Jordan Peterson: Existentialism | Authenticity

it's very common for modern people especially intelligent modern people to identify themselves with the contents of their intellect but that's a strange thing to do in many sense in many ways because first of all obviously you're not just the content so if your intellect here also your emotions and your motivations in your body and so forth and your embeddedness within the social context but especially if you're intelligent it's tempting to identify yourself with the contents of your intellect but there's no reason to assume whatsoever that those contents are in fact congruent with the programming of your body or even with its natural inclinations and that's partly because the fact that you can abstract also means that you can learn abstractly and that means you can pull in concepts from the world at a level of abstraction that may have virtually nothing to do with you and that's certainly the case if you're educated because you read all sorts of things and though you know the reading and all the investigating that you do at an abstract level allows you to have theories about being and theories about yourself but there's no necessity that those theories about being in yourself have any basis in who or what you actually are and so that can that makes you in an inauthentic that's the existential perspective and the Rogerian perspective would be incongruent there are you're not a singular entity at all the multiple levels at which you exist and that can cause conflict so for example maybe you're acting out an ideology because you're convinced of its rational integrity and coherence and utility but that utility at ideology doesn't fulfill you as a individual that's certainly an existential claim it's a fundamental existential claim in fact as we'll talk about in the next lecture there are thinkers like Solzhenitsyn who ascribed the worst catastrophes of the 20th century to exactly that kind of inauthenticity which is the development of a coherent and rational ideology say like a communist ideology and then the attempt to force that on the world and on people despite the fact that the rational formulation and the reality of the people and world have very little in common now how would you detect your own inauthenticity or you in your own in congruence well Rogers had this idea that he called sub ception which was maybe something that you might regard as a sixth sense it's sort of like a proprio centric perception and that's the perception that you have of your body as its reacting and localized in time and space and so it's sort of like touch the feeling but it's it's it's your sense of how you're reacting internally and where you are a lot of that is observed by the autonomic nervous system which is reporting to you about various states of being in your body Rogers believed that you could use the information that's being provided to you from your body sort of bought them up to determine when you were being inauthentic or non congruent and I thought about this for a long time and tried to sort it out in a practical manner and what I've concluded is this you could try this for a couple of weeks it's an extremely interesting exercise so you sort of have to detach yourself from your thoughts and your and and what you say so you got to assume you start by assuming that what you say and what you think is not necessarily you and of course that's just the case because a lot of what you think in fact most of what you think and most of what you say are the opinions of other people there are things you've read or things people have told you and you know that that's a benefit in some ways because you get all those thoughts that other people have spent a long time formulating but it's a disadvantage in that it's not exactly you okay so you detach yourself from that you're no longer your thoughts or or the things that you say or maybe you're no longer all of them and now what you're going to try to find out is which of your thoughts and things that you say are you and maybe so you cannot utilize the rest or maybe so that you can correct the rest because they're not representative of yourself as a as an integrated being they don't take everything into account my senses being that you can tell when you're saying something that's not authentic by feeling out whether or not it makes you weak or strong now you know sometimes when you're conversing with people you can say something that embarrasses yourself now Nietzsche said for example everyone has perjured themselves at least once in the attempt to maintain their good name something like that it's not an exact quote but I've got the gist of it right so maybe you're saying things to impress someone or you're saying things to remain part of your political group or your social group or whatever or maybe you have attributes personal attributes that might be positive that you're ashamed of and so you're not going to speak about them so there's a falseness about your self representation watch for two weeks and see make a rule that if you start to say something and it makes you feel weak it's hard to describe exactly what that means to me what it means is that I can feel things coming apart sort of in my midsection so I think it's an autonomic phenomena and the the subjective senses of a falsehood it's like I've just stepped off the solid ground and onto something that doesn't support me well and it it feels like a self betrayal so that's existential in authenticity you can feel it right away and then the rule is shut up if that happens stop talking and then feel around and see if you can find some words that you can say in that situation that don't produce that sensation and it's like you see this played out in different forms of drama so there's there's a scene in The Lord of the Rings for example where I believe it's Gollum and Bilbo States the Lord of the Rings it's yeah it's Bilbo it's Lord of the Rings not The Hobbit because the hobbits Frodo right so it's Bilbo there I've got it wrong it's the other way around okay so Gollum and Frodo yes are going across this swamp and the swamp is full of essentially full of dead souls and they have to step very carefully in order to not fall off the track and the is sort of hidden underneath the surface and the implication there is that in order to follow a trail properly you have to pick your your ground very carefully and you have to test it to see if it's solid or you'll slip off into this well essentially what it is is chaos you'll slip off into chaos and that's a dramatic representation of what I'm what I'm suggesting to you it's like all you have to do is notice but and you have to pay attention and so to some degree what you're doing in fact is you're making your capacity to pay attention super ordinate to your capacity to think and to speak because you know you might ask yourself well exactly what are you well I said you can identify yourself with your intellect and that's very very common it's sort of like the worst sin of intelligent people but that isn't all you are and there are lots of reasons for making the assumption that attention is a higher order function than intellect because attention is what teaches intellect so if by if you pay very very careful attention to what you say without having the automatic without bringing the automatic assumption that what you say is you to bear on the conversation and then also to feel like you have to defend it once you say it you'll find very rapidly that very much of what you think and say has absolutely nothing to do with you it's just it's the dead souls that are in that little scene that I described to you sort of manifesting themselves in your head they're dead ideas that other people have created and some of them might