Episode #108 - Transcript

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

I hope you love the show today.

So, we’re going to be talking about individual philosophers on most shows, but let’s never forget the fact that our ultimate goal throughout this current arc of the show is to tell some of the main philosophical stories of the 20th century. And, look, realistically, you could never tell the full story on a show like this anyway. But, the point is, we’re talking about more than just individuals now. We’re talking about movements. We’re talking about massive historical events that thinkers are living within and reacting to. We’re telling a story here. And, whenever you’re telling a story, sometimes you need a narrator that takes a step back from the individual characters and what they’re saying and talks about what’s going on on a larger scale so that you can understand the behavior of the characters better. Why is it that freedom and responsibility are so important to Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, specifically in the time they’re living? What were they responding to? Why is Bertrand Russell so concerned with mathematics? Why is Wittgenstein so concerned with language, specifically during the time he was living in the early 20th century?

We have a lot of people to talk about, but one thing I think you’ll find, the further we get along in this journey, is just how revolutionary of a moment it was in modern human history when Nietzsche wrote the words “God is dead.” Seriously, if there was a page one of this story that we’re telling, it wouldn’t be, you know, “Once upon a time,” in that giant, Declaration of Independence font. It would be, “God is dead. He remains dead. And we have killed him.” Now, when Nietzsche says this, a way someone might misinterpret Nietzsche here is to say, “Oh! He said, ‘God is dead.’ Here’s this antireligious, nihilist philosopher triumphantly proclaiming that God is dead, calling for us to move onward into a better age where we can get away from this scourge of religion.” Not even close to who Nietzsche was or what he was saying there. And I think it’s going to be useful for us to talk a little bit more about what he was saying there, at least more than we did in Nietzsche part one.

Real quick, just to get us back to where we were in that episode, think of any universal human problem. Think of a problem where, no matter what area of the world your particular ancestors decided to settle, they were going to be faced with this problem and were going to be forced to come up with some creative invention that deals with this problem. The example we used was carrying a lot of heavy stuff around. No matter where you’re from, your ancestors had to invent something to cope with carrying around heavy stuff. And, historically, what we see are different cultures coming up with slightly different solutions to this problem based on a lot of different factors individual to them: what resources they had, what landmarks were around them, what their lives were like. For example, if you were a culture of animal husbandry, some sort of herding culture, maybe you used animals to solve this problem of carrying around heavy stuff. If you were part of a culture that had a lot of trees around you, maybe you rolled things around on logs. Maybe you made a cart or a wagon or a rickshaw or any of these inventions that are all slightly different from each other but ultimately were all created by human beings with the same goal in mind: to solve this universal problem of carrying heavy stuff.

Well, what’s another universal human problem? What’s a question that every human being asks at some point in their life? What is the meaning of my life? How do I fit into the grand picture of the universe? How can I feel like my life has meaning? In other words, in the same way cultures throughout history have all come up with their own personalized, slightly different, clever inventions that solve the problem of carrying around heavy stuff, Nietzsche would say that all the varying forms of mythology and religion throughout history have been the same thing: clever human inventions to solve a universal human problem of answering these existential questions.

Now, fast forward to Nietzsche saying, “God is dead.” Nietzsche himself isn’t doing anything when he just says, “God is dead.” The significance of those words lies in him pointing out a reality of the world that’s come to pass. He’s pointing out that our understanding of the world has come a long way since the scientific revolution, that science has no doubt given us a lot of incredible things, but we have to start to think about at what cost has that come. Nietzsche would say that being a human being in this new scientific world we have is just a totally different situation than any other situation a human has had to face before. That for us living in a world post-Copernicus, post-Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Freud -- living in that world as a human being, it has become next to impossible to simultaneously be both a reasonable person while also believing there’s a guy up in the clouds named Zeus with lightning bolts that’s going to zap you if you do something wrong or there’s a guy that used to walk on water and cure blind people. In other words, it’s become next to impossible to use one of these clever human inventions that solve this universal human problem of searching for meaning.

When Nietzsche says, “God is dead,” he’s not saying that in a happy tone at all. He’s saying it regretfully, fearfully even. Think about the situation we’re in as people. We are tribal creatures. We have such a strong tendency to attach ourselves to some group or some cause. And then the meaning of our life becomes to advance the agenda of our group, label some other group as the enemy, and then go to war with that other group. Think of all the other incentives we have to act this way: how good it feels to seemingly have a vise grip on the way that things are in the world, no further questions, no more cognitive dissonance for me; how good it feels to derive a sense of identity from these beliefs that you hold, to escape that ambiguity about who you are. Given the reality of human psychology, think of how many barriers are naturally in the way if you want to try to budge somebody off of one of these positions. And for tens of thousands of years, whenever people have asked what tribe they should be a part of or what their sense of identity should be or where they can get a convenient vise grip on the truth, for tens of thousands of years mythology and religion have given them those answers.

