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#974 - Joe Folley - Existential Philosophy, Nietzsche, Suffering & Self-Awareness
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- [00:01]
Joe Follos
So one of the things that in some ways Nietzsche really comes up with a very naturalistic view of what it means to be a human, which I think kind of jives relatively well with the kind of spirit of a lot of modern empirical research into, well, into psychology. I mean, Nietzsche is considered by people like kind of. He was a huge influence of people like Freud and Jung and stuff like that. I mean, I wouldn't go so far as say that Nietzsche was an evolutionary psychologist, but I think that he might be worth reading if you're interested in evolutionary psychology. It's kind of a very different perspective. The thing that Nietzsche has, as I say, a kind of picture of the human which ends up really influencing the psychologists immediately after him, but also just kind of. It's still a broad view of the human that still is around today is that Nietzsche conceives of the mind as basically a collection of drives, or the will as basically a collection of drives. And so as opposed to a lot of thinkers before him who sort of conceived of the will as like one object. So the kind of. I know if you want an image, it's like the little man driving our bodies, if that makes sense. Nietzsche kind of throws out this. This picture and he says, no, that kind of. If I think about how a human being works, they tend not to work quite like that. I tend to think, okay, I've got this kind of quite chaotic series of drives, and it's very difficult to pinpoint exactly what the ME drive is in there. And so he comes up with this image of human psychology which is of. We all have our mind just is a series of drives. And some people have those drives kind of roughly pointing in one direction. Other people are kind of completely scattered to the four winds. And, you know, the drives are pulling them this way and that way. And they can't act, they can't get anything done, they can't prioritize. And so this is kind of the view of the mind that I would say is kind of then ends up in a lot of late 19th century and right through the 20th century in terms of psychological ideas and theorising and research. Because, you know, if you think about how a therapist might conceive of the human will today, they tend to talk roughly in terms of different drives, different facets of the mind, like this kind of fragmentary view of the human will, where it's not just kind of one set thing, it's this collection of different ideas and drives and desires. And that kind of comes from Nietzsche. I mean, he's Building off earlier thinkers. But that, for instance, is where a lot of early psychoanalysts kind of credit where their view of the mind has come from. And then this, let's say, ends up filtering through. Right, right. Even to. Even to today. I mean, you know, I know you've mentioned before that you're kind of in. You have had therapy and stuff. So I think that, you know, I don't know how similar that was to how some of the therapy that you've undergone has conceived of the human mind.
- [02:45]
Chris Williamson
Hmm. Yeah. Well, I think Robert Wright in why Buddhism is true evolutionary psychologist who then pivoted to do mindfulness, a lot of retreats and sort of have a take on Buddhism with an evolutionary lens. He's got this wonderful idea about the mind as a collection of modules. And that's not too dissimilar to what you're talking about, that there is a module for this and a module for that and a module for the other, and trying to get the right module to go at the right time. And the fact that these are kind of compartmentalized off and they don't necessarily communicate very well. So, yeah, the difference between there being one train driver at the front that's pulling this big locomotive or kind of like a racetrack with shit, tons of different drivers, and they've all got their own design. One's going backwards, one's driving the car upside down. And yeah, the. I think what I'm fascinated by, my point at the very beginning, you have an area of expertise, something that you're very familiar with, and you start to see the world through this lens. And then when you start to learn a new topic, your anchoring bias inevitably starts. Oh, that's similar to the will to power. Oh, that's similar to notes from the integrator, you know. Oh, that's similar to such and such a thing. Like you have your own framing. But when I read anything from your world, I then start to think about, oh, well, that's the difference between proximate and ultimate reasons for behavior. Oh, well, that's an adaptive ancestral explanation for this thing. Oh, well, this is the balance and the trade off you have to have between survival and reproduction. So kind of whatever your topic, area of choice is, whatever you know best, everything else kind of acts in relativity to that. And it's so funny, just when you've got one area, you know, well, you learn something new and you start to sort of pull these threads out in reference to the first one.
- [04:34]
Joe Follos
Oh, yeah, I think that's. I think that's one of the reasons why I really enjoy, like, kind of looking at a lot of different topics, kind of reading as widely as possible. I think one of the, one of the real privileges of being in sort of, I don't know, public communication of philosophy as opposed to, like academic philosophy is that it kind of gives me the scope to sort of read a bit of this and a bit of that. And actually I quite often find these kind of connections emerging. Like I was reading a book, I think Peter Godfrey Smith, he kind of has a, you know, he's a philosopher, but works mainly in philosophy of biology. And he writes an entire book on the octopus and cuttlefish and this kind of divergent evolutionary path where you end up with these kind of radically different looking neurological structures. And, you know, it's. Again, it kind of. It's nice having that to draw from when I then talk about something like Nietzsche, you know, for example, I mean, this is kind of a tenuous link, but nonetheless, I think it kind of illustrates that quite well. Is that in octopuses. And I've checked, apparently that is the correct plural.
- [05:30]
Chris Williamson
It's not octopi.
- [05:31]
Joe Follos
I know, yeah, I, I kind of. I've been saying octopi for years.
- [05:34]
Chris Williamson
We've been double psyops.
- [05:35]
Joe Follos
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Turns out I was just being pretentious. God, what a. What a shot. But octopuses have this kind of incredibly disparate neurological system. So their arms are kind of semi autonomous. And that again, you know, reminded me a little bit of, you know, you've got, you know, Nietzsche has this picture of the human will as a bunch of, you know, semi autonomous drives. And you kind of. You find yourself sort of. Of in the midst of this situation. There is no, there is no kind of point separate from that where you can sit there and you can like, quite calmly and patiently dictate all of your drives to be this way. And that way you're kind of. You are inescapably in the midst of your own life and you just kind of have to deal with that. And one of the things he becomes increasingly concerned with, and you find this especially in his notebooks, is he becomes very concerned about the organization of the will. So again, a kind of a concept that comes up a lot in his notebooks is the notion of the organized will, where all of these drives are kind of roughly pointing in a single direction and the disorganized will, where they're kind of again, scattered to the fourth winds. And I think that this is. I wanted to kind of start on this point because I think that this is one of the things I really like about thinkers like Nietzsche and Dostoevsky is that they've got all this kind of like highfalutin philosophical side to them. And that kind of is what they're known for. But also as you're reading them you find a lot of, a lot of insight that is, is just surprisingly down to earth and sort of, you know, is immediately translatable into your, into your map of, of how you see the world and navigate it.
- [07:04]
Chris Williamson
Why is it that existential philosophy is so alluring? Like I wouldn't think if you were to just tell me from first principles, if you would say, hey, here's the books. This is kind of what they're about from. This is the level of difficulty, this is the level of length, this is the sort of level of accessibility. These are the kind of takeaways. This is what it was built for. This is the era it came out of. This is the demeanor of the people who wrote it. I would not put existential philosophy that high on my list of potential matches. And yet it seems to be very attractive, very seductive, very alluring to a lot of people, very life changing to a lot of people. What's going on there?
- [07:44]
Joe Follos
Why I think part of it is this sort of coherence between a set of quite abstract ideas by quite abstract thinking people and also. And the coherence between that and then a series of very, very down to earth issues that you just encounter every day. I mean something like Dostoevsky for example. He's got lots and lots of themes in his book that are about kind of religion and a particular conception of theology and an, an active love, which is a sort of an idea of kind of being self sacrificial in your, in your love and that sort of thing. But he's also got these kind of sudden, incredibly insightful psychological ideas like the idea that you can't run from guilt or notes from underground is sort of one of the most troubling and most, most detailed examinations of resentment that I've ever come across. And I think that there's something about say reading something that looks from underground. And you know, there are plenty of passages in that that are very, very abstract. There's also troublingly relatable habits of behavior that you'll be able to spot, or at least I'll be able to spot it myself. Maybe it's just I'm a bastard and everyone else is one of them, but at the very least I would imagine that most of us would be able to spot in ourselves. And. And I think that's part of what makes it so appealing, you know, and if you read Nietzsche, amongst all of the kind of impenetrable prose and maybe stuff that you're not necessarily interested in, there will be these kind of offhand psychological insights. Like, you know, a really good example. One of Nietzsche's, you know, analyses that has ended up being a bit more popular is again, to do with resentment, or ressentiment, as he calls it. And that, for Nietzsche, is sort of a cross between a conscious feeling, you know, resentment, and an unconscious drive to sort of recoup a sense of power when you're feeling powerlessness. And this is in his book the Genealogy of Morals, where essentially he's trying to give an analysis of Christian morality from his perspective. And he's broadly very anti Christian. He kind of. He really doesn't like it. His analysis of Christianity has been pretty heavily criticized, but I'm more interested in the kind of angle he takes. So his argument is that Christian morality, which is incredibly concerned with sort of suffering and compassion and. And pity and concern for the weak, in Nietzsche's terms, he basically asked, well, how could this kind of thing come about? And he makes the claim that Christian morality stemmed from a resentful feeling of powerlessness and that as an attempt to recoup a sense of power, these powerless people defined a morality whereby people would have to take pity upon them and. And stuff like that. And so regardless of what you think of that particular story, because, you know, as a. As a kind of historical narrative, it's the very least quite questionable nonetheless, that approach of taking something that almost seems commonsensically right, you know, what could be more intuitive than the idea of being compassionate or taking pity upon somebody vulnerable or who's in a difficult situation? Anietzsche kind of takes that and says, okay, well, if we interrogated what was underneath this, would we find something really quite reprehensible? Would it be kind of. Would it not live up to its own expectations as a moral system in its origins? And I find that that kind of approach is very fascinating. Even if you don't necessarily agree with his conclusions.
