2015 Personality Lecture 12: Existentialism: Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard

This lecture, and the next, are probably the most explicitly philosophical lectures of the course. Then, we move into psychometrics and biological psychology. Those are going to be the most scientific lectures of the course. I was thinking, this morning, while I was preparing this lecture, about why I approach these topics this way. Part of the answer is, probably, that it is not clear that the study of personality - at least, insofar as the concern is to further the development of personality, which is a term associated with the desire for mental health, or "subjective well-being," a term I really do not like, or "meaning" - can be strictly scientific pursuits.

So, then, if they're not strictly scientific pursuits, what should you do about understanding them? If you look at studies, after studies, the problem is you get a very narrow slice of the domain. It's often not very comprehensible because, in order to understand the results of a study, you have to have the knowledge - the underlying knowledge - that is necessary to put the study in some sort of framework. That framework is going to be developed by studying the relevant scientific literature and psychological literature.

Behind that, the framework has to be expanded to include the relevant philosophical assumptions. I do not really think that you can understand the details without understanding the assumptions. I also think you are relegated to memorization if you do not understand the fundamentals. Memorization has very little to do with knowledge. You might be able to memorize procedures that would enable you to act on something, perhaps to fix an automobile or to play a piece on the piano.

It is not like those things are not worth doing. But for these ideas to take root and have affect and meaning, you have to understand them at the right level of analysis. One of the things I really like about personality theory, especially the clinical end of it, though not exclusively the clinical end of it, is that the people who were conducting clinical practice and writing clinical theory during the 20th century were in fact dealing with the most profound problems that affect people.

I started my academic career as a political scientist, while insofar as you're any sort of political scientist when you are an undergraduate. I was not interested in it at all by my third year because what I found was that, at least at this time - and I don't know how much it has changed - the political scientists had already decided that people were basically motivated by economic concerns. To me that was no use at all because I wanted to know why they were motivated by economic concerns.

It is easy to understand people in some sense if you already decide what they value. But if you can't figure out what they value, or what they should value, that is a whole different issue - and that's psychology. It is a deep question because it isn't even obvious whether the question "are there things you should value" is a reasonable question or that it can be reasonably answered. The thing I can tell you about that is most closely allied with my own experience.

I do not mean personal experience, but say, experience as a clinician, is that aimless people are in real trouble. Now I do not necessarily know why that is. And I do not necessarily know what that means for what your aim should be, but I have certainly seen, for example, if you had to make a choice which all of you will in the next five years or so between pursuing something diligently and establishing a fixed identity because of that, or remaining bereft of choice and drifting.

I can tell you that if you drift, by the time you are 30, you are going to be one miserable person. Now I am not sure why that is exactly, and I am not exactly sure that that necessarily means that picking something and sticking to it, which is a form of apprenticeship, is better than drifting. It depends on what you mean by better. But I can tell you that not catalyzing an identity seems to be a mistake, and it is a fatal mistake by the time you are 40.

It is very difficult to recover from it at that point because you are not young anymore, at that point. If you try to catalyze an identity at that time, which sometimes can happen, you are competing with all these young shiny people, who are fuller of potential from the perspective of an employer, for example, then you are. It gets pretty dismal.

Anyways, today we're going to go deeper into philosophical presuppositions than we have in the past. I want to familiarize you with what I think are the great philosophical and psychological movements of the 20th century because they shape you and they shape the world you live in, in ways that are incalculable. If you do not understand them, you do not really know where you are. You do not know where you are in history and you do not know what ideas you are possessed by.

I think I told you when we were studying Jung, that Jung said that - people do not have ideas, that ideas have people - which I believe to be true. One of Jung's lasting contributions in some sense was that you should know what ideas possess you because otherwise you will not know what the hell they are doing with you. When you think about all the irrational and apparently counterproductive things that people do as individuals and also in a mass, you have to ask yourself if you want to be caught up in that sort of thing.

If you could be free from it, if you are caught up in it, just exactly where is it that you are headed? Which was also something that Jung thought you should figure out in case where you are headed was not necessarily where you would go if you were making a fully informed conscious choice. I think that material that we're dealing within the next two lectures is the most relevant of all the material we're going to cover with regards to the possession of people by ideas.

The existentialists, who are tightly aligned philosophically with the phenomenologists, basically emerged as a psychological movement after World War II. There are reasons for this. One of the reasons was that it was quite obvious, not only that World War II was an ideological battle fundamentally between Fascism and Western democracy roughly speaking, and it was immediately supplanted by another ideological battle, which was the one between communism and liberalism, roughly speaking.

The issue of ideological possession and the relationship between the individual, who is ideologically possessed, and their responsibility and the actions of the state became paramount concerns in the 1950s, as they should have. One of the lasting questions that remained after World War II that still has been insufficiently answered is, when the mass goes insane, what is the culpability of the individuals who compose the mass?

Now you can circumvent that question with regards to what happened in Nazi Germany by assuming that it was top-down coercion that turned the mass of ordinary German citizens into majority Nazis. I do not think that there is any evidence that those sorts of ideas are true. There is research bearing on people's willingness to conform to authority figures. You know the famous experiments on the prison experiment. For example, at Stanford, where undergraduates were divided arbitrarily into guards and prisoners, and then they ran a simulation of the prison, and of course the guards turned into sadistic psychopaths, some of them did anyway.

The prisoners turned into cringing victims in no time flat. There is obviously an element there that demonstrates that people are very responsive to situational cues and that they can go out of hand very rapidly. But that does not necessarily mean that you can use your tendency to be accommodating to authority, or the human tendency to be accommodating to authority, as an explanation for the rise of mass movements like Nazism or communism, because the explanation does not really help.

Okay, some people in the mass were mere followers. What about the leaders? Well, maybe they were all followers right up to Hitler, so it is Hitler's fault. Is it all Hitler's fault? You are elevating the guy to the status of a God at that point. Now an evil God, but still, if he has got all the motive power, you cannot separate him from the idea of Lucifer. He has become an archetypical figure of evil at that point.

