Episode #086 - Transcript

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

Today is the first episode in a series on Sartre and Camus. I hope you love it.

And, look, I know what you guys are saying. “[Heavy southern accent] Nice pronunciation of Sartre. It’s [affected French accent] Jean-Paul Sartre.” Look, I’m not going to spend the next 30 minutes of my life or the rest of this series, for that matter, saying [affected French accent] Jean-Paul Sartre every time I reference the guy. If you guys have a problem with it, be mad at Obama or whoever it was that created this accent that I have, alright? Like, have you guys ever seen that video of German people trying to say the word “squirrel?” But they can’t do it. They say “squeerell, skweerell,” or something like that, not because they’re dumb people. But, from what I understand, they have no frame of reference for that “quirrel” sound in their language. What I’m saying is, don’t judge me; enjoy the episode. Let’s get onto the program.

So, just like most episodes of the show, I want to start today by thinking about something. But quick disclaimer for any of you out there that might hear the beginning of this line of thinking and think that I’m wasting your time purposefully or that there’s no possible way this could ever be related to the episode. Trust me, by the middle of the episode you’ll understand why I did it this way. So, the question I want to ask you is this: Have you ever been sitting in your room by yourself, talking to yourself, and just said the word “cookie” to yourself 25 times in a row? Like, cookie, cookie, cookie. For that matter, have you ever said any word to yourself 25 times in a row? Really the question underneath this question is, have you ever said a word and paid close attention to it and analyzed it and had the thought, “Man, that’s a really strange-sounding word. Why does the word sound that way? Why do we even call them cookies to begin with?” You look at the word “cookie” hard enough and, in that moment, it almost starts to feel like it’s the first time you’ve ever heard the word “cookie” in your lifetime. You ever have that happen to you?

How about when you look at something? You ever been staring at a plant for like 10 minutes straight? You know, maybe your mom has a decorative fern hanging in her kitchen. And you’re staring at it in a fugue state as she’s telling you about how they still haven’t fixed that light down by the RadioShack yet. And you’re looking at the plant, and you just start to notice in that moment how incredibly alien this thing looks when you pay close attention to it. You may have walked past this exact plant 400 times before and never thought twice about it. But for some reason right now it looks really strange to you. You ever had that feeling?

Well, if you’ve ever had this feeling before, even if it was just for a minute, Jean-Paul Sartre would say that you’re probably onto something there. But maybe the more important thing he would point out is that this feeling extends way beyond just the word “cookie” or your mom’s decorative fern. Everything is this strange, potentially. Everything in the whole world could evoke this same feeling in you if you paid close enough attention. This is a really interesting concept that Sartre refers to all the time. He calls it the absurdity of the world.

And there’s a brilliant example that illustrates what he’s talking about that my friend told me one time that he apparently heard from somebody else. But the general idea is, imagine you get home from work; it’s six o’clock, time for you to sit down and eat dinner with your significant other. Now, for most of us, we don’t see anything strange about this. We do this every day. This is just a normal Thursday afternoon in my household. But Sartre would say, consider how utterly ridiculous what you’re doing actually is. You’re essentially waiting for this rock that you live on that’s hurtling through the vacuum of space to get to a particular spot in relation to the giant ball of gas burning in the middle of the solar system so that you can then sit down on a bunch of chopped up trees and put little pieces of plants and animals in your mouth that are going to become infused into your cells. And you’re doing all of this purposefully like synchronized swimmers alongside this other member of your species that you one day hope to procreate with and start a family. But, before you do that, you got to figure out what aspects of their inner thoughts they’ve been lying to you about since the first day they met you.

