people meaningful. And there's, you know, that's where, I mean, some people argue that's where a lot of truth really just develops. I had a professor who said all science is just intersubjective agreement, which is kind of, yeah, if we're using science to derive truth, that is kind of maybe, I don't even know if it's cynical. It's just a very kind of realist notion of that. But you're hitting on something that I'm really interested in in terms of my research because Aristotle a long time ago brought up eudaimonia.

37:48He brought up the idea, what is the good life? And, you know, we have this ultimate aim, this telos. And this can be flipped. Like, I think Camus does it. He flips it in the same way Aristotle is making the argument of, like, what are we supposed to do? Camus is saying that just in darker words with, you know, why shouldn't we kill ourselves? Like, it's just a bit more extreme. I think when the French get a hold of these things, they make them a bit more, you know, drastic. But And it's interesting because psychologists generally are pretty decent at measuring subjective well-being, of measuring kind of affective states of well-being.

38:28You know, if somebody has like an ice cream or if somebody, you know, gets into a good relationship, like you see kind of consistent predictors and indicators of hedonic functioning, at least. Like people are pretty good at saying, I feel good. but and and this usually coincides with greater kind of material safety kind of physiological safety um and comforts basically you know this is kind of taken to the extreme and like aldous huxley's brave new world where people can just have like a pill where they're basically always feeling good on some level um but i think that this is brought up a lot uh especially nowadays is like that's not enough like there needs to be some more some other sort of well-being that we're aiming for.

39:14Like, yes, maybe the purpose of life is happiness, but it's not just this affective happiness. It's meaning, perhaps. There's something meaningful about it. And this is where we get into huge issues because, yes, psychology, on some level, you can just ask for a self-report of are you happy or not, and people can answer that fairly reliably. But if somebody says, you know, it's very meaningful that I count blades of grass, it's like that might not generalize to the population, but also who are we to say that that's not true? How do you actually measure this? What is meaning? What does it mean for somebody to live a meaningful or good life in the sort of Aristotelian sense of like eudaimonia?

39:55And that's developed this entire field of research in eudaimonic well-being, because I think they're still uncomfortable with saying that they're measuring eudaimonia because that's kind of a nebulous philosophical concept, but eudaemonic well-being is supposed to capture the stuff that hedonic well-being doesn't quite get at. And I work in like the specifically it's like self-determination theory and they've done a fairly good job, I would say, at universalizing this, the kind of three basic psychological needs in the same way that like Maslow brought in like the basic physiological needs of like shelter, food, water, and then he kind of talks about these psychological needs.

40:36You go further up. They also introduce kind of these three needs that seemingly across cultures, although cultures will differ in terms of how much they kind of prioritize one or the other. Generally, people need to feel a sense of autonomy so they can endorse their own behavior. They need a sense of relatedness. So that's the need to belong, a need to feel included, to feel valued, connected, and a sense of competence where they feel mastery at something. And so that is like kind of an objectivist argument for eudaimonia, for eudaimonic well-being, that there are some nutrients we've discovered where we can go, this person is living, you know, regardless of their self-report in terms of are they living a meaningful life or a good life, we can say like, oh, this person is like measuring high on eudaemonic well-being.

41:27But then a lot of philosophers have criticized this because it's completely leaving out the subjectivist approach, like what you're bringing up, which is the grass, especially. Although, I mean, usually what they use is kind of extreme versions of like, what if a white supremacist, you know, technically they're endorsing their own behavior of white supremacy, of going to rallies. They feel a sense of belonging when they are, you know, fighting for their their bloodline and, you know, a sense of competence when they're making like the picket signs or whatever. Um, I don't know exactly what a lot of these people do, but yeah, you know, to apply those basic needs, who's to say that they aren't feeling some sense of satisfaction.

42:08Um, what I'm interested in is looking at the subjective it's and, and trying to unify this model of like more of an objective approach. So I always think of it as like people are like plants and it's like a flower, for example. It needs water, soil, sunlight. Similarly, this model of eudaimonia identifies kind of basic nutrients that everyone seemingly needs. So autonomy relatedness, competence. And then as Aristotle argued with eudaimonia is that it's not just feeling kind of, it's not that you're doing good things. You're also feeling good. There's some pleasant sensations. And so -

42:46Ben Thomas:You said eudaimonia a few times. Can you just define what that means? Yes, yes. So eudaimonia is, it's a sense, or it's the, I mean, to use Aristotle's traditional term, it is the pursuit of excellence, arete, with the, there's usually some civic or social consciousness involved. um there is the feeling of kind of pleasant uh experiences pleasant states um he usually includes friendship in there he he has very kind of uh specific ideas but but broadly what a lot of psychologists and philosophers operate on is this definition of like you were living excellently like you were living with some level of excellence because he feels like this is a sort of fulfilling and flourishing of human potentiality.

