Within Reason - #71 Unsolicited Advice - An Introduction to Nihilism

Episode Date: June 9, 2024

Joe Folley is the creator of the YouTube channel "Unsolicited Advice" which creates short, digestible philosophical videos on a wide range of topics. He joins me today to discuss nihilism: its history, its meaning, and its significance in philosophy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Joe Foley, welcome to the show. Oh, thank you very much. Glad to be here. Unsolicited advice on YouTube, a channel that I must have discovered about a year ago. Well, you haven't been doing it that long. No, no, no. I mean, I've been doing it on and off for a little bit since last January, but only really started to post regularly sort of May June-ish. And then only started doing philosophy videos in like October. Yeah.

It's been a, it's been really good fun, actually. I mean, you know, it's good. I get to like read for a living. It's, you know, a phenomenal stroke of luck. Yeah, you know, if you ask kids these days what they want to do when they're older, they've stopped saying I want to be a singer or a doctor or a lawyer or whatever. Now they say they want to be YouTubers. That's like the job that kids say they want to me.

It certainly takes me a while to, I think maybe I'm the opposite. It takes me well to own up to being a YouTuber in conversation when I meet someone new. I'm sort of like, it becomes this kind of like, you know, kind of half looking at the ground, ever so slightly ashamed of actually kind of, I do. I do a bit of YouTube I make videos I find myself telling people like I don't say I'm a YouTuber

I say things like I make videos on YouTube Yes no I I think I probably I probably I always coat it with something like Oh yeah I do these like I do these like Philosophy monologues and I put them on And then eventually the other person The conversation would go So you're a YouTuber

You're a YouTuber I'm an educator of sorts I think that's probably got a lot to do with the connotations When someone says YouTuber you think of like Jake Paul No disrespect to Big Paul, please don't try to box me or something. I'm not sure I have like a firm grasp of who Jake Paul is. But like, is he a boxing person? He's like a boxing. Yeah, he's like a YouTuber.

He was like a sort of vlogger person, you know, Logan Paul's brother. Like they did videos and stuff together. And then he just, when YouTube boxing took off, he just like took it super seriously. And now he's like this absolute machine of YouTube boxing. That's very impressive. It's been quite phenomenal to see how that's grown into an industry of its own. I think maybe we should set something like that up ourselves. Yeah, kind of philosophy YouTube boxing.

Yeah, it's got to be a way of setting that up. I mean, I think I'd just get hurt an awful lot. But, you know, it's worth a try. I do think that if you took two people who didn't know how to it, this is what the YouTube boxing thing was, but like we're totally unathletic, like, you know, and give like a serious time to train. I reckon if you give me like nine, ten months,

maybe a year to like actually know that this was around the corner. Yeah, yeah. Who would I fight? I don't know. Oh, are there any other YouTubers that I think I could, I could say, well, I'd fight genetically modified skeptic just because he's supposed to be sort of the American version of me. So it would be a good way to sort of, to settle that one. Yeah.

I wouldn't battle rationality rules because he is like actually quite like built. He's quite tall. He's a strong man. But maybe that would be all the motivation. Yeah, no. I mean, I imagine if I was given nine months to train for a YouTube fight, I would spend the first eight months not doing anything. You would spend mad panic. You would spend the first eight months reading about the philosophy.

Oh yeah, no, I spend the first eight months being like, well, if I just learn this in the abstract, maybe the practical will just follow from that of axiomatically. Of people who don't know you, your channel is unsolicited advice, as I say, which sort of makes these quite short, by the standard of philosophy videos, informational videos about philosophical topics. So you'll have a video on Nietzsche, you'll have a video on nihilism, you'll have a video on the existentialist and that kind of stuff, which a lot of people do, and have attempted, but I think that you bring a speed, like the amount that you're uploading so frequently is wonderful, but also, you know, like a clarity and enthusiasm and a presentational style that I think people really

appreciate. And I would recommend that people check it out if they haven't. I'll make sure it's linked down in the description. Recently, you did a video about nihilism. Yes. Yeah. And, well, a few years ago, I sat down with that self-same rationality rules, Steve Woodford, and Rachel Oates to talk about nihilism in a garden and it's been years since then and I think it would be interesting to sort of revisit the topic and well nihilism can be quite an emotive topic a lot of the time when people say nihilism I think they use it as a euphemism for depression yeah they say I'm nihilistic when what they really means that their life isn't going so well and they feel it bad but there is also this abstracted philosophical concept of nihilism that's worth talking about and so uh Given the nature of your videos of the sort of informative areas of philosophy, I thought, like, yeah, yeah, who better to sit down with and try to explore this topic with? And so, well, why did you think that nihilism was a subject worth talking about in that abstract sense? Yeah, I mean, I think, I think nihilism, for me, I think it's a topic that is often, it's discussed a fair amount. It's kind of, I don't know, as far as you can have a hot button topic in philosophy, I think nihilism is kind of a hot button topic. sure and but I think that also it's I think that a lot of the times sorry a lot of the time there's a certain equivocation on different definitions of nihilism and I think this is

kind of inevitable I think nihilism as it's used in common parlance is this sort of family resemblancy cluster concepts sure where you kind of have common themes running through but you know you have you have the term nihilist applied to people who who don't act but also nihilist apply to people who act impulsively. And historically, nihilism has also been used to refer to certain people advocating like social reform in Russia. Like Russian nihilism was just as much associated with a certain view of politics as it was with, you know, this figure of somebody who's either hopeless and or impulsive and hedonistic. And so I think that, so I wanted to explore it from that perspective. I mean, mainly when I, you know, during my undergrad, I primarily studied like

philosophical logic. So I kind of, I inevitably take that lens, I think, applying to existential concepts. Like, I want to try and make them as precise as possible, but no precisely than that. Because there is inevitable sort of vagueness, I think, when you're, when you're discussing topics that deal with things that can't, can't easily be boiled down into this neat, kind of neat logical language. Like, you know, I would challenge, I would challenge anyone to try and like formalize a debate about about existentialism because often it's often it's slightly less clear than say if you're having a discussion about like determinism and you can say well this person thinks proposition a this person thinks

proposition not a they're both of the conclusion of like 20 step arguments and you can just kind of you can examine them a bit more analytically in detail and and I kind of want to try and take that approach but not go massively overboard to the point where we're not talking about anything that anyone cares about anymore yeah well this is quite the distinction between, this quite well captures this distinction between analytic and continental philosophy, so to speak, is this challenge of like, I mean, the analytical tradition sort of grows out of a philosophical tradition that has been, you know, motivated by narrative and by sort of a poetic way of thinking and just reflections on the world. I mean, people have been more formal and

constructed systems, but this attempt to really systematize philosophy as analytic philosophy is like a way of saying we've got this thing philosophy and we want to universalize it. We want to put it into a language that other people can use and we can syllogize and sort of test things against each other. And there's this sense in which the Continentals who produce, you know, broadly speaking, or you might look at the example I usually pick is the outsider by El There Camus, the stranger. Yeah, yeah. And the challenge is, you know, read that book. Tell me that it hasn't given you some kind of important philosophical reflection. And then here's the challenge. Put it into a syllogism. Well, yeah, exactly. I mean, I think there's all, you know, there's that, ah, kind of, it's either, I mean, it's the same thought expressed both in Hume and air where they go kind of, I think it's huge version where it goes, you know, if it's not either a relationship, a relation of ideas or a matter of fact.

Yeah. I can't remember the exact. You know, if it's not one of those, then commit it to the fire. And I think that something can be lost there. an enormous amount of sympathy for it as an approach, because I think that I largely got into philosophy because I was just struggling to understand the world. Okay, well, there's this nice analytic, quote-unquote, critical thinking way of approaching, and that seems like it would be helpful. Yeah, that's the downfall of the sort of empiricist approach when it comes to dealing with continental philosophy. I mean, Hume there is talking about the two types of thought that you can have, and he uses the terms that, well, the terms that you've just given there to define them, like when he says matters of fact, he means essentially, um,

things which are empirically derived things which you can imagine the negation of is the actual definition he gives so like you know the fact that the sun rises the fact that objects fall when you drop them these kinds of

examples of knowledge I can like conceive of me dropping an object and it floating in midair not like physically but like logically speaking there's nothing there's nothing logically against that whereas relations of ideas are the kind of knowledge that come about just through the nature of an idea. So two plus two is four. You can't even imagine the negation of that. And he says,

quite rightly, as you, as you put, and I forgot that he'd phrased it. So, uh, it's really bombastic. So, yeah, so virulently, like, if it doesn't conform to one of those two, if it's not, you know, if you can't sort of empirically, uh, analyze this or if it's not just like true by tortology, then commit it to the fire. I know, it's, it's, it's, it's, you know, I think that air gets a lot of flack for, for, for copying that, or not, I wouldn't say, copying, because it is a kind of development of it. This is AJ Ayer of logical positivism, famous for his emotivist ethical theory. Yeah, and also

this idea that if you can't verify something, then if it's not, if something isn't true by definition or empirically verifiable, then we shouldn't talk about it. Or it's not, I think, factually meaningful is the term he uses. Yeah, I mean, this is part of, I mean, Ayer's probably best remembered for his emotivist ethical framework, which says that moral statements are just expressions of emotion. But this grows out of a broader philosophy that he has called logical positivism, which says that for a statement to be meaningful, it's not just sort of, you know, how can we get to truth, whatever, but for a statement to literally mean anything, it has to either be, in the language of Hume, you know, a matter of fact, a relation of ideas.

