Episode 140: Beauvoir on the Ambiguous Human Condition

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Our question for episode 140 is something like how can existentialism support ethics? Or maybe what is the human condition? We read Simone de Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity from 1948, Parts 1 and 2. You can join the discussion, get the text and lots More information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, A thing crushed by Other Things in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:01 Seth: This is Seth Paskin adventuring in Austin, Texas.

1:05 Wes: This is Wes Alwan Willing My Own Freedom in Boston, Massachusetts.

1:09 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in My Tragic Ambiguity in Middleton, Wisconsin.

1:14 Mark: Why? There are some ground rules for our discussions that we haven't read in a while. The first one being try not to assume that our audience has read what we're talking about or has any other background in philosophy. The second one don't make arguments that hinge on something other than what we've agreed to read. Don't say you'd know what I was talking about if you'd just heard Tim Quirk's naturist manifesto the Otter Song. You guys are gonna have to YouTube that to see why I would give him shit about the Otter Song. Because you should. Number three, we will be rigorous and exact in all that we say, unless doing otherwise would be potentially more entertaining.

Simone's long requested, long on our list, partially got held up because we had a guest that was lined up to do it for some years and kept pushing us off and then finally said she just didn't have time anytime soon. So we are braving it guestless and after getting into the book we decided that it was awesome enough and it was dense enough and we wanted to read the whole thing even though it's a pretty short book. So we're gonna have a two discussion episode run. So that's four episodes for the non citizen folk.

2:18 Wes: Well, it's two episodes still, technically, right?

2:20 Mark: Four books, yes it is four installments. Give us some reactions. What do you think? How do you want to kick this off?

2:27 Dylan: I thought it was awesome. Yeah, I would agree it's dense, but it's very readable. I thought that she goes right at something that we regularly run into in a serious way, which is confronting. Well, what do you do about making an argument for how you ought to do anything in ethics in the face of something like existentialism? Or what would it mean to justify a notion of freedom that's rooted in the self? It'd be related to how you would justify our own. Well, I guess relativism in some respect, what you would mean by saying, you know, understanding that our values are relativistic doesn't mean that they are unfounded. It was very, very interesting.

3:16 Seth: Yeah. I think she makes an attempt to answer some questions that were levied at, like Sartre and some of the other existentialists about a positive existential ethics that goes beyond dealing with absurdity or creating your own meaning, but also has what I think are some pretty robust critiques of traditional metaphysics, ethics built on traditional metaphysics that I'm excited to get into.

3:42 Wes: So should we say what we mean by existentialism and what she means by existence? A word that she uses a lot of.

3:48 Dylan: I figure we'll get into it for sure.

3:50 Mark: Well, let's place her. This is 1947. She was the longtime companion of Jean Paul Sartre.

3:57 Dylan: He's her longtime companion, yes.

3:59 Mark: According to Wikipedia, this was actually prompted by a lecture she gave in 1945, after which she claimed it was impossible to base an ethical system on her partner Jean Paul Sartre's major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness. So Being and Nothingness came out in 1943, not that far before this. However, the following year, over a six month period, she took up the challenge, publishing the resulting text first as installments and then in November 1947 as a book. So this is something that took a little while to come together and was explicitly a piece of apologetics for Sartre's existentialism.

When this was recommended to me a long time ago, I'm not sure by who that this is a clearer explanation of existentialism than you'll get anywhere from Sartre. His Existentialism is a humanism essay that we covered is 1946, written at the existence exact same time that this was what we got out of that. And folks can look at our old episode from that was okay, well, yes, we're absolutely free, but somehow willing your own freedom, embracing Your own freedom requires acknowledging, even willing, the freedom of other people. So that claim is in there.

But there was nothing like a coherent argument for why that would be the case. And it just seemed kind of strange. And so existentialism has come up in our episodes many times. You know, we had the one on no country for Old men, on Cormac McCarthy's book where it looked like there was an existentialist villain in there. In that discussion and almost every other discussion we've had on this topic, it's been, well, if you create your own values and there are no values written in the universe, then what really prevents you from just being a bastard as long as you're consistent about it, as long as you're not self deceiving about it?

It seems like there's nothing in existentialism that would prevent that. And especially if you take a doctrine like Camus, where the ethic has sort of preserved the abs recognize that the life force that is driving you, that gets you to come up with goals and pursue goals, is kind of silly, given that we're all going to die and that we all know that we're all going to die. And so that's. For him, it was what characterizes existentialism is keeping the absurd in mind. Now, for Sartre, it was keeping your freedom in mind. And Simone de Beauvoir.

This notion of ambiguity, though, is not in either of those folks. I think it comes close to what Sartre was getting at, obviously, but it's her own formulation and it's pretty ingenious one.

6:15 Wes: Well, it's her way of putting this conflict between what we might typically think of as a conflict between free will and determinism. The fact that we are in some sense part of nature and we are material beings and we obey the laws of physics and chemistry. And then the question is, how can we freely choose anything under those circumstances? So the ambiguity here is just which is the way she starts the book is just this. The fact that we are both subject and object and the fact that we feel like we are both product of external circumstances and that we are free.

And the way existentialists talk about external circumstances is I think, less in terms of, you know, we think of as physics, but more in terms of character. So that's something that comes up in Sartre and will come up here, the extent to which we are determined as essences. So this is to call back to the something we explained during the start episode. Existentialist credo is that existence precedes essence and that's a way of formulating the idea that we are not determined by some essential nature. We create ourselves and our values in some sense.