43:38And he was more objectivist. He literally, in the Nicomachean Ethics, writes down point blank the kind of exact amount, the golden mean of courage you should be exhibiting, the golden mean of humility and so forth. Like he, he really doesn't care too much about like what people individually want. Um, and he, he very much, you know, because of the time restricted mostly to like men and also specifically philosophers, because these people are going to kind of have the most material comforts and the, and the best sort of social, um, acclaim. Uh, although broadly he says, you know, most people could, could experience some, some sort of eudaimonia or happiness.

44:21Um, so does that, does that kind of clear?

44:24Ben Thomas:Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think people might just hear the phrase and either not have heard of it, or maybe they've heard of it, but don't quite know what it means. Aristotle, of course, believes that there is another word used, a telos, a sort of end, a natural goal, let's say, to human life that was literally just like built into the person. It's not something that you sort of choose or that you fancy. It's like there is an actual purpose to human life in the sense that there is something human beings tend towards, and that the sort of fulfillment of that end is what being a human is for, and that end is eudaimonia.

44:59Ben Thomas:Some people translate it as like pleasure, but as in any case when the word pleasure comes up in philosophy, it's not like hedonism. It's not like the pleasure you get from partying. It's like the deeply fulfilling pleasure of genuine goodness and excellence, as it were. It's quite difficult to define always of course yeah well i think worth just flagging no no and i mean that's actually a good um just because to specify it's uh a lot of eudaimonic psychology now it does consider pleasant pleasure or pleasant feelings or like they're kind of byproducts of living this life and you usually see that i mean there is like i think one study by like huda and dc where they people pursuing goals with the idea in mind that they want to enhance their happiness tended to not actually experience as much happiness as people pursuing meaningful goals, which were goals that were kind of unrelated to the outcome of the affective state.

45:58And they were more related to just like doing the thing itself, usually like the process or the activity itself is intrinsically satisfying. So there's a that's kind of like kind of where I was going is like, if you have these kind of more objective nutrients, where regardless of any flower, it's going to need water, light, um, soil, there's kind of this by-product of it growing, which I always consider, you know, in the same way, if, if we give people those things broadly, they're going to be happy. Like we can generally say that that's what this, a lot of this research has shown. Um, if you take care of a plant, it's going to kind of emit a nice odor.

46:34So I always think of the hedonic byproducts or the happiness is almost kind of like it smells nice, but that's like not really, you know, it's fleeting, it's not really enough. But a lot of people, that's what they're looking for all the time. They're looking for hedonic pursuits. And, you know, that's where you see a lot of like addiction, for example, and kind of, you know, you can argue consumerism. And the one thing that this model isn't capturing is that no flower is exactly the same, that they all have their own kind of form, their own kind of direction of growth, and, you know, own color and vibrancy and so forth.

47:06And what I've been really interested in is just directly asking people what is their idea of the good life and getting a qualitative measure along with kind of a sense of efficacy and a sense of motivation and a sense of appraisal for what their idea of the good life is. So then we are including this subjective variance in the idea of eudaimonic well-being because there was one researcher, Jack Bauer, who brought up that the one issue in well-being research is we rarely give the participant the privilege to define what good is. It's usually almost always defined by the researcher themselves. And this is hard.

47:47This is really getting into the bread and butter of psychology and philosophy and to what extent can we actually measure these kind of immeasurable things. But I think it also speaks to, once again, this heritage, this intellectual heritage, going back to the ancient Greeks of trying to answer these seemingly simple questions, which are, what are we to do? And why are we alive? And why should we continue living? And what does it look like if we're living the good or correct way, if there is a good or correct way? So these are all things that I've been very, very interested in.

48:24Ben Thomas:So why is it then that when we think of existential philosophy, we think of Camus, and we think of Sartre and we think of these guys that seem to sort of just crop up in the black and white photographic era. You know, like sometime in the 20th century, these guys sort of come out of nowhere and it seems to be something quite distinct. Like what is it about the 20th century that gives rise to this particular breed of interaction with the problem of meaning? I mean, I think the 20th century was especially, I mean, you see it a bit before and even afterwards, this is definitely a social trend, but the championing of authenticity, of this kind of romantic endorsement of the essential self, that you need to pursue things your own way.

49:12And I bring it up in the book that there's kind of this different machinery of identity making throughout history, starting with kind of Lionel Trillian's notion of sincerity. for a long time, people weren't really having these existential crises. To use the Buddha as an example, again, you can use a lot of religious figures as an example of this. They're usually rare people that they kind of went, why am I doing this? Because most of the people back then were fairly, you know, maybe not entirely conscious of a level of agency. And even like the notion of free will, there's kind of a controversial, I don't know if you're familiar with like Julius James, like the notion that free will is like actually a fairly contemporary concept.

49:59And when you look back to ancient Greek literature and like the Homeric text, when people are thinking, when they're referring to kind of like these like hearing voices and reflecting, it sounds like a lot of the time it's almost like the gods are communicating with them. And so this author's argument is that kind of our inner worlds back then would have been characterized by, you know, we would have thought that this was actually coming from the outside on some level. There was not really much of an inner agent. And you see this, you know, I don't know how much I totally agree with that, but I will say like after Christianity, the notion of free will and that, you know, there is a right or wrong way to operate and you're kind of given this privilege of deciding, you know, ethically what to do.