- [11:10]
Chris Williamson
Let me give you an equivalent from my world of evolutionary psychology. So sympathy is investment advice is a way of summarizing the adaptive reason for why we feel sympathy toward other people. Now, it's pro social. It is highlighting somebody who needs help, and it sort of engenders this sense of unfairness, an imperative to action, a softness Caringness toward this person. That all seems fantastic. You're living in a small tribe, you're probably somehow related to them or are going to be at some point in the near future, good to keep everybody alive. That's probably a pretty good idea. The self serving, that would be the, that'd be one layer of analysis. Another layer of analysis would be this person is so down on their luck, they are so bereft that their bank account is so low that even a penny to them would be a large contribution, which means that you can invest in them a small amount of, and they will owe you the maximum amount. To a starving man, a scrap of food is worth a lot. To a person who is pretty well fed, that doesn't mean much at all. So sympathy is investment advice. Not too dissimilar to what you're talking about there. That somebody who has been, has struggled in order to gain dominance or prowess or prestige in society or well, perhaps it's not that they didn't contribute, couldn't contribute, didn't have the capacity, didn't do the things right. Perhaps it's that they're inherently more noble. Like that's happening. The call is coming from inside of the house with regards to that thinking that they've turned the bar stool upside down themselves. Whereas this one is you on the outside looking at them and saying, oh, this poor meek person that really needs my help. I should, I'm. This would be a great idea. And, and also the back of your mind is saying, and if you help them, you don't need to give them much and they'll really owe you.
- [13:16]
Joe Follos
That's very interesting. Yeah. I think that to a certain extent Nietzsche kind of tells the story from the other perspective. So his account of the origin of like a compassion based morality is from the perspective of the powerless. And he says, well, you know, imagine that you're, you know. I suppose one important kind of preliminary to this story is that Nietzsche thinks that a feeling of overcoming resistance or a feeling of power is just incredibly important for font of a better term and existential fulfillment. So arguably, I mean, there's an interpretation of Nietzsche by a guy called Bernard Regenster. One thing I should say is that pretty much everything about Nietzsche is controversial. Not only did he say lots of controversial things, also what he meant is really controversial. So, you know, take all of this with a grain of salt. But in this Bernard Register interpretation, Nietzsche effectively identifies overcoming resistance as one of, if not the primary source of human fulfilment or existential fulfilment. And so under that kind of moat, feeling powerless is sort of like living in hell. You know, you're really in a bad way. And which is, I think, kind of jives with a certain common sense view of if you're powerless, you feel very vulnerable. That can be very, very unpleasant. And so his story of how, his idea of how Christian morality came about was that these powerless people thought, right, we're very powerless. How are we going to recoup a sense of power? Because we need to feel powerful. That's one of our intrinsic psychological needs. Again, if we wanted to draw a. A kind of line to where this has ended up in modern cognitive psychology, you might talk about agency or something like that. These people, they've got no power over their own lives. They have no feeling of strength. And so according to Nietzsche, they play a kind of twofold trick. One is to say something along the lines of, I chose this, I chose to be powerless. And the other is to say, actually being powerless is really good. And, you know, I kind of think that, again, whether this is a good account of how kind of Pauline Christian morality came about aside, I think that when most people read that, they're probably not. They probably take it out of that context and say something like, oh, yeah, actually I can think about the times where I couldn't achieve something because of lack of power. I didn't have the strength to overcome resistance, or I felt powerless or I felt weak. And as a result, I basically went, no, I don't want that thing anyway. Like, I can't get it, so I don't want it. That kind of sort of sour grapes, I suppose, is the kind of common expression for that sort of thing. So I think that's what kind of like, there's a kind of divergence between what kind of Nietzsche's interested in and what most people take away from Nietzsche. But I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. You know, there's nothing wrong with reading a philosopher outside of their original context and asking, you know, how can I build upon these ideas? Arguably, that's closer to doing philosophy than just sort of parroting. Exactly.
- [15:57]
Chris Williamson
Passively taking it. Yeah, very interesting. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Look, you're not going into business to learn how to code or build a website or do backend inventory management. Shopify takes all of that off your hands and allows you to focus on the job that you came here to do, which is designing and selling an awesome product. Shopify powers 10% of all e commerce companies. In the US they are the driving force behind Gymshark and Skims and Allo and Nutonic. And that is why I've partnered with them. Because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they're best in class. Their checkout is 36% better on average compared with other leading commerce platforms. And with Shop Pay, you can boost your conversions by up to 50%. You can upgrade your business and get the same checkout that we use at Nutonic with Shopify by going to the link in the description below and signing up for a $1 per month trial period or by heading to shopify.commodernwisdom or lowercase, that's shopify.commodernwisdom to upgrade your selling today. Are you familiar with Isaiah Boleyn's inner citadel? Do you know this?
- [16:59]
Joe Follos
Oh God, I've heard of it, but I don't.
- [17:00]
Chris Williamson
I don't know. Yeah, so it's very similar, or at least sounds pretty similar to what you're talking about. So he basically says if you can't get what you want, you have to teach yourself to want what you can get. So a good example would be your leg gets injured in a battle. You try to treat the leg, and if you do, that's fine, but if you can't, then you chop your leg off and announce that the desire for legs is misguided and must be subdued. So he talks about retreating into yourself when the fated ills of the world do not deliver to you that which you desire. You retreat into yourself. You wall yourself off into sort of spiritual depth. And he refers to this as the inner citadel. If you can't get what you want, you have to teach yourself to want what you can get. And this sounds super similar to this. So I guess why is resentment, resentment and resistance. Why are these two key themes, like what makes us so important? Why they're such big drivers?