7:26 Mark: And it's amazing how free of that kind of language this book is.

7:29 Wes: Free of what?

7:31 Mark: Talking about existence in essence.

7:33 Wes: Well, there's a lot of existence.

7:34 Dylan: There's no essence and a lot of being.

7:37 Wes: Yeah, she's really using the word being a lot instead of or in itself.

7:41 Mark: And that we are a negative, which is something straight out of Sartre, too. It's kind of glossed over. Should we try to explain that I understood when we talked about Sartre by saying that nothingness is a strongly present element in our experience that is usually denied by philosophers, but that if we're going to give a good account of the phenomenology, the kind of example that we gave for that was, you know, if I'm looking for my friend Pierre in the cafe, I actually perceive, if he's not there, the absence of Pierre. I perceive the nothingness, you know, so pretty much whenever there's human meaning, whatever is human expectation, then there's a lack of something.

8:17 Wes: Well, also, nothingness is a way of referring to consciousness. It's a way of.

8:22 Mark: Yeah, so that's what. That's what she's using here.

8:24 Wes: But in this case, she's actually drawing a lot on Hegel. So negativity is just this sense in which we have desires and needs. That's what creates the whole possibility of even having ends. Right. Ends are these things we reach out for to satisfy that negativity. We start with this privation, and then we try to compensate for that in some way. And that makes us beings who reach out into the world. So that's the negativity part. We've got something that needs to be filled up. Or does it need to be filled up? That's really the question, because the filling up is sort of the path we're tempted to go down. But I think she's gonna say that's a bad path.

9:01 Seth: Shall we go to the text?

9:03 Dylan: Yeah, I think she walks through this whole thing in a very clear stepwise fashion. And the part that you were talking about is like the second or third step, which is fine.

9:15 Wes: It's really not until page 10 that she starts to talk about this.

9:18 Dylan: That's exactly right.

9:19 Wes: Page 10.

9:19 Seth: Yeah. This is the first paragraph of the book. Page seven of the version I have, by the way, I've got the Citadel Press edition. Is that the one you guys have?

9:29 Dylan: I have the Philosophical Library Open Road

9:32 Seth: Edition, the Continuous Work of our life, says Montaigne, is to build death. Man knows and thinks this tragic ambivalence which the animal and the plant merely undergo. A new paradox is thereby introduced into his destiny. Rational animal, or thinking reed. He escapes from his natural condition without however freeing himself from it. He is still a part of this world of which he is a consciousness. He asserts himself as a pure internality against which no external power can take hold. And he also experiences himself as a thing crushed by the dark weight of other things.

At every moment he can grasp the non temporal truth of his existence. But between the past, which no longer is, and the future, which is not, yet this moment when he exists is nothing. This privilege which he alone possesses of being a sovereign and unique subject amidst a universe of objects, is what he shares with all of his fellow men in turn an object for others. He is nothing more than an individual in the collectivity on which he depends.

10:41 Mark: So you might think that's step by step, nice explanation. To me, it's throwing a bunch of seemingly disconnected phenomenological stuff at you to try to get at what this fundamental paradox is. Instead of saying, here's what the paradox is and just stating it. She states it in seven different ways, none of which are exactly the same.

11:01 Seth: Seven? I got two. What are the seven?

11:04 Mark: Rational animal, being unto death, pure internality, feeling free against, as opposed to being a thing, an individual in the collectivity. It's even a little unclear what the relation of that last sentence in turn an object for others, he's nothing more. He's nothing more than an individual in the collectivity on which he depends.

11:22 Seth: Okay, so I got two notions of that out of this. I think those boil down to two. One is the notion of a transcendent experience or consciousness which is independent of the physical world. And then I also. And these are connected, is the notion that there's this transcendent moment in time between past and future. So there's a temporal aspect and then there's what you might call a physically transcendent aspect. And of course the two things are related. But I thought it all boiled down to those two aspects. And she's talking about what it means to have subjective consciousness. Embodied, physically embodied.

11:56 Dylan: Isn't there a third one in that last sentence of being an individual within a collective? That is the relation of being a subject. And later on she'll talk about as being a subject and an object?

12:07 Mark: Yeah, I think it's those last two sentences are a pair. This privilege which he alone possesses of being a sovereign and unique subject amidst the universe of objects which he shares with fellow men. But on the other hand, he's an object for others, nothing more than an individual in the collectivity on which he depends.

12:21 Dylan: Exactly. A sovereign, free entity and a mere individual within a collective.

12:28 Wes: So the contrast there is between being a Cartesian cogito, a sort of free floating subjectivity, and then Hegelian subjectivity, which requires the collectivity. It requires the recognition, the subjectivities of others.

12:41 Seth: That's a good way of putting it.

12:42 Dylan: Yeah. And that relationship is going to be part of the way in which you have freedom that is constrained and freedom that has a direction, freedom that has demands.

12:54 Wes: Yes. The roles of others are going to loom. Other freedoms are going to loom large eventually for them.

13:00 Dylan: Exactly.

13:00 Seth: The point of this is to say that this tension exists, and as you mentioned earlier, there's this desire to try to reconcile that or to do something about it. And she's going to take a different tact.

13:11 Dylan: That tension that you call. That's what she. That's the ambiguity.

