5 Useful Things I’ve Learned from Existentialism

i've been reading and making videos about the existentialists a lot recently and in the past uh recently i've made a video on authenticity i've looked at sartre in the past i've looked at nietzsche and dostoyevsky i thought now would be a good time to reflect on that and try and write something more practical about the existentialists as a exercise and reflection so i write a blog post which i'll link to below but i thought i'd off the cuff ramble about here briefly and always trying to bring philosophy down from the abstract and ethereal heights and wrestle it to the ground in some way and try and make it useful so five useful things i've learned from the existentialists one remember to laugh at yourself i tend to take myself too seriously sometimes and if you look in the dictionary uh seriousness is synonymous with earnestness and conviction and to have a conviction about something is to have reasons for it to be certain about it in some way to hold it strongly seriously and the existentialists in many ways reflect on the limits of reason the limits of what we can know for sure um dostoyevsky in the underground man his anti-hero laments his inability to hold or find or create a stable identity a stable character he has ambiguous and inconsistent desires he says at one point i did not know how to become anything neither good nor bad neither a rascal nor an honest man neither an insect nor a hero and i think we can all identify with dostoyevsky's anti-hero in some way and we all know what it's like to wake up losing a certainty we had about something the day before um losing interest in a meal we've always loved finding new evidence about a belief we hold so while conviction and confidence is obviously important um to hold something a belief an idea to do something with such strong conviction at the expense of humility is an overestimation of our cognitive abilities this is something camus reflected on too in the myth of sisyphus he likened our lot in life to sisyphus forever condemned to rolling a rock up a mountain only for it to fall back down roll back down the next day we can not find ultimate conviction ultimate reason ultimate meaning for acting in a specific way we have to make leaps of faith and many people find this difficult many people find this um paralyzing and when i first read sisyphus i found camus advice at the end one must imagine sisyphus happy to be quite underwhelming for one of the most influential writers of the 20th century but one day i found myself laughing at myself or a friend laughing at me us laughing at something stupid i'd said something uh irrational that i'd done and i realized that that's what laughter is a lot of the time it's a cover for something more serious um it's a way of dealing with the absurdities of life the times you've done something incoherent or irrational or said something stupid and in the way it keeps us grounded uh because of that plato said that we laugh at past versions of ourselves and others because it makes us feel superior but instead i think it keeps us humble laughter is a cover for something more serious so we shouldn't take seriousness irrationality stupidness too seriously we should stare down the barrel of our irrationality with laughter and remember to have a good chuckle at ourselves and it's just the age-old wisdom rearticulated by the existentialists that laughter is scientifically anecdotally historically good existentialist medicine so rather than imagining sisyphus happy maybe we should imagine him laughing okay the second thing i've learned is to stop thinking the existentialists like the romantics were commenting in many ways on the limits of the scientific world view the scientific world view is the dominant lens we view the world through in modernity and essentially it's the search for causation now we've always been a scientific species in a certain way we've always said or thought things like the seed will grow if i plant it there hopefully we ask what's causing a herd in hunter-gatherer times to move a certain way so our minds in a way are built to think in terms of cause and effect um and we try and predict the future in this way too we try and collect variables we say if i approach something this way i predict it will do this whereas if i approach it this way i predict it will do that and we try and weigh up different options accordingly but a quick reflection on the nature of our minds of our cognitive abilities quickly reveals that that way of thinking is actually quite limited um think about the times when your mind's been stumped by even a simple sub i struggle with basic math sometimes because i'm so under practiced a lot of it is rote um or a poorly worded recipe leaves us just stumped i get it a lot when i play chess um you think one two three moves ahead and then your mind gets a bit fuzzy you really can't think well personally i can't think and i think most people can't think through more than a number of options at a time and this is something the existentialists were commenting on in a way especially someone like kierkegaard but i'll give you an example quickly last summer my partner and i uh were reflecting on whether we should buy a car we were weighing up all the options all the variables and we live in the city we don't really need one but we wanted to get out more how expensive would it be what would it be like driving in the city um bad for the environment how much is fuel insurance parking permits how much would we save on trains um you quickly realize and even a simple