- [18:00]
Joe Follos
So partly Nietzsche has a problem with resentment because he thinks it's dishonest. He just sort of thinks, no, you're lying about what you want, you want this, but you're denying yourself even the ability to go and get it or try and become more powerful. In his terms, the resistance thing's important because Nietzsche has the framing for a lot of Nietzsche's project around the will to power is that he's very worried about the death of God, but at the same time sees this a kind of opportunity. So one of Nietzsche's primary ideas, and I think that this is what draws a lot of people to Nietzsche and to existential philosophy in general is that he wants to make sense of and help us deal with suffering. This was particularly acute for Nietzsche because he had a really quite debilitating chronic pain condition. So he used to get these kind of splitting headaches and kind of that would put him in basically months and months of agony. And he. So this kind of idea of suffering and how to overcome suffering in a kind of internal sense, how to deal with it, how to. How to not hate life because life is kicking you in the head was really quite pertinent. And for him, a lot of the way that people had dealt with that before was using some kind of religion. So Nietzsche's an atheist, but he doesn't really argue for atheism in any meaningful sense. He kind of takes it as redemption. His philosophical project is more sort of, okay, if you're an atheist, what now? Because he thinks that a lot of the ways that people have dealt with suffering beforehand have been in some way religious. You know, imagine that you're a Christian. You can think something like, well, sure, I'm a kind of medieval peasant starving to death, but I'm going to inherit eternal life and moreover, eternal bliss. So things aren't that bad. There's a sense in which life can still be made meaningful, even if it's really unpleasant. And Nietzsche wants to figure out how to do this in a sort of post religious or post Christian world. And what he comes up with is he sort of sits back and thinks, right, I need to make suffering not something that is undesirable, but I need to somehow incorporate it into my kind of meaning scheme of the world. I need to take suffering and turn it into something that is desirable. And this is kind of the kind of underlying themes in his construction of the will to power. The will to power, for Nietzsche, is, you know, when he first introduces it, he largely talks about it as a feeling of overcoming resistance. So, again, I think this, you know, that sounds very abstract. It's also very easy to bring down to earth. You know, you've. I mean, I don't know how long you've been running this podcast, but I imagine it was an awful lot of work. I imagine it was. Still is very, very difficult. Right. And Nietzsche's point, if we kind of bring it more down to the everyday level, is that how some. How fulfilling or how good, in a very broad sense, something is going to feel once you've done it, is partly a function of how difficult it is, how much resistance you've had to overcome to do it. And Nietzsche spots In this, a potential way to re. Enchant suffering, a way to make suffering not the absolute end of the world, even if you're experiencing an awful lot of it, as Nietzsche was, is that he sort of goes, right, okay, well, what if we constructed our kind of philosophy of the world alongside this idea of overcoming resistance? Because then you sort of goes, right, in that case, even if you're suffering a lot, you can, in some sense, or at least you stand half a chance of finding a way to celebrate that. Because if your aim is to overcome resistance, you must also want resistance. So that's kind of his. So that was how he kind of wanted to. To incorporate suffering into the way that, you know, people looked at the world post God. But again, I feel like, you know, regardless of what you think about the very kind of abstract picture there, this is an insight that has trickled down into. Well, at the very least, you can see it manifest on an everyday level. Right. I think that, you know, arguably you can find it in modern psychological concepts like flow. You know, part of the. Part of the necessary ingredients of flow is that you encounter a certain level of resistance. That's part of what makes it meaningful. And for Nietzsche, resistance is. And resistance, and specifically overcoming resistance is what makes something meaningful. And part of what this allows him to do is say, well, whereas before we were aiming at heaven, we were aiming at a changeless, blissful state. Now, in fact, in order to achieve what we want out of life, we need to encounter resistance and we need to encounter suffering. And this is kind of image that. That is scattered all the way through his philosophy. So at the very kind of. Well, in Dustbake Zarathustra actually note before that, one of his first published works is called the Birth of Tragedy. It's about art. And he's talking there about how he thinks certain ancient Greek playwrights learnt to make the very, very harsh life of ancient Greece something that was to be celebrated, something that didn't tear them down, something that actually made them rejoice in life. And so he talks about Greek tragedy as a means to which they did that. And then, you know, this theme re emerges and thus fakes Zarathustra. The first metamorphosis of Nietzsche's Ubermensch is called the Camel. And Nietzsche defines the camel as a being that takes on load and also celebrates the fact that they're taking on load. So we have this idea of, you know, challenge is not just kind of an incidental thing to be compensated for later. The resistance is the point and the Overcoming of the resistance is the thing that's being aimed at. But again, it's all very abstract. But I think one of the reasons why Nietzsche really appeals to people is that that's a very abstract way of putting things. It's also very applicable to your everyday life. If you can find a way to celebrate suffering and celebrate resistance or celebrate overcoming resistance, that's going to be pretty handy for when you do encounter challenges, as we all inevitably do, what's the.
- [23:44]
Chris Williamson
Role of play or joy or pleasure or sort of moment to moment happiness? It sounds a lot here like meaning long term deferred gratification, the acceptance of challenge, almost the reveling in it. But this is largely deriving pleasure from meaning, not driving pleasure from pleasure. So is there a, is there a more sort of hedonic element of this at all or is that kind of discarded as flimsy?
- [24:20]
Joe Follos
So Nietzsche doesn't focus as much on the hedonic element, but it is there. It's not sort of, I think partly because he's less concerned about the pleasurable sides of life, because the pleasurable sides of life aren't that hard to get through. It's actually very nice. But he does touch upon this a fair amount. He often uses metaphors of dancing and joy and laughing. I think that the way you could incorporate this into this kind of idea of overcoming resistance, it's a little bit like sort of competitive sport, I think is a really good example of that. Right. Or even, you know, weightlifting or something like that. You know, it's not just that the overcoming of resistance is something that's, you know, you really suffer through and you think it's horrible and then you get to the other side and you're allowed to feel joy. Nietzsche thinks that ideally he wants to be in a situation where you're celebrating that process of overcoming resistance as well. So again, I think competitive sport is a good analogy for this. Right? Like players enjoy winning a game, but they also enjoy the process of winning a game. Nietzsche's philosophy is very, is in a lot of ways taking joy in process because again, if your fundamental goal is to continue to overcome resistance, then as soon as you've overcome one bit of resistance, or like in layman's terms, as soon as you accomplish one challenge, then you've got to find another one. If your whole aim in life is to continue to overcome resistance or beat challenges or however you want to put it, then it is a very kind of process based philosophy.
- [25:48]
Chris Williamson
Nietzsche's very keen on atomic habits for the 1800s, yeah.
- [25:53]
Joe Follos
A little bit. Interestingly, I always thought that atomic habits reminds me very much of this chat. Sorry, I'm going off topic now, this chatter in Aristotle. So Aristotle's entire philosophy is based around habits, and his whole picture of the virtuous human is based around habituated behaviour. So I've always thought there's a chapter in Nicomachean Ethics that whenever I'm sort of teaching, I'd occasionally go to speak at schools and teach and teach things. And one of the. I always refer to one of the chapters as sort of atomic habits in the kind of 4th century BC. But anyway. But, yeah, I think that, again, Nietzsche's philosophy is very kind of taking joy in the journey sort of way. But again, it's significantly less. I don't know how to put it. It's significantly less fun than I just put it. He's really into the nitty gritty of suffering, which you can imagine. This is a man who spends a good portion of his life in really unbearable pay. So you can see how this was a really imperative question for him to answer. But nonetheless, he does also eventually conceive of overcoming resistance and the process of overcoming resistance as a joyful activity.
- [27:04]
Chris Williamson
Right.
- [27:05]
Joe Follos
So.
- [27:07]
Chris Williamson
What would be his advice to somebody who keeps getting kicked in the nuts over and over and is regularly or keeps having a splitting headache that lasts for months on end? What would his sort of layperson advice be to them about how to deal with that?
- [27:24]
Joe Follos
So Nietzsche's ultimate goal for all of his philosophy is this concept of amalfati, which I think is a phrase that he borrowed from Stoic philosophy, but is using in a very different way. So the kind of culmination of his philosophical project is the idea of loving literally everything that happens to you and not merely kind of being content or kind of accepting it, but truly loving it. And it's kind of. I mean, he definitely never got there because, you know, if you read his letters, he's not necessarily a happy bunny a lot of the time. But that's. So the advice that he. Or he, when he's writing about how he deals with his own pay, he largely talks about it as a kind of resistance to overcome. So something that he's in some twisted way enjoying overcoming, he uses and he kind of channels it into his writing. So he has these splitting headaches and he has this. I can't remember the exact metaphor, but. But he talks about how it was so painful that it kind of focused his mind in a strange sense, and so he channelled that pain into his writing or into his work. And although that's not a kind of bit of his formal philosophy, it is nonetheless kind of reminiscent of some of the stuff he does say in his formal philosophy, where he talks about kind of sublimating pain or suffering or sublimating your drives towards this kind of organized will, whose aim is fundamentally to overcome resistance and as a result, must will resistance for themselves.
- [28:48]
Chris Williamson
Would that mean that a life without resistance would be kind of like a hell?
- [28:52]
Joe Follos
Yeah, essentially, he's very worried about human potential. So one of the images from Nietzsche's philosophy that really sticks out to a lot of people is the figure of the last man, which is a character in Thus Spake Zarathustra, where the last man is sort of a kind of passive nihilist. But the thing that they're hankering after is contentment. So not contentment in the kind of, I don't know, like, Buddhist sense, I suppose, of kind of reaching nirvana. Although Nietzsche also has a problem with that. This sort of, oh, right, I'm going to avoid challenge and resistance as much as I possibly can. And there are two reasons why Nietzsche is opposed to this. The first is that he's got this sort of. I don't want to call it sentimental, but he's got this real investment in the idea of humans achieving their potential. You see this. And again, all through his works, even he has an essay called Schopenhauer as Educator, where he's kind of reflecting on the work of Arthur Schopenhauer. And in that, he has this kind of like, almost mini rant in the middle of the essay, which is, like, really fascinating about how he just, like, absolutely cannot stand it when people don't in his words, kind of embrace what they could uniquely be as there, and instead allow these other pressures to interfere with, again, to kind of invoke his terms, to bid to interfere with them, becoming who they are if resistance isn't there. He's worried that humanity will just kind of decay into this, like, sludge that doesn't do anything. He's, you know, he's worried that all we'll do is kind of. We'll sit around on our sofas pursuing comfort, avoiding pain, and as a result, we will also never feel for him the kind of joys of actually ending up overcoming resistance. So, I mean, again, it all sounds very abstract when you put it like this. It's actually quite a. Quite an intuitive thought where, you know, imagine that. Imagine that you'd literally never struggled in life. Like, I, you know, I'm sure that Nietzsche wouldn't like actually wish his headache upon himself, but we could imagine a person who literally never encounters any struggle. Well, if we all recognize that there's a real feeling of achievement in overcoming some kind of struggle or resistance, even if it's just a small one, then for Nietzsche, this person will never experience that sort of. They will never experience the kind of fulfilment that comes with having overcome something.