So it has to be something that's either empirically testable, something that you can, you can sort of look and see if it's true or false with your sense data, or it has to be tortologically true. It has to be like a mathematical truth. Yes. And that if it, it doesn't mean it needs to be true, but it needs to be testable on those criterion. And if it's not, then Aether thought that the statement was literally meaningless. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think there's a, and I don't know, because I only have the second edition of language, truth and logic. So I don't know if this is a later on he goes and, and kind of, I don't know if this is how he originally meant literally meaningless or whether this is a later kind of, this is a later kind of, ever so slight softening of position. Because he kind of, you know, because certainly when I first read it, I got the impression, he meant literally meaningless. and literally is a sort of intensificatory adjective. Yeah, yeah. Literally meaningless. But then, at least in the in the preface, I think, to the second edition. And again, I don't know if this is, so he's a riddle intention, just a backpedal. He's talking about, no, it's literally meaningless in the sense of literal meaning,

which I still think is really, because he doesn't, it's not like he, at least in language, truth and logic, haven't read all of his works, has a kind of really fleshed out way of dealing with all the stuff that isn't literally meaningful. So in some ways, I think it amounts to a similar thing. But I think this, and I think this, going back to the point about nihilism, I think that this vein of philosophy is actually very, very relevant. I was recently reading, I feel like there's a book published recently by a guy called John Stewart, who's not the American TV host, although I'm sure that his thoughts about nihilism are also potent and stuff. But it's a kind of, this John Stewart did a kind of historical survey of nihilism in the 19th century. And, you know, he, conceives of nihilism, you conceive of the origins of nihilism as this kind of end of 18th, beginning of 19th century, at least modern nihilism, right? Because you can find a kind of sentiment of nihilism very, much earlier than that. I mean, there is, you know, it comes up in the epic of Gilgamesh, which I think is the oldest known work of literature.

It might not be. I feel like that's a fact that I need to check. But it's really bloody old. So like the, you know, and Gilgamesh's brother. best friend, I can't remember exactly, dies. And Gilgamesh has this existential crisis, Roselleys, everybody. Oh, yes, I'm terribly sorry. It's in, like, the fourth

tablet. I think it's the, it's the text that you've had literally the most amount of possible time to get to grips with. Yes, yeah, yeah. People often say that it's like, if it's a spoiler, they're like, well, look, it's been out for 10 years. I mean, this has been out. Yeah, yeah, it's been out since. Yeah, so, so fair enough. But, yes, so. Yeah, so, so, so, so Gilgamesh's

brother, stroke, best friend, I think, dies and Gilmess just has a complete existential meltdown what's the point in carrying on because A, I've just lost a loved one and B, that's going to happen to me at some point and that's just fundamentally terrifying and you know, who can blame him? And then you know you've got a similar similar sentiment in Ecclesiastes where you know was it vanity vanity, all is vanity

Yes, interestingly in Ecclesiastes which is of course part of the wisdom literature of the Old Testament Yeah, yeah. This is sort of this outpouring of nihilistic concern and the Hebrew word is hevel. Everything is hevel. And it's unclear precisely how to translate it. So in the King James Bible, it's vanity. Vanity of vanity. Everything is vanity. In more modern translations, you tend to find the word meaningless. Meaningless. Meaningless as the teacher. Everything is meaningless. I think that vanity only took on its kind of narcissistic vibes, I suppose, later on. I don't know if it's at the point of the translation of the King James, but like, yeah.

There's something more poetic about describing, you know, the rolling into the tide and the rolling out of the tide and its endlessness as vanity, but meaningless better captures what we were in today. I have heard some suggest that since the development of absurdism as a philosophy that the best translation in the modern age is actually absurd, absurd. That's fantastic. Everything is absurd. I mean, Yeah, I actually think that's, that's very, very cool. It captures it quite well, right? Yeah, this is the Camus translation of the Bible. Because what Ecclesiastes writes about, and people should read it. It's one of the shortest books in the old assessment. It's one of the shortest. And it begins with this, with this teacher, you know, meaningless, meaningless.

Every says to the teacher, everything is meaningless. And then just goes in this outpouring. He says, you know, again, in that sort of Camouian spirit, you know, people will go to work, they'll come home, the sun will rise, the sun will set, and there's nothing new under the sun, you know, people will, and it's that motif throughout the book, under the sun, you know, that people create things, but there's nothing new under the sun, you know, there's people toil and then they die, and nothing changes under the sun. And the author who, I think, is sometimes identified with Solomon. Yes, I think, is, is, talks about how he was once a great king,

and he had riches. And he went through this period. where he didn't deny him his eyes any any pleasures that they saw he allowed himself to indulge in everything and and he he had money and he had fame and he had you know he had land but all of it was hevel that is meaningless and the fact that he's basically saying look I allowed myself to sort of get this get get everything that I desired but there was still something that was just not doing it for me this this Khmerian idea of absurdism that our our desires of how the world should be are constantly rubbing up against the reality of the world, which I think is a good definition. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's quite well captured, I think, in this spirit. And so I think maybe absurd is a good... Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a good translation of...

Yeah, I suppose in some ways you want kind of absurd, everything absurd, and then a little footnote and saying, you know, in the tradition of French and say... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, I think it's... But yeah, I think it's right. It captures a very potent nihilistic spirit. Back to the show in a second,

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You can try it out for yourself at ground. Dot News forward slash Alex O.C. You can also subscribe using my link to get 40% off their unlimited vantage plan, which is the one that I have. So thank you to Ground News for sponsoring this episode of the show. Speaking of which, let's get back to it. It's an old idea, is what you're saying. Like this, this thread of meaninglessness and despair.

It's ancient. Yeah, it's not a modern phenomenon. Yeah, it's very ancient. And you know, you see it crop up. I mean, arguably, you know, you kind of see it crop up in philosophers like here and there. Like, I even argue that you see it a tiny bit in like the end of the beginning of Descartes' second meditation. Whereas like, I've doubted everything. And now I don't know what to do.

Yes. And I can't stand this. So what am I going to do about it? You're so right, yeah. You know, and so I do think it's kind of an old problem. He says, like, I sort of found myself, my feet couldn't find the ground, and yet my head couldn't find the ceiling, and I was sort of floating around in this like abyss. And he described like a real despair just at doing his thought experiment of realizing that he doesn't know how to prove anything is true. And he, he, he, it's very, it's quite, it's personal, surprisingly personal moment in the meditation.

Yeah, it's about as it's, it's about as existential as the kind of Uber mathematical logic like Descartes will get. But it's, you know, I think it's, it's, it's, but I, you know, I, you know, I use. to illustrate the idea that actually, you know, as a as a, as a kind of philosophical, emotive structure, nihilism is really, really old. And, but as a, as a kind of modern phenomenon, historically, it's often, seems, it's often thought to have emerged at the kind of, yeah, late 18th, sorry, I need to get my centuries lined up. Yeah, late 18th, early 19th, with, with, with this kind of scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, you know, this, this idea of, okay, you've got a, you have a kind of series of promises that have been made culturally at that time.

You know, you've got immortality and free will and the existence of God. And like, basically this kind of underlying normativity strung through the world at the deepest level. You know, I mean, I think that, you know, in some ways I think this is really exemplified in Kant where it's like, you know, you've got God and rationality and ethics are all kind of like mesh together in this. this big ball of normative stuff. That's, you know, and I say, you know, cancer, an absolute genius. But I think that actually one of the hallmarks of his genius is he kind of makes this all work. But I also, I think that, you know, I think that the... I've lost my train of thought.

But yes, no, I think that part of the emergence of nihilism is this increase in, this increase in pure descriptive scientific language. And I mean, you know, in some ways this is, you know, it's still, something we're dealing with today, right? And I think, you know, still the majority of the world is religious. So the majority of the world hasn't gone through this if you think that people will eventually end up atheist, which I suppose is its own assumption. But it's certainly something we have to deal with, because we're both atheists. And although, you know, sometimes people will will say that at least I'm not, or that I don't act like one. I'm constantly

getting accused. This act like thing. I'd love to come back to that. Yeah, because I really, pragmatic definitions of belief. We must talk about whether belief is best exemplified by how you act out, especially in relation to nihilist. Well, yeah, exactly. I mean, I think there's a reasonably powerful argument that, like, nobody's a total nihilist, at least not in practice. You know, because I do think there are, I do think, anyway, I'll come back to a later. But the, yeah, and yeah, so there's this, there's this kind of stripping away of various

different promises that have been made. So, oh, there was a god. And, you know, there's, you're going to be immortal. You're going to be reunited with your loved ones in the next life. And that's like, oh, well, maybe you won't. And there's a moral author. Yeah, there's a moral author. An authoritative historical scripture.