It's the same with Stalin and Mao. We know that they were very, very bad men. There is no doubt about it. But to localize all the evil in them and to consider everyone else victimized followers is a convenient idea, but it is not helpful. That just makes the followers pathetic for a different reason. They're not actively self-engaged in cruelty for their own purposes apart from conformity, but they are just as pathetic and evil as they would be if they were doing it on their own volition.

I do not see the difference between a bully and a bully's henchmen. In fact, I think the bully probably has more courage than the henchmen. It is courage of a fairly peculiar sort. This is what the existentialists were concerned about. The locus of their concern was basically Nietzsche. You all know that the reason I concentrate on Nietzsche and also on Dostoyevsky is because I think those two people summed up the 19th century. I really think that.

The problems that they laid out and predicted would unfold in the 20th century were the problems that unfolded in the 20th century. They got their predictions right and I think they got their causality right too. Given the inability of social scientists, including psychologists, to predict large term mass events, the fact that these two people managed at 30 to 40 years before the events unfolded and even longer than that seems to me that it is pretty much worthwhile to consider them psychologists. Certainly Nietzsche thought that of himself. And so did Dostoyevsky for that matter, and they had immense influence on people like Freud and Jung and Rogers, all the people that we have been studying.

Their thinking is lying underneath every issue we have discussed. This is one of Nietzsche's great statements. "Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness." With greatness, that means cynically and with innocence. What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently, the advent of nihilism.

Our whole European culture is moving from some time now, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade, as toward a catastrophe restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects. It's afraid to reflect. He that speaks here has, conversely, done nothing so far but to reflect as a philosopher and solitary by instinct, who has found his advantage in standing aside, outside.

Why has the advent of nihilism become necessary? Because the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence. Because nihilism represents the ultimate logical extension of our great values and ideals. Because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these values really had. So one of Nietzsche's claims, for example, was that as Christianity in Europe transformed itself into science, he felt that one of the advantages to the Catholic domination of Europe for so many centuries was that the mind of the Catholic adherents who took the discipline seriously, or the dogma seriously, learned to interpret all events under the schema of a single theory.

He thought about that as a form of discipline. Imagine that if I want to teach you how to theorize, I might teach you a theory and have you adopt it. Nietzsche's point would be that while you know a theory, but it also means something else. It also means that now you know how to theorize and the important consequence of learning a theory may not be the theory. It may be that you learn to theorize.

Nietzsche also pointed out that once you learn to theorize, you can separate yourself from the theory that gave rise to that knowledge. And so you can start to theorize even about the theory that you mastered, and he thought that is what happened to Europe as a consequence of its domination by Christianity, especially because of Christianity's essential insistence on the utility of the truth.

He thought that was transformed after Catholicism into scientific investigation, but that the Spirit of theorizing in truth remained intact. The consequence of that was that the European mind was disciplined by a dogma. That it freed itself from the dogma, that it turned its power on the dogma, and noted that the dogma itself, seemed to be grounded in nothing that you could get a grip on. The way you grip things with an empirical mind.

And so it fell apart. That's not saying much more than science posed a fatal challenge to religion, but it's saying it in a much more profound and interesting way. It also explains why he makes this claim, that nihilism is the logical conclusion of the great values and ideals. He did not think about nihilism as a counter proposition, say to dogmatic Christianity. He thought about it as the logical outcome of that.

Is that relevant? Why is that relevant? Well, I think it's relevant for a lot of reasons. The first observation might be that a tremendous amount of mental illness, this is an existential claim, is grounded in nihilism. When someone who is depressed comes to see you, what they often say is, "I cannot see any point in life." That isn't what they mean. What they mean is they see the meaning of life as suffering, which is a meaning, right? And that is not bearable. And then the question is, why bother with it?

And that is the fundamental question of suicide. It is a philosophical question. I think it was Camus who said the only real philosophical question was whether or not to commit suicide. Now you know, that is a little dark, coming like well maybe Camus could use some SSRIs, but you get the point. And it is inappropriate, in my estimation, to even discuss depression with someone who is depressed, especially if they are intelligent and open, and therefore more tilted towards philosophical wanderings without actually addressing the issue.

Why live in the face of suffering? Okay, so that is one problem. To the degree that you will find it difficult in your life to build anything solid under your feet that you can stand on and believe, have faith in, let's say, you are going to be adrift. The reason for that is a lot of the things are going to have to do will be difficult and they will involve suffering, which is also an existential claim.

So, the existentialist for example, they do not make the same claim Freud does. Freud claims that, in some sense, the normal person is mentally healthy apart from the mild distress of normal life, and in order to be psychopathological, you have to have been hurt, maybe multiple times or there are other things that could contribute to that the existentialist would say no, no, let us just wait a minute here. Maybe the fundamental condition of human beings is nihilism and suffering, and that something has to be produced to counter that in order for life to be tolerable.

Well, I think that is a perfectly reasonable proposition. It's a strange proposition because I have seen in my lifetime, people who are tormented by existential ideas who cannot get them out of their mind. You know, ideas that relate to the meaning of life, other people and concern about death, for example, and the extinguishing of everything that seems to have any value. It is a primary concern with them. I have seen other people for whom those questions never seem to arise.

Now, I think those people are conservative people, not very open and probably rather low with neuroticism. They are not philosophically curious. They do not go up chains of abstractions. Even if they do, they do not necessarily get disturbed in the most profound areas of their being by the questioning. That still leaves plenty of people in the other category.

Nihilism and atheism are closely related. They are not identical by any stretch of the imagination. Although I think it is difficult for atheism to describe why it is not essentially nihilistic. That is Dostoyevsky's big criticism. Dostoyevsky's claim was that without any fundamental value assumed, then there is no reason why you cannot do anything you want. And that is his famous line. "If there is no God, then everything is permitted."

All of Dostoyevsky's novel writing is an exploration of that idea. Sometimes it is an exploration of what that idea might mean if it was acted out in the life of the given individual, "Crime and Punishment." Another would be, in his book, "The Devils" or "The Possessed." It is an examination of what that idea means if it is gripped by an individual who has social and political ambitions. That is when Dostoyevsky basically prophesied, so to speak, that one of the consequences of the death of God would be the rise, basically, of Communist totalitarianism because essentially, that is what he predicted in "The Devils."