This is the true absurdity of the world. And we live our lives immersed in it every day, to Sartre. But to fully understand where he’s coming from with this and how it ultimately relates back to the rest of his philosophy, we’re going to need a little historical context. Remember back at the beginning of the Enlightenment? Remember that famous divide that’s been around since almost the dawn of philosophy between rationalists and empiricists -- rationalists believing that we arrive at knowledge best through reason, empiricists believing that it ultimately comes through the senses? Right. So, at the beginning of the Enlightenment, if you were a starry-eyed, aspiring philosopher trying to make a name for yourself in the big city, a really cool place to focus your efforts on would have been bridging this divide.

Philosophers started to ask the questions: Why is knowledge an either/or proposition there? Why can’t both of them be true? Why can’t neither of them be true? Why can’t we all just get along already? Leibniz tried to do it; Hume tried to do it; Kant tried to do it. A lot of people tried to do it is what I’m saying. And, in the early years of Sartre’s life, he traveled many, many miles to study under somebody else who was trying to do it; his name was Edmund Husserl.

See, Husserl thought, you know what’s funny? All these disagreements that rationalists and empiricists have been having with each other for so many centuries, they always seem to happen after we’ve applied all sorts of very human meanings to what we’re experiencing, human biases to what we’re experiencing. What would the world look like if we were somehow able to remove those human biases?

Now, real quick, I just want to be clear. Husserl’s not just talking about biases like, you know, whether you lean republican or democrat. He’s talking about removing every way that you categorize phenomena that enter your senses and brain. We’ve actually talked about something like this before. Remember our episode on David Hume on causation? You know, pool ball A hits pool ball B and causes it to move. David Hume would say that we’re making a mistake by saying that pool ball A caused the movement of pool ball B.

There’s no necessary connection between pool ball A’s movement and pool ball B’s movement. That’s a very flawed, human inference that you’re making. And, although it seems obvious and probably is true that pool ball A caused the movement of pool ball B -- you know, because the events are so close to each other and one ball’s movement directly preceded the other balls movement -- we can’t apply that same standard to the rest of the universe and just assume that we know what causes what.

I mean, I’m sure you can imagine how that might go wrong. I’m sure you can imagine someone saying something like, “Oh, well, day turned into night and then back into day again. It intuitively makes sense to me as a human being that day caused night to come into existence. We of course know that isn’t true. But this is a good example of a mistake that we might make when we, in fancy philosophical lingo, infer necessary causation.

Now, as you probably remember, David Hume said that there is no necessary connection between these two phenomena, but for the sake of practical life we confer this framework of cause and effect onto these phenomena because, he would say, imagine what the world would be like without cause and effect or any other meaning we tack onto these phenomena. It would be chaos. It would be a seemingly random flurry of phenomena happening all around you, no rhyme or reason to them at all. It certainly would be a little off-putting, right?

Well, Husserl thought, if we want to get to the bottom of this existence thing, maybe the task shouldn’t be about interpreting our human experience of these things. Maybe it should be about understanding our human experience at such a deep, comprehensive level that we can sort of subtract it from what we’re experiencing and study the raw phenomena as they actually are. This is what is called phenomenology. Now, ultimately, Husserl’s making the point that if we’re ever going to arrive at certainty about stuff, the current scientific method that we use is probably going to have to go. We’re eventually going to need a new scientific method that takes all of that stuff into account. But that’s for another episode.

What Sartre takes from this is that in our experience of the world it’s not like we’re only making sense of it through the lens of cause and effect. No, we’re tacking on all sorts of stuff, all sorts of connections between things that have been conditioned into us that help us make sense of everything. Go back to the dinner example. When looked at through the lens of phenomenology it starts to seem like a pretty crazy and completely arbitrary scene. And no question, somebody could do a much better job at breaking it down than I did there. But if for some reason you had, you know, a giant claw that could pluck some random person out of a Walmart somewhere and you asked them, “What does this particular sequence of phenomena mean to you?” to them, to the average person, it would just be dinner.