13:14 Seth: Yes, she calls it ambiguity.

13:17 Dylan: Yep. And so in the sense that that tension described in this first paragraph is a kind of statement of the condition of man. That's our ambiguous condition. And in that ambiguous condition, that's why we have this whole book, an ethics of that ambiguity is how do you have an ethics out of that kind of ambiguous state?

13:38 Mark: So you might think just from that description that it is same as what Camus meant by the absurd. And we won't see until later why she thinks that that's objectionable, that saying it's absurd implies something negative. And a lot of the point of the book is that, no, no, no, we can actually sort of spin this positive. We can say that recognizing the ambiguity and holding onto it in much the same way that Camus thinks we have to keep the absurd alive in order to sort of be cool, if not virtuous, to be manly in the way Camus sort of talks about it.

If we end up doing. Fulfilling our existential duty on de Beauvoir's account, we do end up pursuing not just some individual frame of mind that could be characterized by Sisyphus as he's pushing the rock up the hill, or rather following the rock down the hill in hell. That's not the kind of thing that de Beauvoir, she explicitly argues against. Like maybe there is a correct way to be even in that situation. But that's not what she's considering. That's not what she's interested in. She's interested in this ultimately is going to play out into some political ends that, yes, you actually do have an obligation just based on your very freedom and your relationship to yourself to pursue something that looks quite a bit like traditional ethics and certainly involves a great deal of political activism.

So just to jump forward, that's going to be where our stop point is between this whole discussion and the second whole discussion is this time we're talking about the existentialist ethic and the second one we're going to talk about the politics, which we'll get more into sort of what she's famous for, the book she wrote right after this was the Second Sex. So a really, really influential work of feminism. Now, she doesn't get in that specifically, but you can kind of see where she ends up going with this. It addresses a lot of the same kind of stuff we just were addressing in the Bell Hooks and even previous episodes about our duty to raise people's consciousness and give them freedom and self actualization.

15:34 Wes: Well, yeah, really the question of the book is, and I think Dylan and everyone, I think has probably mentioned this already, but it's really, can we establish any sort of values with any specificity, with existentialism? Does it leave us, and this is really around page eight that she starts asking these questions whether we can actually specify any values. Because it's one thing to give some sort of general meta ethical notion. Right. And then it's another to say, can you ever really say what I'm supposed to do specifically, concretely from that?

All ethics sort of suffer from that question. And we saw the way Kant tried to get there. And actually there's a lot of crossover here with Kant. She sort of pivots off it. He tried to get us there from this idea that you could sort of derive ethical maxims purely from the notion of having a free autonomous will. This is one of his sort of transcendental arguments. They just sort of simply fall out of the idea Thou shalt not kill essentially falls out of the idea of an autonomous will. Because if you violate the autonomy of others, your will ceases to be autonomous and you cease to be moral.

And so it's sort of a tight argument like that. So we're trying to see here if we can get the same sort of guidance, same sort of very specific guidance. And especially in light of the fact that existentialism is associated with despair and being ethically impotent and unmoored and even nihilistic, ironically, that's what she's fighting against.

16:57 Dylan: Yeah. And in fact, she'll, as we go on in the book, she'll give a diagnosis of each of those sort of directions of existentialism and how, in fact, they're not actually rooted in existentialism, but misinterpretations of the forms of traditional philosophy.

17:15 Wes: Yeah. And they really each reflect a moral failure.

17:19 Dylan: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

17:21 Mark: And as long as we're playing the comparison game, you know, we usually consider existentialist ethics as basically, well, what Nietzsche said, except working out the details. And maybe she is not a very charitable reader of Nietzsche, and by extension, probably Sartre wasn't either, but she explicitly criticizes him, and his view is sort of too subjectivist to just, you know, that the upshot is you only end up caring about yourself. And, you know, certainly, you know, you can see in Nietzsche's dismissal of the mass of people as sort of hopeless and not worthy of his teachings. This is something that she's. She's not going to approve.

17:56 Wes: Well, see, it's the idea of a will to power where we impose our values on others, whereas ultimately we'll see that we're supposed to respect others as ends in themselves. Does that sound familiar? And respect their values.

18:11 Dylan: Did you notice that her interpretation reminded me of what Eva had said some episodes ago about Nietzsche as basically being a philosopher of tyranny? And that's what Beauvoir's criticism is, essentially, but as Mark said, you might find is an uncharitable reading. But her criticism of his will to power and nihilism is that it is, like several other versions, it's a path to tyranny, either to being a slave or to being a tyrant. That seem to be the two options you have.

18:42 Wes: What if you want to be a tyrant to your own self as a slave?

18:47 Seth: Sorry, that's pretty Hegelian.

18:50 Wes: I don't want to get us. I could try and defend Nietzsche here, but I think we don't need to try and defend each other.

18:57 Mark: We'll pull out the couple quotes when we get to it. Yeah.

18:59 Seth: If you're playing the tyrant and slave dialectic in your own head, then you're being very Hegelian, was my point.

19:05 Mark: Well, and she brings up Hegel almost immediately.

19:07 Seth: Yeah, almost constantly.

19:09 Mark: So she's sort of another way of sketching out this ambiguity is connecting it to the hierarchy of body and soul. So we've had so many philosophers, this whole phenomenological tradition, and many entirely foreign to that tradition, who are trying to argue in some way that this Cartesian, metaphysical or even epistemological take that there's the realm of the mental and the realm of the physical that are separate. Seems de Beauvoir is going to want to say that preserving the ambiguity actually means accepting that as a phenomenological fact that yes, consciousness really does seem different than the physical. Whether or not brains end up being identical to mental states or that's all sort of beside the point.