It is pretty dead-on accurate prediction. It was really quite stunning to me when I came across it. Nietzsche made exactly the same prediction, by the way. For those two men, the death of an ultimate meaning system, especially one that you see when you think about something like European Christianity at its misleading, in some sense, because the system of beliefs that constituted European Christianity and other great belief systems wasn't 2000 years old. It was 25,000 years old.

You know you can think about it as beginning at year zero but it is a mistake from a historical perspective. The ideas that profound religious traditions are predicated on are generally grounded in ideas that are much older than the traditions themselves. In some sense when, at the end of the 19th century, when things fell apart for us and we can no longer rely on our history predicated morality to guide us, it wasn't merely that we lost an overlay, a psychological overlay that had laid on humanity for 2000 years.

It was way deeper than that. We do not even know how old those how will those ideas are. We know we have some idea about how old they are there. They are at least as old as written culture. But we also know that the people who have been brought into the main streams of history, you know, as the world has united people, who were not literate had mythologies that drew from the same themes. Some of those people, as far as we can tell, had lived a lifestyle that was essentially unchanged for 25,000 years. Australian aborigines are like that.

There is plenty of evidence that these ideas are extraordinarily old. What that means is, when we separate from them in some sense, not only do we separate from our philosophical presuppositions, but we separate from the historical consequences of our biology. It is a serious problem. I think that is partly why it is very difficult to distinguish between someone who is nihilistic and someone who is mentally ill.

It is not a radical claim. People, especially those on the depressed side of the distribution, will tell you that they are nihilistic. They may not use that terminology, although they often do. "I just cannot see any point, why does that matter or why does it matter." It seems to be a fact that it matters. It is an interesting fact, that is a phenomenological fact in some sense, because one of the things that Heidegger pointed out, he was a founder of the phenomenological school, was that your primary orientation to the world, he thinks in a strange way, that your primary orientation to the world was one of care.

You could say what characterizes your experience? What sort of creature are you? Heidegger's answer would be, you are a creature who cares about things, in so far as you're engaged in the world, your primary orientation is one of care. You can think about that as a value. It is a consequence of your value orientation. God only knows where that comes from. Part of it is biological, part of it is developmental, part of it is historical. It is very, very complex.

But if you stop caring about everything, you are in trouble. That is one of the things that seems to indicate that caring is actually a fundamental reality. You stop caring about things, you do not stop suffering. It seems that unless the caring counterbalances the suffering, you cannot maintain an even keel. That is partly because it does not seem just. When terrible things happen to people, they always say two things.

How is it that being could be constituted in this manner? What the hell's going on at the fundamental levels of reality, that such suffering has to be the case? You will certainly ask that if your child was diagnosed with cancer, for example. Or you might think, why is this cruelty as it appears necessarily aimed at me right now in this place, when hypothetically it could have not happened at all, or perhaps been visited on someone more deserving? Which is the good remain the good are punished and the evil remain unpunished something like that.

For human beings, that produces a cry for justice. How can the world be constituted that way? That seems to be built into us. Those aren't questions we can just avoid. They're questions that will arise in your psyche. They will arise as fundamental questions when sufficiently terrible things happen to you. So the existentialists would say, those are conditions of existence, you are just stuck with that. It's part of human nature. It's part of human being to be perplexed by those questions.

Then the question is, at least in part, is there any way of answering them? Nietzsche said, we required some time, new values. Nihilism stands at the door. Whence comes this uncanniest of all guests? Point of departure. It is an error to consider social distress or physiological degeneration or corruption of all things as the cause of nihilism.

Now that is a typical Nietzschian phrase because there are three profound ideas in that sentence. Each one is in a different phrase. Nietzsche said at one point, I can write in a sentence what other people write in a book. Then he said, what other people cannot even write in a book. This sentence is a good example of that.

So what is he saying? If you see that people are suffering and in trouble, one thing you can say is that the reason for that is that the economic system is unjust and they are layered along the bottom and that is the fundamental cause of their suffering. But Nietzsche does not allow that to be a causal interpretation because he says there are multiple ways of interpreting your position. Near absence of material luxury does not necessarily destine you to one perspective or another.

Physiological degeneration. People are unhappy or suffering because they are ill in some manner. You could make that a matter of definition by saying that if you're suffering or unhappy, you are ill. But that is not a causal argument. It is just a different way of categorizing the data. Nietzsche would reject that because he would also note that there is some correlation between physiological health and meaning in life. But the correlation does not imply causality.

Even if it did, the relationship is by no means perfect to the degree that you would want a relationship to be before you accepted it as relevant. Or corruption of all things, that would be the idea that being itself is evil, like an evil trick, which is what Tolstoy said, by the way, when he wrote his confessions. Tolstoy, at the height of his intellectual power, he was the most famous novelist in the world and unbelievably well regarded throughout the world, but particularly in Russia.

He was a very socially benevolent man and well regarded for his wisdom. For years he was afraid to go outside with a rope or a gun because he thought he would either hang or shoot himself. The reason for that was that he had been struck by the idea that life is so unbearable, that it should be eradicated. He could not think his way out of that.

It was a form of thought that was actually very characteristic of intellectuals in Russia during his time and in his place. Dostoyevsky wrote about exactly the same sorts of things. Even Tolstoy noticed that merely observing that the world was a corrupt and evil place was not necessarily enough to tilt people towards nihilism because there seem to be people who weren't nihilistic despite the fact that that seemed self-evident to him.

Tolstoy actually turned to the Russian people, you know, he was very entranced by the idea of the folk and folk wisdom, and he turned to the Russian people as a source of new inspiration like the peasantry. Tolstoy actually fought for the freedom of the peasantry and he felt that their simple faith, so to speak, was something truly admirable rather than something pathetic and weak from an intellectual perspective.