be applicable to you you know you might have the right to them so to speak but lots of them won't and you're using the words as camouflage or self-defense or as an attempt to attain status in the status hierarchy or to make yourself look smarter than you are or there's all sorts of reasons or or to hide what you think from other people I see this in undergraduate essays all the time so because the essays are full of cliches and you know it's not all that obvious why a cliche is a bad thing but a cliche is a bad thing in the same way that being possessed by the dead is a bad thing it's like a cliche isn't you it's something else it's like the crowd it's like the other it's it's not living it has nothing to do with you and part of the reason that students use cliches is because it's easier than than using your own genuine creative formulation so you can just default to cliche use but there's something more insidious than that is that if you write an essay that's nothing but a string of cliches and you get criticized then you're not being criticized what's being criticized is the cliches and you can hide behind that and and the part of you that's wise but but but treacherous thinks well the criticism doesn't really apply to me because you know I didn't really say what I thought and then there's this kind of sense you get that you've gotten away with something which is a terrible thing so when I read undergraduate essays what I see very frequently is especially the first essays just nothing but cliches it's awful it's it's dull you can hardly stand reading it because there's nothing in it that's gripping or alive and then maybe the second essay you can see there's a layer of cliche and then now and then the person will be brave enough to poke up a thought of their own it'll just sort of poke up somewhere maybe in three pages in it's like this little green shoot that's barely alive and the person is brave enough to pop it up in the hope that you know maybe it won't get wall up down with a sledgehammer and so one of the things I try to do is to point that out it's like look you know this is something there's a real thought here it's a real original thought it's something that you have the right to because it's derived from your own experience and your own knowledge and you've formulated it in an original and compelling way but the problem with that is that if you get criticized for that you're just going to pull right back into your shell right because that hurts because it's actually part of you that you've exposed and that's a terrifying thing to expose yourself like that but it's it's it's an absolute prerequisite to genuine communication and thought so the ancient Mesopotamians I haven't got time to tell you this story if you want to hear it you can come to my maps of meaning class in your fourth year but the mez ancient Mesopotamians had figured out five thousand years ago or so that the the highest God in the hierarchy of God so sort of like the highest value or thing that should be imitated most carefully was a God that whose are whose head had eyes all the way around it and who spoke magic words and so the words he spoke could make the sunrise and make the sunset very very powerful speaker and the reason the Mesopotamians had figured this out to the degree they had was because they realized that the capacity to pay attention which is the eyes of course because ah we really pay attention with her eyes and then the capacity to speak properly is in fact the highest virtue and so then you can check yourself you can see all you have to do is listen like you would listen to someone else and you have to feel you think do I actually believe that is that actually my thought and really I'll tell you what you'll find is 95% of what you say has nothing to do with you so it's quite shocking to do this because you'll start to say something and you'll think oh that doesn't feel quite right like it doesn't make me feel solid when I say it there's something about that that I'm subordinating myself to something or hiding in some way it's very difficult to figure out exactly what you're doing but you'll find out that almost everything that's abstractly represented but it has to be that way because you guys are all so young so in some sense you know way more than you can actually know right you've been taught all these things but you don't know them they're just in your head in fact they have you rather than the other way around it's like Carl Jung said people don't have ideas ideas have people and that's something to really think about because then you want to watch and see what ideas there are floating around in your head and start to figure out where they came from because it's highly probable that they're controlling you just like a marionette is controlled by the puppeteer it's very very similar and there's an inauthentic about that and so that brings us into existentialism so now I want to talk to you a little bit about existentialists because existentialists are very concerned with authenticity and so you could say that above all else existentialists are concerned with truth now of course we know that it's not very easy to do exactly what constitutes truth and and I would also say there are various definitions of truth that can be used for different purposes you know because your definitions of truth can also have a tool like function and and and finally that we can't come up with an ultimate definition of truth because we're not infinitely informed right so ignorant is going to underlie our claims all the time but that doesn't eradicate the validity of the concept of truth and I think one of the ways you can deal with that existentially is that you may not be able to determine what's true at any given moment but it's quite a different matter to determine what's false that's a lot easier so one of the things I have to tell my clients for example is uh here's a way to clean up your life stop doing the things that you know are wrong that you could stop doing right so it's it's a fairly it's a fairly limited attempt first of all we're not going to say that you know what the good is or what the truth is in any ultimate sense but we will presume that there are things that you're doing that for one reason or other you know are not in your best interests there's something about them that you just know you should stop there are kind of self-evident to you other things you're going to be doubtful about you're not going to know which way is up and which way is down but there are things that you're doing that you know you shouldn't do now some of those you won't stop doing for whatever reason you don't have the discipline or maybe there's a secondary payoff or you don't believe it's necessary or it's too much of a sacrifice or you're angry or resentful or or afraid who knows so forget about those for now but there's another subset that you could stop doing it might be little thing well that's fine stop doing it and see what happens and what will happen is your vision will clear a little bit and then something else will pop up in your field of apprehension that you will also know you should stop doing and that you could stop doing because you strengthened yourself a bit by stopping doing the particular stupid thing that you were doing before that just puts you together a little bit more and you could do that repeatedly for for an indefinite period time and and you know that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to ever be able to formulate a clear and final picture of what constitutes the truth and the good but it does mean that you'll be able to continually move away from what's untruth and what's bad and you know that's not a bad start now Solzhenitsyn who will talk a lot about in the next lecture