2014 Personality Lecture 11: Existentialism: Viktor Frankl

We talked about phenomenology last time, and I tried to make the case that phenomenology, at least in part, was an attempt to include the entire domain of subjective experience inside the definition of reality. When Rogers talked about mental health, he was speaking of something that superseded just rational coherence. I mean, Rogers also touched on a topic that's become very well-developed since the time of Rogers, which is the topic of embodied cognition. It's become increasingly clear to artificial intelligence researchers, particularly, that the Enlightenment idea of rationality as a disembodied sort of spiritual function is wrong in principle. And I think that's because the way the brain sets itself up with the body is the way that we discussed when we were talking about P. It's that the mind is built from motor actions up, and the concepts that the mind uses aren't abstract categories that describe reality; they're more like tools that allow us to do things in the world. Their validity is predicated on the fact that we have a body.

One of the things that Rogers was trying to emphasize, and I think there's a long history of this in Western thought over the last few thousand years, is that there are faculties of apprehension that are higher than rationality. Some of those are embodied, so it's a variant of theory because the Freudians, of course, thought that it was necessary to attend to emotions and motivational states and to integrate them with the ego. But it takes that idea further in some sense by treating the inputs of the body—motivational states and emotions—but also perhaps the capacity to mirror other people as a prerequisite for mental health. The other thing that Rogers emphasizes is to pay attention to how it is that your experiential field is manifesting itself while you speak and interact with other people. He was hoping and striving towards a kind of unification that was analogous to the unification that I described to you that Jung talked about in his last book.

There's another practical element to this that I should tell you that I think is unbelievably useful. We talked last time a little bit about the necessity of listening to people and techniques that you could use to do that in the effort to improve your communications and to improve the degree to which you were gathering information that was practically useful to you and corrective. But with the Rogerian techniques, to some degree, you can do the same thing with regards to the relationship between your intellectual rationality—your knowledge as represented at the highest level of verbal abstraction—and the platform on which that knowledge is hypothetically implemented.

You can imagine in the Padian mode of development, you start to learn how to move, and then those movements are chained in ever more complex sequences. Those sequences start to become representable abstractly so that you can describe yourself, for example, as a good person. And hypothetically, as you decompose the idea of a good person down towards specific actions, that whole hierarchy is internally consistent in that you're a good person in your self-representation, but you also enact all the things that a good person would enact. Then there's no flaws in the entire hierarchy.

But the weird thing about having an intelligence that's dissociable, which means that you can think of things without acting them out, is that you can also formulate self-representations and ideas that aren't fully integrated with the manner in which you actually act. So you can have a concept of yourself, and even an ideological framework, that's only vaguely related to the programming that's been instantiated in your body. Rogers would consider that—he has a technical term for it—it's a form of internal disharmony, non-congruence—that's his term. The non-congruence idea is a very interesting one because, in my experience, you can feel it.

Here's something that you can try as an experiment, and I think it's as effective an experiment as the listening experiment we discussed last time. It's very common for modern people, especially intelligent modern people, to identify themselves with the contents of their intellect. But that's a strange thing to do in many ways. Because, first of all, obviously, you're not just the context of your intellect; you're also your emotions and your motivations and your body and so forth, and your embeddedness within the social context. But especially if you're intelligent, it's tempting to identify yourself with the contents of your intellect. But there's no reason to assume whatsoever that those contents are, in fact, congruent with the programming of your body or even with its natural inclination.

That's partly because the fact that you can abstract also means that you can learn abstractly, and that means you can pull in concepts from the world at a level of abstraction that may have virtually nothing to do with you. That's certainly the case if you're educated, because you read all sorts of things. The reading and all the investigating that you do at an abstract level allows you to have theories about being and theories about yourself. But there's no necessity that those theories about being and yourself have any basis in who or what you actually are. That makes you, in a sense, inauthentic. That's the existential perspective. The Rogerian perspective would be incongruent; you are not a singular entity at all.

At the multiple levels at which you exist, that can cause conflict. So, for example, maybe you're acting out an ideology because you're convinced of its rational integrity and coherence and utility. But that ideology doesn't fulfill you as an individual. Now, that's certainly an existential claim. It's a fundamental existential claim, in fact. As we'll talk about in the next lecture, there are thinkers like Solzhenitsyn who have ascribed the worst catastrophes of the 20th century to exactly that kind of inauthenticity, which is the development of a coherent and rational ideology, say like a communist ideology, and then the attempt to force that on the world and on people despite the fact that the rational formulation and the reality of the people and the world have very little in common.

Now, how would you detect your own inauthenticity or your own incongruence? Well, Rogers had this idea that he called "subception," which was maybe something that you might regard as a sixth sense. It's sort of like a proprioceptive perception, and that's the perception that you have of your body as it's reacting and localized in time and space. It's sort of like touch, the feeling, but it's your sense of how you're reacting internally and where you are. A lot of that is subserved by the autonomic nervous system, which is reporting to you about various states of being in your body.

Rogers believed that you could use the information that's being provided to you from your body, sort of bottom up, to determine when you were being inauthentic or non-congruent. I've thought about this for a long time and tried to sort it out in a practical manner. What I've concluded is this: you can try this for a couple of weeks; it's an extremely interesting exercise. You sort of have to detach yourself from your thoughts and what you say.

You start by assuming that what you say and what you think is not necessarily you. Of course, that's just the case because a lot of what you think—in fact, most of what you think and most of what you say—are the opinions of other people. They are things you've read or things people have told you. You know that that's a benefit in some ways because you get all those thoughts that other people have spent a long time formulating. But it's a disadvantage in that it's not exactly you, okay? So you detach yourself from that. You're no longer your thoughts or the things that you say, or maybe you're no longer all of them.

Now, what you're going to try to find out is which of your thoughts and things that you say are you, and maybe so you can utilize the rest or maybe so that you can correct the rest because they're not representative of yourself as an integrated being. They don't take everything into account. My sense has been that you can tell when you're saying something that's not authentic by feeling out whether or not it makes you weak or strong. Now, you know sometimes when you're conversing with people, you can say something that embarrasses yourself.