Sartre gives tons of examples of this absurdity of the world in his book called Nausea. There’s a scene where the main character is traveling on a tram and he looks over to his side and he sees a chair sitting in the corner. And, in that moment, he is just puzzled. He looks at the chair and, as he’s looking at it, he experiences what it feels like for there to be no obvious usage for that object conditioned into his brain over the years. Think about that. There’s no decades of sitting in chairs or seeing people in chairs or seeing men in thong bikinis hitting each other with chairs at WrestleMania. None of that meaning is there for him. It’s like he’s a baby seeing a chair for the first time in his life.

Here’s another example from his book Nausea where the main character is describing a chestnut tree:

“If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered, in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form which was added to external things without changing anything in their nature. And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder -- naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness.

“I kept myself from making the slightest movement, but I didn’t need to move in order to see, behind the trees, the blue columns and the lamp posts of the bandstand and the Velleda, in the midst of a mountain of laurel. All these objects…how can I explain? They inconvenienced me; I would have liked them to exist less strongly, more dryly, in a more abstract way, with more reserve.”

Now, just imagine, imagine if this was how the entire world looked to you, everything in it. The story goes that Sartre was on a heavy dose of mescaline one fine summer’s eve and had this very experience. Mescaline, for you more adventurous folk out there, is better known as Peyote. And, for the rest of you, stay in school, and look both ways before you cross the street.

Now, Sartre would say that, if you don’t believe in a God that has assigned some sort of preordained meaning to that chair and everything in the world, for that matter, a position progressively growing in popularity during this time -- if you don’t believe in that preordained meaning, then you realize something when you look at the world in that state. You realize that human beings are just sort of making it up as they go along. All of this meaning that you’ve been applying to these objects like chairs or the word “cookie” for your entire life, there’s no essence preordained into these things by a higher power. No, if you go back far enough, all that meaning, turns out it was just some person that came up with it to try to make this process of understanding these phenomena more simple.

This is a key point that maybe needs a little bit more historical context. Remember Plato and Aristotle? They believed that every object had within it an essence. The essence of a thing is a specific thing or a collection of things within an object that need to be there for that thing to be considered whatever it is. If the thing for some reason no longer had these specific properties, it would lose its identity and would, therefore, become something else.

For example, a toothbrush, right? There are certain properties about any toothbrush that are called nonessential properties, all kinds of things. Your toothbrush could be red, yellow, short, long, bamboo, whatever you want. But one thing’s for sure, if the toothbrush doesn’t have that little brushy thing at the top, it’s no longer a toothbrush: it’s just kind of a colorful stick at that point. Remove the bristles from the toothbrush, and you remove what is called an essential property or the essence of that toothbrush, a quality that’s necessary to make it what it is. Now, Plato and Aristotle believed that there is an essence to every object including, you guessed it, human beings, even you. This essence is whatever makes you you. If it was taken away from you, you’d be someone or something else.

Now, this essence is typically considered to be something that was in you before you were even born. And this theory was pretty much conventional wisdom up until the late 1800s. And what Jean-Paul Sartre represents is one of several people during this time period that are starting to say, hey, wait a minute, what if we’re born without an essence, and once we’re born it’s our job to determine what our essence will be? What if to be truly aware of existence means that you’re aware of the chair as it is before you’ve tacked on all this meaning to it? What if -- as the famous line goes -- existence precedes essence?

See, because the significance of realizing that the way that things are in the world isn’t some cosmically determined state of affairs is that, once you realize that, you’re free. All these people around you saying stuff like, “That’s just the way that things are. Sorry,” they could be wrong! In fact, look back at history. They probably are wrong. Sartre would say that, whenever you hear somebody say something like, you know, “Marriage is a sacred bond under the eyes of God between a man and a woman, and that’s that,” you can realize that that conclusion was arrived at just as arbitrarily as yours was. It may not even be true. And this goes with everything: the way relationships work, the way you make your money, the diet you consume. You are free. Freedom.