- [31:10]
Chris Williamson
Does that mean that he hates weak people? Was he not a fan of sort of cowardly weak people?
- [31:16]
Joe Follos
Yeah, it's interesting because, I mean, in a lot of ways, arguably, Nietzsche wasn't like a massively strong person. You know, he was a nervous wreck for much of his life. Again, he suffered from a terrible chronic pain condition. And so there's this sort of back and forth that goes on in a lot of kind of popular discussions on Nietzsche where people sort of quite understandably pose the question of does Nietzsche really live up to his own ideal here? And again, if we perceive of power as overcoming resistance, then arguably he gets some of the way there. But, you know, I think that it is perfectly plausible to turn Nietzsche's challenge back on him and say, well, hang on a second, Matt, you got rejected by a couple of girls and then you decided you hated women as a whole and you kind of ran from basically any criticism that you got and you kind of retreated to your cabin and went on walks in the Alps. And that doesn't sound like it's overcoming resistance all that much. So to bring it back to Nietzsche's view on weak people. Yeah, he has a real contempt for them, like, in a way that I think it's very easy to run from when you're reading Nietzsche because, you know, we've had 70 years of, you know. Well, was it? Yeah, since the end of World War II. So 80 years now of people going, okay, the Nazis were a real fan of Nietzsche. This seems a bit. Have they misinterpreted him? What's been going on here? And basically everyone agrees that, yeah, okay, they have misinterpreted him in some key ways. This does sometimes lead to the creation of what I call fluffy bunny Nietzsche, which is where you sort of imbue Nietzsche with whatever you personally think is a really good thing and pretend that he said it, which is kind of relatively easy to do on the basis that Nietzsche himself says an awful lot of things, a lot of which contradict one another. You can kind of pick and choose little bits and create your own sort of model Nietzsche that says everything that you want him to say. But nonetheless, Nietzsche does have a real contempt for what he sees as weakness. And I kind of. I often sometimes wonder to what extent he turned that contempt on himself. I think that he kind of. He has this view for a number of reasons. The first is that he sort of thinks that weakness breeds dishonesty. So again, this coming back to that kind of sour grapes point. But secondly, he thinks that in his view, a kind of unwillingness to overcome resistance, which is broadly how he defines weakness, kind of an unwillingness or an inability to overcome resistance is going to eventually lead this person to kind of become a nihilist. So Nietzsche has this very confusing way of talking about, like, weak people, or quote, unquote, weak people, because again, he has a kind of weird esoteric definition for it whereby he quite often says, oh, yeah, man, like I hate them, I have scorned for them, or something like that. And then at other points he says, no, no, no, I love all people. And you sit there and you think, well, these things are very difficult to go together. And a lot of the time this is resolved by interpreters by saying something like, well, if you imagine that Nietzsche's project is for everyone to become willing and able to overcome resistance because he truly thinks, whether he's right or wrong, he truly thinks that that is the way that you can not become nihilistic in a world without God and without any kind of given meaning for yourself, then when he's kind of hard on weak people, I think a lot of interpreters will kind of try and reinterpret this. And, you know, I think that probably this thing is a broadly sensible interpretation as a kind of tough dad attitude, a sort of. No, you know, it will be. It would be in some way condescending to extend pity to people when Nietzsche fully knows that they could become this kind of. This figure of uniquely themselves and they could overcome resistance. So that's one of his broad critiques of compassion, which is sort of very difficult to get your head around, is that he thinks compassion is bad for the person, that is the person that one is being compassionate towards. He thinks that you are in some way holding them back, which, again, it's a very abstract point when Nietzsche puts it, but again, we kind of all recognize that whether you want to take it as extreme as Nietzsche does, that there are contexts where this attitude is appropriate. And I'm thinking of my own dad, right? My dad was sort of very, you must overcome challenges type thing. And in hindsight, I'm very, very grateful for that. Because it was kind of allow. It kind of taught me how to be more independent. You know, I think of some people I know who had maybe much and I quote unquote softer parents and actually, I don't know, did that benefit them? I don't think it did. Don't get me wrong. I mean I think that Nietzsche's way of putting this is probably far beyond anything that most people want to accept now because he is really, really anti compassion and anti pity. There are like a couple of passages where he's talking about, oh yeah, well you can be magnanimous if you want, but on the whole he's very, very, very hard on people that he perceives as weak.
- [36:23]
Chris Williamson
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- [37:29]
Joe Follos
So the Ubermensch is interestingly, despite the fact that it's like the thing that people know about Nietzsche, like the Ubermensch is married to Nietzsche in popular consciousness. It only comes up in Thus Spake Zarathustra. And the purpose of the Ubermensch for Nietzsche is it's at that point it's someone that is strong enough to make life seem meaningful and you know, in his terms create values evam recognizing that, you know, there is no God, the world is. Is in itself valueless. The Ubermensch is somebody that can look at that and say, all right, bring it on, man. Like, I'm going to create values for this world. And the actual term Ubermensch is very quickly abandoned in favour of other things. So this figure then evolves in later work into figures like the new philosophers. And the new philosophers are also creating value. So you can tell that they're doing a very similar job, but again, they're given a very different name. And eventually, you know, this ends up culminating. And his kind of final word for this is Dionysian wisdom, which again is. It's the same kind of idea. It's this idea that you can look at the world and most importantly, the look at the really awful things in the world. You know, all of the stuff that you would hate to go through and in some sense learn to celebrate it. And Nietzsche sort of doesn't pretend that this is going to be an easy thing to do. As I say, I think it's. I don't think that he would say that he accomplished that, but it's something that he at least believes to be possible. And I don't know, I'm a bit more sceptical, but that's kind of his position on things you said.
- [39:00]
Chris Williamson
I've heard you say Dostoevsky changed you. Why?
- [39:03]
Joe Follos
Yeah, absolutely.
- [39:04]
Chris Williamson
Why did that happen?
- [39:07]
Joe Follos
Partly because I think that it's very easy to compute ideas about resentment or hatred and the ways that these kind of eat you up inside. Right. So not just that it's like a nasty thing to do to someone else, but it's a nasty thing to do to yourself. There are some lessons, I find, where you can really learn them cognitively, but either, you know, you need to find them out for yourself through kind of no matter how many times somebody has told you something, or. And I think this is one of the, like, strange benefits of really, really good novels is that because you get inside as much as possible the head of the protagonist or the characters, you can kind of feel the lesson in a way that you might have processed intellectually but hasn't kind of want a better way of phrasing it, like, sunk down to the bones. I don't know. Again, it's very difficult to talk about this. It sounds really wooey, but I feel like most people kind of know roughly what I mean. Right. You know, we've all had moments where we've learned something cognitively, maybe from a psychology paper, and it's True, right? We know it's true and we read it and we think, yeah, I'm definitely going to do that. Right. Like that's in the old, that's in the noggin now and it's never coming out. And then immediately you just revert back to your old behaviors. And I think something for me reading Dostoevsky now, I kind of, I like talking about Dostoevsky just because I think that despite the fact that I'm an agnostic and he's a die hard orthodox Christian, we have a lot to agree upon. I think one of the benefits of reading these Dostoevsky books and indeed any novels that kind of really resonate with you is that they allow you to, they kind of speak directly to your emotions in a way that just makes it much more likely to stick in you. You know, if I, I can kind of cognitively think, oh yeah, resentment is a self destructive emotion that I should try and expunge really at all costs, which is a very difficult thing to do. You know, I think we all end up feeling resentful sometimes. But nonetheless, you know, it's very easy to think that the idea of, okay, I've spent sort of like three hours, you know, Notes for Underground is a pretty short book. So I spent like three to five hours with this guy who's just a bastard, like just kind of a miserable prick for again, is is really another word for it. He's just kind of, you know, he's, he delights in the misery of others and delights in his own misery, but it's not true delight. It's this self destructive outlook on life. If I think about not becoming the underground man, that's much more likely to stick in my head. I think that, you know, Notes from Underground is a book that I would really recommend to everyone because again, it's very difficult to put into words, but you really come away from it thinking, oh, wow, I may have known before that not caring about other people and only being out for yourself and trying to be an egoist and feeling all resentful of the world, thinking the world hates me and hating the world in return. I kind of cognitively knew all those things were bad things to do, but this kind of really hammers it home in a way that is truly emotionally unforgettable.