Now, N said, for example, everyone has perjured themselves at least once in the attempt to maintain their good name—something like that. It's not an exact quote, but I've got the gist of it right. So maybe you're saying things to impress someone, or you're saying things to remain part of your political group or your social group or whatever, or maybe you have positive personal attributes that you're ashamed of, and so you're not going to speak about them. So there's a falseness about your self-representation.

Watch for two weeks and see. Make a rule that if you start to say something and it makes you feel weak—it's hard to describe exactly what that means—to me what it means is that I can feel things coming apart sort of in my midsection. I think it's an autonomic phenomenon, and the subjective sense is of falsehood. It's like I've just stepped off the solid ground and onto something that doesn't support me well, and it feels like a self-betrayal. So that's existential inauthenticity; you can feel it right away.

Then, the rule is shut up if that happens. Stop talking. Feel around and see if you can find some words that you can say in that situation that don't produce that sensation. It's like you see this played out in different forms of drama. So there's a scene in The Lord of the Rings, for example, where I believe it's Gollum and Frodo. It's the Lord of the Rings; it's, yeah, it's Bilbo. It's the Lord of the Rings, not The Hobbit because The Hobbit's Frodo, right? So it's Bilbo. There—have I got it wrong? It's the other way around, okay? So Gollum and Frodo, yes, are going across this swamp, and the swamp is essentially full of dead souls.

They have to step very carefully in order to not fall off the track, and the stones are sort of hidden underneath the surface. The implication there is that in order to follow a trail properly, you have to pick your ground very carefully, and you have to test it to see if it's solid, or you'll slip off into this—well, essentially what it is is chaos. You'll slip off into chaos, and that's a dramatic representation of what I'm suggesting to you. It's like all you have to do is notice, but you have to pay attention.

To some degree, what you're doing, in fact, is making your capacity to pay attention superordinate to your capacity to think and to speak. You might ask yourself, exactly what are you? You might say you can identify yourself with your intellect, and that's very, very common; it's sort of like the worst sin of intelligent people. But that isn't all you are. There are lots of reasons for making the assumption that attention is a higher order function than intellect because attention is what teaches intellect.

So if by careful attention to what you say, without having the automatic assumption that what you say is you to bear on the conversation, and then also to feel like you have to defend it once you say it—you'll find very rapidly that very much of what you think and say has absolutely nothing to do with you. It's just the dead souls that are in that little scene that I described to you, sort of manifesting themselves in your head. They're dead ideas that other people have created, and some of them might be applicable to you. You might have the right to them, so to speak, but lots of them won't, and you're using the words as camouflage or self-defense or as an attempt to attain status in a status hierarchy or to make yourself look smarter than you are.

There are all sorts of reasons—or to hide what you think from other people. I see this in undergraduate essays all the time because the essays are full of clichés. You know, it's not all that obvious why a cliché is a bad thing, but a cliché is a bad thing in the same way that being possessed by the dead is a bad thing. It's like a cliché isn't you; it's something else. It's like the crowd; it's like the other; it's not living; it has nothing to do with you.

Part of the reason that students use clichés is that it's easier than using your own genuine creative formulation, so you can just default to cliché use. There's something more insidious than that: if you write an essay that's nothing but a string of clichés and you get criticized, then you're not being criticized—what's being criticized are the clichés, and you can hide behind that. The part of you that's wise but treacherous thinks, "Well, the criticism doesn't really apply to me because, you know, I didn't really say what I thought." Then there's this kind of sense you get that you've gotten away with something, which is a terrible thing.

When I read undergraduate essays, what I see very frequently is, especially the first essays, it's just nothing but clichés. It's awful; it's dull. You can hardly stand reading it because there's nothing in it that's gripping or alive. Then, maybe the second essay, you can see there's a layer of cliché, and now and then the person will be brave enough to poke up a thought of their own; it'll just sort of poke up somewhere, maybe in three pages in. It's like this little green shoot that's barely alive, and the person is brave enough to pop it up in the hope that, you know, maybe it won't get walloped down with the sledgehammer.

So, one of the things I try to do is to point that out. It's like, "Look, you know, this is something—there's a real thought here; it's a real original thought—it's something that you have the right to because it's derived from your own experience and your own knowledge, and you formulated it in an original and compelling way." But the problem with that is that if you get criticized for that, you're just going to pull right back into your shell, right? Because that hurts because it's actually part of you that you've exposed, and that's a terrifying thing to expose yourself like that.

But it's an absolute prerequisite to genuine communication and thought. The ancient Mesopotamians—I haven't got time to tell you this story; if you want to hear it, you can come to my Maps of Meaning class in your fourth year—but the ancient Mesopotamians had figured out 5,000 years ago or so that the highest God in the hierarchy of Gods, so sort of like the highest value or the thing that should be imitated most carefully, was a God whose head had eyes all the way around it and who spoke magic words.

So the words he spoke could make the sunrise and make the sun set—very, very powerful speaker. The reason the Mesopotamians had figured this out to the degree they had was because they realized that the capacity to pay attention—which is the eyes, of course, because we really pay attention with our eyes—and then the capacity to speak properly is, in fact, the highest virtue. So then you can check yourself; you can see all you have to do is listen like you would listen to someone else, and you have to feel. You think, "Do I actually believe that? Is that actually my thought?"

Really, I'll tell you what you'll find: 95% of what you say has nothing to do with you. So it's quite shocking to do this because you'll start to say something and you'll think, "Oh, that doesn't feel quite right; it doesn't make me feel solid when I say it." There's something about that that I'm subordinating myself to something or hiding in some way. It's very difficult to figure out exactly what you're doing, but you'll find out that almost everything that's abstractly represented—it has to be that way because you guys are all so young, so, in some sense, you know way more than you can actually know, right? You've been taught all these things, but you don't know them; they're just in your head.