19:52 Wes: Yeah. Trying to reduce one to the other is a way of sort of denying the ambiguity. This is the argument she makes on pages six to seven. Traditional philosophers have sort of tried to undo that tension. Yeah.

20:04 Mark: Not only does she not like ones who try to, you know, eliminate the mind or eliminate the body, like Barclay, you know, say, oh, everything is really just ideas. There's really no, no body at all. What body is, is ultimately mental stuff. She even doesn't like people who try to come up with some unifying, you know, neutral thing that really is both of those. So any kind of identity theorist or, you know, Spinozic solution, if you're really doing hard science and you have a purpose in doing it, you know, there might, there might be a point. But just sort of holding it as a philosophy that will have an effect on the way you treat yourself and other people is entirely wrongheaded.

20:41 Dylan: On my page seven, it's right after her paragraph where she brings up Hegel. She says, at the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation. But their attempt to lie to us is in vain. Cowardice doesn't pay those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they would like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer. Men of today seem to feel more acutely than ever the paradox of their condition.

21:12 Wes: Because of technology.

21:14 Dylan: Yup.

21:15 Mark: So how would we characterize, I mean, metaphysically? We've had plenty of examples of people who try to reduce one to the other. But how does that translate into an ethics? I mean, it seems like, for instance, if you say, well, you know, mankind has a teleology, there's something that is naturally good for us, we are animals. And to fulfill that animal goodness is to, well, pursue health. And it turns out, according to Aristotle, that in fact we're social animals. So just, it's not just pursuing our own health, it is actually helping other people, at least within some social circle, maybe not universally.

Or you could even argue that the, you know, human well being does require that we not be cruel to anybody, even animals, you know, that we, we could Sort of expand the. All this is sort of treating us like physical beings that are in some way determined. It's not saying, well, we might fail. There's still a point in doing ethics. The animals are too dumb to realize their own good is really what that comes down to. But it seems like that whole take on ethics is going to be. It's too deterministic for de Beauvoir, for any existentialist, even though that sounds very much like what I think Nietzsche following Aristotle is arguing, is this, you know, something that involves consciousness?

Certainly it involves us making decisions, but ultimately the justification comes down to something about our nature, our static nature as human beings.

22:38 Wes: Is your question, how is she founding this ethics? In a way, what assumption, what ultimate assumption is she making?

22:44 Mark: Well, I'm trying to ask. Yeah, what is she arguing against? And she's not filling in the details here. She's saying there are these metaphysicians who kind of paper over the mind body distinctions and ethicists, you know, the very same people are ethicists that do that. And. But she's not really giving us what kind of ethics she's talking about that she doesn't like.

23:03 Wes: Yeah, I don't think she's specifically arguing against other ethics in this.

23:07 Seth: What are you looking at specifically? Anything in general or just the quote

23:11 Mark: that Dylan just read?

23:12 Seth: Oh, okay.

23:13 Wes: I mean, she criticizes on those pages the traditional philosophical attempts to deny ambiguity. And that's a sort of stepping stone to saying, hey, we have to face the ambiguity. And I do think a lot flows out of that idea of facing the ambiguity and facing this thing that she calls negativity.

23:30 Dylan: And as Wes referred to just a few more sentences later in characterizing this, she's. The more widespread their mastery of the world, the more they find themselves crushed by uncontrollable forces. Though they are masters of the atomic bomb, yet it is created only to destroy them. I mean, I think Wes is right that in this section she's criticizing the certainty put forward by something like science or a technological approach to the world. But I think she's basically criticizing any attempt, whether it be for ethics or for understanding our own condition that doesn't understand its fundamental ambiguity.

So that ambiguity will be fundamentally uncertain. I guess those two words kind of go together. And so the more you try to actually ground it, I mean, I take her saying at this section, the more you really try to nail it to the ground, the more you're going to find yourself unable to hold on to it. It's like trying to hold A cup of water with your hands.

24:29 Mark: What is nailing ambiguity to the ground? It seems like the nailing is just denying it, is denying the transcendence of it.

24:35 Dylan: Yeah, well, well, yes. Right. So the more you try to be certain about it, the less it's going to work. Right. That's where Taker is saying, the more widespread their mastery of the world, the more they find themselves crushed by uncontrollable forces.

24:47 Wes: Yeah, so she says later. So let on the same page, let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting. So other than this assertion that, you know, there is this ambiguity and we must face it, there's not a whole lot of argument to that effect. And then the rest of the argument depends on that assumption.

25:13 Seth: What underlies the criticism that she's making is the notion that to have ethics there has to be a lack. If you believe that people are perfect or wholly contained inside of themselves and completely self justified, then you don't really have to have ethics. There's no reason for it. And so if you think about a founding metaphor like the Fall, the original sin, right, you have to posit that there's this gap between where you are and where you should be. And what she's criticizing these people of collapsing that distinction as they propose it, and then they try to find some way to reconcile it where they erase it.