- [42:08]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, that's a lovely way to put it. It's interesting to me reading fiction. I'm not able to get through old fiction as easily as I can get through new sci fi. If you put a fucking Blake Crouch or A Max Barry or a Pierce Brown book in front of me, I'll eat that up. If you put some Dostoevsky in front of me, it's gonna take. I'm gonna have to do this in five page bites. But anyway, my point being, getting lessons to sink below the neck are a pretty difficult thing to do. And it's definitely the curse of the sort of ruminative thinker to assume that you can just top down dictate your system. Like, this is compelling. I should pay attention to this, pay attention to that. You're shouting at your own gut and system saying you will pay attention to this. And he goes, yeah, sure, I'll do that. And then as you say, you step out of the house and you forget it all. Whereas Alex had this really lovely idea, actually, which I think is related to this with regards to a anti atheist argument. The thing that's most real to humans is personification and narrative and story and archetype and good and evil and myth and motivation and human psychology and relationship. And that is what the world of atheism is telling everybody to let go of. The thing which to them is most real and most true and most easy to understand and most compelling. And instead in its place saying, be compelled by statistics and data and theory, it's all sterile and gray brown sludge and there's no reason for it other than just raw data. And this is what the spreadsheet says. And I think kind of the fiction versus nonfiction thing is not necessarily too dissimilar to that. We all love the idea of being as compelled by atomic habits as we would be by reading Dostoevsky. But, you know, and this is you. You even see this. Why is it the case? Apart from for, I guess, like explanatory depth, why is it the case that nonfiction books are fake, filled with anecdotes and little portable stories? Or because it's more engaging, but also because you know that this will hammer the point home better than the statistics can.
- [44:37]
Joe Follos
Absolutely. I think that, you know, where the. Again, it's, it's, it's, it's different. Right. Because narratives, especially, you know, fictional narratives are on their face false. So in some sense this proposes a challenge to anyone reading them. Right. Because you want to learn from them. You know, I want to pick up a dos devs, you can learn from it, but I can't just take everything.
- [44:56]
Chris Williamson
That reading a lie. I know I'm reading a lie.
- [44:59]
Joe Follos
You can write story about anything. You know, I could write a story about, about whatever I want in it, it wouldn't make it have any lessons in. So you've kind of got this weird two part division in what you're doing where like at one kind of, you know, critical side you've got to think, well, you know, this is a fiction book. I can't take everything it says as read. Like even its allegorical lessons, I can't just kind of take them on board because this is the product of one person's mind and one person's mind is eminently fallow. On the other hand, just approaching the world in this incredibly analytic. You know, I'm never going to put anything into any kind of narrative. I'm not going to talk to my emotions, if that makes sense. I'm not, I'm not going to appeal to them at all. I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna have propositions and relations between propositions. That's really hard to, that's really hard to learn from and also, you know, again, learn from in this kind of emotional sense. I also think that it's, it's a, I think that it's quite a, like an empty, feeling way to live. And I think that, you know, part of the reason why we perhaps don't recognize this is actually we're very good at telling stories. Like if you tell, if you give people some information, they will almost immediately sort it into a story if they can. It's because, you know, this is fantastic. There are loads of memory techniques and mnemonics that are just based on this idea. You know, you tell a story about something and again, to bring this back to Dostoevsky and even to tie in Nietzsche a little bit, I think one of the things that reading a novel by Dostoevsky does is it takes these lessons that you may or may not have heard before about kind of psychology and the kind of the human condition, if you want to call it that, and all of a sudden you are emotionally engaged with it and kind of, to use Nietzsche's terminology, it's not just appealing to your cognitive side, it's appealing to your kind of basic instincts and they're, you know, they're a lot stronger. It's very hard to think yourself into motivation, into like real consistent motivation. But if you really feel like something's meaningful and worth getting, you kind of naturally end up following it. I feel, I mean, my kind of path towards this way of thinking is very strange. At university I kind of basically just did logic, like kind of formal logic. So I was like the, I did like the driest form of philosophy imaginable where you just sit there and you've got a proposition. They're like, well, prove this. And you sit there and after 45 minutes you go, I give up. And you email the lecturer. But in theory you sit there and you finish proving it. And I kind of, you know, as I got a little bit older, I say older, I'm like 25. But as I kind of, as the rest of my, my brain, my kind of grew into my mid-20s, I kind of thought, yeah, no, there is really a place for this kind of slightly nebulous but nonetheless definitely there idea of taking a really great book from the past and using that to learn a lesson that you know independently is a good lesson, but that when it's presented in this narrative form really sinks in and all of a sudden you can enact it.
- [47:48]
Chris Williamson
It's interesting. Propositions and relations between propositions is actually what Alex calls date night on a Friday, which I'm recording with Alex tomorrow.
- [48:00]
Joe Follos
About the history of Lava.
- [48:03]
Chris Williamson
I'm very sorry, Vidya. This sounds to me a little bit related to this sort of danger of hyper consciousness, this sort of self referential thinking. How does that play a role? Again, we've hinted here at the perils of the sort of ruminative cerebral praying at the cognitive horsepower alter thinker. What's the danger of hyper consciousness?
- [48:29]
Joe Follos
So again, this is a really prominent theme in Notes from Underground. One of the things that the underground man is suffering from is what he calls the disease of hyper consciousness, which is effectively that he can't act naturally. And by naturally I sort of mean he sort of lives his entire life ever so slightly outside his own perspective. It's as if. It's as if he's moving through the world, kind of viewing himself from a third person perspective like a video camera. Like a video camera's following him around. And try as he might, he can't inhabit his own first person perspective. He's like stuck in this third person view. And again, I don't know, this sort of one of the interesting things about reading Dostoevsky, it's very hard to then go away and kind of go, oh well there's all of this empirical literature on kind of n equals 2000 people that verifies this. But I'm willing to bet that at least a fair proportion of people have had this happen to them, especially if they're of the more kind of ruminatey type. Like one of the reasons why not really appeals to me is because we have a lot of narratives and we're told as kids, right? You know, don't, you know, think before you act. Don't just, don't just act. And I think that a fair amount of population, myself included, really ran with that and went, right, I'm going to think and I'm going to keep thinking until I'm really sure what I'm going to do. And I'm never going to like all of those kind of instincts and more kind of, I'm, you know, forget about those. Those are, those are complete nonsense. I'm going to sit here and I'm going to calculate until I know exactly what's going to happen. And one of the, one of the things that, or one of the kind of sub arguments, I suppose, if you like, of not from Underground, is that Dostoevsky is attempting to illustrate this is simply not how you can live your life in any kind of compelling fashion. He's not, you know, saying you need to act without thinking at all. He's more trying to indicate that the needs that a person has can't simply be satisfied by cognition. And he's largely responding to other thinkers at the time who are kind of proposing a theory of human fulfillment called rational egoism, which is where you organize society around people rationally pursuing their own ends and everything turns out fine. And Dostoevsky's point is that, no, if people aren't rational enough for that, and moreover, they'd be miserable if they tried to be.
- [50:45]
Chris Williamson
There's a line in Hamlet, thus conscience does make cowards of us all. This sort of idea that self awareness is paralyzing. And it seems unbelievably linked here.
- [50:58]
Joe Follos
Yes. And again, it's one of those things where, like, I can't appeal to, like, airtight scientific evidence that this is a widespread phenomenon. I can only appeal to your, to your own experiences. But this is again, one of the, one of the really nice things about reading, you know, a kind of psychological novelist like Dostoyevsky or like another example is the French thinker Stendhal. When you're reading a very, very broad study, like studying 2,000 people, by necessity, any conclusion that that study comes to is probably, it's probably going to apply to you. It also probably isn't going to be as detailed as you might like just because, you know, this isn't, this isn't a fault. This is exactly what you want out of a generalizable conclusion. Right? You want something that applies to everyone. But humans are very, very different to one another. And so one of the things that I think that psychological Novels and also if, you know, there used to be journals that published therapists case notes and they don't really exist anymore, but they were fantastic for this kind of thing where if you pick up, you get a very, very in depth view of one person's perspective on the world, which might be completely useless, but it might, if that person's similar to you, that is like fucking gold. You know, if they're facing the same problem as you, that's amazing because it's really, really detailed. And you know, you run through this novel and you think, oh my God, I'm exactly like this person. Their life's a mess and so is mine. And how am I, how am I going to, how am I going to deal with this? And to a certain extent you get a lot more detail out of it. You just then have to make sure that your critical lens is also fitted so that you don't, you know, read novels and then go, right, everything in this novel is, you know, by necessity.
- [52:29]
Chris Williamson
I'm going to go kill, I'm going to go kill a woman. Yeah.
- [52:31]
Joe Follos
Yes, exactly.
- [52:33]
Chris Williamson
That's such a good point. The fact that by design representative samples are important in order to be able to do studies. And because of that you end up curbing off, you shave off outliers because outliers get regressed back to the mean by there being a sufficiently big sample size that's representative enough. But given that even the most, the average of average person, the most average person on the planet is going to have some idiosyncrasies that are abnormal or non typical or quirky or different, you actually do need to find for them, okay, what is the person that's like you's thoughts about this thing and what did they learn? And that kind of requires you to either I guess do purposefully unrepresentative samples.