You know, Nietzsche would say that the sort of naïve way of looking at religion is to say, “Hey! Look back at history. Look at all the wars that have been carried out in the name of religion, in the name of these fairy tales people used to believe in. You know what we got to do? We got to do away with all this religion nonsense, end all this unnecessary bloodshed going on.” Nietzsche would say, okay, let’s do away with religion and start over. Do you think the history of the world is going to be a bunch of science fairs and meditation seminars? No, it would still be a violent and bloody clash of people organizing into groups, thinking in terms of us versus them, exercising their will to power; it just wouldn’t be religious groups carrying it out. In fact, there’s people that make the case that religion may have been a moderating influence on the violence throughout history because at least it allowed people to organize into these massive groups of millions of people as opposed to the world being much more fragmented and volatile.

When Nietzsche says, “God is dead,” he’s not talking about the literal death of some deity. He’s talking about the death of humanity’s pursuit for moral objectivity. He’s talking about the death of people having a ready-made answer that fills that void within them that craves meaning. Nietzsche’s asking, what are people going to do now that they don’t have that answer? Remember, to Nietzsche, 95% of people are the mob. They’re camels, beasts of burden, all of their beliefs and values loaded onto their backs by other people. They’re scared and lazy and, generally speaking, are just not the kind of people that are going to read up on some existentialism and fill this void in other ways. And it’s not like when you cut the legs out from underneath religion that science just naturally fills that void. People aren’t sitting around saying, “Well, there’s no meaning to anything that I do in this life, but I got a large hadron collider for Christmas. That’ll be fun. Just got a new iPhone. Spiritual guidance? I think I’m good.” No, that void doesn’t just magically disappear. And they’re going to fill it with something. The question becomes, now that it’s a near impossibility to fill it with religion, what are people going to fill it with?

Nietzsche predicts in his book The Will to Power, very ominously that, in the next hundred years after having written that book, tens of millions of people are going to die because of this position that we’ve worked ourselves into. Nietzsche saw the beginning of the 20th century before it even happened. In many ways, he saw the world we still live in today before it even happened. Out went religion, and in came ideology, nationalism, Marxism, capitalism, tons of other isms you could throw in there. The story of the 20th century is in large part a story of competing ideologies living in the wake of the death of God. When the French existentialists -- you know, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Camus -- are writing their work, part of the reason why they’re so focused on making a case for individuality is because they’re living in the middle of Nazi-occupied France. They’re living in a world where people are thinking of themselves first, and primarily, as a member of some group and then as an individual human being. “I am a German. Germany is one of the great nations of the world. If we’re ever going to assume our rightful place as a world power, we’re going to have to take back some of the land that they took from us through the Treaty of Versailles.” Us versus them. People identifying themselves in terms of their group identity rather than their individuality.

The reason freedom and responsibility is so important to the French existentialists is because people were using this group identity as a justification for doing horrible things and then pretending they had no choice in the matter because, hey, this is what my group is doing. For example, “Look, I’m just a Nazi soldier, alright? If one of the higher-ups tells me to go round those kids up and put a bullet in their head, look, I’m just a soldier following orders. Really, I had no choice in the matter.” Or on the other side, “Hey, look, I’m just a citizen of France. I didn’t want to go to war. Those Nazi people have guns. What can I do but just sit around and weave flowers together, so I can throw them on whoever comes to rescue me? I didn’t have a choice in the matter.” The existentialists are responding to this thinking by saying, no, in both cases you didn’t need to kill those kids, and you could have been actively part of the resistance. In other words, you did have a choice, and you’re responsible for what you’ve done. The consequences for you making that different choice may have been dire for you. But one thing the existentialists are not going to allow is to let you get away with pretending to be some droning, mindless member of a group that’s devoid of any individual autonomy.