Solzhenitsyn was a great Russian writer he wrote a book called the Gulag Archipelago which was instrumental in bringing down the Soviet Union and Solzhenitsyn like Viktor Frankl who you'll also read was very much convinced that the reason the horrors of the Soviet Union and of the of Nazi Germany and of Mao's China and various other places around the world he was very convinced that the reason those horrors took place the death and torture of hundreds of millions of people was because the individuals that made up that those societies were inauthentic in their own use of of thought and speech and so it isn't our following orders theory it's it's not that at all it's a bottom-up pathology theory it's the reason the whole state is pathological is because the individuals that compose it are pathological not because they're good in following orders so I I believe that I believe that to be the case I do believe that the catastrophes of the state are a consequence of the Amalgamated pathologies of the individuals especially their willful blindness and so another thing that you might think about because most young people do think about this is what is it that you can do in order to aid the world let's say like you might if you were thinking about being an environmentalist well as far as I can tell the one sure route to aiding the world is to clean up your existential space first of all you're not telling anyone else what to do that's a big plus and second well the more you do that the more you're going to be able to do things you know and so you might think well if you're going to clean up the world you might start by cleaning up your phenomenological space and see how far you get with that it's a very difficult thing to do but if you do it the better the better you get at it the more capable you are of handling larger and larger problems and that's how you should start you should start with what's right in your grasp and with what you can control and and not that'll enables you to practice now and here's here's an offshoot of this so this is an existential offshoot so here's a hypothesis so you imagine the existentialists continually claimed unlike the psychoanalysts that people are psychopathological not because say of childhood trauma or neuroses or repression or failure to integrate elements of the it'd into the ego the existentialist claim that the reason that people are psychopathological is because the conditions of existence are so tragic that it's inevitable that people become psychopathological right and that's okay so what's the argument well people are self-conscious so that's a big problem so and because we're self-conscious we know that we're going to die we're aware of our temporal limitations so that's a real catastrophe because no other animal has that problem like elephants look like they've got kind of a dim apprehension of it but they're not articulate so they can't really get to the final stage of you know assessing their existence in relationship to its its finitude and of course everyone knows that they're prone to illness of all sorts and aging and that you know so is everyone else they know and that you can be damaged incomprehensibly by untruth and by falsehood and by by betrayal you know and then and also that there's a hundred and fifty things wrong with you that you're acutely aware of at almost all times so you you fall short of perfection along pretty much any axis of comparison that you wish to generate and so the existential point of view on that is that all of that's enough to make the default condition of human beings psychopathological it's like the weight of existence itself is sufficient to me normal pathological and and it's a very powerful it's very powerful argument because one of the things you might ask and it's certainly something I've asked when I dealt with people who have agoraphobic for example who are afraid to go out you know they're afraid to go up because they might have a heart attack and then that they'll be too far away from the hospital and then they'll die well they make fools of themselves that's basically the agoraphobic sphere so it's biological mortality plus social exposure right it's bad enough to die but if you die in public while everyone's looking at you then you know you get the worst of both worlds and it is to me it's not such a mystery that people are agoraphobic it's a mystery that other people aren't you know and from the existential point of view the mystery starts to become the the ubiquity of normality given the intolerable conditions of existence it's a much more powerful viewpoint I think it's correct too because there's no reason to assume that the default condition of mankind is like calm rational acceptance of fate it's like you have two very very specific conditions that you're in before you're calm and and and you know feeling comfortable and sort of hopeful about the future it's like that's a rare state to achieve we can assume that's normal at least to some degree in our society because it's unbelievably technologically sophisticated and we're not hungry that off that we're not cold that oftener you know or even sick that often but to think of that as the norms like no definitely not that's it's a miracle that it's ever like that now the other claim the existentialist make fundamentally is something like this is like well if the fundamental conditions of existence are tragic at a minimum because there's worse there's evil - which is different than tragedy because evil is sort of like unnecessary tragedy you know because there's earthquakes say and you know who you're going to blame about that but then you're there is you going to school and you know there's four people who've got it out for you and all they do is pound you flat every time you you enter the building or make fun of you and you know try to torture you to death that's that's not tragedy that's it's not accident it's not your accidental subjugation to fate it's some Horror Show perpetrated on you by people whose only goal is to make sure that there's more suffering in the world rather than less so you also have to put up with that but we'll leave that aside for the time being you're stuck in your pathology because the conditions of existence are intolerable to a self-conscious being will say that so then you might ask well what could you do about that well here's one potential answer and that answer is see what happens if you stop doing things you know to be inadequate and wrong so the hypothesis is every time you engage in an activity like that you weaken yourself you put yourself down first you remove your own self-confidence but you also fail to take the opportunity to expand your domain of competence what would life be like if you didn't do that and the existential claim is it's it's it's a it's a weak claim in some ways the claim is but there's two one is if you don't do that if you don't try to fix the things that you could fix things will go from bad to worse for your life and that will spread out and it will take everyone else's life along with it so that so that's on the negative end so you don't do it because of the negative end but then there's a positive claim too which is maybe if you stopped bullying yourself the tragic conditions of existence would become bearable because you would be strong enough to tolerate them and and it's it's analogous to Jung's idea of progression towards the self it's because Jung has a very strong existential theme underlying his work derived mostly from Nietzsche but it's it's the most optimistic it's the only optimistic hypothesis I've ever seen in psychology truly optimistic hypothesis because there's other hypotheses like the positive illusion hypothesis which is basically life is so tragic that you have to