In fact, they have you rather than the other way around. It's like Carl Jung said: people don't have ideas; ideas have people. That's something to really think about because then you want to watch and see what ideas there are floating around in your head and start to figure out where they came from. It's highly probable that they're controlling you just like a marionette is controlled by the puppeteer. It's very, very similar, and there's an inauthenticity about that, and so that brings us into existentialism.

Now, I want to talk to you a little bit about existentialists because existentialists are very concerned with authenticity. You could say that above all else, existentialists are concerned with truth. Now, of course, we know that it's not very easy to define exactly what constitutes truth, and I would also say there are various definitions of truth that can be used for different purposes, you know, because your definitions of truth can also have a tool-like function. Finally, we can't come up with an ultimate definition of truth because we're not infinitely informed, right? So ignorance is going to underlie our claims all the time, but that doesn't eradicate the validity of the concept of truth.

One of the ways you can deal with that existentially is that you may not be able to determine what's true at any given moment, but it's quite a different matter to determine what's false. That's a lot easier. One of the things I often tell my clients, for example, is, "Here's a way to clean up your life: stop doing the things that you know are wrong that you could stop doing."

So it's a fairly limited attempt. First of all, we're not going to say that you know what the good is or what the truth is in any ultimate sense, but we will presume that there are things that you're doing that, for one reason or another, you know are not in your best interests. There's something about them that you just know you should stop; they're kind of self-evident to you. Other things you're going to be doubtful about; you're not going to know which way is up and which way is down. But there are things that you're doing that you know you shouldn't do.

Now, some of those you won't stop doing for whatever reason—you don't have the discipline, or maybe there's a secondary payoff, or you don't believe it's necessary, or it's too much of a sacrifice, or you're angry or resentful or afraid—who knows? So forget about those for now. But there's another subset that you could stop doing. It might be a little thing; well, that's fine—stop doing it and see what happens. What'll happen is your vision will clear a little bit, and then something else will pop up in your field of apprehension that you will also know you should stop doing and that you could stop doing because you strengthened yourself a bit by stopping doing the particular stupid thing that you were doing before. That just puts you together a little bit more.

You could do that repeatedly for an indefinite period of time, and, you know, that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to ever be able to formulate a clear and final picture of what constitutes the truth and the good, but it does mean that you'll be able to continually move away from what's untruth and what's bad. You know, that's not a bad start. Now, Solzhenitsyn, who we'll talk a lot about in the next lecture, was a great Russian writer. He wrote a book called The Gulag Archipelago, which was instrumental in bringing down the Soviet Union.

Solzhenitsyn, like Viktor Frankl, who you'll also read, was very much convinced that the reason the horrors of the Soviet Union and of Nazi Germany and various other places around the world occurred—the death and torture of hundreds of millions of people—was because the individuals that made up those societies were inauthentic in their own use of thought and speech. It isn't a following orders theory; it's not that at all—it's a bottom-up pathology theory. The reason the whole state is pathological is because the individuals that compose it are pathological—not because they're good at following orders.

I believe that. I do believe that the catastrophes of the state are a consequence of the amalgamated pathologies of the individuals, especially their willful blindness. Another thing that you might think about—because most young people do think about this—is what is it that you can do in order to aid the world? Let's say, like, you might be thinking about being an environmentalist. Well, as far as I can tell, the one sure route to aiding the world is to clean up your existential space. First of all, you're not telling anyone else what to do—that's a big plus. Second, well, the more you do that, the more you're going to be able to do things, you know?

So you might think, "Well, if you're going to clean up the world, you might start by cleaning up your phenomenological space and see how far you get with that." It's a very difficult thing to do, but if you do it, the better you get at it, the more capable you are of handling larger and larger problems. That's how you should start. You should start with what's right in your grasp and what you can control, and that enables you to practice.

Now, here's an offshoot of this; this is an existential offshoot. Here's a hypothesis. Imagine the existentialists continually claim, unlike the psychoanalysts, that people are psychopathological not because, say, of childhood trauma or neurosis or repression or failure to integrate elements of the id into the ego. The existentialists claim that the reason that people are psychopathological is because the conditions of existence are so tragic that it's inevitable that people become psychopathological. Right?

Okay, so what's the argument? Well, people are self-conscious. That's a big problem. And because we're self-conscious, we know that we're going to die. We're aware of our temporal limitations. So that's a real catastrophe because no other animal has that problem. Elephants look like they've got kind of a dim apprehension of it, but they're not articulate, so they can't really get to the final stage of, you know, assessing their existence in relationship to its finitude.

Of course, everyone knows that they're prone to illness of all sorts and aging and that, you know, so is everyone else they know. And that you can be damaged incomprehensibly by untruth and by falsehood and by betrayal, you know? And then also that there's 150 things wrong with you that you're acutely aware of at almost all times. You fall short of perfection along pretty much any axis of comparison that you wish to generate.

The existential point of view on that is that all of that's enough to make the default condition of human beings psychopathological. It's like the weight of existence itself is sufficient to make normal pathological, and it's a very powerful argument because one of the things you might ask—and it's certainly something I've asked when I've dealt with people who have agoraphobia, for example, who are afraid to go out—you know, they're afraid to go out because they might have a heart attack and that they'll be too far away from the hospital and then they'll die while they make fools of themselves. That's basically the agoraphobic sphere.

So it's biological mortality plus social exposure, right? It's bad enough to die, but if you die in public while everyone's looking at you, then you know you get the worst of both worlds. To me, it's not such a mystery that people are agoraphobic; it's a mystery that other people aren't. From the existential point of view, the mystery starts to become the ubiquity of normality given the intolerable conditions of existence. It's a much more powerful viewpoint, and I think it's correct, too, because there's no reason to assume that the default condition of mankind is like calm rational acceptance of fate.

You have to have very, very specific conditions that you're in before you're calm and, you know, feeling comfortable and sort of hopeful about the future. That's a rare state to achieve. We can assume that's normal, at least to some degree in our society, because it's unbelievably technologically sophisticated, and we're not hungry that often; we're not cold that often or, you know, even sick that often. But to think of that as the norm, it's like no, definitely not. It's a miracle that it's ever like that.