- [53:24]
Joe Follos
Good luck trying to get funding for that.
- [53:26]
Chris Williamson
Yeah. Or as you say, targeting individuals experiences and going very deep.
- [53:33]
Joe Follos
Yeah, I think a good, a good analogy of this is, you know, I'm like, I know I go to the gym as a kind of hobby, but the gym that happens to be nearest to me is like a really intense gym. And so it's got lots of like powerlifters in there who do competitions, lots of bodybuilders in there who compete and you know, they're all pretty friendly. So I go up and natter to them while they're trying to get on with things. And one of the things I asked them about is their training program and something that you immediately find, I'M sure, you know, you're very into the gym, so I'm sure that you've kind of find this as well is that they're all very different because they all get to know themselves in such an in depth level that all of the kind of, that everything that applies to the average person no longer applies to them or they can see themselves in such a higher resolution that they will take some of that on board but also disregard other bits because they just know it doesn't work for them. Think about like, you know, like, was it Dorian Yates did like four sets for chest every two weeks or something like that? You know, you think that's 99.9% of people that's not going to work for. It's not a representative kind of training plan, but it really works for him.
- [54:32]
Chris Williamson
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- [55:31]
Joe Follos
Oh yeah, certainly in some cases, like I think that again, you can certainly, especially when you learn about some of these people's lives, you can really see how their personal struggles bleed through into their philosophies. I think that again, it's a very controversial thing for me to say, but for me the value in reading, say Nietzsche isn't necessarily because I think that his view on the world is all that correct. I think it's because for me, I also have a chronic pain condition. So when I read Nietzsche, I read someone who is kind of going through a similar thing. That I do. I'm in pain for pretty much all my waking hours. And so seeing him, kind of how he copes with that and the philosophy that emerged from that is really. Is very, very insightful for my own experiences as well. But, like, say, your point about depression, you know, you really see this in. In the philosophy of someone like Camus, where a lot of his early novels, like the Stranger is kind of the novel that. That he's most known for, is sort of about a really depressed person or somebody that really struggles to connect with reality or other people in any way, and sort of everything seems the same to them. And this has a philosophical aspect for Camus. But additionally, if you also feel similarly disconnected from life and you struggle to relate to people and all of that kind of thing, then that can be far more valuable for you than it would be for your average person. I think that to a certain extent, a lot of existential philosophy is philosophers taking their own problems and really attempting to dig into them. And sometimes they hit upon something that's really generalizable. Quite often they don't. I think that one of the valuable things about reading them is that if they happen to have a similar problem that you have, then that's so valuable. So, you know, take this kind of. Again, take the chronic pain thing, that kind of idea of like, I've got to find something. I'm suffering already, I've got pain, and there's nothing I can do about it. I need to find some way to celebrate it. It's like that's kind of the appeal of aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy for me.
- [57:36]
Chris Williamson
Why didn't Camus consider himself an existentialist?
- [57:41]
Joe Follos
So, partly because he fell out with all of the existentialists, but also because he has a slightly different philosophical approach. So existentialism, to kind of really boil it down as much as humanly possible. A lot of the existentialist solutions to nihilism, or a sense of felt meaninglessness, is authenticity in some way. And by authenticity, they don't exactly mean what your average person would mean by authenticity. They mean, in Sartre's case, like a recognition of your radical freedom. So Sartre, one of the things Sartre thinks that people do is act in bad faith. And for him, bad faith isn't like, you know, approaching an argument, wanting to show the other person to be a fool or something like that. It's when we go around the world denying our own free will. So he uses the example of a waiter who, when they're doing that, don't Think of themselves as a person who's chosen to wait. They think of themselves as like a waiter and nothing more than that. They kind of reduce themselves to their social role. And, you know, so Sartre's approach is very authenticity focused. Camus is a little different. So whereas existentialism is about restoring, kind of creating meaning, a sense of, you know, okay, if I was going to boil it down, it's like creating meaning, re imbuing the world with meaning. Camus sort of wants to know if he can continue to live without appealing to meaning at all. He has his phrase, you know, can I live without appealing? And that's kind of the insight out of which absurdism is born. So Camus is very against the idea of retreating into meaning in any sense. He kind of wants you to keep the meaninglessness of life right at the front of your head and see if you can maintain the contradiction between you wanting meaning in some sense and there not being any meaning there and somehow still continue to live and in some sense enjoy life. And a lot of people have pointed out that Camus suffered from really quite severe bouts of depression. And maybe this was a causative factor in the particular way that he has constructed this philosophy. Again, it's like, I think that, you know, while I think that a lot of these thinkers may have conceived of themselves as creating a semi universal solution to nihilism and problems of meaninglessness, I think that today, certainly the way that I see them is that they're very, very in depth solutions to similar problems that the authors happen to have.
- [60:17]
Chris Williamson
So, okay, how. How is actually just when it comes to Camus, sort of the story of Sisyphus seems very relevant to absurdism. What is the lesson to take away from that?
- [60:37]
Joe Follos
Yeah, so the myth of Sisyphus in Camus writing is meant to symbolize this kind of. It's meant to stand in for us all. So in Camus perspective, we are trudging along a basically cyclical existence in the sense that there is nothing that we're doing anything for. You know, we're not ending up, you know, we're not obeying the will of God or the will of the universe. We are just trundling along in a kind of uncaring, unfeeling vacuum. And he compares this to the Greek king Sisyphus, who is in punishment for his attempts to escape death is downs to Hades, where he has to roll a boulder up a hill and then watch it go all the way back down again and then start at the bottom and roll it all the way back up and just do that for eternity. It's an existence that completely. To take this back to our stuff about narrative earlier, if narratives are almost inherently meaning inducing, you know, they have a resolution and that's lovely. This is a structure of life that completely defies narrative resolution. It is like intensely felt. It's, you know, if you imagine doing that, it's like the most meaningless existence you can possibly think of. And on top of that probably really bloody hurts. So Camus, in his phrase, we must imagine Sisyphus happy is sort of. That's kind of. Again, it's like the absurdist project in a nutshell is can you maintain this view of life whereby you are kind of analogous to. Analogous, Analogous, analogous. Analogous to Sisyphus and nonetheless enjoy it and embrace it and be happy? And it's kind of an open question whether you can. I think that a lot of people will read Camus and Nietzsche or even Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky happens to chime with a lot of things that I think bring my life meaning. So, you know, loving others, that seems like a very very. That's very naturally meaning inducing to me. You know, a lot of people I think, read these thinkers and sort of go, oh yeah, that's great. But actually it is an open question whether any of this works. You're allowed to say, you know, I take your point, Camus, but frankly, I don't think I can imagine sisfus happy. I don't think anyone else can either. So shove it.
- [62:43]
Chris Williamson
Why, why, why was he, why was he concerned about trying to do that? What was the, what was he trying to solve for? What was the end goal he was trying to achieve?
- [62:51]
Joe Follos
So the end, well, the stated end goal of the myth of Sisyphus is that he wants to know whether he should kill himself or whether anyone should kill themselves. Given that in his view life is completely meaningless and his end result is, no, you shouldn't, because in some sense you can learn to be happy despite it, despite yourself being analogous to Sisyphus. That's kind of. That's what he's attempt. That's the problem he's attempting to solve. At least as he puts it, is the problem of suicide. You might instead call it the problem of meaninglessness or something like that, or the problem of how can you like literally feel and think that your life has no meaning and yet still continue to live and potentially continue to enjoy life in some sense. And you know, I kind of think that. I think that how compelling you find that overall narrative is going to Depend on how much the sting of the world potentially having no meaning really hits you. And I think that's going to depend at. That's going to hit you differently at different points in your life. I think for a lot of people, they are just very happy to say, yeah, the world's meaningless. Man, that doesn't bother me in any sense, and I'm kind of not like that. It actually does kind of bother me, but I think for a lot of people, it doesn't. That's fine. Like, I kind of think that. And I also think that it's, it's. Camus talks about this moment where you kind of realize that life's meaningless. And he doesn't describe it as a cognitive event. Again, to tie back to our point earlier, he's basically describing this as one foot in cognition, one foot in emotion. You know, you recognize that life is meaningless, but also suddenly you feel it. And, like, I think that again, to bring this kind of down to earth, I think that something like a midlife crisis or a quarter life crisis is a really good example of this. Like, thinking about, you know, I remember before I kind of started the channel, I was just kind of sitting around being like, wow. Like, I, I, I, I think that I feel like life is meaningless. Like, it's very kind of, you know, you've got this kind of life to live, and you have no idea what to do with it. You don't even know how you're going to prioritize. Like, I don't have an idea of what I even want to do. And I feel like, you know, that more commonly hits people. A kind of midlife crisis is, I think, potentially a more widespread example of that where, you know, somebody gets to like, well, actually, one of my friends had midlife crisis, and he described it as, like, he got to, like, 55, and he was like, oh, my God, like, I'm actually going to die at some point. And I feel like my entire life has been for nothing. And I can't, like, again, I can't, like, intellectualize someone into that experience. I don't think that I felt it nearly as much as my friend did, but, you know, he was seriously in a dark place kind of staring down the barrel of ending his own life on the basis of this realization. And, you know, I imagine for a lot of people, it just never happens. And that's, like, great. Like, I don't think there's any reason to, like, induce it, but I kind of think about my friend a lot with this sort of thing. Where it's like, it's very easy, especially because now, you know, I kind of have a lot of, you know, I kind of enjoy life. I'm kind of a natural optimist, so I kind of find it quite easy to kind of bumble along in a kind of sort of generally, like, quite happy state. But. And so I think that sometimes I kind of look at these. Look at something like Camus writes and says, ah, you know, he's talking about how the realization that life is meaningless is going to bring immense suffering and it's going to make you question whether it's worth carrying on. I kind of think, will it? And then I remember my friend and think, I just don't think I felt it yet.