50:45became a lot more popular. And this, I think, was in tension with this notion of sincerity for a while, which is that you are born into a position, into a role, and that is who you are, and that's who you're going to be. If your dad was a farmer, you're going to be a farmer, for example. It's sort of unquestioning. But around the 18th, 19th, and 20th century, you do see the era of romanticism, you see, you know, Nietzsche starts really criticizing any sort of established truths. Kierkegaard really, really emphasizes subjectivity and this like romantic notion of like the person kind of doing their own thing and and prizing their own their own subjective experiences.

51:35I think the existentialists, this is this is maybe a bit of conjecture, but they a lot of them really liked the U.S. and not because they thought the U.S. was this like amazing, beautiful country necessarily. They thought it was kind of like a hilarious representation of a lot of like the things that they found abhorrent with the bourgeois values and the sort of elitism of these passed down, you know, customs and so forth. And going to America, like a lot of them really liked jazz culture. They really liked, you know, fast food, dirty movies. And I do think because the U.S. is very much like the American Revolution was primed on this real authenticity as a nation of like, this is who we are.

52:22And to this day, they have one of the most longstanding constitutions. They are a country of individualism, I could argue, compared to maybe a lot of other countries. And I think them meshing with existentialism at this time of increased authenticity, which is the notion of you have an essential self and, you know, sincerity is kind of this more conservative, ancient thing that is incorrect in some way. You should follow your heart, for example. I think that that really projected the existentialist aesthetic. And I mean, it's a cool aesthetic, like you're in a trench coat, you're smoking cigarettes, there's jazz music, they were kind of edgy.

53:06And I think like you see young people, especially really endorsing that, like they think that that, I mean, it is cool. It's a cool looking like philosophy. It's one of the, I mean, there's not a lot of people that want to, you know, look like Immanuel Kant or Hegel, you know, it's like kind of their, their marketing is, is, you know, also just a lot better. And it's, it's like more rebellious, more, um, uh, captivating.

53:33Ben Thomas:but you know one of the things that is associated with the rebellious child is a sort of lack of understanding and utopian spirit like when you know the parents say you've got to follow the rules and the kid says well i don't want to and they go and they smoke and they drink and there's like a prodigal son moment of return and they're like oh gosh yeah that was a terrible idea you know can we see the traditions of sartre and particularly camus in a similar kind of way where there are these systems that they reject and they say, no, no, no, we're just going to sort of protest against all of this.

54:08Ben Thomas:But looking at it from the outside, you know, the mature philosophies that have been around for thousands of years might say, okay, you know, kid, we've all been there, but you need to mature a bit. Because like, I suppose what I really want to get at is, does the solution work? I mean, you've talked about some of the ways that Camus sort of disagreed with existentialism. And we've talked a little bit about why creating your own meaning is a bit weird, and Camus agreed with that. But he writes this text, The Myth of Sisyphus, and we haven't yet explained who Sisyphus was or why his name is invoked, but people will probably be vaguely familiar.

54:43Ben Thomas:And the purpose of writing this, I suppose, is to give people almost a kind of consolation. A lot of people find The Myth of Sisyphus quite comforting, and I think the reason for that is it famously opens by just saying there is but one serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Just tackling head on this thing that a lot of people maybe thought, I didn't realize people talked about it so bluntly. And by the end of the book, you get this famous declaration that one must imagine Sisyphus happy. And I can sort of tell that narrative, but why is it that that's supposed to help anyone? What is it that's going on with Sisyphus?

55:23Ben Thomas:Why do we imagine him happy? If we do imagine him happy, is he essentially just deluded? Is it a massive cope? And how is it supposed to help anyone? What is Albert Camus' solution to the problems that we've been discussing, in other words? Yeah, that's a very good question. And I think just at the very start, you were talking about this authenticity naive, and that's very much like I'm kind of borrowing from Muller and D 'Ambrosio's work on profilicity where they they argue that there's kind of a new identity sort of building thing that's really just based off of like exhibition value and profiles and authenticity is has now kind of gone the way of the the dodo um even if we still feel like the essential self is important and there's a lot of psychology research that shows that authenticity is really hard to capture and it usually it's a signal of social desirability.

56:15Um, it's not, which is ironic, but it's usually people, they think something is authentic when it's also, it happens to coincide with kind of being cool. Um, so it's maybe not really reflecting an authentic self, but that's just like a digression. Um, Camus in his myth of Sisyphus, I, I, I think partially why I like appreciated it and also grappled with it is because I was never fully satisfied by it. And I think like at certain times in my life, I would be like, oh no, this actually makes a lot of sense. But then other times it just seemed, it does seem like a cope. Now Camus says, Sisyphus, one of the most important things is that he is not deluded.