Now, the other claim the existentialists make fundamentally is something like this: well, if the fundamental conditions of existence are tragic at minimum—because there's worse, there's evil too, which is different than tragedy because evil is sort of like unnecessary tragedy—you know, because there's earthquakes, say. Who are you going to blame about that? But then there’s you going to school and you know, there's four people who've got it out for you, and all they do is pound you flat every time you enter the building or make fun of you and, you know, try to torture you to death.

That's not tragedy; it's not your accidental subjugation to fate; it's some horror show perpetrated on you by people whose only goal is to make sure that there's more suffering in the world rather than less. So you also have to put up with that, but we'll leave that aside for the time being. You're stuck in your pathology because the conditions of existence are intolerable to a self-conscious being, we'll say that. So then you might ask, well, what could you do about that?

Well, here's one potential answer, and that answer is: see what happens if you stop doing things you know to be inadequate and wrong. The hypothesis is every time you engage in an activity like that, you weaken yourself. You put yourself down first; you remove your own self-confidence, but you also fail to take the opportunity to expand your scope of competence. What would life be like if you didn't do that? The existential claim is a weak claim in some ways. The claim is, well, there's two: one is, if you don't do that, if you don't try to fix the things that you could fix, things will go from bad to worse for your life, and that will spread out, and it will take everyone else's life along with it.

So that's on the negative end. So you don't do it because of the negative end. But then there's a positive claim too, which is maybe if you stopped bullying yourself, the tragic conditions of existence would become bearable because you would be strong enough to tolerate them. It's analogous to Jung's idea of progression towards the self. Jung has a very strong existential theme underlying his work derived mostly from Nietzsche, but it's the most optimistic—it's the only optimistic hypothesis I've ever seen in psychology, truly an optimistic hypothesis.

Because there are other hypotheses like the positive illusion hypothesis, which is basically life is so tragic that you have to tell yourself, you know, happy falsehoods just so you don't go insane, and that's what normal people do—which I think is an absolutely appalling philosophy. It's the ultimate in cynicism. But still, there is a huge literature on the supposed utility of positive illusions. There's also the associated sort of terror management hypothesis, which is that the purpose of your belief systems is to protect you from the anxiety of death, which is sort of a variant of the Freudian idea that religion was a childish delusion designed to protect people from terror of their own mortality.

It's a very powerful critique of religion, although it's one that I happen to think is wrong. I mean, one of the problems with Freud's formulation is that it fails to deal with, you know, concepts like the underworld and hell. I mean, if you're going to just whip up a belief system to protect yourself against the fear of death, why in the world would you envision something like an eternity of suffering worse than death if you ever step out of line? It's very hard to understand how that's a defense mechanism.

Now, a cynic would say, well, the only reason that, say, Christians invented hell—even though they didn't; it's a very old idea—is so that they had somewhere convenient to put people who didn't agree with them. But you have to be unbelievably cynical to assume that that's the only reason, and I don't think there's any historical support for the idea that that's the only reason. Now I'm going to tell you some stories or some of the most famous existentialists in history told their ideas and quotations.

The existentialists that I've read are often the most powerful of writers. Dostoevsky is an existentialist and Solzhenitsyn is an existentialist and so is Viktor Frankl, who survived the concentration camps, and Kierkegaard—a very weird collection of people. Their fundamental belief systems were often very much at odds with one another; some of them are atheists, and some of them are Orthodox Christians, especially, you know, because a lot of the literary existentialists were Russian.

So you can come at existentialism from a variety of origin points. But what they have in common is what I kind of outlined: the first idea is that the essential preconditions of life are sufficiently tragic to render the normative state of humanity pathological, and that health and wholeness is something very difficult to aspire to or accomplish. That the road to that health is the reduction of deceit. That's also a thing that's very interesting about the existentialists because they make a very straightforward moral claim, which is that lies make people sick.

I'll tell you, in my experience as a psychotherapist, you know, I can tell you some of the things that make people sick. A lot of them have nothing to do with the psyche. The things that make people sick are, well, they get unemployed. It's like unemployment just lays people out, especially if they're conscientious. They just devour themselves, and it's so stressful, right? Because if you're unemployed, well, your finances become shaky almost right away. Plus, you don't have any routine; plus, you're not involved in anything meaningful in relationship to society.

You know, and then you start to eat yourself up with doubts and self-criticism, especially if you're a conscientious person or especially if you're a conscientious person who's high in negative emotions. Unemployment will just flatten you. Then the death or illness of yourself or a close relative—it's really hard on people. And there are situations at work that are difficult, so people are bullied; maybe they have a terrible supervisor, or they're in a pathological social structure, so that, you know, they're basically being bullied and oppressed with every step they take. Or they're in a very horrendous relationship.

But then things start to turn a bit. So, okay, so you can lose your job, and you can be ill or dying, and so can people around you, and that'll lay you low a lot of the time. And no wonder, right? It's logical. When people come to me with those sorts of problems, the first thing I often note is they're not psychological. I tell the people that that's not a psychological problem; you're unemployed. That's an actual problem, and it's really useful to distinguish those, right?

So, for example, and this is something that psychiatric diagnosis does very badly. If someone comes to me and they're depressed—so they're not sleeping properly, they feel terrible in the morning, you know, they don't have a lot of energy, they're having a hard time experiencing any positive emotion, it's difficult for them to move, and they have a lot of negative thoughts about the past and the present and the future. I do an analysis of their life first to say, "Well, you know, do you have a job that's, you know, all right? That you know, at least isn't horrifying?"

Is it okay for you to go to work in the morning? Do you have an intimate relationship that's basically functional? Do you have some friends? Are your relationships with your family okay? Are you reasonably healthy apart from the depression? Do you have useful and interesting things to do that aren't related to your career? If the person says yes to all of those and they're still feeling terrible, then I think, "Okay, this person is depressed." Right? Because they don't have a problem; they're just depressed.