decision like this that the variables are vast and ambiguous and then you also have the problem of weighing variables against each other which is subjective how much enjoyment you're going to get out of a camping trip compared to money you save there's no rational way of weighing those two things up against each other they're not calculable but then there's also the problem of many of the variables being in the future you can't predict what's going to happen you can predict how much you use something uh how expensive it will be so the reason and logic is inaccessible to us this is something kierkegaard knew and and he advised instead that passionate action was just as important as reflecting and modern neuroscience has commented on this too antonio di mazzio has influentially argued that our mind uses feelings gut feelings somatic markers he describes them to process cognition as much as reasonable and rational thought does that will get a feeling like a bear scaring us in the woods produces a feeling of fear and the feeling will present certain options to the might so it's like a screening process so follow your gut is now scientific advice there's a reason for it feelings are important there's limits to our cognitive ability kierkegaard uses the example of the story of the good samaritan who as we all know was walking down the road that saw a man attacked beaten and robbed and helped him but kierkegaard reimagines the story through the lens of reason and rationalism and he says first he thought what a beautiful thing it might be to help this person in the distance but as he got closer and he had too long to think he thought about all the bad things that might happen the thieves might still be around it was getting dark it was dangerous he doesn't know if doesn't know if the person is telling the truth the other person might think he is a thief too and so instead of helping he just walks on by kierkegaard said that reflection turns poisonous if it simmers in the brain for too long so his advice was to reflect for a certain amount of time depending on the problem we might also think about the opportunity cost of other things we might be doing while we're reflecting for too long but reflect on our intuitions too and then after a set amount of time passionately and decisively act okay number three is always be creative one of the things that unites the existentialists is their commentary on authenticity which the philosopher jacob gollum has written is a protest against externally imposed values it's the idea that some things in the world are given to us from the outside and some things come from within and if human meaning is human made as the existentialists thought then we have the ability to create many things ourselves whether it's artistically verbally whether it's just in our ways of seeing the world in our values so nietzsche thought that there were two modes of living in a sense that we either adopted our values from others and we're often learning absorbing seeing uh or we create them ourselves and in a sense this is just talking acting doing but nietzsche thoughts that the former was by far the most common the anthropologist david graber has also said that one of the great secrets of the world is that it's something that we make and that we could just as easily make it differently um some people i think find this daunting they think they're not creative that they're not innovative but i think there's creativity in every single action in some way graber lamented the rise of jobs needlessly soulless repetitive jobs that were just a modern curse and even the most basic routines have creativity instilled in them in some way we can all bring our own interpretation and perspective to the world and do something unique if you look at the philosophy and the psychology of creativity there's quite a strong consensus that to be creative something needs to be both original and valuable but the post-structural philosophers people like geodulers have argued that everything is original in some way no two palm trees are the same every time i say hello it's uttered with different air in a different context difference newness uniqueness it's imminent it spreads throughout the world and everything that's done and if you combine that with the argument that we are an inherently creative species you get quite an inspirational method find creativity in everything heidegger thoughts that if we ignore our potential to be unique authentic beings do things for ourselves find our own purpose be that unique little boutique arts and shop that if closed would be irreplaceable that would leave a void in the time if he thought if we ignored all this we would live with an existential guilt we'd be angst ridden and that this was part of our constitution as humans so while we can't all be great historic world-changing figures we can all at least perform great historic world-changing creative actions so even the smallest action can be creative the fourth thing i've learned is that all of our projects are connected and we should treat them like rocks sartra's most famous phrase existence precedes essence is the ultimate invocation that how we define ourselves doesn't come from deep within it comes from the projects we're pursuing in the world the goals the ends that we're pursuing and we look at the world through the lens of those things we don't see the world objectively it's not neutrally presented to us we interpret it through our different goals through our ways of looking at life and a project can be anything it's not a literal project it can