tell yourself No happy falsehoods just so you don't go insane and that's what normal people do which i think is an absolutely appalling philosophy it's it's it's the ultimate and cynicism that but still that you know there's a huge literature on the supposed utility of positive illusions and then there's also the associated sort of terror management hypothesis which is that the purpose of your belief systems is to protect you from the anxiety of death which is sort of a variant of the Freudian idea that religion was a childish delusion designed to protect people from terror of their own mortality very powerful critique of religion although it's one that I happen to think is wrong I mean one of the problems with Freud's formulation is that it fails to deal with you know concepts like the underworld and hell I mean if you're going to just whip up a belief system to protect yourself against the fear of death why in the world would you envision something like an eternity of suffering worse than death if you ever step out of line it's very hard to understand how that's a defense mechanism now a cynic would say well the only reason that say Christians invented hell even though they didn't it's a very old idea is so that they had somewhere convenient to put people who didn't agree with them but you have to be unbelievably cynical to assume that that's the only reason I I don't think there's any historical support for the idea that that's the only reason now I'm going to tell you some I'm going to tell you some stories or so that some of the most famous existentialist sin history told their their ideas and quotations and and I the existentialist that I've read are often the most powerful of writers so Dostoyevsky is an existentialist and Solzhenitsyn an existentialist and so is Viktor Frankl who survived the concentration camps and Kierkegaard very weird collection of people I mean they're their fundamental belief systems were often very much at odds with one another some of them are atheists and some of them are Orthodox Christians especially you know because a lot of the literary existentialist were Russian so you can come out existentialism from a variety of origin points but what they have in common is what I kind of is that the first idea is the essential preconditions of life are sufficiently tragic to render the normative state of humanity pathological and and health something as something and health and wholeness is something very difficult to to aspire to or accomplish and that and that the road to that health is the reduction of deceit and so that's a thing that's also very interesting about the existentialist cuz they make a very straightforward moral claim which is that lies make people sick and I'll tell you in my experience as a psychotherapist I mean you know I can tell you some of the things that make people sick a lot of them have nothing to do with the psyche the things that make people sick are while they get unemployed it's like unemployment just lays people out especially if they're conscientious they just devour themselves and it's so stressful right because if you're unemployed well your finances become shaky almost right away plus you don't have any routine plus you're not involved in anything meaningful in relationship to society you know and then you start to eat yourself up with doubts and and and you know self-criticism especially if you're a conscientious person or especially if you're a conscientious person who's high and negative emotions like unemployment will just flatten you and then the death or illness of yourself or close relative that's really hard on people and there and there are worse situations at work that are difficult so people are bullied maybe they have a terrible supervisor or their or they're in a pathological social structure so that you know they're basically being bullied and oppressed with every step they take or they're in a very horrendous relationship but but then things start to turn a bit so okay so you can lose your job and you can be ill or dying and and so can people around you and that'll lay low a lot of the time and no wonder right it's it's logical and when people come to me with those sorts of problems the first thing I often notice they're not psychological I tell the people that that's not a psychological problem you're unemployed that's an actual problem and it's really useful to distinguish right so so for example and this is something that psychiatric diagnosis does very very badly if someone comes to me and and they're depressed so they're not sleeping properly they feel terrible in the morning you know they they don't have a lot of energy they're having a hard time experiencing any positive emotion it's difficult for them to move and they have a lot of negative thoughts about the past and the present in the future I do an analysis of their life first to say well you know do you have a job that's you know all right that you know that if at least isn't horrifying you know is it okay for you to go to work in the morning do you have an intimate relationship that's basically functional do you have some friends you know are your relationships with your family members okay are you reasonably healthy apart apart from the depression and do you have useful and interesting things to do that aren't related to your career and if the person says yes to all of those and they're still feeling terrible then I think okay this person is depressed right because they don't have a problem they're just depressed and in my experience those are the people who respond quite well to antidepressants you know because their nervous system isn't calibrating its analysis of their situation to the reality of the situation it's as if they're lower status according to their status comparator which is a very primordial thing since even lobsters have it their status comparator isn't paying attention to their actual status and maybe that's because they're you know temperamental 'high a negative emotion or maybe it's because they had been traumatized earlier in their life and so they're much more sensitive to any signs of failure it's easy it's easier to knock them down but then you have other people who are well they don't have a job and they have they never have and maybe they're 30 or 35 no real stable employment history no real educational history it's pretty patchy one or more illnesses and then family members who are just out for their absolute destruction like families can be unbelievably pathological so they're in meshed in the familial situation where for one reason or another as soon as they get up off the ground a little bit someone knocks them back down and so and then maybe they have a drug or alcohol problem to go along with that or they have a relationship with someone who has a drug and alcohol problem or a mental illness and sometimes you see people who have like all five of those things going on at the same time it's like that's not precisely mental illness now a lot of that's associated with deceit you know they're entangled in relationships and in relationships with themselves that are pathologically untrue so I've seen people for example who I've seen people who are in families where probably nothing they were ever told was true like it was never just true it was always twisted and bent in some way by whoever was talking to them for the purposes of that person power or domination or or positive illusion or delusion or something like it all the communication within the family was motivated and so there it's so awful to grow up in an environment like that because you can't get a grip on what's real and then you know it can get worse than that in that the person will tell you that they love you and they'll act all sweet but every time you do anything