In my experience, those are the people who respond quite well to antidepressants, you know, because their nervous system isn't calibrating its analysis of their situation to the reality of the situation. It's as if their lower status, according to their status comparator—which is a very primordial thing since even lobsters have it— their status comparator isn't paying attention to their actual status. Maybe that's because they're temperamentally high in negative emotion or maybe it's because they had been traumatized earlier in their life, and so they're much more sensitive to any signs of failure.

It's easier to knock them down. But then you have the other people who don't have a job, and they never have, and maybe they're 30 or 35, no real stable employment history, no real educational history; it's pretty patchy—one or more illnesses, and then family members who are just out for their absolute destruction. Families can be unbelievably pathological, so they're enmeshed in a familial situation where, for one reason or another, as soon as they get up off the ground a little bit, someone knocks them back down.

Maybe they have a drug or alcohol problem to go along with that, or they have a relationship with someone who has a drug and alcohol problem or a mental illness. Sometimes you see people who have all five of those things going on at the same time. It's like, that's not precisely mental illness. Now, a lot of that’s associated with deceit. You know, they're entangled in relationships, and in relationships with themselves, they're pathologically untrue.

I've seen people, for example, who are in families where probably nothing they were ever told was true; like it was never just true; it was always twisted and bent in some way by whoever was talking to them for the purposes of that person—power domination or positive illusion or delusion or something—like all the communication within the family was motivated. It’s so awful to grow up in an environment like that because you can't get a grip on what's real.

You know, and then, it can get worse than that in that the person will tell you that they love you, and they'll act all sweet, but every time you do anything that's even vaguely productive and useful, they'll just criticize you to death while all the while telling you that they love you. It's really horrible, and that's all tangled up with deception and lies. It's a weird thing because if you look at the Freudian hypothesis, you'll notice that Freud attributed an awful lot of psychopathology to repression, right? But I think the distinction between repression and self-deception or deceit is very permeable.

It's like what's the difference between repressing something and lying to yourself about it? Well, Freud would say often that repression occurs unconsciously. But I really wonder about that. I think that what happens is that something happened or you did something that you don't like, and it's bothering you. You could think it through, but you just decide not to. You just don't think it through, so it's left vague and uncertain and, you know, fairly emotionally salient, but you just refuse to think it through.

Then you practice doing that until you've built up a habit of not thinking that through, and then you forget that you've built up the habit. It's like it's being repressed unconsciously, but I think that, you know—or at least you knew when you first did it. When you meet people who are acting in a twisted and peculiar way, and you ask yourself—and they're very manipulative, say—you ask yourself, well, do they know what they're doing? The answer to that could be, well no, but another answer could be, yeah, but they knew once. They knew when they made the decision to start acting like that.

After they did it a hundred times or so and made it into an automatic routine, well, then they forgot its origin, and now it runs autonomously. So now they don't know, but they did know. This is the sort of point, and this is the real point of the existentialist where clinical psychology and the claims of morality start to become very tightly aligned. It's something that the psychiatric and psychological industries, so to speak, don't really tackle head-on.

My experience has been that in these situations, for example, where the person has five terrible things going on in their life, there's just deceits twisted in and strewn in all of that. People are betraying each other; there's no fidelity in the relationships; there's no clear and genuine communication. Everything's manipulation; no one admits to what they're really up to. There's a lot of false and saccharine love, which has absolutely nothing to do with love—it's all for appearances.

You know, and you cannot be healthy in a situation like that, I don't think, in my experience. You can get unlucky, because you can get cancer, diabetes, or any number of awful things. In my experience, apart from the tragedies of life, there is nothing that hurts people more than deception. Lies do people in, and that's an existentialist claim. The claim is first, while life is basically unbearable—that's an existential claim—then there's the hope that with efficient caution and attention and clarity of thought and speech, you can master it.

You can master it to the point where you could even accept the fact that it's tragic. But if you multiply its tragedy with the use of deceit, it's like forget it. Because, you know, it's one thing to be hurt; you know maybe you break your leg; that's one thing. It's another thing to be attacked by two or three people who break your leg and do everything they can to demean you at the same time.

Lots of people break their leg, and they're not traumatized. It's very few people who can go through the latter experience without being, you know, seriously and permanently damaged. Here's Pascal, one of the first existentialists: "When I consider the brief span of my life swallowed up in the eternity before and behind it, the small space that I fill or even see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces which I know not and which know not me, I am afraid and I wonder to see myself here rather than there; for there's no reason why I should be here rather than there, or now rather than then."

Now another thing the existentialists do that's unromantic is they're not Enlightenment rationalists. Part of the reason they're Romantics is because they actually don't believe that life is rational. Pascal's comment on what the existentialists often call “thrust” is a description of the fundamental irrationality of life. It's like, okay, here you are. Well, why you? Why here? Why now? Why the way you look? Why with your family? Why your gender? Well, there's no answer to any of those questions. It's just how it is. It's blind and random chance, maybe there’s this, but even if it’s not that, there’s something arbitrary about it.

There’s something that’s arbitrary and not self-evidently just or fair. You know, because maybe you could have been born, you know, there are people around the world who make their living in garbage heaps. Whole families and whole societies that live out in the garbage dumps. All they do is pick out the metal and glass that will enable them to sort of glean out a living. It's like, well, why the hell weren't you born there instead of, you know, sitting right here?

So there's an irrational element to that, right? You can't justify it; you can't explain it. You don't really even know what to do about it, right? I mean, do you owe an existential debt to the people who were born much worse off than you, or is it just okay that it's that way? Well, it's a problem that—that, by the way, is the problem the existentialists call "thrust,” which is you're arbitrarily here in that form, and there's no explanation for it.

It's something that’s outside of human concepts of, say, justice and equity and fairness and even sensibility. Then Pascal also points to the fact that, well, we're rather localized things, you know? You're right there, and there's a lot of what isn't right there around you. You're a small thing against a big, infinitely large potential span of experience, and that's also an existential challenge. It's the challenge of the finite against the infinite.

