Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Curt Jaimungal: The Most Terrifying Philosopher I’ve Encountered

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Starting point is 00:00:58 to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount. The truth is a snare. You cannot have it without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you. Sorin Kierkegaard was so young when he died. He was just 42. It's befitting that this was his specific age as his writings touch on the answer to almost everything. Kierkegaard's position runs pretty much exactly counter to the scientific mindset that I'm most comfortable with. His is one of stark and uncompromising faith. Recall this channel is about investigating fundamental nature, usually from a physics perspective or a math or a philosophy perspective. Of course, one can counter, hey, Kurt, all models,

Starting point is 00:01:52 including the scientific ones, have an element of faith. Yes. However, there are different kinds of faith. The spiritual sort of faith is a different kind than the scientific faith, the latter of which is seen as a sort of rational type. To the scientist, faith in something is rational if the evidence supports it. But that's not the sort of faith that Kierkegaard advocates for. In some sense, it's not faith because, rather it's faith despite. Kierkegaard said that if you're not thinking your problems through,

Starting point is 00:02:24 If you haven't suffered your way to them, then you haven't earned them, especially if you're given a solution to a problem, but you haven't suffered your way to that solution, then you haven't actually gotten a solution to your problem. He also says you have to choose. It's either or. You have to choose between faith and reason, but that act itself can't be rationalized. So you're groundless for how you make that choice. Yet you have to make it. Indeed, you're already making. it. You may not know that you're making it, but you're making it at this moment. And if you choose that you want both, like you're some Higalian, you're saying, hey, I want a thesis and then an antithesis, and I'm going to synthesize them, then that's the pleasurable life to Kierkegaard,

Starting point is 00:03:09 the one that he calls the aesthetic. You may think, Kurt, man, I'm not at the aesthetic stage, I'm an intellectual. I love watching podcasts. I love learning about different theories. Maybe I'm an artist, or what have you. You're still getting that satisfaction, whether it's intellectual or what have you or creative. It's hedonism. Kierkegaard thinks that that's just the way that you're born. You're born into the flesh. And that's not exactly, say, sin, but it's your condition. It's your natural condition. He feels that people who haven't suffered for what they believe almost have no right to it, that you earn your desserts, that you earn your stripes as an intellectual by not only thinking problems through, but by feeling

Starting point is 00:03:53 them through. That's Michael Subaru on Kierkegaard. Romantic intellectuals like feeling over reason. They like grand and beautiful emotions. They emphasize sentiment. If you think of Charles Dickens's novels, if you think of Berlio's

Starting point is 00:04:10 music, too much of everything. They have no sense of proportion, but they have lovely sentiments. Well, Kierkegaard has no sense of proportion and has very frightening sentiments. They have horrific sentiments, but they have their unique appeal. Now, the terms aesthetic, ethical, and religious come up repeatedly in his work, so I'll define them here,

Starting point is 00:04:28 at least in the way that I see them, as there are different stages of life. There's the aesthetic stage that I mentioned before, and that's characterized by this pursuit of pleasure and expediency. You can think most people. Then there's this ethical stage, which is typified by commitment, responsibility, even social duty, think people you'd want to employ. Then, lastly, Kierkegaard says there's a religious stage. You get to this when you have an absolute relation with a lowercase A to the absolute with an uppercase A. And that to Kierkegaard is God. You're in a relation to God and that transcends ethical universality. You can think Abraham from the Bible. So again, there's most people, the employable, and Abraham. I think this is the first time the list has ever been

Starting point is 00:05:16 constructed. Kierkegaard makes the observation that to move between these different values means that you've done something that's non-rational. So why? Why is it that to progress between these stages, and he does see it as a progression? Why is it extra rational or what have you? Because if it were via rationality, then it would have been inferred by your existing values.

Starting point is 00:05:39 And thus it would be a part of your value system already. Now, to those who study math, it's in the same way that a theory is a set of closed sentences, the set of all closed sentences implied by the axioms plus the rules of inference. At least this is the way that I like to view Kierkegaard. Now, if you somehow get to something outside that theory, then it must have come from something

Starting point is 00:06:00 that wasn't in the initial axioms slash rules of deduction. And thus it was irrational, in a sense, from within that system. Now, of course, you can dress up this word irrational with whatever fancy prefix you like, like trans rational or metafrational or what have you. Note that Kierkegaard is not saying that reason is worthless, He's just saying that it has its domain and its domain isn't totalizing. Hilary Putnam also says something similar about the non-totalizing domain of the scientific method as well.