that's even vaguely productive and useful they'll just criticize you to death and all the while telling you that they love you it's really horrible and that's all tangled up with deception and lies and it's a weird thing because if you look at the Freudian hypotheses you'll notice that Freud attributed an awful lot of psychopathology to repression right but I think the distinction between repression and self-deception or deceit is very permeable it's like what's the difference between repressing something and lying to yourself about it well Freud would say often that repression occurs unconsciously but I really wonder about that I think that what happens is that something happened or you did something that you don't like and it's bothering you and you could think it through but you just decide not to you just don't think it through so it's left vague and uncertain and you know spare you ashle salient but you just refused to think it through and you practice doing that until you've built up a habit of not thinking that through and then you forget that you've built up the habit and then it's like it's being repressed unconsciously but I think that you know or at least you knew when you first did it and so you know when you meet people who are acting in a twisted and peculiar way and you ask yourself they're very manipulative say you ask yourself well do they know what they're doing the answer to that could be well no but another answer could be yeah but they knew once they knew when they made the decision to start acting like that but after they did it a hundred times or so and made it into an automatic routine well then they forgot its origin and now it runs autonomously and so now they don't know but they did know and so you know this is the sort of point and this is the real point of the existentialist where clinical psychology and and the claims of morality start to become very tightly aligned and it's something that the psychiatric and psychological industries so to speak don't really tackle head-on my experience has been that in these situations for example where the person has five terrible things going on in their life that there's just deception twisted in and strewn in all of that people are betraying each other and there's no fidelity in the relationships there's no clear and genuine communication everything's manipulation no one admits to what they're really up to you know there's a lot of false and saccharine love which has absolutely nothing to do with love it's all for appearance you know and and you cannot be healthy in a situation like that I don't think in my experience you know apart from terrible luck because you know you can get cancer diabetes or any number of awful things in my experience apart from the tragedies of life there is nothing that hurts people more than deception lies do people in and that's an existentialist claim the claim is first while life is basically unbearable that's a none existential claim and there is there's the hope that with sufficient caution and attention and clarity of thought and speech you can man you can master it you can you can master it to the point where you could even accept the fact that it's tragic but if you multiply its tragedy with the use of deceit it's like forget it because you know it's one thing to be hurt you know maybe you break your leg that's one thing it's another thing to be attacked by two or three people who break your leg and do everything they can to demean you at the same time it's like lots of people break their leg and they're not traumatized it's very few people who can go through the latter experience without being you know seriously and permanently damaged here's Pascal one of the first existentialists when I consider the brief span of my life swallowed up in the eternity before and behind it the small space that I fill or even see engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces which I know not and which know not me I am afraid and I wonder to see myself here rather than there for there's no reason why I should be here rather than there or now rather than then now another thing the existentialists do that's it's very unfair romantics they're not enlightenment rationalists and part of the reason they're romantics is because they actually don't believe that life is rational and Pascal's comment on on what the existential is often call thrown this is a description of the fundamental irrationality of life it's like okay here you are well why you why here why now why the way you look why with your family why your gender well there's no answer to any of those questions it's just how it is it's blind and random chance maybe there's this but even if it's not that there's something arbitrary about it and and there's something that's arbitrary and not self-evidently just or fair you know because maybe you could have been born you know there are people around the world who make their living in garbage heaps right so there's whole families and whole societies that live out in garbage dumps and all they do is pick out you know the the metal and glass that will enable them to sort of glean out a living it's like well why the hell aren't you born there instead of you know sitting right here so there's an irrational element to that right you can't justify it you can't explain it and you don't really even know what to do about it right I mean do you owe an existential debt to the people who were born much worse off than you or is it just okay that it's that way well it's a problem not that by the way is the problem the existentialist called thrown this which is you're arbitrarily here in that form and there's no explanation for it and it innit it's something that's outside of human concepts of say justice and equity and fairness and and even sensibility and then Pascal also points to the fact that well we're rather localized things you know you're right there and there's a lot of what isn't right there around you so you're a small thing against a big infinitely large potential span of experience and that's also an existential challenge it's the challenge of the finite against the the infinite and that's also an existential problem which is that it isn't your problem or it is it's more a problem it's just a problem that Springs out of being human one of the places where existentialism and phenomenology touch the phenomenologist of course make the case that reality is best conceived of as the totality of your experience even if that includes things that you wouldn't normally consider you but certainly it includes things like emotions and motivations and bodily sensations and all the things that aren't precisely rational the existentialists would take that claim and push it a bit farther by saying this is analogous to something I already told you that the degree to which that phenomenological field your field of experience is fractured and incoherent and paradoxical that that that occurs in precise proportion to the weak to the weakening of the Spirit within you that necessarily has to be strong in order to remain uncorrupted by the tragic conditions of existence so along with the existentialist claim which is that life is unbearable and it's in its very nature it's tragic and unbearable in its very nature is the idea that that's made worse by your own set of inadequacies inadequacies that you could repair and worse that to the degree that you are rife with inadequacies that you could repair you're going to make the tragic situation that's integral to life worse again not only for yourself but also for other people so out of existentialism also automatically arises a kind of moral necessity which is that you can't just sit in isolation and be useless and resentful that doesn't work if you're useless and resentful