be um a friendship it can be uh it can be a character trait it can be anything that we're thinking about uh at the moment um sartre's most famous example is the crag that looks differently to the mountaineer the geologist the farmer they all take different things from it but a result of this is that the mountaineer doesn't just look at the crag in a different way from the farmer they also look at music hear music in a different way take different things from it because of the way they look at the mountain they look at food in a different way they look at friendships in a different way and what this means is that the ways we look at things are connected to the other ways we look at things you know one interpretation coming from this project will have a knock-on effect on an interpretation of another project everything is connected and analyzing interpreting taking a deep look at those connections can only make life more deeper more meaningful more fulfilling for example i might listen to a song in a different way or enjoy a song more because i thought i used it in a video in a particularly effective way i like a particular beach because we went that a lot when i was younger it reminds me of certain feelings all of these things are interrelated um and for sartre the world only makes sense up against these projects and he calls the way we look at things like mountains facticity situations and again anything can be a factity anything can be a situation but the way we choose to approach it the way we compare it and relate it to other things is what really matters um [Music] freedom for the mountain climber only makes sense up against the different variables and characteristics presented to them through the sheer blunt cold faticity of the rock and how they choose to approach it scale it overcome it and we can think of anything in this way and think of particular attitudes or particular emotions i have i can take them and think of them as rocks and think of them as things to be analyzed interpreted and if necessary overcome and i think this is a more optimistic way of interpreting the traditional existentialist view that life is suffering sartre's view is more that no life is just blunt fantasity we bring an interpretation to it and freedom makes sense up against it we have to challenge ourselves and think of the links between challenges okay finally number five switch off autopilot if it's true that we are creativity needing and authenticity seeking beings as many of the existentialists thought how do we go about pursuing this actively rather than passively adopting others ideas and values like sheep like nietzsche said take reading i often as i'm sure many do find myself frustrated after after i've been reading for an hour or so and i realized i can't remember anything i've just read and i think we expect to be able to do things passively and then recall them at will but this is absurd we have to be able to engage in things actively for them to become embodied within us for them to become ours kierkegaard talked about this as subjective truth he wanted he said to find a truth that was true for him he wanted to grow in his own soil it was a kind of subjective inwardness a taking of the objective world and making it personal individual unique and he said one of the ways to do this practically is to engage in double reflection so it's important to learn and it's important to then reflect it's important to assimilate it to with other things you know to relate it to engage with it and this is more important than the initial passive learning with algebra for example it's not the knowledge that's necessarily important it's what you do with it what you build with it how you use it in your life and this is what kierkegaard thought was integral he said to understand and to understand the two different things and he wanted to be thought of as a 19th century socrates and socrates thought of himself not as teaching people but awakening knowledge within people knowledge that was already there he compared himself to a midwife and i think it's true that we often on autopilot adopt and absorb the things around us without taking the time to really go over it to move the pieces around to think about it in relation to what we want to do with it and how it might relate to something else we're doing and especially in this age of information of over consumption over abundance of facts and interpretations we consume too much we over consume but we under think and i think much better to know one thing well and uniquely and to be able to put your own spin on it and to really feel it from all its edges and to be able to use it in your own way than know many things poorly and unoriginally okay what do you think have i left anything out what have you learned that's useful and practical from the existentialists let me know below and as i said if you want to read a more lucid and articulate and long form hopefully all of those things anyway version of this ramble you can do so in the link below on my blog and you can also sign up to the newsletter slash mailing list while you're there which i don't actually use yet because not many people have signed up but once a decent amount of people have i'm going to be sending out stuff every week and writing a little bit more so do that and subscribe bell like you know the score see you next time

Channel: Then & Now

Views: 28,141

Keywords: existentialism, existentialists, nietzsche, sartre, kierkegaard, camus, heidegger, dostoevsky

Id: NUsFPYQxSX0

Length: 24min 20sec (1460 seconds)

Published: Tue May 11 2021