Episode #078 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Hope you love the show today.

So, among historians of philosophy and people that just in general look at the thinking of Karl Marx, there’s not much of a consensus on how he felt when it comes to the subject of individual people and their relationship to the task of making moral progress. It’s too bad, really. But the good news is, for us—as fans of philosophy rather than historians of philosophy or people that have to attach their identity to these people’s thinking—for us the value of a philosophical concept really just lies in the idea itself, right? What I mean is, we don’t need to necessarily understand the complex inner workings of Marx’s brain as well as he did to get value out of an interpretation of his work. I mean, as long as that interpretation produces some novel string of thought and gets us to think about possible assumptions we have in our thinking, then it’s really done its job for us.

So, let’s talk about a common reading of Marx. What did he think about individual moral progress? Well, we know a little bit about what he thinks based on what we already know about him, you know, religion is the opiate of the masses. But that statement in itself really doesn’t tell us the whole story. I mean, religion is just one catalyst for individual moral progress. To be honest, if somebody told me that in a conversation, “Religion is the opiate of the masses,” my first assumption would be that, well, they probably have some other thing that’s not religion that they think is a better means of facilitating individual moral progress. It’d be a very easy assumption to make.

But Marx takes a much more interesting position here, I think. See, to Marx, whenever we talk about individual morality and all the varying forms that it takes, all of them really don’t matter that much in his worldview. Marx doesn’t care about what the individual does. You know, we’ve been told for so long and most people still see themselves in today’s world as these individual moral agents, you know, and it’s our duty to contemplate our values and work as hard as we can towards being the best individual embodiment of those values that we can. Marx says, not only is that a waste of time; it’s an illusion that’s been fed into us over the ages, oftentimes coercively. It starts to sound like the famous conversation between Socrates and Thrasymachus, you know, at the beginning of Plato’s Republic. Thrasymachus famously says that morality is nothing more than a mechanism for the people in power to control the weak.

Marx says, stop thinking about the individual. The only thing that can be said to matter in this world is that dialectical, historical process of change, the moral progress of society towards the ultimate end goal. To Hegel, as we know, it was mind’s total understanding of itself. But Marx differed from Hegel on this point. He thought the ultimate end goal of this dialectical process was the ideal society. After all, so many of the values that people claim are such strong moral convictions that they’ve arrived at individually, Marx thinks they’re ultimately a byproduct of whatever cultural values they were born into. In other words, we shouldn’t be thinking of ourselves as individual moral agents to Marx. Instead, we should be thinking about our relationship to this historical process of change.

But on May the 5th, 1813, a very unique character came along that probably couldn’t have disagreed with Marx more on how he viewed the individual. His name was Søren Kierkegaard, and how he’d respond to this common reading of Marx is probably by asking, okay, Marx, I get what you’re saying about this historical process and how it should be a point of emphasis. But answer me this: what accounts for all those changes that you’re talking about in government or culture or other institutions that you call the historical process? What accounts for those? Well, I’ll tell you what it is. It’s the conglomeration of all the choices of the individuals that make it up. It’s a conglomeration of individual existences.

Now, to understand where Kierkegaard’s coming from here, probably helpful to understand the world that he was living in. As I said before, Kierkegaard’s born in 1813, and the reason that year matters is because that puts him coming of age smack-dab in the middle of the inception of this age of mass communication. The telegram’s invented in the 1840s. Telephone invented mid-1800s. For the first time, the railroads of the Industrial Age are able to quickly and efficiently deliver daily newspapers, periodicals to everyone. Kierkegaard living in this world, he saw the writing on the wall before there was writing on the wall. Really interesting—Kierkegaard thought that it was very likely in the near future for a world to emerge where most people weren’t individuals anymore acting on their individuality but sort of faceless drones in a sea of spectators. He thought eventually there’d be more people spectating and living vicariously through other people that were actually doing stuff than there would be individuals doing stuff in that world.

Picture a massive colosseum filled with people, and in the middle there’s this spectacle of all the individuals in the world that are doing stuff: running for political office, starting companies, putting on Academy Award-winning performances. And then all around them in the crowd is this enormous stadium of people just sort of passively watching them. Well, to Kierkegaard, these spectators have lost a piece of what makes them theirself. And because of this, they aren’t the embodiment of a true individual to him. Sounds kind of harsh. But it’s actually funny. If you went up to each and every one of these people in the crowd and you asked them, “Do you think you’re an individual?” They would unequivocably say, “Yes, I am an individual. I have to be, right? I mean, I have a car. I have my own clothes. I have a job. I even have my own number. I have a social security number. I have my own number. Seems pretty clear I’m an individual.”