Yes. There's all sorts of... A narrative of your history of the history of your people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, this is kind of, in a certain sense, this is summed up in Nietzsche's, you know, God is dead and we have killed him. And then, you know, this wonderful line of, oh, how should, I can't remember exact phrasing, but how should we live with, how can we live with ourselves the murderers of all murderers? Yes. I thought that's a crackling, partly because of the kind of double pun, right, because you're both, you're killed the high. highest feeing and also at the same time, at least temporarily, abolish the concept of murder. And it's, so it's a, yeah, it's a wonderful, it's a wonderful statement. I don't know if I'm just reading into that. Yeah. I don't know if it holds in the German, but like they, you know,

but provided that it does, it's really cool. And, but yeah, so you've got these kind of promises and the idea of, okay, this, this gradual expansion of scientific knowledge is sort of eroding these, these promises. And so this is where I kind of think that, okay, if we're going to, if we're going to have a starting point for a working definition of nihilism that we can use to discuss and then chop and change and people can add things and remove things. Because, you know, it's like said, it's a cluster concept. I don't think that it's, I don't think we're going to get to like the form of nihilism where I can be like, I have this characteristic function that picks out all of the things that are nihilism and leaves out all of the things that aren't. But I think that the closest thing I can think of is something like a disbelief or devaluing of a thing. Like, so to a certain extent, this is this is kind of a functional definition, right? It has a variable in there that needs to be plugged with something. But I think, for me, at least, this helps situate the philosophical structure of nihilism in the framework of stuff that we already kind of understand on an intuitive level. So I think that, for instance, like Diogenes the cynic, you know, arguably, I always think,

you know, I'd like to think about him in terms of, okay, he was a nihist about the social mores of Athens, you know, and Corinth. Well, who is this Diogenes? Oh, yes. So, Dajunis, the cynic, is kind of a contemporary of Plato and an ancient Greek philosopher who kind of just wandered between Athens and Corinth and various other places and was just sort of, I don't know, the antithesis of everything that a good Hellenic citizen of a Polis was meant to be. So, you know, there's this kind of idea. And you see it, you see it crop up in Aristotle. Which I think is a good enough reason as any to think that other people might have thought of it as well. You know, this idea of, okay, you know, you serve your polis, you're a member of your policy, you contribute to your policy, and you owe duties to your fellow citizens. You know, this isn't just an Aristotle.

This is like all throughout various different types of ancient Greek political literature. And, yeah, and Dajani's just like completely spits in the face of this and just goes, no. I mean, this is partly, this might be partly sparked by the fact that it's often thought that he was exiled from his home. city, which is synop, synop, synop, sinope. And I'm just bad at pronouncing things. So I kind of I'm not sure which one to go with. But yeah, and so he kind of becomes this itinerant philosopher and wanders from place to place and just criticizes people. He's just this like, again, he's a cynic, right? And it's not quite an unmodern sense, but it's not a far off. It's not far off. If you want to get a rough image. And cynic, I wish I could remember, remember the Greek. But it comes

from the word for dog. Yes, yeah, yeah. Well, he calls himself, Diogenes, the dog at some points. They're very... It's a sort of derogatory term because this Diogenes doesn't just walk around like a Socrates figure

criticizing people and asking them questions. Famously sort of lives in a barrel. Oh, yeah, lives in... Yeah, it's like this ceramic pot. Yes. And would sort of publicly masturbate. Yeah, yeah, publicly, publicly,

yeah, I don't know how much bad language are to using the podcast. You can say whatever you like. You know, just kind of... Hey, within reason. You know, yeah, just having a wank in the kind of public place and defecating in the street

and effectively being like I think in a lot of ways you know Socrates's verbal critiques are taken to their logical extreme in Diogenes' very physical critiques of Alamos and you know part of this is part of this is amplified in his

wish to live life as this kind of mendicant so he kind of begs for food and exchanges wisdom in, or his wisdom in exchange food. Well, the other news confronts you with the possibility that, I mean, you can think, you can reflect that, oh, well, you know, well, why do we wear clothes? That's an interesting question. Why do human beings wear clothes even when it's not too cold for us not to? And you start saying, well, I guess in theory, technically, you know, you don't have to. Isn't that interesting?

But that's not to be confronted with that idea in the same way as being confronted by a naked man in the street. Yes, exactly. Especially if he's masturbated. Well, yes, exactly. I mean, you know, I've yet to encounter such a thing. I mean, perhaps we're just, we just have a deficit of cynic philosophy. I think people sort of imagine ancient Greek as this very alien place. It would have been in many ways. People would have dressed and acted differently. But I imagine that the feeling of coming across a diocesan figure would be much the same as if today.

It was just as taboo to masturbate in the streets as it would be if you did it in, I know, Trafalgar Square. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I don't, you know, I'm all for practical philosophy, but I don't. I don't think we'd take it that far. But my point is that this is kind of a familiar maneuver, right? Diogenes devalues and he devalues the social mores of... Yeah. Didn't Diogenes want to get visited by Alexander the Great?

Yes, yeah, yeah. And I can't remember the exact thing, but Alexander the Great, only some of the legends go that Alexander the Great says, I can give you anything you want. And you know, it's Alexander the Great, so it probably can. And Dajonis basically says, can you stop blocking the Sun? Yeah, which is cracking. And then the other, I think the other half of that story is that, is that as, again, this is true, but it's, you know, legend.

As Alexander's walking away, says, you know, if I wasn't Alexander the Great, or Alexander, as was probably known then, if I wasn't Alexander the Great, I would want to be Diogenes. And Diogenes kind of replies, well, you know, if I wasn't Diogenes, I'd also want to be Diogenes, which I think are wonderful. That's magical here. Talk about philosophical self-care. The, yeah, but, you know, Dogenies is, is, is devaluing certain aspects of social life in Athens. She's saying, you know, this isn't worthwhile in some way. And I think that that, I think that thinking of nihilism through that, or philosophical nihilism through that lens, makes things a little bit more, shed to a bit of clarity on it on the topic. Because, you know, then, then, then I say, nihilism regarding God becomes a familiar sort of maneuver, right? We recognize, sorry, we recognize the function and then we just plug something new into the island.

argument position or the object position. And so I like to look at nihism through this lens, partly because I think that looking at it through a kind of pure descriptive lens, often you get to definitions, which I think are perfectly fine. Like, okay, there's no ultimate reason for doing anything or there's no meaning of life. And I think that I suppose I don't quite have a firm grasp of what it looks like to do those things. But I have a firm grasp of what it looks like to devalue something. And then, you know, nihilism. And then, you know, you can slot different things into the argument slot. Like, I kind of have a rough idea of what a moral nihilist would look like, even if I don't have an idea of what a nihilist would look like, you know.

I also tend to draw this distinction between practical and philosophical nihilism. You know, because I think that if somebody's like horribly depressed or they've, you know, or they're grieving, they like look a lot like a nihilist, even if they're not conceiving of it philosophically. Yeah. And, and, but on the other hand, you know, you do have people like, you know, arguably, Camus, especially kind of earlyish Camus. where he's saying, you know, there is no, there is no reason to value anything. You know, I am a, you know, for any X, I am a nihilist about X. And I think that's kind of almost the philosophical propositional counterparts to this, to this type of behavior. And, but also, yeah, but I think that this, I think that this kind of functional definition also allows you to make sense of other types of nihilists. Like the moral nihilist, okay, someone, someone that on a practical level,

doesn't consider morality to be a reason for acting. So that might not, you know, they might not stem from a reasoned position. You know, if somebody's, if somebody just is a psychopath, then practically they're a moral nihilist. And they might not have touched, you know, J.L. Mackey in their life. But, you know, it could just be a sort of, you know, a kind of outlook. They just sort of happen to be. Yeah, they happen to not be able to be able to be able to. What a philosopher in a, in a library somewhere might call a moral nihist.

Yes. But this is just the way they live their life. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Do you think then that the Diogenes, the cynic is a nihilist? I don't, well, I don't, I suppose, I think, I think that he's, I think that he is a nihilist about the customs of Athens and Congress. It's like a sort of social nihilist.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I think I, you know, I kind of grotes it under the kind of typological heading of conventional nihil. Yeah. It's like an example of, of, of a, of a form of nihilism that we might not today call nihilist.

We tend, we tend not to call things nihilism in hindsight if we end up agreeing with them. So like, so like, you know, Darjean is the cynic structurally. He's doing a lot of nihistic stuff regarding the societal structures. and customs of Athens. But, you know, broadly, we probably agree with some of that, right? Not the masturbating in the street thing. I think that, you know, there are limits.