56:56He has lucid awareness that this sort of rebellion through embracing your suffering, your circumstances involves like literally lucidity. That is, He uses, he evokes that word quite often. You are completely conscious of what's going on. And I think there's two things here. One of them, I think he's really invoking a sort of kind of mindfulness or he was a huge, he was hugely influenced by Simone Veil, who was kind of a mystic existentialist, like proto existentialist. She really believed in attention. Attention almost had spiritual qualities to it of you are really directing all of your sort of cognitive energy and efforts to this one thing and you kind of become this one thing.

57:43And you almost see kind of a phenomenological, this beautiful writing on kind of consciousness and the embodied self. And that, I mean, he talks about it. Sisyphus becomes the rock. He becomes the mountain. He becomes all of the world that he's inhabiting. which is an interesting thought because up until that point, there's that distinction between your search for meaning and the silent indifference of the world. But through this lucidity, this sort of like I see it as kind of mindfulness, you are kind of becoming one. There is a sort of union with this world. So that's a bit of a resolution. And then the other thing is when he's talking about one must imagine Sisyphus happy.

58:28This isn't like, you know, dancing, super ecstatic, everything's awesome sort of happiness. From my understanding and how he portrays kind of absurd heroes in his novels such as Dr. Ryu and the Plague, it's an equanimity. It's a sort of peacefulness or tranquility that he finds. This isn't a, you're going to be like telling depressed people like you're going to be doing awesome all the time it's more of a confidence that regardless of what happens next you you can get through it you and not only get through it but you could potentially extract some gold or you can find some uh some bliss or peace with uh life itself and you know i do talk about acceptance and commitment therapy it's maybe not my favorite therapeutic approach but i actually think that it offers like a system that makes a lot of sense when we're talking about Sisyphus.

59:26You are accepting what's going on, and you are also committing to a specific task. And these are really just kind of two elements that almost contrast with the sort of contingency and arbitrariness of things. They're almost like the two solutions. And similarly, I love the Sartre's phrase of freedom is what you do with what's been done to you, where you're simultaneously accepting the situation, and you are nonetheless less moving forward. And this is also a confusing process, but Kierkegaard's idea of, you know, life must be lived forward and it can only be understood backwards really speaks to this, is that we are usually most of the time stumbling in the dark and it's only like when we can stop and actually reflect and think about things, you know, extract some sort of wisdom from it.

1:00:15Can it inform further crawling in the dark or further pushing the rock up, knowing that it's going to roll back down and accepting that and embracing that. And I think it's a satisfactory answer to a certain degree. It's a very short section at the very end of the book. And I do think that it could 100 % be seen as just a sort of comforting kind of piece of text. And I don't think that's entirely a bad thing. I think, you know, when people are going through things, it's more about whatever they can find that's within reason and healthy that can kind of get them on their feet and get them going somewhere and get them to keep pushing.

1:00:58It doesn't always have to be super intellectually sound because as Camus and the existentialists point out, the human condition and human existence might not be the most intellectually understandable experience. Okay.

1:01:17Ben Thomas:So now Camus is talking about this Sisyphus character who is condemned to push a rock up a mountain for eternity. And when he gets to the top of the mountain, it falls back down again and he has to push it up again. And this goes on forever. And there's a kind of brutal meaninglessness of this task. And Camus is trying to compare this to the brutal meaninglessness of our everyday reality. And whenever I talk to people about this, they sort of say like, like you just say that by somehow just finding satisfaction in the task, just sort of accepting your circumstance and committing to the task nonetheless.

1:01:59Ben Thomas:I suppose when someone comes to this, they're kind of asking how to do that. It seems as if somebody's saying to Camus you know I found myself in this situation how can I just accept this how can I get on with my life and Camus says well what I would recommend is that you sort of accept your situation and then just get on with your life anyway and it feels like there's not much of like a mechanism because that's the very problem is is I can kind of imagine you know Sisyphus happy but And I sort of say, well, good for him. I'm glad I could do that. But if it were that easy, in other words, wouldn't we all just sort of choose to be happy in the same way?

1:02:36Ben Thomas:Is there much more that Camus can offer in terms of a mechanism of how to get there? mm-hmm no like camu was not a very um thorough like writer when it came to giving you know practical advice or anything like that and and um i do think like his his characters that he uses in his novels they like i always think of dr ryu as as a as a great example um in the plague like there is uh uh you know a plague befalls this small town and there's a doctor and it just looks like things are just getting worse and worse and they kind of just do. And the book even ends with it kind of saying that there's just going to be another plague.

1:03:16It's very Sisyphean, which is

1:03:19Ben Thomas:the life of a doctor, which is, you know, you're going to keep combating this illness and trying to save people and so forth. And he's really a character where he's atheistic. He doesn't have any sort of real abstract attachments to anything. So he's a real like a Camus kind of stand in almost. But he really is just doing the right thing. And this is like a almost a bit of a like it's an ethical argument. It goes back to some religions where if you're doing the right thing, if you have some sort of ethical virtue, which is usually you're extracting meaning like what's usually referred to as like autotelic kind of feelings from an experience.