Starting point is 00:06:30 But that's another story, so feel free to subscribe for more on that. Now, Kierkegaard can be quite difficult to read, as many continental philosophers are, so I'm linking my favorite lecture on him by the late professor, Michael Sugru. I'm going to say my favorite quotes from the lecture as Michael Sugru is considerably articulate. it. It's phenomenal. I wholeheartedly recommend that you watch his lecture. And I'm going to read them in part because I'd like to add my own emphasis and ordering, and secondly, because I don't want to trigger the YouTube copyright. So please do watch the original, though. Kierkegaard's philosophy is a reaction to the Hegelian synthesis. The idea that philosophy had

Starting point is 00:07:12 pretty much closed up shop once Hegel had comprehended the ultimate purpose or goal of human life. Hegel's encyclopedic system was a kind of end to philosophy if you accepted the arguments that he made. And Kierkegaard hated everything about the Hegelian system. He hated the smug certainty of it, the kind of megalomaniacal comprehensiveness of it, the rationalism of it. What he really disliked most perhaps was the Greek Promethean element of this rationality. In other words, there's a kind of splitting of the difference between Athens and Jerusalem, between reason and faith in Hegel's system, where if he doesn't split the difference, he reconciles them in a way that Kierkegaard found altogether to Pat, inconsistent with his own experience of both reason

Starting point is 00:08:02 and religion. Now, if you're wondering where this whole entire video is coming from, I write my thoughts on math, physics, philosophy, logic, free will, consciousness, and some of the questions that are probing whatever fundamental reality is. on substack. In large part, this is me re-articulating something that went viral on substack. When I posted this, someone commented that as soon as one desires not just to gaze upon beauty, but to actually become beautiful, the aesthetic life passes into the ethical life. I thought that was a brilliant encapsulation of Kierkegaard's view. Now, I find it interesting that Kierkegaard would say, recalling the three phases, that the final religious stage exists because the ethical life,

Starting point is 00:08:44 eventually realizes it can't become beautiful on its own. I find this extremely interesting, an extremely interesting point of view, even though I find it horrid and daunting simultaneously. Now, there's an emphasis in our current society on authenticity, that you have to just be true to yourself, that you have to tell it like it is, and that when people can't handle it, that it's not due to your disgrace, but it's due to others' feebleness. I think that much of what we consider to be authentic is merely a semaphore, indicating, where we land on something, how we want to be seen as well. So we're signaling. And it turns being real into a brand. A few years ago, I remember seeing someone with Mickey Mouse tattoos and a

Starting point is 00:09:27 backpack and bunny ears. And I asked them about this and they said, oh, this is just me being authentic. This is my authentic self. I'm expressing myself authentically. I remember thinking, how could it be that your authentic nature coincides with what some multi-bibis? billion-dollar conglomerate from the 20th century created? What are the odds? Now, when your authenticity has a target demographic, something's amiss. It's like we took Kierkegaard's lessons and then ran them through a LinkedIn post-generator. It's also unclear to me whether authenticity presumes an essence that you're trying to match like your true essence, and that seems to me, at least on the face of it, to conflict with the anti-essentialists, which many

Starting point is 00:10:11 of the proponents of authenticity tend to be. Now, I haven't sorted my thoughts out on this, but these are my present deliberations. Of course, you could use some other definition of authenticity that involves you self-creating, whatever that means. But then at that point, it's not a term that most people mean when they say the word authentic. So it's being vitiated. It's better to just abandon that word, instead of using the same word differently than most people, otherwise you have this conflict of intent, much like when Jordan Peterson uses the word God, it's not quite clear if his conception of God is the same as yours. Perhaps at that point, it's best to use a different expression. I also think we should use a different expression other than know thyself. Now,