He strove to emulate that criticism-less faith. But of course he could not do it because once you take a bite out of the apple, there is no going back, so to speak. Nietzsche says, distress, whether psychic, physical or intellectual, need not at all produce nihilism. That is, the radical rejection of value, meaning and desirability. Such distress always permits a variety of interpretations.

Rather, it is one particular interpretation, the Christian moral one, that nihilism is rooted. The end of Christianity, at the hands of its own morality, which cannot be replaced. Which turns against the Christian God. The sense of truthfulness, highly developed by Christianity is nauseated by the falseness and mendaciousness of all Christian interpretations of the world and of history.

It is a rebound from God is the truth to the equally fanatical faith. All is false. An act of Buddhism. Scepticism regarding morality is what is decisive. The end of the moral interpretation of the world, which no longer has any sanction after it's tried to escape into some beyond, leads to nihilism. All lacks meaning. That is rooted in Nietzsche's criticism of Christianity because he believed that Christianity was exceptionally morally flawed because all it offered its followers was the possibility of salvation and redemption from their suffering after they were dead.

It was projected into some other world. As far as Nietzsche was concerned, alleviating people of their local responsibility to try to improve things here and now and Jung's comments about that were essentially, that it was the proto-scientists' recognition of the fact that the spiritual salvation that Christianity promised was no longer sufficient, that motivated the development of science.

So, for the early Christians this is part of the tension between Christianity and science. For the early Christians, the idea was that the earth in some sense was ineradicably corrupt. That all you can hope for in your earthly life was suffering and that you should accept your suffering and hope for salvation in the future after you're dead. Obviously, that philosophy appeared insufficient for people.

In Jung's hypothesis about the development of science was that a counter fantasy developed in the unconscious of the Europeans which was that the material realm, which had been defined as evil, and therefore not worthy of any study or any pursuit whatsoever actually held the seeds of the redemption that was lacking. That was Jung's commentary on the idea of the philosopher's stone because the alchemists, who were proto-scientists, were trying to find a material substance that would be the philosopher's stone that would offer its holders wealth, health and eternal life.

Why are we pursuing science? Well, hopefully, because we think it will do us some good here and now, in our bodies. Jung regarded science itself as stemming from that compensatory dream, brilliant idea. It is actually the only idea I have ever read that seems to do a reasonable psychological account for the emergence of science as a discipline. It is a very strange practice. You have to narrow your interests tremendously to be a scientist.

You have to focus on one set of phenomena that might appear as useless to contemplate as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. You have to devote decades to the study of that thing to make incremental progress. Why in the world would people ever be motivated to do that? Jung's interpretation was, there was a deep counter movement towards the over-spiritualization of the psyche and that was the revaluation of matter and its possibilities.

While Nietzsche believed that Christianity as it stood, at the end of the 1800s, was an untenable philosophy because he thought it had abandoned its moral obligations by escaping into some beyond, and therefore damned life as it was actually lived by human beings. He felt that the demise was a good thing. He points out one other thing.

This is the difference between having a theory and then learning to theorize. He says look, if you have been raised in the tradition, whatever that tradition happens to be, you have a belief system, whatever that belief system happens to be, and it falls apart on you, at any one point you suffer for two reasons. The first is, your belief system fell apart and that is not a good thing.

It leaves everything unfixed and open, and you drown in possibility, in a sense. That is a Kierkegaard phrase. But the second consequence is even worse. Once you've learned that one belief system that is solid could be demolished and fall apart, then it's very difficult ever again to have any faith in any belief systems whatsoever. Not only do you become a doubter of your own creed, you become a Meta doubter, which is the doubter of all belief systems.

The step from that to nihilism, maybe those are exactly the same thing. You could think about that in some sense as the disease of the critical rational mind. It can saw off any branch that it is sitting on. And you know the utility of that is? Leave no stone unturned, right? You are supposed to question things. The utility of that is, you learn new things.

But the price you pay for it is that you are not necessarily ever certain about anything. You could say, maybe you shouldn't be certain about anything but you can forget that. You are going to have to act as if you are certain many times in your life. When you choose a permanent mate, for example, if you do that which you probably will because you're university educated and university educated people still do that.

Although no one else does. So, you are going to pick a career and you are going to make decisions, one after the other about which, if you are not certain, you cannot make. In which case you have no life. You are just a whirlwind of chaos, so you are stuck with the necessity of following a course of action, which is acted out certainty that your intellect cannot regard as appropriate. And that is hard on people.

Why should I choose this instead of this? Why should I act this way instead of that way? I do not know is not a very useful answer when you are a creature that is cognitively able, as we are. This is something absolutely brilliant. It is very difficult for me to believe that it was written so long ago.

So this is Dostoyevsky's criticism of communism forty years before communism was a political force. Dostoyevsky is thinking really hard about this nihilism problem. By the way, Nietzsche read Dostoyevsky quite extensively. He is thinking about it. He thinks well, there seems to be two alternatives.

One is this superhuman nihilism, which is sort of a variant of what Nietzsche proposed, because Nietzsche proposed that it would become the responsibility of every human being after the death of their religious tradition to establish their own values. He did not think people could do it. He thought there would have to be a new kind of person who could manage it because you know, he is basically asking you to generate a coherent and pragmatically applicable philosophical structure, out of nothing, during your lifetime.

Good luck with that. You know, plus, he assumed that people create values or that they could create values. That is true to some degree. We'll talk about this more when we get into the phenomenological end of things. But it is not self-evident, right? Because one of the things you may notice is that you cannot force yourself to love someone, right? But you cannot just decide to value someone and then, poof, that happens.

In fact, you may want with all your heart, or at least with all your mind, to value someone because they deserve it. They had never mistreated you. Maybe you've said you would be loyal to them, and poof, someone comes along and you're tremendously attracted to them and off you go, like someone who is possessed.

Well, did you create that value? And then, closer to your own experience, can you actually make yourself interested in something you are bored about? Good luck trying that, you know. You'd rather clean up underneath your bed than read a paper you do not want to read. You cannot just tell yourself, well, I need to read this paper for the following reasons, and proof, it becomes interesting.