1:04:09There's an intrinsic feeling there. That in itself, like if you can find stuff that justifies things in themselves, you've got it made. Like it's when we start living kind of instrumentally. Like we start thinking, oh, I do this, then I'll get that, then I'll get this, and I'll be happy. This is more often than not really, really draining because like I think we've brought it up a few times examples where a person's life is just instrumental, where I'll do this and I'll do that and I'll do this and that. And there's some kind of blurry way off in the distance in the horizon, this idea of salvation, or eventually you'll reach it.

1:04:44I think what Camus is really challenging is, no, it's better to cultivate this mindset of the here and now. And at the same time, I don't think he's advocating for inaction. I think what he's potentially going for here is something that, you know, you see it in the Stoic tradition too, which is you accept the things that you can't really do much about and you try to change the things that you can. And this is easier said than done. Maybe the best approach to this is just through cultivating wisdom. And through cultivating wisdom, I mean, that involves usually making a lot of mistakes and actually going out and living and having the courage to stumble in the dark and mess up.

1:05:26But this is something like in therapy that we struggle with a lot is a client comes to you and, you know, if they're in an abusive relationship or they've had some significant trauma, we cannot do anything with regards to that specific situation within reason. reason. There are, you know, ethical things where if it's a, you know, really, really awful, you know, then you can, you can call like an emergency line. But yes, I think like trauma, trauma is a good example. Like that's something that happened in the past and you can't change what has happened to somebody in the past. I think eternal sunshine of the spotless mind does a great job of like, you know, when people want to break up and they literally want to just get rid of that, like those memories.

1:06:11And the tragedy of that, it just seems like it will just always come up no matter what. And it's teaching the person not to get over it. I think that's the worst thing you can tell somebody, especially if they have trauma, but to teach them how to live with it, to nonetheless pursue their life despite this happening, and maybe even extract some sort of growth or meaning from it. And there's like the concept of post-traumatic growth that I think is still a bit nebulous in terms of like research. Uh, but, but I think it's like, you know, it's, it's an important, uh, thing to bring up at least in this discussion.

1:06:50Um, it's, it's teaching somebody to, you know, uh, do, to, to recognize what's been done to you. And then nonetheless, uh, kind of endorse that freedom that like Sartre was talking about, like freedom is what you do with what's been done to you. Um, and that involves that lucidity that this isn't diluting yourself. Like you are, you're not dissociating, which is also, yeah, like that's one of the primary symptoms that you see with people that go through a traumatic episode is that they dissociate. They, they lose meaning. They don't know what happened. It's usually like sensory details that they can remember.

1:07:25And then their life, you know, the sleep issues, interpersonal issues, they all crop up from this. It's like how, okay, these are the inherited problems. These are the, this is the situation. How do we navigate this? this is just it's it's situational it involves you know multiple people like i always think it's important that it's that you're not struggling alone that people are actually like looking for help there um and it's it's it's the process itself which can actually be quite fulfilling and it can lead to some sort of meaning and and uh you know this is a lot of i'm I'm definitely like pulling a lot of stuff that Camus has never really specified specifically because, yeah, I don't think Camus was very adequate in offering a philosophy or, you know, self-help advice that is useful necessarily.

1:08:19But I think he was on to something. And I think I see it in a lot of other kind of across other fields and disciplines and thinkers.

1:08:29Ben Thomas:Do you think that someone can be a happy nihilist? I think that when we describe nihilism, it's got something to do with a recognition of a purposelessness to existence. And oftentimes, this is tied up with the concept of suffering. But these can at least be intellectually distinguished. You can imagine, you know, like Chachi PT becoming conscious and being a bit of a nihilist, but not like feeling pain in any sense. And I wonder if somebody can, I mean, typically people become nihilists when they're depressed about their lives and they don't know why they're doing it all but conceivably to me someone could be like really happy having a really great time and be like but i don't think there's any meaning behind this i'm just sort of having a good time and it seems weird to call them a nihilist because they're so happy but i don't know do you think that they can be distinguished in this way yeah i mean like it's hard um to to kind of imagine that specific mind that they they don't have any sort of value system necessarily but they're also like kind of affectively happy um it does make me think of like yeah when you hear about like notions like nirvana or enlightenment or something where it's a person is just kind of just existence itself is is justifiable and then likewise there's a sort of comfort with death.

1:09:54It's not like they would hold on to their life very much too. Maybe Taoism does a fairly adequate job of, if you wanted to think of somebody who could potentially be nihilist in the sense that we're using it, like the Wu Wei especially, where they're kind of going with the flow and they're recognizing the signlessness of reality, that, you know, binaries don't really exist in a kind of metaphysical sense. And if you can somehow inherit that idea into like how you're actually seeing things. I mean, I just watched, I happened to see that video from like a long time ago where there was, I think, a Tibetan monk who very famously self-immolated in protest against, I think, like a government who was prosecuting their their sect and yeah like when he goes up in flames he doesn't flinch he doesn't do anything he just kind of burns and dies and it's it's it's kind of a horrifying video on some level but there is something a little bit kind of like that's truly superhuman and that is almost like a potentially a happy nihilist is is somebody who could be happy in a meditative state uh you know, in a temple and also happy burned alive, not even like flinching because they know, I mean, he's maybe not a great example because he's still actually perhaps valuing something.