That's also an existential problem, which is that it isn't your problem—or it is; it's more a problem. It's just a problem that springs out of being human. One of the places where existentialism and phenomenology touch—the phenomenologists, of course, make the case that reality is best conceived of as the totality of your experience, even if that includes things that you wouldn't normally consider you.

But certainly, it includes things like emotions and motivations and bodily sensations and all the things that aren't precisely rational. The existentialists would take that claim and push it a bit farther by saying, and this is analogous to something I already told you: the degree to which that phenomenological field—your field of experience—is fractured and incoherent and paradoxical, that occurs in precise proportion to the weakening of the spirit within you that necessarily has to be strong in order to remain uncorrupted by the tragic conditions of existence.

So along with the existentialist claim, which is that life is unbearable in its nature, its tragic and unbearable in its very nature, is the idea that that's made worse by your own set of inadequacies— inadequacies that you could repair. Worse, to the degree that you are rife with inadequacies that you could repair, you're going to make the tragic situation that's integral to life worse again—not only for yourself, but also for other people.

Out of existentialism also automatically arises a kind of moral necessity, which is that you can't just sit in isolation and be useless and resentful—that doesn't work. If you're useless and resentful and you refuse to address the things that you know you should address, you can't help but pathologize everything around you. And so, you're stuck with a moral duty, and the existentialists would say more than that. They would say that if you don't shoulder that existential burden—that existential moral burden—you will inevitably suffer for it; you cannot get out of it. You're stuck with it.

So existentialists are great believers in free will in that you have choice, but the free will has parameters, right? There are still things that you can't get away with, and one of them is you cannot—you fundamentally can't get away with being immoral. The structure of existence is set up—well, one of the things you might say if you were thinking about it existentially is that immoral things are precisely those things that you can't get away with. That's why people have identified them as immoral; the consequences of enacting them will inevitably be brought to bear on you or on the people you love, or it will snap back in some way.

I see this in psychotherapy very often too. People will engage in the same kind of behavior over and over. Well, there's a classic definition of insanity, which is insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome each time. There's an element of self-deception in that. It's like people will run out a procedure that ends in tragedy, and then they'll repeat that over and over. You can lay out for them the causal connection between their actions and their conceptions and the outcome, and they'll listen, but there's no change whatsoever in behavior.

So then they run through the routine again, and bang! What they're doing is immoral precisely because whenever they implement it, it produces the kind of catastrophe they claim to want to avoid. You know, relativists—modern relativists—like to think of morality as something that's just arbitrary, like it's a cultural construction. You know, Society 1 thinks that A is bad, and Society 2 thinks that B is bad. And when you get right down to it, there's no commonality underneath all that.

But the existentialists sort of undercut all that, and they just say, well, what's immoral are those things that you could change that you do that result in outcomes that are catastrophic for you. That's it, that's what immoral is. And so that's universal because it doesn't really matter what the details are. You know, like what you do that's immoral could be very much different than what you do. It might be temperamental; you know, we're each in our own playing field in a sense. But there's a commonality underneath that, which is, well, for example, you won't get away with deceiving yourself. You just can't.

The reason you can't is because you need a model of the world that's like the world. If you try to live in a model of the world that isn't like the world, you'll just bump into the world. The deception brings with it its own punishment, and that's why it's immoral. There are other elements of existentialism that I think are extremely interesting. For example, the definition of truth in existentialism is different than the definition of truth that might be characteristic of objective materialism.

So truths that are truths from the perspective of objective materialism are scientific truths, and they're usually descriptive truths. The truth claims of science go something like this: I'll undertake a procedure, which I'll tell you about, and I'll observe the outcomes. Then if you undertake that procedure and you observe the outcomes, and the outcomes are the same, you know, then we'll do this maybe a hundred times just to be certain—then we'll assume that that outcome is real.

So it's a definition of a procedure that's—that's the experiment that elicits the outcome, and then the demonstration that the outcome is constant across observers. That's a lovely definition of truth, and it obviously has extreme utility—partly because it helps you separate subjective fantasy, which is a form of reality, from other forms of realities. You don't want to confuse those two things. In fact, that's actually a sign of—if not naivety and a state of undeveloped differentiation, it can also be a sign of insanity—because one of the things, say that characterizes schizophrenics is they can't tell the difference between what only they experience and what everybody else experiences.

So the scientific definition of truth is a perfectly reasonable definition, but it's not the existential definition of truth. The existential definition of truth is more action-predicated. For the existentialists, truth is a way of being; it's not a collection of descriptions. So it's more embodied, you know, from the Padian point of view. Truth is reflected in what you act. So Nietzsche would say, for example, it doesn't matter what you say; it matters what you do. If I want to figure out what you believe, I don't ask you; I watch how you act, and I assume that your true beliefs are those that are directing your actions.

So, truth is discovered in action. That's a very different claim. You know, it's not the claim of a passive observer. It's the claim of someone who's actively interacting with the world. And of course, we are always acting; we're always acting interactively with the world. If we don't act interactively with the world, we cease to exist. So the existential claim would be, given that it's in our essential nature, there are ways that you can act that are improper.

Technically, it's like this: for example, let's say you want A, and then you act in a bunch of ways that makes it absolutely impossible that you will get A. An existentialist would say, "Well, there's something wrong with that schema." It's a—you know, it's not necessarily immoral because that would only be if you were willfully blind to it. But they would certainly say, "Well, it's got this self-contradictory element that makes it wrong."

So in so far as you're acting, you're acting towards an aim. You want something, and then in so far as you want something, the fact that you want it constitutes the framework within which you evaluate the utility and truth of your actions. Right? It’s like you come up with a theory of truth just because you're doing something, and the theory is that what you want is acceptable to want. You know, that can be true or not, but it doesn't matter. You just assume that. And, B, that those things that will get you to that end are appropriate. You can't get out of that.