So, what went wrong? Why does Kierkegaard not give them this title? Why would he say that they’re not being as individual as they could be? Well, he talks a lot about this stuff, but let’s talk about two primary pitfalls that he thinks people typically are at the mercy of that makes them less of an individual, that makes them lose that piece of theirself. He says that oftentimes one thing that people do is they lose theirself in the infinite. What does he mean by this? To lose yourself in the infinite is to be in a state of sort of analysis paralysis. He has a famous quote, “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” We live in a world where we seemingly have an infinite number of possibilities at our fingertips. And whenever we find ourselves at one of these decision points, oftentimes we become overwhelmed by the sheer number of possible choices. And a tactic that a lot of people use to mitigate that sense of overwhelm is just to not make the decision. They just kind of sit there at that decision point, weighing their options forever and never actually taking action.

Let’s do an example of this. Imagine somebody who is 18 years old. They graduate high school and now they find themselves at that wonderful point in their life when they have to decide what they’re going to be doing for the rest of their life. At that moment, you have an endless sea of possibilities. I mean, do I become a geologist? Do I become a meteorologist? Do I study business, criminal justice, paralegal? You know, what a giant decision I have to make. And there’s pros and cons to each one. I just don’t know what I want to do yet. What ends up happening if they don’t make that choice is, “Hey, you know what? Tell you what, I’ll go to college, but I’ll just take all the prerequisites and the general education stuff. That’ll buy me enough time to figure out what I want to do with my life. That’ll work. Yeah.” Grandma’s calling you every six months, “Have you decided what you’ll go to school for yet?” “No, Grandma, still thinking about it. Still between geology, meteorology, or business.”

Now, if Kierkegaard could see this, he’d be like, what are you doing? What are you doing!? This is not an individual. This is somebody that thinks they’re an individual lost in the infinite. Honestly, you could sit around and have this exact same conversation with yourself for the rest of your life. When are you going to make a decision and act on it? By the way, how do you think that decision is going to be made anyway? Is it just going to come to you one day? Are you just going to collapse on the floor of a gas station and start convulsing and have a vision of yourself as a meteorologist? No. One day you’re actually going to consider the possibilities and make the best decision you can at that time. You’re just prolonging that process.

And as long as you’re in this state of limbo. As long as you’re not acting on what you think the best decision is, you may possess the ability to freely act on your behalf—you may truly be autonomous—but if you never use it, if you never use that ability to freely act—you know, you just get lost in the infinite thinking about an endless sea of possibilities—you effectively are not capable of freely acting. You’re paralyzed. You lose a piece of yourself in the infinite. By the way, this goes for every choice we make: what job to have, what person to marry, what diet to choose. It’s easy to find ourselves lost in the infinite.

Now, the other side of that, to Kierkegaard, the other common pitfall that people are at the mercy of is called being lost in the finite. So, as you can imagine, it’s kind of the other side of the coin here. Being lost in the finite is not considering enough possibilities and succumbing to the allure of just mindlessly going along with social conventions or culture or expectations of you, etc. This one’s a particularly scary one because most people that are losing a piece of themselves in the finite are less equipped to realize that they’re doing it than the people losing themselves in the infinite. See, to these people they see everything they’re doing as their own choice.

Think of a cow. When a cow is just following the herd in any direction it goes, to that cow it very well seems like it’s making its own choices. Cow synapses are firing. It’s telling its little cow hooves to scurry across the pasture. But really that cow isn’t freely acting. It’s always at the mercy of wherever the herd is going. It just sort of disappears into the crowd.

By the way, listening to this you may find yourself being more prone to one of these than another, but make no mistake, these pitfalls are not mutually exclusive things. See, to Kierkegaard, you could be losing a piece of yourself in both of them at the same time and, on that same note I guess, in two extreme versions of both of them in the very same lifetime. Like, I know this guy, met him in middle school so I’ve known him for a very long time. Didn’t talk to him for years. But within those years that I didn’t talk to him, this guy met a girl when he was a senior in high school, and he said they instantly fell madly in love and became high school sweethearts that were going to get married to each other.

They both go to college. They go to colleges on opposite sides of the country because, well, that’s the next step after high school, right? He’s going to school to become a music teacher because, well, that’s what he said he wanted to do to his guidance counselor in the 9th grade when they asked him to pick something. He partied and lived the college lifestyle because, well, that’s what he saw in the movie American Pie 2. That’s what you do in college, right? They both graduate. This girl moves in with him. They get married. They have a baby. And one day it all just kind of collapses.