1:11:27And that's like, I think that's the hard thing to, to grasp is, is how, what is the motivational behavioral patterns of somebody who has no value system? That's a little, it's a little hard. But this is like maybe the closest that I can kind of think of. I think it's, it's potentially possible um but i'm imagining literally someone who just like

1:11:52Ben Thomas:who just in fact i think a lot of in particular young people are a bit like this they sort of say like you know we're all gonna die you only live once so let's just go and like have a great time that's kind of an embodiment of nihilism like the justification for the pursuit of hedonic pleasure there is the fact that there is no overarching narrative here there's no god there's no afterlife you're here for a short time and that's just it there's no there's no teleology so what more can you do except drink wine and be merry like go and have a good time and it's almost like this it's almost like if you're depressed it can motivate you into nihilism but if you're a nihilist it can motivate you into just pursuing pleasure and at least that won't probably bring long-term fulfillment, but someone can be happy doing that.

1:12:36Because imagining Sisyphus happy,

1:12:40Ben Thomas:I think, doesn't mean that Sisyphus is no longer a nihilist. He could just be a kind of a happy nihilist, someone who recognizes the meaninglessness of it all, but kind of gets along with it anyway. I don't know if in this image of Sisyphus happy, we're supposed to imagine someone who is finding meaning in the task or someone who's still finding no meaning in the task, but is just kind of happy anyway. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, like, I think, cause you could argue that, uh, I feel, cause I feel like we've had this conversation before, like the happy nihilist that you're characterizing.

1:13:13It sounds like there's still some, uh, even if it's just like base level biological, just drives of pleasure where there's still like a motivational state of pleasure and to go away from pain, which in this example is they're going to drink and they're going to do drugs and stuff. But then like you, there's kind of like two extremes of that. If they're truly like, if we're defining nihilism as just nothing more than this base level drive towards pleasure and maybe aversion from pain, there's kind of the maximalist perspective of like, why wouldn't they just do an insane amount of like heroin all at once and then die because their life doesn't mean anything and they get to feel the most pleasure possible.

1:14:00Or maybe this, you know, alternative, like, like other extreme example where like they really, really trying to live like, you know, I'm almost imagining somebody where they just really, maybe I fall into this camp. They really dive into like psychological research and philosophy of like, what is, what are the things that actually derive the most happiness in the more like eudaimonic sense. Um, like what, how can I actually possibly, how can I like maximize my feelings of like, of pleasure? Because, you know, there, there is the argument that it's, it's, uh, um, like you could somehow derive like, like a more substantial long-term feeling of, of pleasantness and pleasure.

1:14:40If you were like living in a sort of like Epicurean garden where everyone got along and it wasn't, you know, you're not just doing like drugs in an alleyway and you die in like a day or something like that. So it's, it's like, there's still, I think that's where I'm struggling is just what would this person look like? Um, if there's still that drive for pleasure, like, and that aversion to pain. And that's where I do start thinking of more Eastern schools where they see that cycle in itself as, um, where suffering comes from. And also where our, our idea of like the binary, like they think that there's pain and pleasure and pleasure and pain and this aversion and grasping is very much interrelated.

1:15:18And they back away from that, and they're able to find this equanimity that I think is also related to kind of the Sisyphean or like Camus' conception of the Sisyphean struggle, where there is suffering, there is pain, they feel it all, but they know that that is just kind of a passing cloud, that's a passing wave. They're just doing something, they're continuing to, I mean, Lacan, if we get into psychoanalysis, like subjective destitution, where you've kind of lost the sense of self. I mean, nihilism broadly to define it here is maybe a kind of a non-being or a lack of self that you've achieved on some level.

1:15:57It could be like this nirvonic embodiment also. I don't think it needs to necessarily turn into this hedonistic example. And I do think that, you know, these a lot of young people, when they say they're nihilistic, I don't know. I mean, I wouldn't challenge them on this. People are allowed to label themselves as whatever they'd like to be. I still think they're valuing something. I think even labeling yourself as a nihilist, like you value social signaling in terms of your own identity. What's the purpose of telling somebody that? You want to feel that your diagnosis of the meaninglessness of things is affirmed by others, or you want to, you know, at least warn people or something.

1:16:42Like, it's hard. Like, it's hard to, I think, on an intellectual level, you can talk about being a nihilist. Like, you know, metaphysically, nothing matters inherently. But if we're using this more kind of meaning as at least an emergent property of human consciousness, then it gets tricky because we're humans. Can we actually get outside of this meaning-making capacity? I think there's philosophy and theology, there's some potential tools there. But yeah, I don't know. It's a good thought experiment.