But, you know, the kind of place of women are second-class citizens in Athens. You know, these are the idea of, I think, you know, nobody below the age of 30 getting a vote. Yeah. And also to an extent also the sort of anti-authoritarian spirit of treating Alexander the Great as an equal, even if that's an apocryphal story. Yes. The idea of sort of, well, okay, it's not that I'm going to necessarily disrespect this person, but I'm not going to expect or demand more of them than I would anybody else. And that's so, so, and I think that, yes, and I think that because we're more familiar with this maneuver,

I think that it works well as a kind of underlying structure to think about nilus. And then you can, you know, you could talk about, okay, well, somebody's a total nilist, then you can just stick anything in that slots and they'll say, okay, yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't think that has, I don't think that has value, or I don't think that's a reason for acting. or a reason for enduring. And we have to be careful always retrospectively labelling ancient people with modern philosophies. It's like saying Abraham was a Christian.

Christians will say that's kind of true, but it's also a bit misleading. I don't mean to say that Darjanese is a nihist in the same way that, I don't know, like the characters of Turgenev's, or the character in Turgenev's fathers and sons as a nihilist. Well, I was about to bring that up because it's here where nihilism

is sort of popularizes a term, right? in Pognev's father than sons novel. I did read that novel, but I can't quite remember like exactly what this character is representing. But at least I remember it's sort of representing this sort of very scientific, very sort of like anti-sacred kind of person. It's not like the way nihilism sort of begins to be used there, like you said earlier, it's not so much a sort of, you know, super depressed, like I don't believe in the true. value of ethical claims kind of thing. It's more like a rejection of the sacred.

Yes. Nialism, you know, sharing a root with the word for annihilation. You can imagine like annihilating. That's quite a helpful way. I mean, it's kind of obvious, but maybe if you haven't thought about it, you might not have realized that, you know, the word annihilation is sort of a, yes. It's sort of an acted out version of nihilism. Yeah, yeah.

And it is to sort of to destroy, to break down. Yes. And it's seen as this like destructive movement. It's seen as something it's like a, it's posed as a challenge to, like as Diogenes did, a challenge to authority to society. Whereas I think in the modern age, nihilism is seen less as like a political challenge to authority. And now more as like a personal struggle with existentialism. And that's probably got a lot to do with the rise of existentialist philosophy. Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, I think, yeah, and you see this personal nihilism in ecclesiasties and in Gilgamesh, you know, this is sort of, um, it's, in some ways it's a kind of return to form, I suppose. Which Turgenev probably wouldn't have looked at like Ecclesiastes and said, oh yeah, that's, that's the nihilism. Yeah, there's nihilism that I'm describing it in, I don't know. That's a really interesting question. In my, what's his name?

Oh, I can't exactly remember. The guy's name. I forget the character. It does begin with a B. But, you know, I doubt that Turgenev would, would look at Ecclesiasties and go, yeah, that's the essence of, yes, yeah, and it's interesting because I think that you get a lot of, you get a lot of different kind of portraits of different types of nihilists in like Dostoevsky

for instance. And you know I think that, you know, now it's like nihilism and people immediately think, okay, you've got like Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre. And these are these kind of like thinkers that we just sort of, you know, not not to nihilists themselves, but To the nihilist adjacent. Well, as in

most of them are kind of tackling the problem of night. Yes. You know, kind of yeah, so like I suppose, yeah. Of interest to nihilist readers. Yes, of interest for, yeah. So people to people, people tackling, tackling this as an issue. And though in Dostoevsky, you have a number of different characterizations of, of kind of types of nihilists.

So you've got the kind of, I don't know, nascent nihilist in Raskolnikov in crime and punishments. Oh, spoilers I had, by the way. We'll, you know, I don't know. We'll have expertly timed stamped our section. So if you haven't read these, these wonderful novels, then. Because they are worth reading. They're very, very good. I mean, it's hardly my most controversial take.

but you feel free to skip ahead if you don't want to hear if you want to hear about the contents of these novels. You know, Raskonikov was kind of toying with the idea of nihilism in both this kind of social reformist sense or social revolutionary sense, arguably, and also from a kind of philosophical level. You know, he is at least mostly an atheist. And he also subscribes to this idea that without God, at the very least, if there is no morality, if there is a morality,

then there are far more avenues for the directions that morality can take. So, like, in one of the fictional articles he's written, he argues that there are two types of person that's like, you know, the kind of person that can't really break free of their conscience. And then these, like, extraordinary people that can break free of their conscience. Like Napoleon. Yeah, yeah. And he admires this.

Yes, yeah, yeah. And it kind of, and the entire book is arguably just like a complete, you know, devastating criticism. Well, I think, I think it's probably supposed to be. But I remember thinking that, like, you could read it in two ways. I mean, Raskolnikov tries to become this Napoleon S figure. The thing he admires in him is as much what you might admire in someone like Diogenes, this sort of, there is this sort of agreed upon morality. Some people are able to step over it or step above it, whatever it is, he says.

And it's these people who, and he's like obsessed with this idea of stepping over morality and doing and doing what you sort of want to do or what you think is right for you. and he admires this in someone like Napoleon and so he does this in the grand act of the novel let's be broad it happens near the beginning but you know most people know what we're talking about and it could as much be a criticism

that actually there are no such people or it could just be an observation that Raskolnikov was not one of Well this is so this is well I mean that's how Raskolnikov takes it for a while I mean you kind of crime punishment ends before he's fully transformed as a person you kind of get the beginning

of this transformation then he goes right, that's a, basically, the crime punishment ends with Dostoev's going, and that's a story for another day. And, and, you know, and then it develops the same themes further in other novels. So it kind of was a story for another day. But, but yeah, so that's, that's kind of what Rosconikov takes from it at the beginning. I think that, certainly I think that the message that, I mean, Dostoevsky doesn't think that there are, there are these kind of great, great men that can rise above morality, because, you know, he's an orthodox Christian, he's a morality as God given. And, but, yeah, but in terms of, but, but in terms of

a kind of a characterization of nihilism, you know, the kind of the nascent, uh, supramoral urges or the latent extramoral urges in Raskolnikov is one example of that. But you also have the kind of apathetic nihilist character in Kirillov in demons who basically just kind of, again, spoil his head. Um, although it's not like a massively major plot point. Um, but, but, you know, Kirillov basically sits around for the whole book and says, well, at some point, I'm, I'm going to kill myself. And then at the end, does. And, and, and, and, and, you know, because he's been requested to somebody's kind of said,

hold off until I need you to kill yourself and then he does. And yeah, and that's a very different kind of nihilism. And then, you know, arguably, you've also got the, you know, the out and out nihilistic characters like Svidrigailov in crime and punishment

where, you know, he just kind of, you know, until his final moment where he also has a crisis that leads to him killing himself. There's kind of a theme here. But the, you know, he basically just doesn't consider morality in this kind of like very,

like horribly innocent way. Right. As in like it just doesn't strike him as something like, you know, there's this, there's this sense of, you know, confronted with a moral reason, he just kind of goes, I just, I don't know what to tell you, I just don't see why I should care. And it's fascinating to see nihilism and specifically moral nihilism emerge practically in a character where he's not like grumpy. Yeah, he's arguably the most cheerful character in the novel.

And he's just like, oh, yeah, no, I do like horrible things. But, you know, would you like a drink? Yeah. And it's, which I think is a really interesting, interesting choice. I should say, there are some interpretations where Svigailov is thought to have been, like, BSing the whole time. And he just never was a bad person. But I don't know. Right, right, right.

I think that's kind of a shame. Maybe this is just my favoritism. I prefer the version where he is a bastard. Yeah. But you, I mean, you can already see why this is, like, of interest to nihilists, even though, like, Dosefki, as you say, it's not a nihilist. Yes. Yeah, yeah. And yet there's so much sort of nihilism contained within these characters.

And I think part of the reason why we so often turn to fiction and why everybody ends up talking about Dostoevsky is because there's only so much nihilism you can do in nonfiction without it just sort of becoming an emotional confession. You wouldn't like write a defense of nihilism because that's almost in itself self-defeating. You know, like to sort of, to say, you know, I care enough about the truth of nihilism that I'm going to convince you that there is no truth of the universe. It sort of doesn't make sense. And so you have to put it into the words of characters. Yes, yeah. And I think that to a sudden, you know, there aren't many defenses of total nihilism.