He later told me that all this stuff that he did with the last five years of his life was a complete lie. Apparently, he was just doing it because it’s what his mom and dad and society and all the people on Facebook told him was what you do with your life after high school. He lost his individuality in the finite for five years of his life. He wasn’t being an individual in Kierkegaard’s eyes. He was just going along with this paradigm that he was supposed to embody.

So, they get a divorce. He moves back in with his parents. He works at a fast-food place now, smokes weed every day. And now, if you talk to him, he has all kinds of great ideas about where he’s going to go next. Maybe he’ll start his own business. Maybe he’ll go back to school. Maybe he’ll move and try to see his kid more often. And look, these things would be great next steps if this is what he’s saying on the first day and he’s taking action on it. But when he’s been having this same conversation with himself day after day, month after month, eventually he has lost a piece of himself in the infinite.

The only way to stop thinking about the endless sea of possibilities and actually make a decision is to do what Kierkegaard sees as the most pure act of reason that you can ever make, and that is to make a leap of faith. You know, in a climate where there’s often this dichotomy created between faith and reason and philosophers all throughout the middle ages are trying to find some way to make the two work together, here’s Kierkegaard saying that making a leap of faith is actually the most reasonable thing you could ever do, because instead of being at the mercy of whatever limited evidence you have or being limited by whatever advice you could conjure up, when you make a leap of faith, you choose the person that you’re going to be rather than the world choosing for you. And when you make that choice, you can actually act on it and be an individual.

Now, of course this concept can be met with resistance here. I’m sure you guys are saying, “Okay, Kierkegaard, but there’s a problem there. I don’t believe in the things that I do based on what I want to believe is true and because I choose to. I believe in whatever’s the closest thing to truth possible. How can I ever justify arbitrarily assenting to a belief in something, especially about the nature of existence, just because I happen to choose to?” Well, what Kierkegaard’s saying here is actually far more interesting than that.

First off, yes, Kierkegaard is a Christian. And, yes, this is his justification for why you should take a leap of faith towards Christianity. But here’s the other thing. If you looked at Kierkegaard and then you compared him to every other Christian that you had ever met in your life, he would be a totally different creature than all those other people. Not only would he be different; he’d probably be disgusted with how lazily and selfishly every Christian you’ve ever met in your life practices their religion. Kierkegaard’s task in a lot of his earlier work is to find out what it means to truly be a good Christian. And the most surprising and frustrating thing to him as he does it is that, as he does it, he’s blazing a trail.

He has this famous quote, “My task is new in such a way that there literally is no one in Christendom’s 1800 years from whom I can learn how to go about it.” He compared himself as a wild goose that was teaching all these domesticated geese how to fly again. He goes on at length about practically every aspect of Christianity and how it’s been distorted and mangled in a desperate attempt to try to make it easier and more attractive for people to join and then, you know, not have to try very hard once they call themselves a Christian. For example, listen to him here:

“Christendom is pampered with the nonsense that the Christian God is a decent and harmless chap, a good fellow, and especially a friend of female busyness and the begetting of children. All human effort tends towards herding together—Let Us Unite, etc. Naturally, this happens under all sorts of high-sounding names, love and sympathy and enthusiasm and the carrying out of some grand plan and the like. This is the usual hypocrisy of the scoundrels we are. But the truth is that in a herd, we are free from the standard of the individual. So, millions of men live and die. They are just numbers and the numerical becomes their horizon. That is to say, they are just copies and Christianity, which in the divine love wants everyone to be an individual, has been transformed by human bungling into precisely the opposite.”

Really interesting the way he puts it there. When you’re lost in the finite, when you become a member of this herd, it’s very alluring to you because it frees you from the standard of the individual. And millions and millions of people have been born, and they find themselves in this place of being lost in the finite. And they never question it, and they live and die. But they live and die not as individuals that have lived and died but basically as just numbers, copies.

So, most people, if you have a criticism of religion in today’s world, just given that we live in this age of empiricism, I feel like most people would see these points that Kierkegaard’s making and see them as kind of a weird place to take issue with religion about. You know, most people in today’s world—it’s not like they have a problem with religion in general. What they have a problem with is all the unfounded claims that they think it’s making about the nature of existence: that there’s a personal God that has rules for you, that some guy walked across Shamu’s fish tank 2,000 years ago—those kind of things, right?