So it's an acknowledgment and then, but it's simultaneously then a move to erase it. Whether you think there's a gap between perfect being and our sinner selves, or if you posit this radical gap between subjectivity and objects in the world, this, you know, that there's consciousness and mind is matter. Ultimately what people try to do is get rid of that. And I think what she was saying is it's not about trying. You know, we all accept that there's some kind of gap in existence regardless of how we characterize it. And without that, we don't have a notion of ethics.

So it makes perfect sense. The trick is to just accept it and not try to reconcile it in those ways. Am I reading?

26:30 Wes: Yeah, this is, that's very, very well put. This is not new to philosophy, this idea. You know, it's a recapitulation of the idea of embracing our ignorance. For instance, with Socrates, the idea of embracing the ambiguity. And you know, she mentioned Sartre here, where on page eight, again, you know, where man tries to in vain to synthesize the for-oneself and the in-oneself to become a God, which is sort of reminiscent also of that Aristophanes myth in the symposium, where that is the original sin. So the original sin is this idea that you can undo this sort of inevitable state of privation of being at a distance from your object, whether it's just an object of consciousness.

It's the idea that you can undo that sense of mediation, or it's the idea that you can have everything you want, you can perfectly satisfy yourself and complete yourself through things in the world and through things that you value projects. That's a path that's doomed to failure. Ethically. You have to face up to that and you have to reorient yourself towards your ends, towards your values, to not give them that kind of import.

27:39 Mark: We should talk about this sentence here. This right after what you just read, Wes. Well, he said, does not Sartre declare in effect that man is a useless passion, that he tries in vain to realize the synthesis of the for-oneself and the in-oneself to make oneself God? It is true. But it is also true that the most optimistic ethics have all begun by emphasizing the element of failure involved in the condition of man without failure. No ethics. For a being who from the very start would be an exact coincidence with himself in a perfect plenitude, the notion of having to be would have no meaning.

The only thing in that couple sentences that we haven't just talked about is this being in exact coincidence with himself. This is the most striking obvious way in which consciousness is supposed to be a nothingness, a negative is because if we are being, we all want to be being. And later he'll say, kids in fact think that they are being. In other words, they think that they have a particular essence. They think, oh, I'm a smart kid, or I am a scamp or something like, they will buy a label. That's the actual. That is the example she uses. So that is denying your freedom to think that you are a thing that sort of is programmed.

And I was thinking about this in terms of like, if you shouldn't need the three laws of robotics, because if you program your robot, then it'll just do what it's programmed to do. Like, if you on top of it, have to tell it, hey, despite your programming, which is very complicated and might give you contradictory things, here's some overriding things to consciously consider some rules to pay attention to beyond your program. Like, no, that's a confused. You just haven't programmed your robots Very well. In the first place, those should not have to be normative rules.

Those should just be built into the programming. The robot should be in coincidence with itself.

29:27 Wes: The idea is that the programming could be a basis for. Not for simply determined behavior, but for artificial intelligence and free behavior. So that's the. Whether or not that's realistic. That's the idea there. In which case you would need to say, hey, yeah, don't hurt people, or yeah.

29:44 Dylan: This is making me want to go back to a question mark asked earlier, which was for other forms of ethics, what would be the force behind them? So if you, as we're acknowledging here, to have an ethics at all, you have to be wrong in some way. And so is it as simple as. Well, the reason that you have an ethics in a case where you know you have an absolute good out there is that you're not trying to attain that absolute good. You're denying your own being or something like that. And it still makes me wonder why that even works. If it's an inexorable force that you should go in that direction, that your ethics points in that way, why do you have to exert any effort to do so?

30:28 Wes: So you mean, are you thinking of virtue ethics and the idea that if we have sort of these ends built into us that some part of us naturally strives for, why does that require any work to reach them and to become virtuous? Let's say, when virtues are just these things, we naturally tend to be.

30:46 Dylan: Yes. And the other one would be, you know, in the case of where we always try to do things that are good and when we make ethical mistakes, it's because we have a misunderstanding of what is good for us or making an error. And the question there would be, why would we want to be right? Especially if you take away something like salvation. Right. The reason you want to be right is that you want to have eternal life under the blessings of God in heaven. If you take that part away.

31:13 Wes: Well, for happiness. Right. For the Greeks.

31:16 Dylan: Ah, for happiness.

31:18 Mark: So being in coincidence with yourself means you are attaining your telos in, you know, being what you're supposed to be. Is being happy. Right. Isn't that what it means, even if you don't seem happy?

31:30 Dylan: Well, I think it's not just the case for teleology. I was just. I mean, teleology and virtue ethics aren't the only examples of ethics that are contradistinction to the ethics that she's talking about. They all are. Right, right.

31:44 Mark: She thinks, she's just, I think the, it's, it was, the word was consoling ethical views. So it's the idea that even though there's a lack and with, you know, the idea of original sin, you're never gonna. That's a permanent lack you're never gonna actually attain maybe when you die and become an angel or something. But as long as you're a human being, you're never gonna overcome.

32:03 Seth: Exactly. When you die and become an angel.

32:05 Dylan: Yes. And that's the call. Right. That's the reason why you would try to overcome it is so that you can guarantee your, in that particular case, so you can guarantee your eternal life in heaven.

32:15 Mark: But what's supposed to be consoling about this is just the fact that there is a structure there. There is either a human nature that underlies our biology, you know, in the case of the teleological views, Aristotle and them, or there is a moral law that God has set up. There is a structure.

32:29 Seth: Yeah.