1:17:17Ben Thomas:Well, what are we missing by neglecting Eastern schools of philosophy? I mean, you said a moment ago that Camus had plans to go to India and he never did. And this almost serves as a metaphor that Albert Camus should go to India, that this line of thinking that grapples with desire and suffering and like the cyclical nature of it all, that if only that would like go to India for a bit. There's probably something to draw there. And there's this weird sort of convergence of philosophies that happens. I mean, it's not like these problems spring out of nowhere. This is part of the human condition that people are addressing.

1:17:54Ben Thomas:And so, of course, other people will have thought of this before. If you're part of a Western tradition, then if somebody has already written about the kind of stuff you're feeling, you're likely to read their work and build on it and engage with it. But it's almost like you've got these separated evolutionary branches, like different species of thought that share some common ancestor thousands of years ago which split off and you get the the indian tradition the chinese tradition the western tradition and so at the top level where we are today with with the western tradition you get like your camus and your sartre but at the top level of your of your indian tradition you'll have a completely different sort of system of thought but which is reacting to the same condition and naturally we neglect them as i'm sure they neglect us but i don't know what do you think is the value in reaching over there?

1:18:43Ben Thomas:And what might people expect to find if they do? I love what you brought up that there is these, regardless of how different they appear nowadays in terms of the West East tradition, it seems like they were grappling with very similar issues in terms of the human condition. And Stephen Batchelor is like a Zen scholar. He went into a real historical exploration of to what extent did Socrates and the Buddha example, the Buddha, for example, they kind of, yeah, I mean, they were around at the same time. And somebody who followed Socrates or somebody who followed the Buddha could have potentially interacted with these ideas pretty early on.

1:19:28And there's some argument to be made that the Hellenistic philosophers like the Epicureans, the Stoics, there's some influence there from the east because this was around the time when uh you know the the alexander kind of brought them as close to india and there's there's actually like the buddha before the the greeks um visited uh they they didn't have like a like a an actual statue of the buddha figure um but this comes from the ancient greeks kind of love of creating these like beautiful statues of like reverent figures. I never knew that, but I guess that's kind of where this developed. There's already that influence there.

1:20:11And the Hellenistic period in ancient Greece was characterized by uncertainty. There was a bunch of rulers that were kind of killing each other, and there was constantly fighting politically in between cities and civil wars. And the Epicureans, the Stoics, like they develop their own sort of systems of how do we grapple with this uncertainty? And it's usually what you hear like when people bring up like cognitive behavioral therapy is that it inherited traditions of Stoicism and Buddhism, which, yeah, it's usually this kind of what we were talking about before, you're accepting what you can't change, and you're going to change what you potentially have some effect on, where it's, you know, they had their own kind of metaphysical beliefs that were kind of characterized by the time.

1:21:00Like I think like the Stoics, they really talk about kind of this divine nature, for example, but the ethical components of it, very related. And it's kind of funny because yeah, then all of these, I mean, Socrates was very much into aporia and not really coming up with any concrete answers to things. But Plato and the Neoplatonists, they really started to believe in this sort of like, there's a real more real reality and like you know we really need to rationalize things and um they did start kind of creating this this they laid the groundwork for like idealism transcendental idealism and like Kant's idea of uh these like inherited cognitive capacities that inform our ethics and everything and I I mean like you could make the argument that that's where we maybe lost the plot if you're an eastern philosopher where it's like this is like this is too much and cartesian dualism it's like a very like clean example of like there is the spirit and then there is like the physical world and then they interact through i think what i think he said it was the pituitary gland or something um and it's just like what like yeah like what are we doing this is uh kind of maybe getting a bit too you know obviously these thinkers brought a lot of amazing um things to the table but just in terms of like trying to figure out the good life and what meaning is, what value is, there's something I think useful about the non-binary kind of endorsement of things like emptiness, signlessness, the selflessness of the more Eastern traditions, and the kind of notion of interbeing, of relatedness, and maybe less of endorsement of individualism and authenticity.

1:22:49And I think that this dialogue between the two is extremely valuable. And I hope that this newer generation of philosophers, they are willing to kind of go across cultural borders and explore these conversations and how they interact.

1:23:09Ben Thomas:Yeah, I mean, when people have engaged in Eastern philosophy, they tend to find that it chimes quite well with some of the things that they thought were unique to Western thought. I mean, Arthur Schopenhauer is a great example of someone who has all kinds of things to say about the Upanishads, the Indian Vedic scripture, and he loved them. he thought that in fact a quote here he says in the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads it has been the solace of my life and it will be the solace of my death and in fact even Schrodinger of Schrodinger's cat fame liked the Upanishad and he wrote here's another quote there is obviously only one alternative namely the unification of minds or consciousness.

1:24:01Ben Thomas:Their multiplicity is only apparent. In truth, there is only one mind. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And when you start looking for it, you realize that a lot of what these guys were saying chime quite well with these other traditions, which you might say to that, well, okay, but what's the point then if we're all saying the same thing? Why would I bother relearning? It's like if I had to go and read Descartes in French. Why am I going to bother reading the same thing in a different language? But I suppose the point is that if you did actually go and read Descartes in French, you might literally just come to a better understanding of what he was saying.