and you refuse to address the things that you know you should address you can't help but pathologize everything around you and so you're stuck with a moral duty and the existentialist would would say more than that they would say that if you don't shoulder that existential burden that existential moral burden you will inevitably suffer for it you can get out of it you're stuck with it so existentialists are great believers in free will in that you have choice but the free will has parameters right there are still things that you can't get away with and one of them is you can't you fundamentally can't get away with being immoral the structure of existence is set up well one of the things you might say if you were thinking about it existentially is immoral things are precisely those things that you can't get away with that's why people have identified them as immoral is that they will inevitably the consequences of enacting them will inevitably be brought to bear on you or on the people you love for they little snapback in some way you know and I see this in psychotherapy very often two people will engage in the same kind of behavior over and over well there's a classic definition of insanity which is insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome each time and there's an element of self-deception in that like people will run out a procedure that ends in tragedy and then they'll repeat that over and over and you can lay out for them the causal connection between their actions and their conceptions and the outcome and they'll listen but there's no change whatsoever in behavior and so then they run through the routine again and bang and what they're doing is immoral precisely because whenever they implemented it produces the kind of catastrophe they claim to want to avoid because you know relative this modern relative it's like to think of morality as something that's just arbitrary like it's a cultural construction you know in society one thinks that a is bad in society two thinks that B is bad and when you get right down to it there's no commonality underneath all that but the existentialist sort of undercut all that and they just say well what's immoral are those things that you could change that you do that result in outcomes that are catastrophic for you that's it that's what immoral is and so that's the universal because it doesn't really matter what the details are you know like what you do that's immoral could be very much different than what you do it might be temperamental you know we're each in our own playing field in a sense but there's a commonality underneath that which is well for example you won't get away with deceiving yourself you just can't and the reason you can't is because you need a model of the world that's like the world and if you try to live in a model of the world it isn't like the world you'll just bump into the world and so that the deception brings with it its own punishment and that's why it's immoral there's other elements of existentialism that I think are extremely interesting for example the definition of truth and existentialism is is different than the definition of truth that might be characteristic of objective materialism so truths that are truths from the perspective of objective materialism are scientific truths and they're usually descriptive truths and so the truth claims of science go something like this I'll undertake a procedure which I'll tell you about and I'll observe the outcomes and then if you undertake that procedure and you observe the outcomes and the outcomes are the same you know and we'll do this maybe a hundred times just to be certain then we'll assume that that what that outcome is is real so it's a definition of a procedure that's that's the experiment that elicits the outcome and then the demonstration that the outcome is constant across observers so that's a lovely definition of truth and it obviously has extreme utility partly because it helps you separate subjective fantasy which is a form of reality from other forms of realities so another form of reality would be collectively apprehensible reality you don't want to confuse those two things fact that's actually a sign of if not not naivety and and and a state of undeveloped differentiation it can also be a sign of insanity because one of the things say that characterizes schizophrenic is they can't tell the difference between what only they experience and what everybody else experiences so the scientific definition of truth is a perfectly reasonable definition but it's not the existential definition of truth the existential definition of truth is more action predicated so for the existentialist truth is a way of being it's not a collection of descriptions so it's more it's more embodied you know from the piagetian point of view and so truth is reflected in in what you act so Nietzsche would say for example it doesn't matter what you say it matters what you do and if I want to figure out what you believe I don't ask you I watch how you act and I assume that your true beliefs are those that are directing your actions and so truth is discovered in action and that's a very different claim you know when it's it's not the claim of a passive observer it's the claim of someone who's actively interacting with the world and of course we are always acting we're always acting interactively with the world and not only that if we don't act interactively with the world we cease to exist so we have to do that merely to maintain ourselves and so the existential claim would be given that's in our essential nature there are ways that you can act that are in your improper and ending it technically it's like for example let's say you want a and then you act in a bunch of ways that makes it absolutely impossible that you will get a it's like an existentialist would say well there's something wrong with that schema I could say it's it's it's not necessarily immoral because that would only be if you were willfully blind to it but they would certainly say well it's got this self contradictory element that makes it wrong so so insofar it's like this insofar as you're acting you're acting towards a name you want something and then insofar as you want something the fact that you want it constitutes the framework within which you evaluate the utility and truth of your actions right so it's like you come up with a theory of truth just because you're doing something and the theory is a that what you want is acceptable to want and you know that can be true or not but it doesn't matter you just assume that and be that those things that will get you to that and are appropriate you can't get out of that if you're doing something you're making a claim about the structure of the world and what constitutes appropriate action as soon as you make any action you can't get out of that Nietzsche said can one live it all truths are bloody truths to me and that's a nice one of the things I really like about reading the existentialist too it's not there's no there's no abstract disembodiment in their philosophy you see that the people who are writing as existentialist are committed to what they say they want to they want to enact what they say in the world it's and it's romantic because it does involve emotions and motivation it's it's see with reason alone enlightenment view of reason was that reason and the passions were antagonistic that all the passions could do would be the cloud reason and that it was reasons job to lift itself up above the body and the emotions and clarified the nature of the worldly the existentialist would deny that completely they would say no no no it's that the purpose the appropriate mode of being is to act properly and rationality can be a guide to that but can also it can also