No, no, your value systems, whatever they happen to be, are off doing their own thing. The reason for that, in large part, is because they're possessed by ideas that you do not know about, that have these historical roots and that play you in some sense, like they play puppets and the stuff is no joke.

Okay so this is what Dostoyevsky said, way back in the late 1800s. This was in a book called "Notes from Underground," and it is about a man who is like Hamlet. In some sense, he is a modern man. He's a 20th-century man really and his problem is, he is hyper-intelligent and he cannot figure out what the hell he should do with his life.

And it is really bothering him and it is worse than that because not only is it really bothering him, that he cannot get his act together, and act with any degree of consistency in character, but he knows that he cannot do that. And he tortures himself about his weakness at the same time. So he is a very neurotic character. But he is a sophisticated and intelligent neurotic.

And so he has run through all the arguments that you might conjure up, to sort of, talk yourself out of being neurotic and suffering. He has nothing but contempt for his own character. He thinks he is much weaker than people who can just act without thinking. And he's in this pit, this horrible pit. And it is a wonderful thing to read.

It is quite blackly comical and it is a great philosophical and psychological study. Anyways, in one of the sections of this book, Dostoyevsky's protagonist starts to talk about alternatives to his nihilistic hopelessness. And he thinks about utopianism as a potential alternative. So what is utopianism? Well, in some sense, medieval Christianity promised people redemption after they died.

While a utopian creed does the same thing, except it promises it here and now. Communism was a particular utopian creed and fascism had the same element. Although it was, I do not know how to describe, it was less intellectually sophisticated than communism. Communists basically said look, if you guys just stop being selfish and share, we can transform the world into a place where everyone will have enough of everything, and everyone will be able to do what they want to do.

And because of the natural goodness of people, if selfishness can be overcome, that will be the next best thing to a paradise. It was a powerful idea for people, you know? 80 years of our history was spent assessing and battling out the validity of that idea. Hundreds of millions of people died as a consequence of it. And you can understand why it was so attractive.

I mean, still utopian ideologies are attractive to people and it is hard to read radical Islam as anything other than a utopian ideology. You know, the idea is, once you establish rigid sharia, then poof, you know, you got the kingdom of God on earth. And part of the reason that the radical Muslims are fighting against the West is because they see what they are doing as a counter position to Western nihilism.

And is partly because they do not want to fall into that, you know. We would say well that is progress. Yeah, it is progress, by our standards, and it comes at a price. and also we do not even understand how it was that we paid the price.

So the reason I am telling you this is because, you do not be thinking, for any time at all, that these sorts of issues have disappeared or that they are not relevant. They're relevant. Now the guy who is advising Putin. His name is Alexander Dugan and he is no admirer of Western liberalism. He thinks about it as fundamentally nihilistic.

He thinks that its universal application would result in the dissolution of all local culture and the production of this sort of materialistic hyper-individuality. He's an admirer of tradition. And you know, specifically Russian Orthodox tradition. And he believes that the cultures, India, Russia and China in particular, should develop their own local cultures, keep the West the hell out, and act as a counter position to nihilistic liberalism.

Now you know, you can say what you want about that. I think Dugan's biggest problem is that, you know, he does not want that the diverse ideas that characterize the West to bump up against Russia and dissolve it. But what he fails to understand is those same ideas are going to emerge within Russia, anyways and if you know, if you want to keep them away outside, you have to keep them away inside and the Soviets already tried that for 70 years with pretty dire results.

So I don't think he can get around the problem merely by putting up walls, but he is going to try. And that is what Putin is doing. So these ideas haven't disappeared at all. They underlie all of the great conflicts that characterize the modern age. Dostoyevsky criticized utopianism and it's brilliant, his formulation, so I am going to read it to you.

In short, one may say anything about the history of the world. Anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can say is that it is rational. The very word sticks in one's throat, and indeed, this is the odd thing that is continually happening. They're continually turning up in life, moral and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity, who make it their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as possible.

To be, so to speak, alike to their neighbours, simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this world. And yet we all know that these very people, soon or later, have been false to themselves playing some queer trick, often a most unseemly one.

Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with such strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing. Drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface. Give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species.

And even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense, his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself, as though that were so necessary, that men still are men, and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control completely, so completely, that one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar.

Clearly that is Dostoyevsky's criticism of materialistic determinism, which he felt as a spiritual threat fundamentally, its proposition being that animals and human beings were deterministic machines. It is a Newtonian worldview and because of that, everything could be calculated and planned ahead of time because it could be predicted and measured, and that is not all.

Even if man really were nothing but a piano key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means, he will contrive destruction and chaos, sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point. He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse, it is his privilege, and the primary distinction between him and other animals, maybe by his curse alone he will attain his object and convince himself that he is a man and not a piano key.

If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated, chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point. I believe in it, I answer for it. For the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.

It may be at the cost of his skin. It might be by cannibalism. And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we don't know? You will scream at me, that is, if you condescend to do so. That no one is touching my free will, that all they're concerned with is that my will should of, should of itself, of its own free will, coincide with my own normal interests, with the laws of nature, and arithmetic.

Good heavens gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic? When it will all be a case of twice two makes four. Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant that. So what's his point? It's sort of a Garden of Eden point, you know? What are people like?

Imagine you can reconstruct a paradise on earth? You know? Hypothetically that's what everyone wants. We can go live in a paradise, and that would be the end of the problem. We'd all live happily ever after. But in the original paradise story, that's what people were provided with. And the first thing they did when they were put there was to do the one thing that they were told not to do, that would bring it all crashing down.

And that was immediately what they did. And so Dostoyevsky's stories are actually a retelling of that idea. The idea was that people aren't like the utopians think. We don't want it easy. We don't want it comfortable. We don't want it good. And the reason for that is, we'd be bored stiff.

And so that if anybody ever did put us in the kind of nursery, that would require us never to exert any effort to do anything at all whatsoever ever again, even if it meant going insane, we'd destroy it. And then he takes that further, he says, and that is a good thing. Kierkegaard writing earlier, about 40 years earlier, said something quite similar.