This is probably the biggest point of emphasis in all of Sartre’s philosophy. He’d probably even say it about his later political work too. Understand how free you actually are, and never take that for granted. He has a famous quote: “Man is condemned to be free.” And what he means by that is, you didn’t bring yourself into existence. You didn’t have a choice. Yet here you are, born into a world with so much freedom to choose while simultaneously held responsible for everything that you choose to do in this existence that you didn’t choose to have. You are condemned to be free.

Now, the question people typically ask here is, “Okay, okay. So, I’m free to determine the meaning of concepts and ideas that I interact with in the world. But, if I don’t believe in God, then, I don’t believe in something that has prescribed a preordained meaning to my life. Doesn’t that make life sort of meaningless? What’s the purpose of my life or anything that I do, for that matter? Doesn’t that just send me spiraling down a deep, dark hole of feeling like nothing I do ever matters?”

Well, Sartre would say, just like when you look at the world of phenomena and you apply meaning to all the things to be able to make sense of it -- meanings that are not cosmically determined but ones that are useful to you -- not only can you apply meaning to your own life; it is your obligation to choose what the meaning of your life is going to be. He’d say, those people that believe that a God has prescribed a meaning to their life, they’ve really just chosen that meaning just as arbitrarily as you chose yours. Again, existence precedes essence, to Sartre. Once we exist, it’s our job to discover our essence.

Now, if you don’t already know, these concepts that we’ve been talking about here are all hallmarks of a line of thinking known as existentialism. When Plato says that essence precedes existence, that is known as essentialism. When Sartre says that existence precedes essence, that’s known as existentialism. Now, I’ve already talked about an existentialist on this podcast before. The name’s Kierkegaard. And, if you remember, Kierkegaard famously says that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. You know, he says that when you realize how free you truly are in this world, when you look down into the yawning abys, you become dizzy.

Quick recap just to give some context. So, freedom is a really interesting thing for human beings. I mean, on one hand we all say that we want it more than anything else out there. We don’t want somebody telling us how to live our lives. Don’t tell me what to do. I don’t want to live under the rule of some king. But, on the other hand, we say, “Wow, I’m free! I’m free? I can do anything I want?” That’s a pretty scary thing when you think about it. Kierkegaard would say that most people find themselves either lost in the infinite or lost in the finite.

Lost in the infinite looks like this: I’m free! I can do anything I want! Where am I going to go with my life? Oh, you know what, better just set up camp here and just think about what I’m going to do for a while. Don’t want to make any rash decisions. I’ll talk to some people, figure out what I’m going to do, come up with all sorts of ideas, and never really take action on any one of them.

Or lost in the finite, how does that look? “Oh! Oh, you guys set up a camp? Oh, oh, your camp’s over there? Okay, I’m going to set up my camp right next to you guys, okay? Oh, oh, is that how you hold your spoon? Okay, I’ll start doing that too. Oh, is that pumpkin spice cream cheese?” Both of these to Kierkegaard are attempts to avoid the dizziness of being truly free, a state of dread as Kierkegaard calls it.

Well, Sartre talks about something very similar to this. He says that, once you realize that you’re in the driver’s seat, once you realize that it’s you that has to decide the meaning of your life and that you’re not limited to this tiny, manageable story about the way that things are that most people tell themselves, when you feel that nausea that comes along after realizing how many options you truly have, it’s a very uncomfortable place to be. And, by the way, there’s no Pepto Bismol for the nausea of existence. So, getting rid of that feeling of nausea by any means necessary starts to look real friendly to you.

And a common trap that people fall into -- a state that most people spend their entire lives in even if they don’t realize how free they are -- is what Sartre calls “bad faith.” Bad faith is when we accept something as true that really isn’t all that convincing to us, not because we think it’s the truest thing in the world but because it’s convenient and easy for us to believe in it.

People do this with all sorts of things, like tanning, right? People that go tanning -- at some level they know that sitting in an oven for 30 minutes is not good for you. At some level they realize that they’re probably going to grow up and look like a lizard. But, hey, in this one clinical trial, six out of seven rats didn’t die of cancer.