But, on the other hand, again, an integral part of being a human being is feeling like you’re a member of some group that’s fighting for good. That’s the sort of ambiguity that we have to navigate as people in this new post-Scientific Revolution world. And, if you’re not an extremely self-aware and honest person -- like Simone de Beauvoir warns about -- you can very easily find yourself a foot soldier for some tyrannical group, all the while feeling totally morally justified, feeling like you’re a good person while doing it. As people that are alive today, just like the people of Germany in the 1930s, we all carry this burden of potentially reducing ourselves to just a foot soldier of an ideological group, but we can’t forget about our individuality.

Now, one of the main ideologies people attached themselves to and worked to advance throughout the 20th century was neo-Marxism in its varying forms. In fact, at the same time Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Camus are doing their work in France, there’s a group of Marxists that have been working on their own project since the 1920s that would come to be known as the Frankfurt School. Now, this needs a bit of a setup. To understand where the mindset of a Western Marxist was during this time period, we have to talk about a couple prophecies that were made by Marx himself back in his time.

Remember Hegel’s dialectic? The general idea is that the process of change throughout history could be understood in terms of a repetition of three stages that Hegel calls the thesis, the antithesis, and the synthesis. Put briefly, there’s a way that things are: that’s the thesis. Some competing interest comes along and overthrows that way of doing things: the antithesis. But, inevitably, that pendulum swings too far in that direction and eventually finds a resting point somewhere in the middle of the thesis and antithesis in a place Hegel calls the synthesis. The synthesis then becomes the new thesis, and so on and so forth throughout the history of time. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept and want more of an explanation, you can always go back and listen to the Hegel episodes.

Well, as Marx famously writes, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” In other words, during his time, Marx looks back at the history of the world and points out that, when people go to war or there’s some sort of bloody revolution or some type of civil war that goes on, people primarily tend to go to war for economic reasons. The history of the world, to Marx, seems to be -- in a way that resembles Hegel’s dialectic -- a revolving door of a ruling class exerting control over an exploited class of people -- the thesis -- the exploited class of people rising up and overthrowing that ruling class -- the antithesis -- and then a new ruling class being elected that appears to be slightly better for the formerly exploited class -- the synthesis. That new ruling class becomes the new thesis, and the whole process repeats itself over and over again, and that’s history. Marx points out how, in every single economic system that’s ever been implemented throughout history, you always have this same dynamic. There always seems to be a ruling class and an exploited class. During the feudal system, it was the peasantry and the aristocracy. In a slave-based economy, there are the slaves and the slave owners. To Karl Marx, capitalism is the same way. There are the people that control the resources and the means of production, and then there’s the working class.

During his time, Marx asks a question that would go on to change the course of human history: why does is have to be this way? Does it? Do you think there’s even potential that there might be some sort of economic system we could put in place that doesn’t involve this dialectic of class struggles? How many people need to die before we start to try to come up with some way that people don’t need to be exploited and there doesn’t need to be this inevitable process of revolution and bloodshed? Well, after realizing this, there’s good news and bad news, says Marx, at this point. The bad news is, people are currently being exploited, right now. But the good news is, we know exactly where this is going because it’s happened all throughout human history. Here’s the prophecy he makes. There’s an industrial revolution going on in Europe at the time he’s alive, and it’s in these high-production areas that the ruling-versus-exploited-class dynamic of capitalism is going to be the most pronounced. Just like the peasants immiserated under the feudal system that rose up, the working class in this capitalist system is eventually going to rise up, take over the means of production, and it’s at that point we should implement a system that doesn’t have this exploitation built into it.

Well, fast forward to Germany in the 1920s and what’s known as the interwar period, or the years in between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II. At this point in time, there’s a lot of Marxist thinkers sitting around on their hands, waiting for this revolution to come about. But, strangely, it hasn’t happened yet. In fact, it seems like it’s not coming. I mean, there’s an attempt right after the end of World War I and all the turmoil that came with that, but the Weimar Republic ends up winning and assuming control of Germany. And there’s a lot of thinkers that are starting to doubt whether Marx was right with this whole grand prophecy of his. Not only that though. They took a look at the only country that’s had a communist revolution at the time, not an industrial society like Marx predicted, but a predominantly agricultural society at the time in Russia. They see Marxism become this Leninist authoritarianism that’s going on there in the 1920s. And what happens is, this general attitude of skepticism towards Marx and his original ideas starts to creep in.