I mean, maybe the closest, the closest I've read is the myth of Sisyphus. But again, Camus is not really saying, the nihilist, it's like, well, we're going to, well, we're going to step over. Exactly. Yeah. Whereas, you know, rather than just trying to figure out how to get out of it, a character in a book, you can have them just, oh yeah, they just killed themselves. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there it is, you know, done and dusted. Like, in a way that an author who themselves is the nihilist couldn't just sort of kill themselves and then live to tell the tale. Yeah, yeah. You know, it doesn't work like that. So you kind of have to, yeah, have to fictionalize it. And there are all these kind of mental states associated with, with aspects of nihilism. So to go back to this kind of idea of broken promises, you know, yeah, you were going

to be immortal, now you're not, and there was going to be morality, and now there's going to be a garden now it's not yeah what are you going to do um there's this i think that you know in you know to take a take another kind of um uh kind of contrast reactions and draw upon dostoev's a bit more you know they're the one of the uh the often thought uh reactions a lot of people have to this is like resentment um and and this comes up a lot in various different ways so you know in in dosti fec character of the underground man um he just kind of he's resent like the book begins with him being like, I'm a sick man, I'm a wicked man, I'm an unattractive man. I think there's something wrong with my liver. Yeah, I think there's something wrong

my liver, but I don't know. The, um, and, you know, this is a notes from the underground. Yes, yeah, a note from the underground. And, um, yes, and so there's this kind of resentful, resentful spirit going through the whole thing. And, um, and, you know, this idea of resentment was then picked up by Nietzsche, who read notes from the underground in French. Um, and I don't if that predated his own thoughts and resentment, but it certainly influenced them. Um, and then, you know, for Nietzsche, resentment is a much more. broader kind of personal motivation for people. So, you know, he thought it was primarily a reaction to being powerless and kind of basically, basically, you know, the idea of, well, you know,

I mean, I'm a good example of this, right. If somebody hit me in the street, I'm like, if they're bigger than me, I've got nothing to do. Like, what am I going to do? I'm just going to get hit more. Yeah. If I try and do anything. So, so, so, you know, and Nietzsche said that a lot of the time, you know, this has the potential to build up and people kind of hold on to insults and and grievances and don't forget them. And one of the things that he interpreted Christianity as a kind of resentful morality. Yes. He thought it was kind of a reaction to Roman occupation and said, you know, this is basically kind of the quote unquote weak taking a kind of philosophical revenge on the strong.

Yes. And to a certain extent, like I think Nietzsche is very interesting here because whereas whereas a lot of other thinkers see, okay, God has fallen outgrowth of science. Now we've got this like nihilistic problem where there are loads of stuff we used to value and now we don't value it because we don't think it's true. And so we can't hang stuff on it. And what are we going to do? Nietzsche very much conceives of Christianity as setting the stage for nihilism. He kind of goes, well, part of the reason, because at points Nietzsche doesn't so much see nihilism. He sees it as a philosophical problem, but he just as much sees it as just like a personal problem.

Like, points in his notes, he refers to nihilists as just like ill. Like, he's like, you know, this is, this is, he views the very question of why should I exist at points, especially in his notes. So, you know, there are other points where he says the opposite of them, as essentially suffering from a deficiency of will. Yeah. And, and yeah, so, but he sees Christianity as setting the stage for that. I'm not quite sure how much I agree with him. I think, I think maybe he's, I think he's a bit harsh with Christianity. I mean, it's fascinating to you.

I mean, famously Christianity is depicted. as this slave morality, is this sort of... Yeah, yeah. There are sort of two ways to achieve what you want, right? Like, if you're not rich and you're not strong and you're not powerful, then there are sort of, and you want to be rich and you want to be powerful, there are two ways to achieve your wants. One is to become rich, become powerful.

The other is to change your wants. Say, oh, actually, no, I don't want to be rich. Because being rich is evil, being strong as evil. I'm going to turn the other cheek. But I also think that one of the things that... Nietzsche, a part of Nietzsche's criticism is that this is like a dishonest move. So he doesn't think that he thinks that people truly still want to be to be rich and powerful and strong. And he does, he views, basically views St. Paul as this like massively corrupting influence on Christ's

doctrine that says he transformed it into this like horrible, resentful thing. Because at points in the Antichrist, he praises the man of Jesus for being someone who was free from resentment. You know, that idea. Sure. Yeah, that idea of like, actually no, he was a fooling himself. He just truly didn't resent. He didn't resent. You know, that kind of forgive them farther for they know not what they do. That's like, I know, that's extraordinary thing. Yeah, even for an atheist. That's that powerful stuff. Oh, yeah. And so Nietzsche has a certain amount of admiration for that. But then he views kind of the way that Christianity has developed over the years as fundamentally like poisoning this initial lack of resentment into

what was, you know, a machine totally powered by resentment. And then he views the social effects of that as a general depowering of people's wills. So, you know, for him, like, I mean, he was raised by his father was a Lutheran minister and, you know, very much raised in a religious background. So, you know, and the kind of messages he associated with Christianity, you know, rightly or wrongly was things like, well, you know, suppress your desire to be angry, suppress your desire to have sex and suppress your desire to do this and suppress your desire to that. And he kind of just thought, well, what are you going to do? You're going to leave somebody with no drives apart from this religious drive. And then.

And, you know, oh, God dies, and now we're stuffed because, because according to him, this, this, this whole social movement has, has chopped down our wills. And I don't know. I, again, I think that, I think that, I don't know, maybe there are aspects of that. I'm, I'm, I'm much more charitable than Nietzsche with a lot of things. I often think that, that nature is a good person, a good person. Like, I think, I think he has a lot, there's a lot that we can get from him. I think that, I mean, you know, obviously he would say the same thing, right? He's got this, his, his, his, he's. this um passage in one of his books it might be echo homer but i don't know which um where he basically says you know if you want if you were going to be a disciple of mine you're going to have to challenge me and and i think you know so i i i think that there is this there is this um a tendency i think occasionally in public discourse to kind of throw out a oh well nietzsche said and it's like okay that's fine but it doesn't mean he's right like you know you can challenge nietzsche you know even even if someone's worth worth reading it doesn't necessarily mean that you agree with them sometimes they're worth reading because you disagree with you

Well, yeah, exactly. I mean, I actually think that one of the reasons that I read a lot of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and the reason that I read them is because they, like, call me out in really profound ways. Yeah, yeah. You know, to a certain extent, you know, we are Dostoevsky's feared atheist, you know, quasi-materialist. Yeah. So, you know, so I think that's very interesting. I think if you ask people in the street, you know, can you name a nihilist from the history of philosophy? They might go, oh, I think Nietzsche. Nietzsche is sort of seen by some as a nihilist hero.

Where does that idea come from? I think, I mean, I think this is probably just because he talks about it so much. But he doesn't really mean, he never really talks about it in a positive way. He's a lot of, I think a lot of Nietzsche's ideas are full of kind of double-edged swords. So like the death of God is a prime example, right? He thinks the death of God has a massive opportunity and is also potentially an enormous disaster. And yeah, and this. And this, you know, this goes into his idea of nihilism.

He sees nihilism as kind of a bridging point between two value systems, you know, the kind of the religious Christian value system, and then, you know, you have nihilism and you need to traverse nihilism, and then you get to this kind of next set of values, which he's, he has some pointers, but he's kind of a bit vague. He sees it very much as the job of the philosophers of the future, at least in, well, there's some thought that he changed his mind on this at the end. And actually his never-completed four-part magnum opus was actually going to be. No, here is what the philosophy of the future is going to be. But he never finished it. So, yeah, so I think that because Nietzsche focuses so much on nihilism and because taken out of context, a lot of his quotes come across as quite nihilistic. If you just hear God is dead and we have killed him, how shall we comfort ourselves,

the murderers of all murderers? Yeah, you kind of go, oh, that sounds quite nihilistic, actually. It's certainly not jolly. But, but I think that this is, I mean, to be fair, I, I think that generally quoting Nietzsche has benefits and drawbacks, because a lot of the time he explores an idea at length and then at the bottom in one line will say, and actually this idea is rubbish. But yes, so I think that's probably why Nietzsche has become so associated with nihilism, despite the fact that he opposed it in various ways. Like a lot of his works are proposed solutions to nihilism or analyses of how it came about. Do you think that there are other writers of sort of philosophy that we can point to who we can say,

actually, I think they were nihilists. Oh, there are, the closest, and I should be very careful here, because I haven't read all that much of it. But the closest that I can think of from what I've read is someone like Max Stern, who was a kind of disbeliever immorality. And in many ways, sort of, in many ways, was much more optimistic about the sort of valueless world than Nietzsche was. And so I think that that might be one. He was certainly very influential in kind of certain areas of Russia. Like it's sometimes, he's sometimes thought of been an influence on aspects of the Russian nihilism movement. But that would be one.

I suppose like Camus could be another. But again, it's kind of absurdism is sort of looking nihilism in the face and going, that's fine. Which you could say is still nihilism, but I think that a lot of the time there's this, you know, as part of this cluster concept, there's this association of nihilism as inherently negatively valenced. And I think that, you know, Camus is, or at least in the myth of Sisyphus, is saying, well, yeah, it doesn't have to be negatively valanced. Yeah, Camus, myth of Sisyphus, you know, opens quite boldly with there is but one serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. All of the other questions, you know, how many dimensions there are, whatever, like they sort of pale in comparison. And there's a sense in which this, this also is a immediate challenge to the sort of scientific materialist. way of seeing the world, by which I mean that, like, when you see the world, you see science

and materials interacting with each other. Instead of being like, you do realize that sort of, you know, how many molecules are in a glass of water and, you know, what a covalent bond is. Although, in a sense, they are like more true than like a question candy or something, you as a person, the most foundational thing to you is not that, is not what a covalent bond is. It's why are you alive? Like, why have you not killed yourself? And so that's a bold way to open the book and and immediately people who are interested in something like nihilism are going to be captured by that. Yeah, yeah.