32:29 Wes: It's not just that we have a place. It's not just that though, because you know what we're trying to do ethically when we define these ends. It's not just that we're trying to do something negative or say what we ought not to do or we're going to get punished or something like that. We are trying to fill this lack. We are trying to perfect ourselves or complete ourselves in a way. And the idea is that this is, you know, whether or not you think it's directly correlated with happiness, it's the most choice worthy of all things and it's the thing we ought to pursue with abandon.

We ought to find the right values and give everything to them. Because whether it's going to make us happy or whether it's going to actualize us or however you want to put it, that's the way to go. And her argument against that is no, we have to give up the whole project of self perfection, of becoming ultimately virtuous, or of saying that, hey, I've got the ultimate value now I'm going to give myself to that. Whether it's a cause or something else, we have to completely abandon that. Which is not to say we abandon values or projects, but that we have to change our attitude towards them.

So it is radically different approach to values than other ethical systems. You know, again, it's a way of sort of embracing the lack, let's put it that way. Feel the burn.

33:44 Mark: This whole thing is a long, drawn out way of explaining that existence precedes essence thing that the essence would be, if you Have a view of human being that has a good, that a human being should attain, that the virtue for a human being is to pursue this and this kind of goal. That's exactly what she's denying. We're not born with an essence like that.

34:06 Wes: Yeah, we can all have radically different kinds of values and projects. Although again, I think, you know, bringing in others and respect for the freedom of others is going to provide a lot of, you know, constraints of the traditional sort that we're used to seeing in ethics. So she's going to rail against tyranny and oppression and all those things that, you know, people typically reject with an ethics.

34:27 Seth: She's.

34:27 Dylan: Yeah, but if there's, there is an intrinsic direction for her which is just the notion of freedom. And if there's any virtue that is most characteristic is our invoking and manifesting our freedom. And in the end the ethics that she's talking about is the true fulfillment of that freedom, the true actualization of that freedom. And so we're most manifesting our existence in that way. And so there is something in existentialism as she's describing it, which is the motive force of our humanity. It's maybe not to be godlike or not to be any of these other things, but it is the thing that gives direction.

As we go on, we'll find out all the ways in which you can fail to actualize that freedom. And those are all genuine failures of being less than human. In fact, there's being the subman and being the no man and all sorts of things like that. But those are all turning on us. Not doing the thing that we most ought to do, which is actualize our freedom.

35:28 Mark: Now does she feel like our freedom? I mean of course the most die hard Christian is going to say yes, of course we have freedom. That's the whole point. We can choose the right thing or we could choose the wrong thing. But it's always been the existentialist position that real freedom, true freedom, means not only that you can choose between good and evil, but that there is no pre written good and evil to choose among that that would be somehow an abrogation. That is an abrogation of your freedom. To say I can choose good, I can choose evil. But that doesn't make evil stop being evil or good stop being good. Like there is a predetermined role that we should follow and our only freedom is choosing within that.

36:06 Seth: Yeah, can I. Are we far enough that I could read something from page 18?

36:10 Wes: We will on a backtrack, I think.

36:11 Seth: But oh, okay.

36:12 Wes: I mean, but you should go ahead.

36:14 Dylan: Yeah, yeah.

36:15 Seth: Well, I mean, I want to take kind of take issue a little bit with the way Mark was phrasing it. So page 18, she says, indeed we are coming to the real situation of the problem. There is in ethics only if there is a problem to solve. And it can be said that the ethics which have given solutions by effacing the fact of the separation of men are not valid precisely because there is this separation in ethics of ambiguity. We'll be one which will refuse to deny a priori that separate existence can at the same time be bound to each other, that their individual freedoms can forge laws valid for all.

So it's not, Mark, technically speaking, that there's some notion of good, or it's the idea that there are universals, that there's a finite way of reconciling or as she says, effacing the difference. Right. Because she talks about the notion of the present and our experience as being finite in our facticity, which is to say, in our being in the world. Our. Our physical presence in the world is finite, but we experience consciousness as infinite, and the future is infinite. And the idea in ethics is that pulling out a rule that a universal law, which is a Kantian strategy, a Christian strategy, a variety of different things, to some extent, is trying to efface that difference between finite and infinite, between individual in particular and universals.

And that's where the problem lies. So it's not that there aren't values. It's that you try to apply a singular value to everybody in all instances.

37:48 Wes: Yeah, before, where you just read Seth, So Mark was talking about it's not the case that values are out there in the universe, whether they're dictated by God or. Some people seem to think now that they could be scientifically discovered. They're not out there for us to discover. They are. They come from our own will, which, of course, is not new. You know, Kant and the German idealists thought the same sort of thing. And so she then tries to just, you know, make a distinction between existentialism and German idealism. So on page 17, she says, for existentialism, it is not, quote, impersonal universal man who is the source of values, but the plurality of concrete particular men projecting themselves toward their ends on the basis of situations, whose particularity is as radical and irreducible as subjectivity itself.

So even though she agrees with Kant in the sense that values sort of spring out of the will, out of our wills, for the German idealist, it becomes this Sort of universal, transcendental will that gives moral laws applicable to all human beings. And here she's talking about something much more particular. You know, she's thinking even in terms of the particular projects and the particular ends we have in our own lives. And of course my ends are going to differ from yours. Of course I'm going to be devoting myself to different sorts of things than you are.