Was Marx correct? Has this just been a massive failed experiment based on a misunderstanding of history? Now, it should be said, there are people that just ignore everything that’s going on and trudge forward with Marxism version 1.0. There’s other people that abandon Marxism, thinking that it’s failed. But there’s a strong contingency of thinkers in the middle -- the Frankfurt School among others -- thinkers in the middle that are still Marxists; they still strongly believe in the world that Marxism’s trying to bring about, but they’re highly critical of Marx for a few different reasons. Many critiques, but two of the major ones are that Marx doesn’t talk enough about the concept of personal liberty within his system and he certainly doesn’t do enough to consider the individual.

Remember, the thinkers of the Frankfurt School are living right around the same time as Husserl and Heidegger and Sartre and all these other thinkers that, like we talked about, are highly skeptical of Enlightenment-style thinking, of exalting reason onto this pedestal above everything else and trying to reduce everything, including human beings within a society, down into these convenient, rational categories. During the time Karl Marx wrote his work, the concept of the individual just wasn’t being considered in the same way it was during the time of the Frankfurt School. And the thinkers of the Frankfurt School saw this as a huge blind spot within Marxism.

So, just to make sure I’m not trudging forward, to keep this organized, the Frankfurt School was a collection of neo-Marxists convinced that Marxism was still correct overall, but it needed some serious reworking, especially if it was ever going to work where they eventually wanted to implement it, in the West. Now, researchers in the Soviet Union compiled a collection of Marx’s notes that was never before published called Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Now, not only did this book provide a never-before-seen, more Hegelian interpretation of Marx, but this book was published in 1932 -- perfect timing if you’re somebody who’s a Western Marxist and you want a fresh perspective on the whole situation. Couple this with the fact that basically every thinker in the first generation of the Frankfurt School was of Jewish decent, living in Germany during the interwar years, seeing the rising tide of anti-Semitism and Naziism all around them. They saw the writing on the wall. First, they moved the school out of Frankfurt to Geneva and then, ultimately, to New York City for several years, where they imbedded themselves into Columbia University.

So, what were the goals of the Frankfurt School? Well, their short-term goals were to take a deep, deep look at Enlightenment-style thinking and try to figure out how it was possible for the world to go from a place technologically and culturally more advanced than it had ever been in history, only to instantly devolve into the most barbaric, brutal, hateful event in human history in World War II. The Frankfurt School wanted to understand how was that even possible? What is it about this post-Enlightenment world that makes that possible? The conclusions they arrive at range from interesting to downright scary. We’ll talk about them in the upcoming episodes of the show. Later works of the Frankfurt School focus partially on a critique of capitalism, which naturally extends to a critique of the people they think are being exploited by capitalism, which then extends to a critique of various traditions and institutions within these cultures.

Now, some of these critiques are scathing to the point that they take things that are long-standing institutions within Western culture and they shine a light on them that makes people never see them in the same way again. And, when it comes to these critiques, how people say you should interpret them and what the ultimate goals of the Frankfurt School were is all over the map. I mean, some people think this is just naturally what happens when Marxist thought clashes with capitalist thought, that capitalism is an antiquated system founded on traditions that by their very nature are oppressive, they don’t stand up to scrutiny, and that certain Western traditions involving the church, lack of community, views on family, among other things -- those traditions are what was necessary for the whole ruling-versus-exploited-class dynamic to ever get off the ground in the first place. These people say that this scathing critique is really just Marxism holding a candle to weak traditions.

There are other people more in the middle that think that both Marxism and capitalism are viable systems if implemented correctly and that the critiques of the Frankfurt School, if they did anything, point out certain weak points that we, as a capitalist society, should keep in mind moving forward when refining our systems and continuing to make things better. There are other people that believe that the Frankfurt School is a group of neo-Marxist thinkers engaged in a direct attack, the goal being to subvert Western values, weaken the foundations of every aspect of Western culture, and then watch as the foundation eventually crumbles, making it much easier to bring about a Marxist revolution in the West.

Point is, this conversation about how to interpret the critiques of the Frankfurt School, this can go on for days. And I’m not interested in being the one that makes the final proclamation. So I’ll leave you to make your own determination about what’s going on inside the heads of these people. All I’m interested in is the merit of the ideas and what’s interesting about them, which brings me to a point I want to make, just some things I want to put out there because I feel like they need to be said. Look, I fully realize how political the world has become in the last year. I fully realize that there are lots of podcasts and shows out there that used to do great content that have now become, first and foremost, a soapbox for some political ideology and, secondarily, content for their listeners. I just want to iterate that, even though some subject matters in the near future may trespass into places that are still relevant to modern politics, this is not this show becoming some bullhorn for who the next president should be, not that I even have strong enough political views to warrant doing a show on them. And maybe that makes me the right person to do this series.