It is now about four years ago that I got the notion of wanting to try my luck as an author. I remember quite clearly, it was on a Sunday. Yes, that is it, a Sunday afternoon. I was seated as usual, out-of-doors at the café in the Fredericksburg garden. I had been a student for half a score of years.

Although never lazy, all my activity, nevertheless was like a glittering inactivity, a kind of occupation for which I still have great partiality and for which, perhaps, I even have a little genius. I read much, spent the remainder of the day idling and thinking, or thinking and idling, but that was all it came to. So there I sat and smoked my cigar until I lapsed into thought.

Among other thoughts, I remember these. You are going on, I said to myself, to become an old man without being anything and really without undertaking to do anything. On the other hand, wherever you look about you in literature and in life, you see the celebrated names and figures, the precious and much heralded men, who were coming into prominence and are much talked about.

The many benefactors of the age who know how to benefit mankind by making life easier and easier. Some by railways, others by omnibuses and steamboats, others by the telegraph, others quite easily apprehended compendiums and short recitals of everything worth knowing. Finally, the true benefactors of the age make spiritual existence in virtue of thought easier and easier yet more and more significant.

And what are you doing? Here my soliloquy was interrupted for my cigar was smoked out and a new one had to be lit. So I smoked again, and then suddenly this thought flashed through my mind. You must do something, but inasmuch as with your limited capacities will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, undertake to make something harder.

This notion pleased me immensely and at the same time, it flattered me to think that I, like the rest of them, would be loved and esteemed by the whole community. For when all combine in every way to make everything easier, there remains only one possible danger. Namely, that the ease become so great, that it becomes altogether too great.

Then there is only one want left, though it is not yet felt want. When people will want difficulty. Out of love for mankind and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing, and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties, everywhere.

Now, one of the things you might ask yourself is, sometimes you come to University and people talk about happiness. For example, they talk about positive psychology. I am not a fan of positive psychology, by the way. Because happiness is basically extraversion minus neuroticism and we knew that 15 years ago. So we didn't need to make a lot of noise about it.

So anyways, one of the things you might ask yourself is, well, why did you come to University? Did you actually come to University to make yourself happier? Well, let's think about that for a minute. Here's one thing to think about? We know that if you put animals in a relatively boring situation, like rats, in a boring situation and you give them free access to cocaine, they'll just take cocaine until they are dead basically.

Now rats in a normal environment won't do that, but bored rats that are sort of isolated, cocaine is really an excellent thing, as far as they are concerned. They'll ignore sex, they'll ignore food. I think they'll still drink water, if I remember correctly. But it is cocaine all the way. And if you could inject an electrode into their minds, their brains, which people have done, you can inject the electrode down into the hypothalamus, into the part that is associated with the reward centres.

It is the source of the dopaminergic tract and you can set them up so that if the rat pushes a button, they get a jolt of happiness, basically, and the rat will sit there and push that happiness button in a rather frantic way, as if it is looking for something else, in some sense. But it will certainly do it because it is a peculiar kind of reward.

Now the question might be, would you allow yourself to be wired up like that? Now you might think there might be some times in your life where you think that might just be a perfectly fine idea, but most of you, I suppose, I presume, wouldn't do that for a second, for the same reasons, perhaps, that you do not avail yourself of unlimited access to cocaine.

Which is a stimulant that is very good at producing positive emotion. It is a powerful psychomotor stimulant and so it affects the parts of your brain that are active when you are doing something that you think is worthwhile and productive. So why not just do that all the time? That is the question that Aldous Huxley asked in "Brave New World."

You've got everything you want, take a drug to keep you calm and happy, poof; perfect. Well, is that what you want? And if the answer is no, then you might ask yourself, what the hell do you want? You know, one of the things I thought a lot about lately is, lately being 10 years, I suppose, there are these statues that I've seen.

I've looked at pictures of them online. There are statues of Atlas, and you know Atlas, he's this God who has the world on his shoulders. And that is his destiny or his curse, to have the world on his shoulders. And he might say, well, you know, poor Atlas. Maybe he should just put the damn world down and you know, go out for a beer or something.

But then you might also think, well what is that figure trying to, what is that that idea trying to indicate because it's an old idea. It is a profound idea. There's something divine about a figure with the world on its shoulders. Well, I might say that's the reason you are in University whether you know it or not.

You are here to take the world on your shoulders because that is a sufficiently profound and worthwhile exercise, so that all the suffering that you are going to have, might be regarded as worthwhile. Because the value of what you are doing is so high, because that is something you might ask, is there something that you could do, whose value is so high, that the fact, for the existentialists, it's a fact, that you're mortal and vulnerable and prone to suffering, inescapably, that you would find that not only acceptable, but desirable.

You might say that you would pay that price. You might say that is the existential question. And one of the things it is very interesting about that question. I am going to talk about this a lot next class. What happens if you make the opposite choice? I think the 20th century actually showed us what happened when people made the opposite choice. Because as far as I can tell, when people abandon their Divine responsibility, let us say, to the utopian claims of a totalitarian state, or to hopeless nihilism, the consequence on the one hand, with nihilism was despair and illness, and the consequence on the totalitarian end of things, the utopian end was that you might not die, but you are certainly going to have a hand in making sure that a lot of other people do.

And so, to some degree it depends on what you want for proof with regards to what you should do. Now, the conclusion I have drawn from all this from reading the existentialists is that, if it is the pointless suffering of humanity and the inability to extract meaning from that, that makes you a nihilist and that justifies it, let us say. You are making a claim right? The claim is, the implicit claim is, that suffering is bad and should be halted.

It is something like that. And so maybe you will do that by becoming suicidal or maybe you do that by becoming ultimately genocidal, which is also an option that's open to more than a few people. But there is a logical inconsistency in that as far as I can tell which is that your initial presupposition is that the suffering is actually bad. It should be mitigated. That should be it should be reduced. It should perhaps even be eliminated.

If you pick up the cloak of nihilism, or maybe you pick up the cloak of ideological totalitarianism, then we know what the consequence of that is. The consequence is that everything that is already really bad becomes so much worse that it is almost unimaginable. And so, even by the standards of the nihilist, who says that the suffering of being should result in its elimination.