- [66:26]
Chris Williamson
Well, I wonder how much of this kind of goes back to what you were saying before so much of the work of philosophy or even YouTube channels did. Everything is a thinly veiled autobiography, as far as I can see.
- [66:40]
Joe Follos
That's a very Nietzschean idea. Nietzsche thought that a lot of philosophers were just basically writing their own autobiographies.
- [66:48]
Chris Williamson
Right? Well, I mean, it certainly seems to be the case here, does it not?
- [66:52]
Joe Follos
Oh, absolutely. I think that it really applies to existential philosophy, you know, and I think that's, again, one of the reasons. I think one of the reasons why it's very easy. You know, although existential philosophy pulls people in, it's also very easy to pick up a couple of books of existential philosophy and basically go, this is like bollocks. But I think that a lot of the time, that feeling of this is like, bollocks. Basically happens if you pick up a thinker who is just psychologically wired very differently to you. I sometimes have that with, like, someone like, you know, I occasionally pick up Sartre, and I don't know, I just can't. Like, there's something about it that just doesn't particularly resonate with me. I can't quite get inside the head of the problem.
- [67:27]
Chris Williamson
How would you advise then? Or how would Camus advise somebody who is torn between the. Life is, like, excruciatingly meaningful and life is excruciatingly meaningless. How do they sort of. I. Laughing my ass off. How do they thread the boat through the middle of that?
- [67:49]
Joe Follos
As in. So. As in the idea of somebody, like, alternating between. Sometimes they feel like life's incredibly meaningless.
- [67:54]
Chris Williamson
Have you seen. Have you seen the image that I'm talking about? Do you know this?
- [67:58]
Joe Follos
Is this the thing on the train? No.
- [68:01]
Chris Williamson
So this. This is. This is one of my favorite images. I'LL get Dean to put it up for the people that are watching. So it's a tiny little, a tiny little boat. A drawing of a tiny little boat. I'll put it in the chat. So you should, you should be able to, you should be able to see this here. It's a tiny little boat and it's illustrated going along the water in between a whirlpool. And on the left it says life is devastatingly meaningless. And on the right is a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 headed dragon. And it says life is excruciatingly meaningful. And there's this teeny tiny little sort of Greek looking boat with oars coming out the side of it and it just goes a lmao.
- [68:42]
Joe Follos
I think that's, I think that's like, you know, the, I think that's Scylla and Charybdis. The kind of, the, like the, the. I actually think that the, the kind of an underexplored area in existential philosophy which I think Camus touched upon a little bit, but I think is like, if somebody wants to go out and write like the next tract of existential philosophy, I'd love for it to be on. This would be that idea of excruciating meaning because it's very easy, I think, to romanticize the idea of a meaningful life, but it's totally possible for things to be like far too meaningful for comfort. And you know, Camus talks about this in the context, Camus talks about this in the context of politics, which I think is, you know, fascinating. So he's, he, after he finishes the Myth of Sisyphus, he sort of has this kind of like indifference about it. He's kind of, he's like, right, okay, so you know, all the experience is roughly the same. There's no objective meaning. I'm somehow managing to muddle along despite that. But in theory this should make me indifferent to all of the bad things that are happening around me. And Camus basically finds he can't do that. And he has this, this book called the Rebel, which is by far his like most impenetrable work. But it is generally very, very interesting. And one of the points he makes in the Rebel is that at a societal level it is perfectly possible to become too imbued with meaning. If you think about any kind of sort of theocratic tyranny or like the terror of the French Revolution or Camus example is sort of Stalin's ussr. His analysis of this is that the issue is at least partly that if you have an ultimate Meaning that you're willing to literally sacrifice everything else to. Then you will sacrifice as many lives as humanly possible or as you think is required to fulfill this vision. What I think, and it occurred to me that this observation definitely works not quite in the same kind of apocalyptic sense, but works at some sense on the individual level in that, you know, we all. I think that the sense of life being too meaningful is very, very natural. It's the sense of being under too much pressure. This idea of like, oh, everything that's happening to me counts an awful lot. What am I going to do? Is, I think, a perfect example of somebody feeling too meaningful. Again, I think that means that, yeah, that's a really insightful meme, actually. I'm going to spend a long time. Because, again, I think that what a lot of people want is not an abundance of meaning, nor a complete lack of meaning, but enough meaning to give them a general direction, but also enough meaninglessness that you can make arbitrary choices along that way, you know, you don't actually want every one of your decisions, I would argue, at least, I think most people don't actually want all of their decisions to be dictated by a kind of set of values in advance. And I also think that that's kind of, I don't know, it's kind of vaguely robotic. And also I think that that kind of approach doesn't do justice to just how difficult some decisions are. I think that certain moral dilemmas, you kind of, you know, imagine that. Imagine that I, you know, you spoke to someone. Sartre has an idea of, like, an insoluble moral dilemma. And his example is that, you know, somebody's torn between staying home and looking after their elderly mother or going to fight the Nazis in the French Resistance. And I know I'd be, you know, his mum could really suffer from this. She could even pass away while he's gone. And at the moment, it's uncertain whether the French Resistance will be victorious at all. And Sartre's point is that this seems pretty indeterminate. And, you know, I don't know if somebody's value system was so well organized that they could give me, like, an instant answer to that dilemma. I don't know if I'd like that. I think that would be like. I think that, you know, there's a sense in which they're. Their choices will be so determined that I don't know. I don't know if it would do justice to how excruciating. Real moral dilemmas and real, Just decisional dilemmas. Are.
- [72:41]
Chris Williamson
I wonder how much of this is a challenge of communication that it's so, it sounds so flimsy to sort of talk about emotion and desire and being pulled in different ways and gut instinct and this ephemeral, like, flaky sense of something. But it's, it's, you know, show me, let me grab a hold of it, put it into language that is testable. That's you. Does this make sense, this sort of desire to communicate things in a much more concrete, verifiable way?
- [73:14]
Joe Follos
And I do think that's a, that's a pretty good instinct because at the same time, you know, I, I, I always, I do think that philosophical discussions can quickly go into territory that is, you know, so abstract that I don't think anyone could plausibly give a shit. But, you know, there's, I think that one of the ways to sort of keep this down to earth is to link things like meaning back down into things like motivation and action and affect. So I think that, you know, when somebody says, you know, what's the meaning of life? There's a reason why that question can strike us as really, like, pointless. Like, you know, what's the meaning of life? Like, how do I even go about passing that? And I think that instead of asking questions like, what's the meaning of life? I find that people are often a lot more enthusiastic. If you phrase an existential question just in terms of, you know, what gets you up in the morning? What actually is the kind of motivating force behind your action? What if you removed it? Would you then struggle to do anything with, like. And, you know, I think that this allows people to get a grip on what they find meaningful, which is quite a useful thing to learn. You know, if you find out that actually, like, I would really not know what to do without my group of friends, that might tell you. You might want to invest more of your time and effort into that area of life. And so it's getting kind of quite a way away from these particular existential philosophers. But I think that's one of the values in asking existential questions, is that it does force you to confront what matters to you. And I think that it's very easy to forget what matters to you. I mean, you know, to tie this back to fiction. I know that a book that you like is the Alchemist, and I feel like a lot of, you know, the same kind of lesson occurs there, right? This is another idea of, like, it's very easy to forget the kind of things that are intuitively and instinctively meaningful. I think that one of the, one of the real flaws, I think, in approaching questions of meaning in the way that I do, which is to go away and read lots of existential philosophers and see what they think, is that there's a tendency that you can just become really ruminative about it. And you know, occasionally I get a comment under one of my videos that's like, you're just overthinking it. And sometimes if I'm in the right mood, I look at it and I'm like, you're probably right. There is a sense in which you can get so, so deep into what this person's particular interpretation of Nietzsche is, or this person's secret interpretation of Camus or Tsartra or Kitgarh. And I find that stuff naturally interesting. But there is a sense in which for the way that just you would want to approach an existential question, if you don't necessarily want to go away and read a bunch of this stuff, is that I think that part of it is recognizing that meaning is at least partly extra cognitive. It may involve cognition, but it's not merely cognition.