If you're doing something, you're making a claim about the structure of the world and what constitutes appropriate action. As soon as you make any action, you can't get out of that. Nietzsche said, "Can one live?" "All truths are bloody truths to me." That's one of the things I really like about reading the existentialists too. There's no abstract disembodiment in their philosophy. You see that the people who are writing as existentialists are committed to what they say—they want to enact what they say in the world.

It's romantic because it does involve emotions and motivation. It's seen with reason alone. The Enlightenment view of reason was that reason and the passions were antagonistic—that all the passions could do would be to cloud reason and that it was reason's job to lift itself up above the body and the emotions and clarify the nature of the world. The existentialists would deny that completely; they would say no, no, no. It's that the appropriate mode of being is to act properly.

Rationality can be a guide to that, but it can also deceive in all sorts of ways. The passions inform you; they don't cloud your reasoning. Although, of course, they can because they tend to be kind of single-minded; you know, they can take you off course. But that doesn't mean that they're enemies of rational clarity per se. When the existentialists write, you can tell they put their whole being into it. It's gripping and passionate.

The existentialists have also identified sort of classes of pathology that are unique in some ways. They're outside the purview of standard psychology and psychiatry. You see, often if you're looking at debates, say, between atheists and religious people, one of the things that tends to set the atheists back on their heels is the observation that the religious people make that if there's no final meaning to anything, then there's no meaning to anything.

So that immediately lists—a kind of nihilism; it's like, if nothing means anything, why do anything? It's a reasonable argument because doing things requires effort, and you can say to yourself, "Well, why should I do X or Y, especially if X is difficult? Who the hell's going to know in a thousand years, or who the hell's going to know in a hundred years, or why does it matter anyway?" Then the atheist will tie themselves up in knots trying to address that issue.

But the existentialists take a different perspective. Nietzsche, for example, viewed the emergence of nihilism as a kind of cultural pathology. You remember, of course, that it was Nietzsche who said, "God is dead." You see that scrolled out in like washroom graffiti from time to time. It's like a truism, but that isn't what Nietzsche said. He said, "God is dead, and we have killed him, and we never find enough water to wash away the blood," which is a very, very different statement.

It wasn't like he was proclaiming it triumphantly; it was more like a catastrophic loss of meaning; you know, the sort of loss of meaning that the terror management theorists would say would produce like a traumatic pathology. What Nietzsche observed was that, of course, you all know this to some degree, that in the course of the development of scientific knowledge and rationality, a contradiction between our historical moral knowledge, formulated in religious terms, and our descriptive rational knowledge emerged.

The conflict between science and religion—now part of that conflict is due to the fact that the purpose of religion is to tell you how to act, and the purpose of science is to provide clear descriptions of what universally apprehensible reality—that they're not working in precisely the same domains. It doesn't matter. Nietzsche's observation was this: he said, "It's pretty clear that the scientific rationalists are going to demolish the substructure of Western religious belief."

Of course, the substructure of that sort of belief all the way around the world, and there's going to be consequences to that. He said there's going to be two consequences, and he predicted this, say in 1850—unbelievable. He said that what's going to happen in Europe is there'll be the rise of socialist/communist utopian schemes that will possess people and that will produce a war. The consequence of that war would be that hundreds of millions of people die.

He predicted that like 80 years before it happened—well, maybe less, if you think of the Russian Revolution as a precursor to that, which Dostoevsky would have certainly viewed it as a precursor to that. Now, so there’s totalitarianism on one side; that's one of the dangers. Another danger is nihilism, and the nihilism emerges because you shatter the meaning structure within which action is conceptualized.

So those are like two emergent pathologies that threaten people. Now, if you talk to someone who's nihilistic—and rationalists are almost always nihilistic, especially if they're depressed—they'll say things like, like I already told you, "What difference does it make anyways?" Now Dostoevsky played out those themes, for example, in a really powerful way in a number of his books.

The possessed, for example, it's funny because Dostoevsky and Nietzsche wrote at the same time. Dostoevsky wrote literature, and Nietzsche wrote philosophy, but they were doing exactly the same thing. In Dostoevsky's The Possessed, he talked about a description of the Russian political, economic, and ideological scene, and what he saw happening was that as people moved away from their enmeshment in a historically conditioned meaning system—so that was, say, Judeo-Christianity—they started to become susceptible to utopian, rationalist utopian ideologies.

It was so out with one system and in with another, and the other was more dangerous because, like the religious system, sort of emerged from the bottom up, and they were weird and mythical and difficult to understand from a rationalist perspective. Whereas the utopian schemes were rational constructions—ideologies, very narrow—and they're just imposed on people. So, for example, the communists would say, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," which sounds wonderful, but if you put it into practice, it’s like it's instantly genocidal.

Nietzsche said, "Well, as the modern world suffers through the contradiction between scientific rationality and ritual religion, historically conditioned, the consequence of that is going to be that two pathologies will emerge: one is reliance on totalitarianism." So, I would say to the degree that any of you are ideological, then you've succumbed to the one pole of post-religious pathology, and all you've done is replace adherence to one set of beliefs—even though religious beliefs are not precisely beliefs—with another that's rationally constructed and incredibly dangerous.

He said, "If it isn't going to be totalitarianism, it's going to be nihilism." The thing that's so interesting about the existentialists is they make a forthright claim that regardless of whether or not the fact that people will turn to those alternatives can be rationalized, it makes sense that it would happen—it's still pathological. It's like an a priori statement. So I could say, well, let's say you're nihilistic. You know, you lack—you have a lot of doubt about life's meaning and purpose, and it's eating at you.

It's a disease of the soul. You come to me, and you tell me 30 logical reasons why what you say has to be true, and I would say those are excellent logical reasons, and you're making a very powerful argument, but it doesn't matter; it's irrelevant. The fact that you're nihilistic means that you're infected with a pathology, and whether or not you can justify it rationally is completely irrelevant.