deceive in all sorts of ways the passions inform you they don't cloud your reasoning although of course they can because they tend to be kind of single-minded you know they can take you off course but that doesn't mean that they're enemies of rational clarity per se and when the existentialist right you can tell that they put their whole being into it so it's it's gripping and passionate the existentialists have also identified sort of classes of pathology that are unique in some ways that they're outside the purview of standard psychology and psychiatry so you you see often if you're looking at debates say between atheists and religious people one of the things that tends to set the atheist back on their heels is the observation that the religious people make that if there's no final meaning to anything then there's no meaning to anything and so that immediately elicits it's a kind of nihilism it's like if nothing means anything why do anything and it's a reasonable argument because doing things requires effort and you could say to yourself well why should I do X or Y especially if X is difficult if who the hell is going to know in a thousand years or who the hell is going to know where in a hundred years or why does it matter anyways and then the atheists will tie themselves up in knots trying to address that issue but the existentialist take a different perspective Nietzsche said for example he was he viewed the emergence of nihilism as a kind of cultural pathology and so you remember of course that it was Nietzsche who said God is dead right you see that scrawled out in like washroom graffiti from time to time you know it's it's it's like a truism but that isn't what Nietzsche said he said God is dead and we have killed him and we'll never find enough water to wash away the blood which is a very very different statement it wasn't like he was proclaiming it triumphantly it was more like a catastrophic loss of meaning you know the sort of loss of meaning that the terror management theorists would say would produce like a traumatic pathology now what Nietzsche observed was that there you know and of course you all know this to some degree that in the course of the development of scientific knowledge and rationality that a contradiction between our historical moral knowledge formulated religious terms and our descriptive rational knowledge emerged conflict between science and religion now part of that conflict is ilusory because the purpose of religion is to tell you how to act and the purpose of science is to provide clear descriptions of what universally apprehensible reality they're not working in precisely the same domains it doesn't matter Nietzsche's observation was this he said well it's pretty clear that the scientific rationalists are going to demolish the substructure of Western religious belief and then of course the substructure of that sort of belief all the way around the world and there's going to be consequences to that and he said there's going to be two consequences and he predicted this say in 1850 it's something like 1850 and will to power it's unbelievable he said that what's going to happen in Europe is that there'll be the rise of socialist-slash-communist utopian schemes that will possess people and that will produce a war and the consequence of that war that will be that hundreds of millions of people died and he predicted that like 80 years before it happened well maybe less if you think of the Russian Revolution as a precursor of that which Dostoyevsky would have certainly viewed it as a precursor of that now so there's totalitarianism on one side that's that's one of the dangers another danger is nihilism and the nihilism emerges because you shatter the meaning structure within which action is conceptualized and so those are like two emergent pathologies that threaten people now if you talk to someone who's not lista cand rationalists are almost always nihilistic especially if they're depressed they'll say things like like I already told you what difference does it make anyways now Dostoevsky played out those themes for example in a really in a very very powerful way in a number of his books oh the possessed for example it's funny because Dostoevsky Aneesha wrote at the same time in Dostoevsky wrote literature Nietzsche wrote philosophy but they were doing exactly the same thing in Dostoyevsky's the possessed he talked about its description of the Russian political economic ideological scene and what he saw happening was that as people moved away from their enmeshment in a historically conditioned meaning system so that was say judeo-christianity that they started to become susceptible to utopian rationalist utopian ideologies it was so out with one belief system and in with another and the other was more dangerous because like the religious system sort of emerged from the bottom up and they were weird and mythical and difficult to understand from a rationalist perspective whereas the utopian schemes were rational constructions ideologies very narrow and they're just imposed on people so for the example the Communists would say from each according to his ability to each according to his need which sounds wonderful but if you put it into practice it's like it's instantly genocide 'el so Nietzsche said well as the modern world suffers through the contradiction between scientific rationality and ritual religion historically conditioned the consequence of that is going to be that two pathologies will emerge one is reliance on totalitarianism and so I would say to the degree that any of you are ideological then you've succumbed to the one pole of a post religious pathology and all you've done is replace adherence to one set of beliefs even though religious beliefs are not precisely beliefs with another that's rationally constructed and incredibly dangerous he said well if it isn't going to be totalitarianism it's going to be nihilism but the thing that's so interesting about the existentialist is they make a forthright claim that regardless of whether or not the fact that people will turn to those alternatives is a rational can be rationalized it makes sense that it would happen it's still pathological it's like it's like an a priori statement so I could say well let's say you're nihilistic you know you lack you have a lot of doubt about life's meaning and purpose and it's like it's eating at you it's it's it's a disease of the soul and you come to me and you tell me thirty logical reasons why what you say has to be true and I would say those are excellent logical reasons and you're making a very powerful argument but it doesn't matter it's irrelevant the fact that you're nihilistic means that you're infected with the pathology and whether or not you can justify it rationally is complete irrelevant all it means is that your rational mind is capable of spinning off a sequence of logical tricks and the ultimate truth is its undermining your ability to live and so it's wrong why is it wrong I don't care why it's wrong it's not relevant why it's wrong what's relevant is you can't live like that and that's an existential claim because the existentialist are interested in a different kind of truth they would say that a truth you cannot live is not true because their definition of truth is different it's predicated on action and then the totalitarianism claim is the same thing so let's say that you're an ardent right winger or you're an ardent socialist or you're an ardent feminist or an environmentalist or who cares what the ISM is you've abstracted out a bunch of axioms you develop a coherent representation of the world and it's pathological it doesn't matter what the content is it's pathological because it's not you it's not you if it was you then a million other people