Starting point is 00:10:55 in fact, this is something I said on my substack that I disagree with the valuing of know thyself in today's spiritual discourse, and I think Kierkegaard would as well. I see it as a route to self-absorption, And an excuse to work on yourself more than, say, working on what else matters or other parts that matter, like other people, other problems, being clement, being someone people can rely on, minimizing your envy and your deceit. It's forsaking exteriority for almost unadulterated interiority. I think know-they-self is a mantra that some flocked toward because it allows them to put a disproportionate amount of time into some inner world. in an indulgent manner, while making it seem noble and meritorious because of its supposed ties to ancient Greece and the East, even though, of course, we have some skewed version of what the East is that bears little resemblance to the tradition that these people claim to be

Starting point is 00:11:54 replicating with their intellectual hedonism. To be clear, I don't mean that you shouldn't ever look at yourself and your own self-motivations. Anyone who knows me or subscribes to this channel knows that I'm not anti-introspective in the least. Neither is Kierkegaard, or both extreme introverts. What I mean is that know-thyself has become a brand and it now functions as a dignified sounding permission to endlessly analyze one psyche and not only to the point of some crooked overbalance, but also because the exclamation of know-thyself can and for some already has become a spiritual version of virtue signaling. It's like spiritual

Starting point is 00:12:39 signaling, a form of, hey, look how refined I am. It's like people saying, I'm doing shadow work, and then that's almost all they do, even to the neglect of the light. They can brood over their constant self-examination, which can worsen their mental state or often does and functions as this decoy from other difficult necessary work in one's life. In Buddhism, the order is actually ethics, then concentration, then wisdom. Ethics comes first. The West, we think of the East, and we have this distorted view, and we invert it, and we think we're going to meditate our way to right action. For Kierkegaard, the correct know thyself, is meaning to see oneself as someone called to love thy neighbor, love one's neighbor, yes, and also as a responsible person before God.

Starting point is 00:13:29 It's quite interesting that God is a component that's essential to Kierkegaard, that your awareness of your sinful nature is what would kill the more narcissistic self-preoccupation of know thyself. It's because you discover your guilt and your duties, not because you discover your specialness. Kierkegaard, though he's an existentialist, and that's often seen as a precursor, forefather-like figure to the authenticity movement, he seems to suggest that we should value earnestness more than authenticity. And that's something that I agree with. Now, getting back to Michael Sugru, he says the following. Kierkegaard believes that the orientation a person takes toward the world

Starting point is 00:14:09 determines their behavior, their activities, and the level of human existence they may rise to. What's worse is that he's confronted with the problem of religious faith and won't look away or accept any facile compromises between reason and faith. This kind of whistling through the dark that we get from Hegel, they're both really the same, and that Christianity can be easily reconciled with the Greek rationalistic philosophy that doesn't satisfy him. Strictly speaking, Kierkegaard says, no, you must choose one or the other. You can see how he disdains Hegelian synthesis of any kind, because Hegel would say, we'll get a little bit of this, we'll get a little bit of that, we'll get a thesis, an antithesis, we'll synthesize, hagel says, no synthesis, no compromise, this or that. Decide which.

Starting point is 00:14:56 If you refuse to decide, well, you started out as an aesthetic man to begin with. Kierkegaard thinks we don't entirely comprehend the wretched state of the purely natural aesthetic man. I think it's T.S. Eliot that once wrote a line describing the hollow man, I believe. He said that they're distracted from distraction by distraction. Well, Kierkegaard thinks that that's what the life of the aesthetic man is. It's one distraction after another to prevent you from seeing the vacuum of your existence. to prevent you from looking right at the void and being turned into stone.

Starting point is 00:15:30 He says that's why you pursue pleasure and novelty all the time because the real evil or the real misery in the life of the aesthetic man is boredom. Kierkegaard says, and I think it's one of the greatest lines in the history of philosophy, it's beautiful and horrifyingly true. He says that boredom is the root of all evil. Think about that.

Starting point is 00:15:51 It's much more dangerous than money. Think about the amount of evil that's introduced into the world by people's simple desire for sensation. There's so much that's frightening in just these last two minutes. It's something you can think about for years.

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Curt Jaimungal: The Most Terrifying Philosopher I’ve Encountered

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