All it means is that your rational mind is capable of spinning off a sequence of logical tricks, and the ultimate truth is it's undermining your ability to live, and so it's wrong. Why is it wrong? I don't care why it's wrong; it's not relevant why it's wrong. What's relevant is you can't live like that, and that's an existential claim, because the existentialists are interested in a different kind of truth.

They would say that a truth you cannot live is not true because their definition of truth is different; it's predicated on action. The totalitarianism claim is the same thing. So let's say that you're an ardent right-winger, or you're an ardent socialist, or you're an ardent feminist, or an environmentalist, or who cares what the 'ism' is. You've abstracted out a bunch of axioms, you develop a coherent representation of the world, and it's pathological.

It doesn't matter what the content is; it's pathological because it's not you. If it was you, then a million other people wouldn't believe it. So the existentialist would say if a million other people believe it, it's definitely false. They're not talking about scientific claims; that's a whole different order of discussion and description. They're merely making the point that you're an individual thing, and if you've been unable to particularize your experience and you've replaced that with adherence to some sort of arbitrary and universal call to action or representation, you're pathological; it's a form of mental illness.

You might say, well, what's the evidence for that? Well, what we'll find out in the next lecture is the 20th century was evidence for that—not so much for the nihilism aspect. I think that we're still in for that because I think we swung to totalitarianism first, and that didn't work. You see this in postmodernism, for example. It's an unbelievably nihilistic philosophy because it claims that all meaning, for example, is reducible to motivations of power, which is intellectually simplistic beyond belief.

It comes straight out of like 1950s Marxism, and you know, it's pretty much permeated the humanities and the study of literature at universities all over North America. It's sick beyond belief to teach young people that all meaning is relative. It's the last thing you guys need to hear when you're like 20. The reason that people teach it is that they're more afraid that things might have meaning than they are afraid that things might not.

You might ask yourself, well, here's two options: one is, it doesn't bloody well matter what you do. Who the hell cares who’s going to know in a thousand years, and everything's relative? Well, you think God, nothing could be worse than that. Well, I can tell you something that would be worse than that. It’s easy: let's take the reverse—everything you do matters. Okay, so what's the downside of that? It's like you don't get to get away with anything. Everything you do is important. It's linked to everything else.

Now choose. You've got a choice. You can either choose to believe nihilistically that nothing has any meaning. Well, you get to be depressed and anxious, and maybe you're impulsive because that's the only kind of pleasure you can find. But the advantage is you don't have any responsibility; you can do whatever you want. If a psychoanalyst would say, "Hmm, maybe that's why you believe it—that's a secondary gain," right? You think you believe it because you've derived it logically.

It's like, yeah, sure. No, no, you believe it because it's in the best interest of the worst aspects of you to believe it because it justifies sloth and cynicism. While the opposite is, yeah, what you do matters. It's like, well, why not believe that? Well, try believing it seriously and see what happens. You take the existential claim seriously. One of them is: you make a mistake, especially one that you know is a mistake; you will absolutely pay for it.

And worse, you'll never get away with it. And worse than that, it'll domino out into the world. So not only will you pay for it, but the people that you're connected with will pay for it. There's always a price. It's like, well, you decide which of those two things is more terrifying. When you read Freud, and Freud says religion is a defense against death anxiety, well, that's a good argument.

But it is by no means clear to me at all that the reverse of that—which is the idea that things have intrinsic meaning and that you have a like an intrinsic responsibility—is by no means clear to me that that's a comforting idea. It could easily be that the more comforting idea is that, you know, you're just a speck in a collection of specks, and what you do doesn't matter. Well, you can sit and play video games for the rest of your life, and it’s not going to make any difference; it doesn’t have any significance.

Well, if the opposite is true, you know, every time you do something pathological, especially if you know it's pathological, you tilt the whole world towards pathology. The existentialists would say of the 20th century, we just about annihilated ourselves once in 1962, and then once again in the early ’80s. We were this far away from nuclear annihilation. You might ask yourself, well, why didn't we do it?

The existential answer would be, as a collective, human beings decided that it would be better to continue being than not to. And the way they decided that was by shifting the ratio of their pathological to honest behaviors a little bit more towards honesty. You might wonder about this sort of thing, if this kind of thing could possibly be true. Well, that's why I have you read Frankl and Solzhenitsyn. You know, they're not classic personality theorists, but it doesn't matter to me because they're getting at something that's deeper than the terror management theorists or the people who deal with positive illusions.

They're trying to make a case based on the analysis of an entire bloody century, and the case is societies become carnivorous and pathological in precise proportion to the degree that the individuals who make up that society become deceitful and irresponsible. I've never encountered a political or economic analysis or claim that has anywhere near the power of that. But it's a terrifying proposition, even though what you get out of it is, well, your life is meaningful. Your life is meaningful.

Then, if all of a sudden you find that you're suffering unnecessarily—this is a weird thing too about meaning claims—you know, someone's nihilistic; they come and talk to you; they say, well, my life has no meaning, and I say, well, how do you feel about that? They say, well, I'm really feeling bad. Then you say, well, that's a meaning. Feeling bad, being anxious, hurting—those are meanings; they're just not very good meanings.

So then you might also ask yourself if your philosophy throws you in the direction of overwhelming negative emotion, anxiety, and pain. That's a meaning too, a. You might note you're not going to argue yourself out of that. You know, which shows that there's a meaning basis; you can't just all of a sudden decide you're not hurting or not anxious. You don't have control over that; the meaning of your pain is completely impenetrable to your rational mind.

So even if you're nihilistic, you have to admit to the meaning of negative emotion. Well, then what do you do? You just deny the existence of anything positive? Well, why is that reasonable? Maybe it's just that, well, you could be unlucky, and maybe you're not. Well, you know, and maybe you have reasons to be suffering that have nothing to do with the way you're construing the world because people do get unlucky.

But there's always the possibility that the reason that things are so terrible for you is that you're inhabiting a pathological perspective. That's an existential point of view. Can somebody tell me what time it is? What? Well, good, then we can stop. We'll see you after reading week.