But Kierkegaard’s sort of the opposite. He always said, he’s not concerned with the what of religion but the how of religion. In other words, he doesn’t think the goal of religion is to make some sort of doctrinal proclamation about objective truth or “This is the way that the world is!” or “Here is how it was created!” No, what Kierkegaard sees is that the only way religion can exist is if it has some sort of human being that it’s being delivered to. The Bible isn’t an encyclopedia to Kierkegaard. Why do people think of it that way? Human beings are an inexorable part of religion. The Bible is just a system, a system for bringing about the highest form of us as an individual. It's not that Kierkegaard thinks that the book of Genesis is the most accurate depiction of how the universe was created, but the values ascribed throughout the books are the best method to him at getting us to be our true individual selves. So, in that sense, religion is not the opiate of the masses, as Marx would say. The function of religion is to organize a commitment to a particular way of life.

But you know what, at this point it’s really easy to get muddied up by all the biases that we’re bringing to the table thinking about the word “religion” and the word “God” and “Christianity” and all that stuff. So, let’s try to take all the buzzwords out of the mix, and let’s do a thought experiment, alright? Because I think the point that Kierkegaard’s making here is actually a really good one.

This is a thought experiment that I have done at several points throughout my life, and it’s always been really helpful at getting me to think about my actions. Here’s what I want us to do. Let’s all start our own religion right now. Seriously, get a pen and a piece of paper. Actually, get a pencil and a piece of paper because you’re going to be making corrections to this religion over the years. Now, I want you to imagine that a multi-billionaire comes up to you. Mark Cuban comes up to you, and he says, “Okay, okay. I need your help. You are uniquely qualified in this field, and here’s what I want you to do for me. I’m going to give you $10,000,000 to scour the deepest places in that brain of yours. And what I want you to do for me is write down the end-all-be-all perfect recipe for success. Write down from sunup to sundown exactly which actions somebody would need to do to achieve the goals that you have right now. Forget about discipline. Forget about motivation. Write down a list of activities where, if we could program someone to do them, they would definitely achieve the goals that you have right now. What would that day look like?”

Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I would just cite and reference every self-help book, YouTube video, online article—I’d cite everything that I had ever read. I mean, I’d have this person waking up at the crack of dawn, after 8 hours of sleep of course. And they’d go into the kitchen. They would get a cup. They’d fill that cup with lukewarm, filtered water, a squeeze of lemon, maybe a clove of garlic and a pinch of salt. And they’d drink it. Then they’d get in the lotus position. They’d sit down on the floor. They would do breathing exercises and visualization and meditation for 30 minutes. Then it’d be off to the sand dunes to do some interval hill sprints for a while. Then they’d come home, and they’d have a perfectly balanced macro- and micro-nutrient breakfast. Doesn’t really tase that good, but it’s just what their body needed. And all this is before they even get to work.

Do you see what I’m doing here? I’m scouring my brain for everything I’ve ever heard about morning routines and how to start your day the best way possible. And based on my current understanding of living, I’m creating the ultimate morning routine. Now, do that for the rest of the day. Pretend Mark Cuban’s standing in front of you with $10,000,000 in a briefcase, and what you have is a best-practices guide for achieving your goals. What you have is the ultimate cheat sheet to following your own advice.

And isn’t that most people’s problem? They know they should be doing something. They just can’t find the motivation or the wherewithal to actually do it every day. Like, I know for a fact I would be more of a physical specimen if I went to the sand dunes every day and did some hill sprints. I just don’t. I just would rather burn 300 calories on the treadmill or the elliptical and be done with it. On that same note, I know for a fact that I would feel better and live longer and all kinds of other great stuff if I just ate leaves and drank rain all the time. I just don’t. I find a happy medium between that and eating pizza and ice cream every day. Point is, most people know what to do, and if somebody asked them for their advice, they could give them a much better way of doing the things that they do in practice.

So, when Kierkegaard says the value of religion is that it’s a commitment to a particular way of life, to do this set of behaviors religiously—replace the Christianity of Kierkegaard with your own personal religion that you just made, and you can start to see the value of religion in Kierkegaard’s eyes. By taking a leap of faith that this is the best set of behaviors you can hold yourself to—which it obviously isn’t, right? You’ll go on to read more books. You’ll do better experiments. You’ll learn more about yourself and life, and you’ll make adjustments. But by taking that leap of faith in that moment and committing yourself to action on this religion of yours, you’ll avoid the whole process of losing a piece of yourself either in the finite or the infinite. And you’ll be truly living the best life you can possibly be living. This is why Kierkegaard sees faith as the ultimate act of reason, because you can choose the type of person you’re going to be as opposed to possibly being rendered paralyzed by that reasoning process.

One other interesting thing to do with that list of behaviors that you have. Try to analyze them. Try to come up with a few virtues that are embodied in all of these behaviors. Are all of your behaviors temperate? Are they courageous? Are they honest? And when you come up with that list of virtues, write the virtues down on the paper with the behaviors. Because when you do that, I think you may learn something about yourself.

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.