Tell me about the myth of Sisyphus. Like, where does it go? What's its sort of approach to this problem of nihilism? So, I mean, the myth of Sisyphus is, first of all, it's a cracking book. Like, really, really, really good. And short stuff. Yeah, I'm pretty short. You can read it in like a day.

It's wonderful. And, yeah, his approach is, I mean, if you would summon up a single sentence, his approach is that that you that he defines the absurd or which is kind of analogous to the problem of nihilism though I suppose there are subtle distinctions but for the sake of like discussion they they go together quite a lot um the absurd is this confrontation between the fact that we want the universe to give us meaning um and it just doesn't cough up the goods uh and you know that makes a lot sense right I'm I'm kind of broadly on board with the idea that that at least at the point where our current experience of life is unpleasant. We want something to tell us that enduring it is okay and

it isn't the act of an idiot. And yeah, so Camus begins with this outlining of the problem. He says, okay, the problem is created by the interaction between wanting to have meaning and no meaning. And he says, well, you know, you can either get meaning. And he says, you know, this kind of get meaning where you retreat into a value system, as he puts it, he calls philosophical suicide because he basically thinks this is like not looking facts in the face. You know, you kind of like he would characterize the sort of, I suppose, kick a guardian approach of, well, life without God is pretty unbearable for him. So I, you know, he has this, this idea of, you know, faith as a project and you kind of, you really work at faith. And, you know, you see similar

ideas in William James, the kind of American psychologist and kind of, I think, is he considered the father of American psychology? You know, very, very cool. Yeah, yeah. Who says, you know, well, if you need God to survive, then believe in God. Right, right. And Camus basically like, this is, this is just, all you're doing is running. And I, you know, and I, you know, fair enough.

It's, so he's, and then he says, well, there's, there's another alternative, which is literal suicide. Actual suicide. And he says, you know, that's one way to do it, but ultimately. But for him, that's grotesque. Well, yeah, it just doesn't, I mean, fair enough, it doesn't, I don't want to commit. suicide. Yeah, and it seems equally like a sort of an escapeism. Yeah, and also as a philosophy of life, die, isn't, it leaves a bit to be desired. Yeah, I don't know if it even makes sense to call the philosophy of life. It's, it's, it's, uh, you, you have a philosophy of life by,

you know, taking up arms against a sea of troubles and yes. Yeah. By opposing and, you know, it's like it's an, it's an oppositional, uh, uh, philosophy of life. Yeah. But, okay, so, so, so, He's got these two options. Here's, here's Camus, and he's defined this concept of the absurd, which we hear thrown around in the language all the time, but this specifically is referring to this meeting of the desire for purpose with the lack of purpose that we perceive in the universe. So a response to the absurd feeling, or the encounter with the absurd, one thing you can do is just adopts an ideology, that's philosophical suicide.

One thing you can do is kill yourself, that's actual suicide. What else is on... Well, and then his answer is absurdism. And I've been a long since I've read the myth Sisyphus, so I'm going to collect my thoughts a little bit. But yes. And essentially this is, you know, you've got these two halves intersecting, causing a problem.

And he says, well, get rid of the want for meaning. And it's worth noting he does not pretend that this is going to be easy. Like, as in, I think that you kind of... Because imagine Sisyphus happy is such like a... It's such a good phrase. Yeah. Which, by the way, the myth of Sisyphers is not. named after a famous Greek myth, where somebody who attempted to, I think it's the person

that Sisyphus attempted to conquer death by chaining him up and then he conquers death in another way. But anyway, and then he gets to the end of his life, I think naturally in the legend that I've read. And yeah, and then in order to show the futility of running from death because it gets you in the end, he's forced to roll this boulder up a hill and then it goes back down. And he's punished him, yeah, and he's consigned for the rest of eternity to push a boulder up a hill. gets to the top, it rolls all the way back down again. He's going to go and push the boulder up the hill and roll all the way back down again and just do that for eternity.

And the reason this has become iconic for the nihilist and the absurdist and the reason that Camus chooses it is because that's sort of a lot of the pain of nihilism. It's a lot like when they make, you know, prisoners lift heavy rocks and build things. A lot of the pain of the act is actually in the uselessness of the act. Yeah, it's like there's not just the physical pain. But the knowledge of the uselessness of... Yeah, I mean, it's this... There's a fun of another line from Dostoevsky reflecting on his time in prison

where he says, you know, the only thing... Again, like this actually on prison labour, which just sounds like, you know, obviously profoundly unpleasant. You know, he says, he says, basically, I think that a sure far way to drive anyone insane is to make them do a useless task that they know is useless for a long time. Yes. And he gives the example of like, I think filling up cups of water and then pouring them into one another.

Which, you know, isn't physically that unpleasant. It's just like intellectually so horrifying. And I feel, you know, one of my friends hates his job. And he often describes this feeling, right? As in like he says, you know, he sits at his desk and he goes, this is really pointless, but I have to do it because I want food. Yeah. You know, that's a good enough reason to do something as any, but it's not necessarily a fulfilling reason.

And so, you know, I think that might be one reason why imagine SIFAs happy resonates for so many people. It's because I think a lot of people do conceive of themselves in this kind of Sisyphian situation. Yeah, I mean, this is this is the, this is why the image is popular and chosen by Camus because this boulder up, bowled down, boulder up, boulder up, bould not being quite sure why you're doing it is evocative of the sort of go to work, come home, go to sleep, go to work, come home, go to sleep. And you're sort of like, when you sit back and reflect on it, you're like, why am I even

doing this in the first place? And, yeah, I mean, Camus's famous conclusion here is to imagine Sisyphus happy. Yeah, and I, what does that mean? It's, it's, it's, it's, I suppose it's at once. I suppose simple to say and just like incredibly difficult to do. So I think for Camus, he characterizes this idea in a number of ways. So at points he talks about valuing like quantity of life over quality of life and things like that, which is kind of a difficult idea to get hair round. He uses the figure of like Don Juan as this like person that values like the,

well, crudely put, values the quantity of lovers over the quality or the connection he forms with them. And he says, okay, well, that's one idea of quantity over quality. He's not like recommending that we become Don Juan or anything like that. But it's, it's, you know, this decide this kind of quality, quantity, quantity distinction. And, yeah, so it's the idea of imagining Sisphus happy is to kind of let go of this, of this wish for meaning and this wish for kind of normativity as a whole, and to stare, to stare facts in the face and somehow be okay with it. And it's not, it's not, like, the myth of Sisvus isn't like a self-help book.

It's not entirely clear exactly how you meant to do this, but Camus is pretty insistent on the fact that it's really bloody hard. And I mean, to some extent, all of the, all of the, of the philosophers that encounter nihilism are really open about the fact this is a very difficult thing to do. A lot of them, you get the sense that for a lot of them, nihilism is a bit like this basilisk that hurts by, you know, you look at it and you're struck with this question and, you know, just kind of gnaws at you and you can't get rid of it. And that might be brought on by the death of a loved one or like, you know, like, Kierkegaard has this image of someone

getting older and kind of possibility passing into actuality. And, you know, getting to a certain point in life and being like, oh, no, the possibilities for my life are shrinking and shrinking and it's causing a version of an existential crisis. So, yeah, so there's the, you know, and the idea of, okay, well, you know, where do you go from there? And yeah, so for Camus, it's not an easy task, but the idea is to let go of this, this part of the intersection. I want meaning. I want objective meaning. And even, you know, on some interpretations, arguably, I want subjective meaning. You know, I think the thing that distinguishes Camus from a lot of other thinkers is that, you know, Nietzsche and Sartra say, you know, create meaning in some way loosely. I mean, there are differences between the two of them, but yeah, like if you were going to boil it down to a single phrase, and that will be in there. And whereas, you know, I think the thing that distinguishes Camus is him saying, no, don't create meaning.

The process is meaning in some sort of, it's difficult to put in the words without using the word meaning, which is paradoxical because we're trying to let go of the idea of a search for meaning. Also, by the way, this emphasizes, I think, the utility in continental philosophy. Yes. And the style of someone like Camus is that a phrase like that imagines this of us happy. The reason why that's so famous is because it's, it's easy to say in the sense that easy to say hard to do. But it's also easy to say in that it's quite a beautiful phrase. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, it's quite poetic.

And, you know, I would challenge an analytic philosopher to take, to capture that thought. I mean, there'd be a way of doing it, but it would. lose something important. It would be like sort of describing blue to Mary locked in the room and not actually get to see the color blue. It's something that you missed by not just having it in that phrase. And so

the way you say, you know, it's quite difficult to know exactly what's meant. That's kind of the point of continental philosophy is that you read a poem and you say, well, what does it mean? Well, you know, I don't know, Dolt Jette decorum S by Wilfred O. Describing, you know, watching his friend choking under the gas

you know, an ecstasy of fumbling and all this kind of stuff. Like, what does that mean? Well, you know what it's about. You know, it's about someone dying in the war. You know that it's supposed to evoke sort of sadness and panic. But literally, what does it mean specifically? Like, it's impossible to say, and yet you get it. You get it out of the text.