Bottom line, look, I come from poverty. I absolutely cherish being able to do this podcast for a living. The idea that I would dilute the show down and waste your time like that -- I mean, if you knew me personally, you’d know that’s the furthest thing from who I am. I approach every episode of this show with the same question in mind: how can I give the people listening to me the most value possible in these 30 minutes of their time they’ve given me? To me, it’s an unselfish way of approaching the show that I think is a big reason why I’ve been able to do it as long as I have. I respect your time, and I hate when my time’s not respected.

And I guess I just want to plant a flag in the ground here and make a couple promises moving forward. I promise to cover these issues as fairly as I can. And I’m not just talking about the binary, left/right way of looking at things. I plan on covering these subjects from multiple different angles that are interesting. And, if I can’t be comprehensive, I just won’t cover it. Secondly, my hunch is that the majority of you listening -- even if you’re already a hardcore capitalist or Marxist -- my hunch is that you’d welcome and be excited to hear a deep reading of the philosophy that underlies the other side, respectively. They may ask questions you don’t have answers to that you can look into. I mean, at the very least you come out having strengthened your views from seeing the best the other side has to offer. Even if you’re not that openminded and you’ve already joined the tribe, and even if in this world where God is dead you’ve labeled one of those groups as your mortal enemy you have to fight against for the rest of your life, I promise I’m going to do these episodes in a way where you’re still going to get something out of it.

Now, onto the question some of you are probably wondering right now. Where’s Camus? You said on Facebook, Camus would be here. Where is he? No, here’s the thing about Camus. Throughout the next several episodes, we’re not just going to be talking about Marxism and capitalism from the perspective of the Frankfurt School. We’re also going to be looking at them from many other perspectives including thinkers that are critical of Marxism, of which Camus is one of them. And he’s a particularly interesting one because he’s a French existentialist who’s not a Marxist, unlike Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. And, not to mention, he has a really interesting take on how Marxism, once you look at it, starts to resemble a direct mirror of Christianity, you know, with the dialectic as this absolute governing force moving us providentially in a particular direction; the idea of this dialectic moving us towards some sort of ultimate end point; there being notable figures throughout its history that resemble saints and bishops; heresy trials. There are many more parallels that we’ll talk about more in depth when we get there.

Anyway, to bring this full circle, I guess, there are a couple of ideas from Camus that I want to expand on that I didn’t get to finish in the last Camus episode because I was pressed for time. So, Nietzsche talks about this void that we have inside of us that craves meaning, right? This void that’s such a default, universal part of what it is to be a human being that some people aren’t even aware that they have it. They just fill it up with something immediately around them and then assume their role as a tribal zealot for the rest of their life. But what I love about Camus and The Myth of Sisyphus is that he talks about the process of discovering that void for the first time. When exactly do we realize there’s something lacking in that department?

Real briefly, Sisyphus is a man condemned by the gods to an eternity of pushing a boulder up a hill, only to reach the top and watch as the boulder rolls back down to the bottom of the hill. At which point he walks back down to the bottom of the hill and starts the process all over again. The ultimate example of struggling and straining and feeling pain and exerting yourself only to have all your efforts ultimately be for nothing. This is a metaphor for life, to Camus. We live in a universe that’s so inconceivably large and complex and of a scope that we as human beings can’t even wrap our heads around. We live out our lives. With every step we take, we’re fighting against a tidal wave of things that are trying to kill us at any moment. We coast through good times. We struggle through bad ones, only to reach the end of our lives to have to accept our fate that the universe really doesn’t care about anything that you did in your life. Certainly, in a humanistic sense what you do matters. I mean, it matters to the microscopic scaffolding we’ve set up on this dust speck out in the boonies of some ordinary galaxy. But, on the level of the universe, the sun’s going to blow up in 5 billion years. Where’s this podcast going to be then? Where’s your stamp collection going to be, you’ve worked so hard to complete?

We’re all a little like Sisyphus in that regard. We’re all rolling these boulders up our respective hills, only to have it ultimately be for nothing. And, at the end of last episode on Camus, I made the point that maybe we are all like Sisyphus in a way, but that Camus says we’re only condemned by the gods to push the boulder, not to agonize over the process, and that we should strive to enjoy the process of pushing that boulder as much as we can, that we should imagine Sisyphus smiling. I said all that, but I never really got a chance to go into how Camus thinks you should actually go about doing that.