39:06 Mark: Well, to move back in pages a little bit, the first place she talks that I see about sort of the positive take is page 11. It was right after the part that I was just quoting. She's talking about this failure as described in being, in nothingness, the failure of the human condition, that we're a useless passion. Something, well, Man Sartre tells us, is a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being. So we talked about the lack. The lack is you make yourself a lack of being. In other words, you transcend. If anybody points at you and say you are a slave, you are a specific thing. It's the nature of human consciousness to posit that we are free. You can just decide to not be that today, whatever anybody labels you.

39:52 Wes: But I also think to make yourself a lack of being again is to embrace the desire, embrace the privation. So that's what it means to have ends. Ends are inversely related to privation. The ends are the things we seek because of the privation. So to be free and to freely posit ends is the same thing as to be a lack.

40:12 Mark: But how would that be any different? It seems like if you're just saying desire is what makes you a lack, then you don't have to have consciousness for that. Animals have desires all the time. So every time my dog is hungry, she's making herself a lack of a

40:23 Wes: dog doesn't start projects. We're talking about specific kinds of desires, you know, in self conscious things.

40:30 Seth: So there's another way to, I think, think about this, because she does mention being frequently, is the idea that if you think of yourself 100% as being and finite, there's no room for becoming. So there has to be some kind of a lack, or you could say non being. It's similar to this conversation that we had many moons ago. I think it was in the Heraclitus episode about being and becoming. The idea of change, the notion of the static versus the dynamic. We have no place to go, we have nothing to do. If we are what we are 100%, if there's no gap for us to strive towards, if there's no future to project into. So, you know, we have to create this for ourselves. And that's in fact what we do. And that's what this notion of subjectivity is.

41:17 Mark: But I think, Seth, you're making the case that I was just trying to make inadvertently, which is when Heraclitus is talking about that, he's not talking about consciousness, he's talking about all of nature. And if you just determine something having a self moving power as indicating a lack, well, that's much too global to just cover consciousness.

41:35 Wes: So in this whole page 11, right. She also uses this phrase. Passion and passion is also synonymous. It's also in the same family of these words as negation, desire, privation, and we give ourselves reasons with passion. We give ourselves ends by way of passion. And then she goes on to argue that there are two different ways you can think about this. You could think of the sort of primal passion as wanting to merge with our objects and completely satisfy our needs. That's the quote unquote, wanting to be. When she talks about wanting to be as opposed to wanting to disclose being.

Wanting to be is wanting that merger wanting to be. Not simply this subject in tension with the object, whether you're thinking about consciousness or whether you're thinking about desire, but the more primal passion is actually wanting to disclose being, which means leaving our ends never fully satisfied. Being in this kind of tense relationship to the object so that we can be connected to it without us disappearing into each other. That's disclosure. So by uprooting himself from the world, man makes himself present to the world and makes the world present to him.

She repeatedly talks about this distance and uprootedness and maintaining this tension as opposed to simply having everything. I think merger is a good word for it.

42:52 Mark: This helps me make some sense out of the thing that we talked about with Heidegger and then later with Eva Brann about letting the beings be. Yeah, sort of the existentialist goal for Heidegger was to let being disclose itself, was to leave being alone.

43:09 Wes: No, I'm just kidding.

43:11 Dylan: Let it be.

43:13 Mark: Exactly. Eva Brann's take on it was even more sort of, oh, no, even Heidegger was being too forceful and willful about it. That, no, we need to really. This is a peaceful thing. But I don't know, it would seem strange. I'm fine putting that forward as a desirable end as part of de Beauvoir's positive solution. But she's saying Sartre tells us, you know, uniformly across the board, that man is a being who Makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being. So she's not just giving Sartre's view of the existentially correct move. She's saying this is just what human beings are.

Whether or not they're committing all the various atrocities of existentialism, whether they're, you know, end up being subman or these other things that we'll talk about about. They all fall into the category of you make yourself a lack so you have some sort of desire. On Wes's take, in order that there might be being. Which I guess that phraseology covers both the letting the beings be and also I want to be that being, which is one of the many wrong ways.

44:13 Wes: Yeah, letting beings be, you know, among those beings are our ends. So in other words, it's like we let ourselves be empty a little bit so that we can have this directedness towards ends. Towards the beings of the world. Yeah, because our ends are directed towards

44:30 Mark: beings, you know, towards creating a situation.

44:33 Dylan: Well, yeah. To wanting to disclose being.

44:36 Wes: Right.

44:36 Dylan: Where Mark says that, you know, Sartre tells us that man makes himself this lack of being in order that there might be being. The term in order that clearly indicates an intentionality. That's the directionality that Mark was talking about. About. It is not in vain that man nullifies being. Thanks to him, being is disclosed and he desires this disclosure. There is an original type of attachment to being, which is not the relationship wanting to be, but rather wanting to disclose being.

45:05 Wes: So the wanting to be is sort of the way we'll see that people fall short all the time. They don't maintain their lack, and they develop again the fantasy of absolute ends or these ultimately satisfying beings outside of them that they can use to complete themselves. Instead of having ends and saying, you know, well, I have an end, I have a project. I really want to do this thing. But it's not the end. All, be all. I don't live or die by this. And later on we'll see. It's because there's a more important end underneath it which is just willing my own freedom.