1:24:33Ben Thomas:Because there's always interpretation in translation. And I suppose that what we're doing as philosophers, I mean, we as a human species, not you and me, is we're trying to interpret, we're trying to translate our experiences of the world into language. So it's just like if you read a Russian novel, if you read that in two different translations, even though it's the same source material, you're going to have a much better grasp of what the text is really getting at if you like read the the world of philosophy through the translation of the western tradition and the translation of the eastern tradition realize that a lot of the time they're talking about the same stuff in different language and then come away with with a sort of a synthesized understanding of what's actually there you know below all of it i think as as schopenhauer said there is there is nothing more beneficial and elevating than doing such a thing.

1:25:26Ben Thomas:And then he shoved that old lady down the stairs. Yes, he did. And he had some choice words for women as well. I am interested though, in wrapping up here, the extent to which you think these philosophers can be separated from their personal lives. It's sort of like the separation of art and artist thing that happens in the modern day with singers and authors and things. But we've got this tradition of thinkers who, like you said, Camus was a bit of a hedonist and he sort of serially cheats on his wife to the extent that she attempts suicide. And a lot of people, like some people will criticize philosophies by saying that they dictate the way that you live.

1:26:14Ben Thomas:Jean-Paul Sartre was part of the many, the sort of long list of French intellectuals who signed a petition trying to get rid of the age of consent and allow adults to have sexual relationships with consenting, as it were, children. Arthur Schopenhauer, as we've just seen, also had a bit of a dodgy personal life. And even in his writing, his polemical writings, says things that a lot of people would, I think, understandably put a lot of people off. So are we able to just shelve that? Or is there some legitimacy in the people who come along and say, okay, Mr. Existentialism, Absurdism, and how beautiful it is, but look at the kind of lives and philosophies that this lives to.

1:26:53Ben Thomas:This is surely somewhere where you don't want to end up. Yeah. I mean, I think if we were to do a purity test on the body of philosophical text that's been given to us, there probably wouldn't be philosophy. But I also really like this phrase of, you know, if there is a jewel in a garbage can, don't, you know, expect to get your hands dirty when you go to extract it, which is, I think, like a lot of these philosophers, even if their philosophy is, it feels on the surface like, oh, this is actually quite nice and ethical, it's important to understand their personal life, because I do think it very much informs their views.

1:27:39And I think it could potentially foreshadow or reveal certain consequences of totally following through with these philosophies and also investigating the extent to which they really lived coherently with this philosophy. I think Camus, for example, part of my skepticism with him as I grew older was the lack of ethics in his early work, especially and how it related to his treatment with women. Like, I think that that's something where you could, if you really embrace absurdism, it's not too far of a leap to embrace hedonism, which is not too far of a leap to be kind of an asshole and, you know, sleep around a lot.

1:28:25And it's, it's, and even like Camus and Sartre, like Sartre, how he would talk about other people. It's like hell is other people. And it was like this awful kind of this situation and human relationships were kind of like gross. And he had, you know, in his own life, he was he was reported to be quite insecure about how he looked. Camus was, you know, he's considered to be one of the more good looking philosophers. And he really did not have trouble in his love life. And you can kind of see their two thoughts as also reflections of kind of their life situation. Sarcher was also a lot more culturally celebrated at the time.

1:29:09He really made it up to high level of academic stature in France. His funeral was attended by so many people. He had a normal family, whereas Camus, he lived with his mute mother in a poor Algerian coastal town. He was really a rags to riches kind of guy. Like there's, I think all it can do is just help your understanding of these works more. And, you know, especially in terms of the ethical aspects of it, I think it's good to be aware of the interplay between a person's thought and where they come from, their context.

1:29:53Ben Thomas:Yes, we are after all, all just humans trying to do the same thing. These aren't marble statues or Renaissance paintings. These are men and women of flesh and blood who are made out of the same stuff as us, which is precisely why we can look to them to help solve some of our problems. But we're all kind of doing the same thing. So I think we recognize the limitations of people's philosophy and the limitations of their lives and shake things with a bit of a pinch of salt, not expect to find a full solution, and we'll probably have a better time. And that's what's represented well in your book. There we go.

1:30:27Ben Thomas:A wonderful segue in rounding off. um so you're having an existential crisis of course the link is in the in the description and congratulations it's a it's quite the quite the thing to have a have a book out in the world it must must feel pretty gratifying yeah no right thank you very much like i appreciate it thanks for having me on and i look forward to in the future if you ever do pursue uh potentially writing something that would be uh i definitely look forward to that soon come one day one day i'm sure it'll be like buses you know it takes forever to come and then once one appears they'll just keep keep arriving i'm sure that once i get the bug for it i i won't be able to stop so i better think carefully before committing myself to that lifestyle but soon can't ben thanks uh thanks for coming on your channel cis455 of course is also links down in the description so yeah thanks for your time it's been fun thank you alex