The consequences of thinking that way, or flipping to the other side and adopting some sort of defensive ideology is that, things go from being, you know, merely the sort of bad state of the earth as it is now, to something as hellish as the Soviet gulags, or the Russian concentration camps or Mao's great experiment in the Cultural Revolution, which probably killed 100 million people. You know, about which we generally hear nothing.

Now you know one of the things the existentialist would say is, what is the relationship between mental health and responsibility? Now that's a good question because it also has to do with something like the definition of mental health and responsibility. It is like, if you want your life to be well constituted, let us say, whatever that means. And it does not mean being happy.

The reason it can't mean being happy is there's going to be times in your life where you're to be called on to act when you are not happy. So, for example, when one of your parents dies, you're going to make a choice. You are not going to be happy. Hopefully, you won't be. Otherwise, you are tangled in some sort of Freudian nightmare. But let us assume that that is not the case.

You are not going to be happy about it. You're going to be hurt and maybe even partly broken. So what the hell you supposed to do, then? Well the answer is, you should be more use than trouble. Under some such circumstances, that's a good thing to strive for, you know? Because your mother would be, if it is your father. And your mother is to be equally distraught and so are your siblings and everyone else you care for.

Maybe by that time, you should be tough enough so that in that situation, you are good for something. Someone has to make the damn funeral arrangements. Someone has to settle out the will. Someone has to make sure the family does not degenerate into horrific squabbling, which is something that often happens after the death of a parent. And you are not going to be motivated to do that by happiness.

And what if you have a sick child, when you are a parent? Maybe it is a chronic illness. You are not going to be happy about that. You know it will be a weight that you carry with you all the time and it is one of those things. It seems particularly unjust. Then, you are no longer happy. If being happy is the purpose of life, then you are basically, that is pretty much it for you.

And you know these catastrophes that I am speaking of. You can be certain that you are going to be exposed to many of those during your life. You know. It will be a rare period, I think it is rare, in anyone's life where one or more of such things is not going on chronically. It is not you, with some terrible health problem, or some other terrible problem, then it is a parent or a sibling or a child.

Because you know, you are connected to other people and their vulnerable to so that is the law of human beings. And so if it is happiness and this is what Solzhenitsyn said about happiness too. He said happiness is a philosophy, who's brought to ruin by the first blow of a guard's truncheon.

Like yeah, that is about as bluntly as you can put it. Here is another, I have time to read both of these. I think this is from Kierkegaard as well. Kierkegaard, by the way, was really the first thinker who identified what we would describe in modern terms as anxiety, especially as existential anxiety or angst.

And it would be associated with the condition of questioning the nature of existence, the utility of existence, and so Kierkegaard was really the first person who formalized that into something resembling a philosophy or a psychology and that he was trying to think about how that might be overcome. Given that it seemed to be rooted in fact, the factual observation. That is the observation of suffering and this is a corollary to Dostoyevsky's comments even though Kierkegaard's comments were written decades earlier.

Dostoyevsky's critique basically said, you cannot solve the problem of suffering by formalizing a utopia and then enjoining it like a mass animal. You cannot do that because you are not that kind of creature. Even if it was possible, you would not accept it, you cause trouble because you are interested in trouble. You are probably more interested in trouble than you are at being happy.

So I mean, you know people like that. That is another marker of serious personality disorder, right? I have clients, have many of them, who are way more interested in causing trouble in some dramatic way than they are in being boring and stable. They will take any form of suffering and inflict any form of suffering on any number of people they can possibly get their hooks into in order merely to escape, you know, drab and secure normality.

You know, you call those people dramatic, overly dramatic. That is one way of looking at it. And they make, as far as I can tell, a relatively conscious choice. Trouble is more interesting than safety. Kierkegaard says something similar. But in a manner that is more constructive, in some sense, with regards to what you should do with all that insane energy that you are not going to be able to encapsulate inside a utopia.

And it has to do with individual responsibility. There is a view of life, which conceives that where the crowd is, there is also the truth. And then, in truth itself, there is need of having the crowd on its side. I was on a panel at one point about. I think we were discussing gender differences between, obviously between men and women and there are lots of people.

The social constructionists, in particular, who think that all the differences; there is biological sex and then there is gender and gender is socially constructed and that all gender differences are socially constructed. And there is no biological differences in gender between the two sexes.

Now, virtually no evidence supports that proposition. If you look at the hard-core psychological evidence, in fact, it is completely the opposite. And not only that, as you make societies more egalitarian, men and women get more different instead of more the same.

Now the reason that happens is because, once you iron out the environmental variability, by equalizing everything, all that is left is genetic variability. So it springs to the forefront. And so the biggest gender differences in the world are between men and women in Scandinavia. And those are partly personality differences.

Women are higher in negative emotion and more agreeable, among other things, but more particularly, the differences seem to be those of interest. So the biggest differences between men and women seem to be, what they are interested in, and roughly speaking, women are more interested in people and roughly speaking, men are more interested in things.

And so in Scandinavia, for example, you have 20 to 1 proportion of women to men in nursing, and a 20 to 1 proportion of men to women in engineering. And so, you know, the Scandinavia governments, now and then, try to move that, so there are more male nurses and more female engineers.

And if they really push, they can move the ratios somewhat, for a few years. But as they relax, they snap right back to 20 to 1. So anyways, I was citing some of these studies, and one of the people that I was discussing said, what are we supposed to do with that?

And I said, I do not know what you mean. Those are scientific findings. He said that, yeah, truth has to be established by consensus. And I thought I do not want to live in whatever world you are going to end up ruling because truth is not merely established by consensus. or if you think it does.

If you think it is, then while you are in a position that Kierkegaard describes, which is that, as long as everyone else believes it, then the appropriate thing is for you to believe it, and also that is the truth. Like, it is a pretty damn dismal philosophy and it gets people into tremendous trouble because no matter how many people think there isn't a wall there, anyone who runs at it head first, is in for a vicious surprise.