- [76:09]
Chris Williamson
It's all vibes, man, just come standard.
- [76:11]
Joe Follos
Well, I think that, you know, I think that vibes are really important.
- [76:14]
Chris Williamson
Like I, I do not undervalue the vibes.
- [76:18]
Joe Follos
Yeah, I. I think so, you know, think about like what you come away with from a social set, like a kind of hang out with friends or hang out with someone. You know, you might not remember exactly what was said, but you remember the vibe. I think that, you know, we kind of. Again, I don't want to get kind of too wooey, but I feel like we are far beyond that point. One of the. I think that something that one of the valuable insights in Nietzsche's kind of prioritizing of the instinct or kind of Dostoevsky's novelistic approach to existential questions is that they are both essentially saying, you know, this isn't merely a cognitive issue. This is something that you also need to. To feel and enact. And you know, they disagree on a lot, but I think it's nice when they agree on something.
- [77:07]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, this sort of balance between what the cerebral ruminative thinker loves, which is to ask the why question, and the realization that there is such a thing as too much reflection. There is a golden mean for fucking everything. Right? And rumination is one of them. I'm kind of obsessed by this idea at the moment. That advice which is made and works for most people will be widely distributed because on average it's most. It's effective, it's an effective meme and it'll continue to spread. But the problem is, because it's so popular, it's got such a bull run behind it that even people who that advice is not for, who already have too much of the thing that it's pushing them to do more of, attempted to take it on because it works so well for everybody else. So one of the good examples here is something like just work harder now, just working harder will reliably give everybody, almost everybody on the planet will benefit from that. There are very few scenarios that I can think of where working harder is not going to make the outcomes. But there is a particular cohort of people for whom working harder is something they already do too much of and what they actually need is a good rest ethic rather than a good work ethic.
- [78:32]
Joe Follos
I also think that. Oh, sorry, go on.
- [78:34]
Chris Williamson
No, no, no. Just that the same thing comes for reflection, rumination, that there are many people Think before you act, young Joseph. Think before you act. This is very important. Oh, I must think before I act. Thank you, Mum. Thank you, Dad. I go. If you are a perennial thinker, maybe think a bit less, maybe follow your gut. But the problem is thinking before you act, even for the overthinker, is likely to give them, from an objective metric sense, better outcomes in life. They're going to be more careful, they're going to be more considered, they're going to make fewer failures. But what is it that they've lost? All of the losses here are hidden and all of the successes tend to be pretty observable. So the losses of time, of the quality of peace, of the inner texture of your mind, of lost opportunity because it took you so long to be able to arrive at this particular thing. And the same thing for hard work. Well, how much are you tearing yourself up? What about the state of your health? What about your blood pressure? What about how much time you're spent thinking about this thing and obsessing when you should have just been eating a sandwich or playing with your friends or doing whatever? Well, objectively it's made you more successful. But again, I think this is why widespread rough hewn advice should always go through a filter. And it's also why I find the criticisms that kind of treat audience members. You know, the podcast election with Rogan last year, it is so fucking patronizing to say, look at these agentic unwashed peons, watching this man just shovel like radical dogma down their throat. They voted exclusively because of what he Said, okay, right. So you're saying that these people have no ability to discern anything that they see, and there's no filter between what they watch on YouTube, on Joe Rogan's channel, or this advice from David Goggins saying, to work harder, or, you know, the fucking Camus saying, you need to refer whatever. Like, there is no degree of filter. And in the same sentence, I know that if the advice is sufficiently seductive and if it's sufficiently popular that people do tend to imbibe that, so there's like a big tension going on there. But, yeah, I'm pretty obsessed with this idea. Popular advice gets taken on unquestioningly, and for some people, they already have too much of it, so they probably need less.
- [80:57]
Joe Follos
Absolutely. I think the other. The other side to that is a lot of the. A lot of popular advice just kind of generally is going to be maximized towards sort of minimizing social harm. So I actually, the thing that reminded me of this was a clip by David Mitchell on Would I Lie to you? And he sort of says, you know, children, broadly speaking, are divided into reckless children and timorous children. And he sort of says, you know, in order to keep the reckless children from jumping off of things and killing themselves by virtue of their, you know, untethered love for life, you need to tell all children, stop what you're doing. You know, think and slow down and be more afraid. And if you're already naturally fearful, as David Mitchell was, this is terrible advice and is actually going to harm you. But because the harm is significantly more hidden, as you say, it's less likely to end up on the news and have more guardrails.
- [81:46]
Chris Williamson
Oh, that's so good. You explained what I was explaining much more succinctly than I managed to do it. Yeah, that's brilliant.
- [81:55]
Joe Follos
I think that the. Yeah, but I totally take your point about pocket advice. I think, again, you know, one of the benefits of reading novels is, yeah, you kind of laser in on. If you really relate to a particular novel, then you laser in on a vice that is almost tailor made for you and lessons that are almost tailor made for you. And I go on about Dostoevsky all the time because that's a novelist that I really like and who really resonates with me because a lot of the. He resonates with me far more than someone like Nietzsche, for example, because a lot of Dostoevsky's advice or lessons for living meaningfully are to do with this notion he has of active love. You know, he's very religious. But the way in which this religiosity often manifests in his work is through the idea of loving others. But he's pretty kind of clear that loving others is going to be really hard work. He has this wonderful kind of offhand brilliant insight from a doctor in the Brothers Karamazov where the doctor says, ah, you know, it's very easy to love mankind in general and it's very hard to love people in particular. I think that's brilliant. That's amazing. That's so true. And I think, yeah, Dostoevsky kind of outlining that act of love is going to make your life incredibly meaningful, but also is going to be really, really, really tough. Is, you know, that's an approach to life that very much resonates with me. That's why I kind of go on about Dostoevsky all the time. I find that all of the stuff that Dostoevsky criticizes people for are applicable to me, and I find that all of his lessons are also applicable to me. So that's kind of. But my point is that other people might find authors or philosophers or anyone really who really resonates with them. I think that we kind of, again, we have a tendency, and I have this tendency as well, recovering logic students and all that, to only ever take on lessons that are universalizable. And the trouble is that kind of, if we, you know, if we're talking about the mean earlier, the kind of level of standard deviation of human properties is absolutely massive. So, you know, you go off the mean, there's a good chance that you might end up. You might end up severely down the wrong path, especially in the kind of details. And that's where I think this kind of novel stuff can come in. I'm still, you know, don't. I feel like. I feel like I sound like I'm really down on empirical psychology. I'm really not. I think it's brilliant. But I also think that, you know, I'm going to try to make the case for the kind of psychological novel, which is that you absolutely won't learn anything about humankind, but you might learn something about a few people and one of them might be you.
- [84:24]
Chris Williamson
Oh, dude, that is so good. Hey, man, let's bring this one home. I love your work. I love your channel. Everyone should go and subscribe. Where should people go? They're going to want to keep up to date with the stuff you're doing.
- [84:34]
Joe Follos
Oh, yeah, I suppose I'm unsolicited advice on YouTube. I may change the name at some point. That was kind of a name that I basically put on to acknowledge the fact that nobody'd asked me to do this. As a result, everything I do is deeply unrelated.
- [84:47]
Chris Williamson
Well, I'm very pro. I am very pro. Using your own name. If you ask Alex when you see him tomorrow, ask Alex for the war zone that he made me crawl through in order to convince him to change his channel name from cosmic Skeptic. Just get him to explain to you because he could. He could make me breakfast for the next six months and still owe me every single day. He could make me breakfast. I'm so bullish on you making a change. Make it your name, dude. Capture that Fucking personal accountability. But everyone should go and watch it. You've got great breakdowns of tons of different books and ideas and even stuff that I wouldn't have expected on their ideas about masculinity and love and crushes and stuff. It's sick. So I'm very bullish on Joe Folly and dude, I'm looking forward to speaking again, man.
- [85:39]
Joe Follos
Oh, thanks. As am I.
- [85:43]
Chris Williamson
I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real life stories. And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. These are the most life changing reads that I've ever found. And there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to ChrisWillX.com books. That's ChrisWillX.com books.