wouldn't believe it so the existentialist would say if a million other people believe it it's definitely false and they're not talking about scientific claims that's a whole different that's a whole different order of discussion and description they're merely making the point that you're an individual thing and if you've been unable to particularize your experience and you've replaced that with adherence to some sort of arbitrary and universal call to action or representation you've your pathological it's a form of mental illness and you might say well what's the evidence for that well what we'll find out in the next lecture is the 20th century was evidence for that not so much for the nihilism nihilism aspect I think that we're still in for that because I think we swung to totalitarianism first and that didn't work and so now you see this in post-modernism for example it's an unbelievably nihilistic full aasif II because it claims that all meaning for example is reducible to motivations of power which is like intellect intellectually simplistic beyond belief and it comes straight out of like 1950s Marxism and you know it's it's pretty much permeated the humanities in the study of literature universities all over North America it's it's it's sick beyond belief to teach young people that all meaning is relative it's the last thing you guys need to hear when you're like 20 it's and the reason that people teach it is because they're more afraid that things might have meaning then they are afraid that things might not because you might ask yourself well here's two options one is it doesn't bloody well matter what you do who the hell cares who's going to know in a thousand years and everything is relative well you think god nothing could be worse than that well I can tell you something that would be worse than that it's easy let's take the reverse everything you do matters okay so what's the downside of that it's like you don't get to get away with anything everything you do is important it's linked to everything else it's like okay now choose you've got a choice you can either choose to believe nihilistic aliy that nothing has any meaning well you get to be depressed and anxious and maybe you're impulsive because that's the only kind of pleasure you can find but the advantage is you don't have any responsibility you can do whatever you want and if psychoanalyst would say hmm maybe that's why you believe it that's a secondary gain right you think you believe it because you've derived it logically it's like yeah sure no no you believe it because it's in the best interest of the worst aspects of you to believe it because it justifies sloth and cynicism well the opposite is yeah what you do matters it's like well why not believe that well try believing it seriously and see what happens you take the existential claim seriously one of them is you make a mistake especially one that you know is a mistake you will absolutely pay for it and worse that you'll never get away with it and worse than that it'll dominoe out into the world so not only will you pay for it but the people that you're connected with will pay for it there's always a price it's like well you decide which of those two things is more terrifying you know when you read Freud and Freud says religion is a defense against death anxiety well that's a good argument but it is not by no means clear to me at all that the reverse of that which is the idea that things have intrinsic meaning and that you have a unlike an intrinsic responsibility it's by no means clear to me that that's a comforting idea it could easily be that the more comforting idea is that you know you're just a speck in a collection of specks and what you do doesn't matter well you can sit and play video games for the rest of your life and it isn't going to make any difference it doesn't have any significance well if the opposite is true you know every time you do something pathological especially if you know it's pathological you tilt the whole world towards pathology and so the existentialist would say of the 20th century we just about annihilated ourselves once in 1962 and then once again in the early 80s we're this far away from nuclear annihilation you might ask yourself well why didn't we do it and the existential answer would be as a collective human beings decided that it would be better to continue being than not to and the way they decided that was by shifting the ratio of their pathological to honest behaviors a little bit more towards honesty and you know you might wonder about this sort of thing if this kind of thing could possibly be true well that's why I have you read Frankel in Solzhenitsyn you know they're not classic personality theorists but it doesn't matter to me because they're getting at something that's deeper than the terror management theorists or the people who deal with pause of illusions they're trying to make a case based on the analysis of an entire bloody century and the case is societies become carnivorous and pathological in precise proportion to the degree that the individuals who make up that society become deceit full and irresponsible and I've never encountered a political or economic analysis or claim that has anywhere near the power of that but it's a terrifying proposition even though what you get out of it is while your life is meaningful your life is meaningful and then if all of a sudden you find that you're suffering unnecessarily this is a weird thing to about meaning claims you know someone's nihilistic they come and talk to you they say well my life has any there's no meaning in my life and I say well how do you feel about that and they say well I'm really feeling bad and then you say well that's a meaning feeling bad being anxious hurting those are meanings they're just not very good meanings and so then you might also ask yourself if your philosophy throws you in the direction of overwhelming negative emotion anxiety and pain and that's a meaning a you might note you're not going to argue yourself out of that you know which shows that there's a meaning basis you can't just all of a sudden decide you're not hurting you're not anxious you don't have control over that the meaning of your pain is is completely impenetrable to your rational mind so it even if you're not listed you have to admit to the meaning of negative emotion well then what do you do you just deny the existence of anything positive well why is that reasonable maybe it's just that well you could be unlucky and maybe you're not well you know and maybe you have reasons to be suffering that have nothing to do with the way you're construing the world because people do get unlucky but there's always the possibility that the reason that things are so terrible for you is that you're inhabiting a pathological perspective and that's an existential point of view can somebody tell me what time it is it's one oh well good then we can stop huh we'll see you after reading week

Channel: M Czerna

Views: 822,956

Rating: 4.8688793 out of 5

Keywords: Carl Rogers (Academic), Existentialism, Authenticity

Id: I_7hCPYgXEk

Length: 71min 29sec (4289 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 17 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

This lecturer changed my life a lot for the better with his Maps of Meaning series he released a very long time ago. I've very grateful for him and the work he does.

[u/MagooVillage]

Technically everything changes your life a little bit.. Great lecture though

[u/HamOwl]

Smart guy. I really enjoyed his views and thoughts on bill C16 in Canada... that being said, he starts to go off the philosophical rails in other areas, especially relating to god and religion. He's kind of emo too, not nearly as stoic as I would like him to be