And Continental philosophy is supposed to work like poetry, I think, in that way, or like a novel, you know. Yeah, yeah. In that it sort of gives you something without exactly telling you what to do. Yes, I mean, I think there a lot of existential philosophy is. I think a lot of that's why it's communicated in novelistic form or through fiction or through evocative essays. You know, like, you won't find many, you won't find a lot of, like, neat propositional arguments. I mean, you do sometimes in Nietzsche, but it's normally kind of a bit more, you know, I mean, it makes sense, right? This is least partly an emotional problem, like we're saying at the beginning.

And also, I think that, you know, through a novel, you get to go on a journey with the character and have an experience with them in a way that I think both conveys the idea very, you know, very clearly and also kind of imports the aspects of it that are very difficult to get across in, you know, and discussing in even a podcast setting like this. Because I think that sometimes existentialism gets caricatured as, oh, well, you don't have meaning, create your own meaning. And it's like, oh, wow, I would have never thought of that. But it's like, okay, yeah, you know, if you boil it down, I think I'm a firm believer in the idea that if you boil down things to, you know, three words, you can make almost anything sound really stupid. That's true. That is probably true. Yeah, yeah, I think so, yeah. I mean, you can describe almost anything in a way that makes it sound weird.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like eating a meal or like, you know, meeting up with your friends or driving a car. or driving a car or whatever. You can describe it in terms that make it sound a little bit strange. And yeah, and put like that, it has that the same sort of vibe of that video that went viral a few years ago, that woman going, well, if you're homeless, just like, buy a house? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, yes, I understand why people kind of scoff at it.

Well, to what extent is existentialism or absurdism? I know people treat them very differently, they've got a lot in common. To what extent are these copes? I mean, when somebody says, you know, create your own meaning, because you haven't got any meaning, it's a bit like, you know, Nietzsche comes along and says, God is dead, you know, no one believes in God anymore. And we say, oh, you know, just create your own God. Which some people kind of do say, but it would seem like really crude to suggest, I know you don't believe in God, but just like create. I just create my own God. Yeah, I think what to what extent is this sort of what's going on with existentialism and to what extent is that just motivated by a desire to escape it? I mean, I think that, certainly I think that arguably Camus' idea of philosophical suicide maps quite neatly onto kind of cope. Because, you know, he's conceiving it as a retreat into something. I think that that's kind of often, if I, if I, again, you know, not to, I'm not online very much.

So I, but I see cope emerge as a kind of linguistic phenomenon. And, and it are oftentimes, like, when I see people use it, it, it seems to have this, like, Nietzschean accusation of dishonesty. It's like, you're saying, fundamentally, you don't believe. that. You are saying that because you cannot face up to the truths about you and the world and how they how they coexist and interact. And so I think that there's, I think there is, I think that a lot of extantial philosophers have accused one another of Cove. Nietzsche was certainly accused someone like Kierkegaard of Cove. You know, this idea of like, oh well, you know, effectively go back to religion, work on your faith. I'm massively simplifying

what Kierkega thought there. But, you know, this kind of religious based solution, you know, Nietzsche's going, well, it's cope. You know, this is just, this is just, this is just, This is just a retreat and Cameron would say it's just philosophical suicide. And also there's the question that I think that both of us have discussed before just kind of over coffee, which is, you know, choosing beliefs is kind of a tricky thing. I mean, Kierkegaard, again, doesn't pretend that it's easy. You know, he says that true faith is like the faith of Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac going, holding the simultaneous beliefs of he is going to continue living and I'm going to obey my God and stab him. And yet, yet he will remain alive afterwards. And it's like this ability to hold loads of contradictions in your head. And a lot of us would say, yeah, okay, that's kind of cope. I mean, I'm certainly, I certainly lean towards that. I mean, I don't know how I could do that.

But this idea of faith is very kind of key to kick a God's existential solutions. And yeah, and I think that a lot of, I mean, a lot of atheists would say that's cope, right? I mean, you know, what are you going to, you know, I don't believe in God. What are you going to do? Yeah. I do. I, yeah, there's an open question of, well, where do I go from there? I actually tried this out one year for Lent every year. I know it's like a weird perversion of Lent, but I try out of philosophical outlook.

So I went like last year I went for the entirety of Lent without calling something good or bad. But I just thought, okay, I'm not going to do like baseline evaluations. I'm going to do descriptive valuations. Yeah. Instead of calling something good, if my, you know, friend did something nice, I said, oh, that was really kind. Yeah, let's see if it's reducible. Yes, yeah, yeah. And it was really hard.

And, you know, I'm sure that, you know, the open question on. argument will crop up if I was there long enough. But it worked a little bit. And a couple of years ago, I also, I did this kind of, okay, I've got 40 days. This is in 221, so it was lockdown, or lockdown-ish. I was like, okay, I'm going to, I've got 40 days. My final exams are coming up. So this is a good time to have a side project. I'm going to see if I can believe in God at the end of these 40 days. And I don't think I fully got there, but it was terrifying in a certain sense because I sort of, because I, I remember, you know, like any kind of young atheist encountering the sort of pragmatic arguments to believe in God that someone like, you know, Pascal famously put

forward. And also, you know, seems to have kind of had a resurgence in Jordan Peterson. I think that I don't, I don't know an awful lot about his work as a whole, but I sort of sometimes semi-familiar with his ideas about God. And yeah, and so I thought, well, okay, but the fact that I can't choose in the moment, like I can't just will a belief out of nowhere, doesn't necessarily certainly mean that I can't choose to believe. I might just have to affect my behaviours until the belief emerges. Yeah. And so, yeah. And so I spent, I spent a lot of time on live stream church services. I read a lot of Christian literature. I didn't read any atheist literature. Um, so, so, so I kind of just constructed my environment in such a way. You know, I would call pretty much only my friends who

are Christians. And by the end of the 40 days, I was like, if I continued this for six months, I'm sure that I would, I would believe at the end of it. Really? Well, I suppose it makes sense, right? Because I mean, that's true of most things. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. We don't form our beliefs, you know, entirely rationally. That's what Pascal was recommending. He didn't recommend just, oh, just like, say you're a Christian. Because people parody it. You get to the pearly gates and God's like, really, you expect me to buy that? He's like, no, no, no, like steep yourself in the literature because you've got nothing to lose by doing so, except something like, you know, truth if you're wrong. But then who cares if God doesn't exist if you're wrong?

So did you ever do 40 days of Lent as a nihilist? I haven't. So this is, I think it was going to be my one, my one. Oh, wait, no, I did. No, no, no, sorry, this was, this was my first one. This was one was like 16. Okay. So it's kind of right in the back of my head. So you're like an edgy 16-year-old nihilist rather than the sort of matured, philosophically reflective.

Yeah, yeah. I don't think I did it quite well. A, it was very, very difficult. Yeah. Because it's very difficult not to value, lots of things. Yes. You kind of do it instinctively out of habit. Well, there's a question.

Is there such thing as a nihilist? I think that with the kind of functional structure, you can, you can say that there are, there are such things as nihilists, as in nihilists, kind of regarding X. I think that the idea of a practical total nihilist probably doesn't really exist. Because to be a nihilist about everything, like a nihilist, capital N nihilist, would be to think that nothing has value. Now, you've spoken about this in the video you made on nihilist, and you say, like, not even subjectively valuing things.

Yes, I think that's an important difference, right, because, you know, not believing something is objectively valuable and not subjectively valuing something. different things. You know, I can think, you know, I could think, yeah, I recognize that like my family aren't objectively more valuable than other people, but that doesn't mean that I don't subjectively value them a lot more than... But can you be like a total nihilist about objective value? I mean, I sort of imagine a lot of people say to me, well, you know, there can't be a nihilist because they wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. They wouldn't do anything. They'd starve to death because they wouldn't have the value of food. And I'm like, well, it would be like, I think

A nihilist might be someone who, to whom is explained, the biological, the biological basis of hunger, right? They feel hungry. And then someone comes along some scientists and they say, did you know that the reason that you feel that is because X, Y and Z? And they say, yeah, but I sort of still feel hungry. And although they recognize it's not some sort of, you know, objective law of the universe that they ought to get food, they just have this preference. but they just recognize that, like, there's no meaning in it. So they go and get the food, and they do it because they want to, but they don't think they're doing anything grander than just fulfilling their appetites.