There is a view of life, which conceives that where the crowd is, there is also the truth and in that truth, is in truth itself. There is need of having a crowd on its side. There is a view of life, which conceives that wherever there is a crowd there is untruth.

So that to consider for a moment, the extreme case. Even if every individual, each for himself in private, were to be in possession of the truth. Yet, in case they are all to get together in a crowd, a crowd to which any sort of decisive significance is attributed; avoiding, voting, noisy, audible crowd, untruth would immediately be in evidence. For a crowd is the untruth.

In a godly sense, it is true, eternally, Christianly, as St. Paul says that only one attains the goal. Which is not meant in a comparative sense. For comparison takes others into account. It means that every individual can be that one. God helping them therein, but only one attains the goal.

And again, this means that every man should be careful about having to do with the others. And essentially should only talk with God himself. For only one attains the goal. and again this means that man or to be a man is akin to deity. In a worldly and temporal sense, it will be said by the man of bustle, sociability and amicableness, how unreasonable, that only one attains the goal.

For it is far more likely that many, by the strength of united effort, should attain the goal. And when we were many success is more certain, and it is easier for each man severally. True enough, it is far more likely, and it is also true with respect to all earthly and material goods. If it is allowed to have its way.

However, this becomes the only true point of view. For it does away with God in eternity and with man's kinship with deity. It does away with it, or transforms it into a fable. And puts in its place, the modern, or we might say the old pagan notion, that to be a man is to belong to a race, endowed with reason.

To belong to it as a specimen, so that the race or species is higher than the individual. This is 100 years before Nazism. Which is to say, that there are no more individuals, but only specimens. But, eternity which arches over and high above the temporal. Tranquil as the starry vault at night.

And God in heaven, who in the bliss of that sublime tranquility, holds in survey, without the least sense of dizziness at such a height, those countless multitudes of men, and knows each single individual by name. He, the great examiner says that only one attains the goal. Kierkegaard was a Christian existentialist Protestant. Dostoyevsky was an Orthodox Christian existentialist.

And Nietzsche, who was also an existentialist, was a perhaps the most effective anti-Christian philosopher who has ever existed. And he made it one of his conscious aims, to take a hammer to everything that was foundational against what was left of Christianity at the time that he existed. The reason I am telling you this is because existentialism is a strange philosophy.

It brings people with very divergent fundamental assumptions together. They share certain assumptions. And one assumption is that life, in its essence, is suffering. And the second is that the individual has a responsibility to adopt responsibility in the face of that suffering. And that is the proper response the proper response in the nihilism or ideological possession.

It is something else at something that depends on the person themselves. Nietzsche draws the same conclusions as Kierkegaard. A traveller who had seen many countries and peoples and several continents was asked what human traits he had found everywhere, and he answered, men are inclined to laziness.

Some will feel that he might have said with greater justice. They are all timid. They hide behind customs and opinions. At bottom, every human being knows very well that he is in this world just once, as something unique and that no accident, however strange, will throw together a second time into a unity.

Such a curious and diffuse plurality. He knows it, but hides it like a bad conscience. Why? The last lecture, when we were talking about Rogers, not the video lecture, but last time I talk to you about Rogers, I was talking about instrumental speech. And that is the speech that you engage in that is inauthentic from Roger and existentialist perspective.

When the goal of the speech is to extract something from someone or something. The goal is not mere clarity of communication. And so what that means is that the speech becomes separate from the person. And the speech is being used as a tool for what some element of the person requires. And that's the hiding behind convention that Nietzsche's talking about.

Because, when people use instrumental speech, they're almost always pursuing something that other people have told them that they should want. It might be status. It might be career promotion. Those are two of the major, it might be material progress of other sorts. But the problem is that it is only part of the person talking.

And that part is the part that is fixated on that local achievement. It's not the part that is attempting to inquire about what the truth might be in this particular situation, and to describe it as carefully as possible. And that is the clearest speech of the individual. Now one of the premises of existential psychotherapy is that that is the only way you can be healthy.

You have to learn to speak and act as a whole. And you have to be directed towards responsibility and truth. And the consequences of not doing that will be A. that you will suffer pointlessly which is the worst kind of suffering and B. which is worse, you will bring rack and ruin onto everyone around you.

And it gets worse than that, actually, because if you do that long enough. Not only will you bring rack in ruin on everyone around you, you will want to. And that seems at least potentially like a bad outcome. Well, you can say, if you adopt a firm belief system that will protect you from that.

It is like the terror management idea of ideology protecting you from death anxiety. Which is a very hopeless philosophy, that. Because it basically suggests that the only reason people have beliefs is because they are terrified without them. And that if they engage in any sort of heroic behaviour, it is merely a facade, which in the final analysis is empty, although necessary.

That is where the idea of positive illusions came from, essentially, you know? That life is so terrible that unless you lie yourself into tranquility. You will be mentally unstable and unhealthy. A doctrine for which, by the way, there is no real evidence.

Anyways, from fear of his neighbour who insists on convention and veils himself with it. But what is it that compels the individual human being to fear his neighbour? To think and act herd fashion, and not to be glad of himself. A sense of shame, perhaps, in a few rare cases. In the vast majority it is the desire for comfort.

Inertia, in short, that inclination to laziness of which the traveller spoke. He is right. Men are even lazier than they are timid. What they fear most is the troubles with which any unconditional honesty and nudity would burden them. Only artists hate this slovenly life in borrowed manners and loosely fitting opinions and unveil the secret, everyone's bad conscience.

The principle that every human being is a unique wonder. They dare to show us the human being as he is down to the last muscle. Himself and himself alone. Even more, that in this rigorous consistency of his uniqueness, he is beautiful and worth contemplating, as novel and incredible as every work of nature, and by no means dull.

When a great thinker despises men, it is their laziness that he despises. For it is on account of this that they have the appearance of factory products and appear indifferent and unworthy of companionship or instruction. The human being, who does not wish to belong to the mass must merely cease being comfortable with himself.

Let him follow his conscience, which shouts at him. Be yourself. What you are presently doing, opining, and desiring, that is not really you. That is a good place to stop, see you Thursday.