Camus gives two main strategies that Sisyphus uses to be happy. Camus would say that, as outsiders, if we could somehow sit on the sidelines and watch Sisyphus push the boulder up the hill over and over again, it would no doubt look to us like a totally meaningless, torturous, insane thing that Sisyphus is being forced to do. But at what point does Sisyphus realize that it’s all meaningless? It’s only when Sisyphus stops being present, takes a step back, and says, “Wait a second. Why am I pushing this boulder anyway?” looks around him, can’t make sense of it, deems it all to be meaningless -- it’s only at this point that this concept of meaning comes into play at all. Ten seconds ago, he was just pushing a boulder. It wasn’t until he stopped and reflected on the fact that he was pushing the boulder that he started feeling like something was lacking.

This is an example of a recurring theme that comes up in every single one of Camus’s books. It’s the contrast between reflection and lived experience. Camus would say, think about exactly what it is you’re doing whenever you stop to reflect on something. First, you stop doing whatever it is you’re doing, and then you use your capacity to reason to try to make sense of things by asking a bunch of questions. Why am I pushing this boulder up the hill? Why am I here? Why do my actions matter? Well, consider for a second just how presumptuous and arrogant that whole reasoning process is. Oh, I’m going to take this narrow, human, rational scope that I have called reason, and I’m going to use this tool and impose this rationality onto the universe and then see what conclusions I arrive at when it comes to what the whole purpose of it is. Right. Right. What if reason is not the right tool for the job? What if you had some rusty hammer held together by a string and some old Allen wrench from Ikea and someone told you to put together a space shuttle? Go. You’d say, “Really? Are you serious? I mean, I can try, I guess.” The same way an Allen wrench is not the right tool for putting together a space shuttle, reflection and the human capacity to reason is not the right tool for understanding things like the meaning or non-meaning of the things that you do.

So, again, keep in mind, this critique of reason is very popular among thinkers of this era. And it’s the first thing we’re going to talk about with the Frankfurt School. But, anyway, the way Sisyphus deals with this absurdity of the universe -- the way he deals with the fact that bad sometimes triumphs over good and that my grandma died and I didn’t want her to die, and my car broke down, and Santa Claus isn’t real -- the way he deals with all this stuff, Camus says, is that Sisyphus makes his rock his thing. What he means is, Sisyphus is happy because he chooses to fully engage himself in his work. So, if sitting around reflecting all day on what the ultimate meaning of pushing the boulder is is never going to leave us with a satisfactory answer because of the limits of reason itself, why not focus all your effort on being engaged in the task you’re currently doing? See, to Camus, reflection is good. It certainly is a necessary part of life. But there’s a point of diminishing returns. You can reflect too much. And the only thing it’s going to do at that point is deteriorate the quality of your lived experience. No, accept the absurdity of the universe, and then immerse yourself back into being more fully engaged in the tasks you care about.

What Sisyphus does is he makes his rock his thing. He learns to love his rock that he pushes up the hill. He studies all the little grooves in the rock, all the different ways the grooves interact with the soil underneath. He pays attention to his posture and his form when he’s guiding the rock. He studies patterns in the way the rock rolls back down the hill. He tries to find the most efficient way of getting back down the hill to start over. He makes the rock his thing. Camus says that one strategy we can use is to be as engaged in the tasks of our lives as Sisyphus is with his rock. Maybe for you that’s appreciating your family more deeply. Maybe it’s eating great food. Maybe it’s working on contemplative stuff to get your mental game on another level. The point is that sometimes, if we spend too much time reflecting, too much time looking at things from the outside all the time, we can lose sight of the significance and the beauty of these moments because we’re just not as engaged as we could be.

Kierkegaard has an example where he talks about a couple out in public showing some strong levels of affection for each other. They’re making out, rubbing all over each other, breathing heavy. Gross! And he says that, if you just look at what they’re doing from the sidelines and reflect on it, if you really look at what it is they’re doing, it’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever seen in your life. “Aw, I, I wanna put my lips up against your lips and feel a little tickly feeling as I move them around and, and I wanna hold you in one place and, and rub all over those clothes and feel what kind of cotton-polyester blend you’re wearing today.” It’s completely ridiculous, right? The whole process can seem that way if you’re just reflecting on it from the outside. No, it’s only when you’re the one doing the kissing that you understand it. It’s only when you’re fully engaged in the act itself that any of the significance and the meaning starts to make sense to you. So too with the things we do in this life. I’ll save the second strategy Sisyphus uses for our response to the Frankfurt School.

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