That seems pretty nihilistic, right? And so for the person who says, well, yeah, I get out of bed of the morning, but that's because I was tired and wanted to stretch my legs. But there's no meaning behind it. And actually, I'm kind of puzzled by why my legs ache in the first place and why I have legs in the first place. You know, that person still sounds to me like it would be appropriate to describe that person as a nihilist, even though they have those.

subjective preferences. Yeah, I think that to a certain extent, this is where the division between kind of a practical and philosophical nihilist becomes very helpful. And also this functional structure becomes very, very helpful because you can say, okay, what are they in fact motivated by? And what are they, even if they don't think those motivations are like justifiable? Like what, what in fact compels them to action? And you know, and I think, you know, then you can, you know, you can say, okay, well, that person's not practically of total nihilist, but they are philosophically a total nihilist, right? There's a twinge of the nihilism. about them. And it might be very, it might still be very, very distrassing. And, you know, I'm not

suggesting that this definition is correct. It's just stipulated. But I think, but I think that it might help to, to carve the difference between two situations. I feel like a lot of discussions on nihilism do get hung up on this idea of, well, is that person really a nihilist? Or are they just kind of a, are they just a hedonist? Or are they just a hedonist? Or are they just, you know, really, really sad or grieving or depressed? Yeah. And I think that this cashing out the practical nihilist in terms of, you know, in fact behavior and cashing out the philosophical nihilist in terms of abstract belief

about what is a good reason for acting. Do you think those overlap in the sense that, you know, it's been really popularized by Jordan Peterson of late. You say you believe one thing, but that's not how you behave. Yeah, I mean, I think, oh, I'm fascinated by this discussion about kind of

different definitions of belief and pragmatic versus you know, that's kind of a pragmatic theory of belief. Yeah, yeah. You know, you've got this kind of Well, you know, you might say you believe this, but you don't act like it. And I actually think there's a perfectly fair intuition behind that, right? If I told you that there is a screen in front of us, but I, you know, and I just kept asserting it, but I didn't behave like it was, you know, like I move my hands through where the screen would be.

You know, it's fair enough to say, well, come on. Like, do you really believe that there's a screen there? Because, you know, there are no, there's no behavior or expected observation implied by a statement. I don't believe that this microphone is working. but I'm going to keep talking into it and I'm going to make sure that it's still in front of my face and move sort of around in

and I think that I think that that is I think there's definitely something in the concept of belief that's really captured by that I suppose I think that there are two things one is there's a kind of asymmetry because a set of a single set of behaviours

a single set of behaviour could imply any number of beliefs so you kind of I suppose to have to whittle someone down over time to a series of possible belief sets they could hold. But you could rule out particular beliefs. Yeah, yeah, you could absolutely rule out particular beliefs. So, well, I suppose, yeah, yes, you could plausibly rule out particular beliefs. I mean, you know, there's always the kind of bootstrapped counter example of, well, you know, what if they are, what if they are, you know, what if they've been possessed by a demon or a hit or something like that?

But, you know, saving, you know, barring those sorts of counter examples, yeah, I think you can rule things out, which is one of the reasons why I think that on a, on a, in a certain sense, the practical. total nihilist probably doesn't exist. That doesn't necessarily mean they're not useful because they're a standard through which you can hold other things up to, right? The closer someone is, because I think the other aspects of nihilism is that it's kind of scalar. Well, maybe not scalar, but it certainly comes on scales. But, you know, somebody can be more or less nihilistic about something. Sure. I might value my job higher than my friend who hates his job, right? That's a perfectly sensible statement. And I think that to a certain extent you can conceive of, you can start to conceive of nihilism on those scales relative to a given object

of nihilism and or value in viewing as kind of the kind of compliments that fills the gap where meaning isn't. We often think about like beliefs or like ideologies or whatever as you either have or you don't. You believe it or yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's sort of like, well, are you a Christian? Or this guy's a Christian and I'm not. But there might be someone who's sort of more Christian than the other Christian friend or whatever. And so with nihilism, you might imagine like on One, and maybe both sides of the scale are actually impossible. So on one side of the scale, you have the person who is inert. They do not, they do not hunger.

They do not have preferences. They basically just become a rock. Yeah, I mean, they can't even, presumably they can't even observe. They can't sort of, maybe they can observe. Well, as in like, but they'd have to, that have to be kind of, well, I mean, maybe this is metaphysically dubious. They'd have to be very myriological about it. Yeah, because there's a whole thing to say about whether value is embedded into observation.

It's another thing Peterson talks about a lot, right? But like, you know, you have to choose. where to look. You know, why am I looking at you right now rather than sort of staring in the sky? Because, because I sort of value what you're giving me right now rather than what the ceiling is, right? And so, okay, so that, that total nihilus is like a sort of unimaginable creature, right? But that's, that's the side of the scale. The other side of the scale is perhaps equally unimaginable that every single thing, everything is imbued with this, like, just, just fullest sense of meaning. Like, like, the position of your hands, like, when you,

when you move one leg over the other and switch it. Like, when you, when you're sort of, whatever it is you do, you put your keys in the ignition. Like, in every single stage of that is like meaning, meaning, meaning, all the way along, right? It kind of becomes a bit horseshoey, right? Because if you value everything, you sort of value everything as much as everything else. You are still in the, in this kind of just the same sort of, I don't want to say hierarchical. That makes it seem a bit like, I don't know. Well, well, as in, I, see, I mean, hierarchical is a good enough way to do it.

I just don't want to put words in Jordan Peterson's mouth that he hasn't said. But like, but, um, I think he might have said the word hierarchy a few times. But yeah, if I remember right. He's very, I just don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to put this particular thought in his mouth if you haven't said it. But yeah, but, but, but, but this hierarchical, um, yeah, this, you have the same, you have the same problem of fundamentally, I want that there are two options and I,

I can only do one of them because I've got a limited amount of time and I'm limited by the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the force of possibility becoming actual. And, you know, so ultimately, yeah, I suppose they were kind of horseshoe round. But that is interesting. No, that is fascinating. I want people to reflect on that for a second, right? Because what is it to value?

Like I said a second ago, why am I looking at you instead of looking at the ceiling? Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you could say because I value what you're saying. But more specifically, it's because I value what you're saying more than I value putting my attention on anything else. So if I value nothing, then my eyes would be randomly fleeting around. But also if I valued everything, then my eyes would be fleeting around. And they do sort of come back together again.

You know, I haven't thought about this before, but this is really cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if the thing that matters is, yeah, is this linear ordering or, I mean, or non-linear ordering, but like some form of ordering of significance between different options. And you're sort of somewhere. So, you know, whether you're an nihilist or not is maybe a sort of faulty question. It's rather sort of where do you sit on this potentially horseshoe-esque scale? Yes, and where do you sit on that kind of horseshoe scale, but also for any given thing, where do you sit? on just a kind of, you know, you know, nought to one scale.

Because there are people who sort of think that like life has meaning, there's morality, that their family has meaning, that their job has meaning. And then there might be someone who thinks that, yeah, God exists and there's a meaning to the universe, but, you know, they don't find very much meaning in their family and their job. Or maybe someone who thinks who really loves their job and their family but doesn't think there's any objective meaning to it. And there's sort of these sort of gradations and scales of how much you can value certain Yeah. And I do think something that's often skipped over in the kind of existentialist literature. And just general discussions about this is that like, I know it sounds really obvious to say, but people are very, very different. And then different things will motivate different people on practical level, but also, you know, like I sometimes think about, you know, kid God saying, okay, you know, we need to cultivate this faith in order to overcome. You know, I don't think he uses a term nihilism, but effectively nihilism. And then you've got Nietzsche saying, okay, well, some people will be able to overcome it through strength of will. And some people, whenever you've ever even

occur to them that nihilism is even an option because they're just of that constitution. And yeah, and I think, well, actually, there's nothing necessarily contradictory between those as long as they're not universalized. And so, you know, I think there's something worth considering there as well. But yeah, no, I think that, yeah, but that's that, that hierarchical thing is really interesting. Yes. I'm going to go home and think about that. I'm sure that there's something to say about the fact that, like, although in practice, it would mean sort of not being able to sort of act or do anything, there does seem to be a difference between not acting because nothing's valuable and not acting because you're sort of paralyzed by value. There does seem to be a difference.

But I think you're quite right to think on that more, to, and I'd be interested to see what listeners have to say as well. And we'll have to have you back to talk about it. I'll go away and have a think about it. I don't know if I've written anything on that. That's awesome. Who knows? Well, so well, maybe someone can help us out in the audience here. We can call the paper. Yeah, that would be great. You know, it would be great to finally do something academic with my life for once since leaving university. But whether we talk about that or not, I'll have to have you back. This has been great fun. As I say, I mean, your channel's growing rapidly at the moment. I met you. We were talking, I think, when you had about 30,000

subscribers. And that was a matter of months ago. You're like 180,000 or something. Yeah, it's in the 180s. So growing fast and rightfully so, your videos, I think people will be able to tell. You're very well read. You're very good at communicating ideas. You've got enthusiasm and passion the way that you present them. And I think that people, that's, that's, people, there's sort of an ineffable quality that comes out of those kinds of characteristics merging together that I think is exemplified in your channel. And so I would recommend that people go and check it out. And I'll make sure it's linked in the description down below. And we'll have to have you back. It's been, it's been great fun. Thank you. Yeah. No, thank you for having me. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Yeah, thanks to come on with the show. Awesome.