That’s another thing, right? It’s so easy in this day and age, much easier than any other generation, to decide what it is you want to believe in and then do a reconnaissance Google search after the fact for a study that you can point to as a reason why you’re doing it. It’s gotten pretty crazy. I mean, try going to Google and typing in, you know, anything: “reasons kale is bad for you.” And then after that type in “reasons kale is good for you.” Guarantee you’re going to get a ton of results on either side of that.

Point is, it’s so easy to have this bad faith that Sartre talks about where you don’t believe in what the most compelling position is but one that’s convenient for you to believe. We tell ourselves a story that we want to hear so that we don’t have to do the hard work of having difficult conversations with ourselves. Sartre thought one of the most common types of bad faith -- one that he saw firsthand all around him during his lifetime -- is when people tell themselves they have zero options about what they can do.

Sartre talks about a hypothetical waiter who hates his job. He goes to the same restaurant day after day, hating his job, not feeling fulfilled. But, whenever he thinks about applying for a different job or asking himself the difficult questions that would come along with that sort of life choice, he just tells himself the same thing: “Look, I’m a waiter. Always been a waiter, always going to be a waiter. My father was a waiter just like his father before him. I’m never going to be able to try to do anything else because this is my job, and I need the money to survive. I might as well just accept it. I’m trapped on this unfulfilling hamster wheel for the rest of my life.”

Now, Sartre would say that this is absolute nonsense. Your essence isn’t determined by what your father or your grandfather did. It’s not determined by a few overdue rent notices in your mailbox. You are a free individual that can choose the meaning of your life. You can do anything you want. The money and the rich family heritage of being a waiter aren’t preventing you from doing anything. You are preventing yourself.

People do this for any number of reasons, probably most commonly to avoid some difficult conversation that would be looming. But consider what it is someone’s actually doing when they find themselves in one of these bad faith scenarios that Sartre talks about. When the waiter wants to change his job and he tells himself that he has zero options and that he’s essentially destined to angrily get people baskets of chips for the rest of his life at the Mexican restaurant he works at, what is he doing there? Well, he’s cutting the legs out from underneath his ability to choose. He’s putting up this barrier to try to convince himself that he actually doesn’t have a choice in the matter and that being unhappy at this job is a life sentence.

Just imagine what sort of world he’s living in, and imagine if he was living under a tyrannical dictator that told him, “You’re going to wait tables for the rest of your life or I’m going to chop your head off.” That is basically the world that this waiter lives in. And Sartre would say that it’s entirely self-imposed. Sartre talks about how people do this a lot with relationships too. You know, someone will stay with someone for a couple years. They’ll ignore all the telltale signs of the two of them being fundamentally incompatible. And, when they wake up one morning and they realize how unhappy they are in the relationship, “Oh, well, I could never leave them. We’ve been together for 10 years now!” Oh, so, you should waste another 10 years of your life? “I could never leave them. I just can’t reinvent myself at the age of 30.” Yes, you can. And many people do.

Sartre would say, something people do all the time is they avoid making these kinds of difficult life decisions, desperately trying to avoid that temporary, short-term discomfort of contending with the freedom that they have at their disposal. So they tell themselves one of these stories of bad faith. And what they end up doing is putting themselves through long-term agony in an attempt to avoid short-term discomfort.

Think of the message that -- think of what you’re telling yourself when you accept this bad faith. What you’re saying is that the person you are right now in this very moment is the only person you can ever be for the rest of your life. Now, if that sounds needlessly reductionist to you, Sartre would say, you’re right. You shouldn’t be ashamed of using this bad faith. You shouldn’t get down on yourself if you’re 50 years old and you realize that bad faith has controlled you for most of your life, and you feel like it was all your fault all along, and you’ve wasted your entire life. No, just be free.

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