Sorry to jump ahead a little bit, but in other words, when I will, when I manifest freedom, it's not and I will a certain end to come about. You know, that end is going to pass by. I'm just going to be gone and I'm going to be on to something new. So it's not the essential thing. And that treating it as essential is disastrous in life. The essential thing is simply that I will my own willing, that I will My own freedom, that's the ultimate end. My own freedom, rather than I'm going to be a rock star or I'm going to be, you know, a really, really good person or things like that.

46:08 Dylan: Yeah.

46:09 Mark: And I like, Wes, that you put it in that way of wanting these things to complete yourself. Because this very much describes the Christian picture of, you know, we live in original sin, we are incomplete. And for me to be complete, it's enough that God exists. And God has this whole structure that I am a part of, whether or not I sort of realize it or will it or not. And to the extent that I can internalize that supposed fact that actually will make me feel complete.

46:37 Wes: Right.

46:37 Mark: And anybody who doesn't realize that that's what's going to be lacking in their lives. Don't you feel a sense of emptiness? Don't you need God to fill that hole?

46:44 Wes: Yeah, and it doesn't have to be. I mean, he mentions at some point you could take the same attitude towards say fashion when he's talking about the world of the serious. The world of the serious is just any of these. It's really a matter of how you approach it. It could be any sort of content. There's a kind of quasi religious aspect to any value that you take really, really seriously.

47:02 Mark: So, and that's again a Christian strain of argument, which is to say if you don't let God fill that God shaped hole, you're going to have something else fill that hole. It's just inevitable. It's human nature, verstehen, that we have a lack that we will fill in that way. And so better to have it pointed at God than at mammon at something else.

47:20 Dylan: I sat next to a guy who basically made that argument to me on

47:24 Seth: my whole plane trip coming back from Italy.

47:28 Wes: You mean someone tried to convert you?

47:30 Dylan: No, thank goodness it was not. On a nine hour plane ride, someone

47:33 Wes: tried to proselytize to you.

47:34 Dylan: He's one of these examples of just a very friendly, gregarious guy. He's probably about 75 years old. He was very, very talkative, chatting with me and then eventually learning a little bit about me. It became clear that he was going to try to save my soul. And in fact, at one point he says, you know, you seem like a really decent guy. I just can't help but feel like you're just missing out on just how great it is to have God in your life and have Jesus as your savior.

48:01 Wes: See, this is such a perfect example because I've had this happen to me before. I think I. There's some really friendly people. And what happened? It turned out they were staying at a hotel that I was working room service at and I sent them a bottle of champagne. And then after all that happens, they're like, we're gonna try and convert you now to our religion. I feel dirty and used by that. And so in a sense, it's like that actually is an example of people not, not respecting your freedom and not treating you as an end in yourself. They're treating you as a means, in a sense, even though under some more traditional interpretation of morality, perhaps they are treating you as an end in yourself, they're trying to save you.

But under, I think the existentialist interpretation, and it's the way it feels, and I think it would feel this way even if I were religious. I mean, under the existentialist interpretation, my ends and my moral direction in life is actually something very, very particular. And for someone else to pretend that they can just get in there and tinker with that for the sake of my own good is actually demeaning.

49:07 Dylan: I agree. I also find it, you know, it wasn't the first time that kind of thing had happened to me either. And what I find is strange is the, the confusion that I don't seem like I'm a complete asshole or I'm like deeply corrupt without having Jesus as my savior. Because there was like a kind of astonishment that that wasn't the case. I just find it strange.

49:33 Mark: So you need to explain to such a person that, you know, there's an original type of attachment to being, which is not the relationship wanting to be, which is what you're describing of wanting to be the child of God and sort of have your world filled out already.

49:46 Dylan: Exactly.

49:46 Mark: But rather wanting to disclose being.

49:48 Dylan: Yes.

49:48 Mark: Now here there is not failure, but rather success. This end which man proposes to himself by making himself a lack of being is in effect realized by him by uprooting himself from the world. Man makes himself present to the world, it makes the world present to him. There you go.

50:02 Wes: Or you could say the genuine man will not agree to recognize any foreign absolute.

50:09 Mark: Alright, have we explained this point enough? I'm not sure that this will be convincing to anybody.

50:14 Wes: What do you mean, which part?

50:15 Mark: Why, the quote that I just read is an appropriate response to that as opposed to the quote, you read this wanting to disclose being. Can we say more about how that plays out as a positive directive that ends up entailing ethics?

50:29 Dylan: Well, that comes up later in this section. Right. Wanting to disclose being is A way of reformulating her quote from Sartre, a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being. She goes through this step of clarifying that as, look, it's not that we want to be, but it's an activity of wanting to disclose being. And then later on in the paragraph, she says, man makes himself a lack, but he can deny the lack as lack and affirm himself as a positive existence. He then assumes the failure and the condemned action, insofar as it is an effort to be, finds its validity insofar as it is a manifestation of existence. And then she gets into this discussion of conversion and what an existentialist conversion would be, as opposed to a Stoic conversion or Hegelian conversion.

51:22 Wes: I want to convince you as well that my talk about desire is not. I'm not simply pulling that out of my ass. So, for instance, on page 13, she says it is desire which creates the desirable and the project which sets up the end. So that actually is a parallel statement to the idea that we have a lack of being in order to disclose being. You can think about this in different ways, but it's a. The having, the lack in order to disclose being is parallel to allowing desire in order to create the desirable.

51:54 Mark: Which sounds in isolation, just like you're stating relativism. In other words, things are desirable because people in fact desire them. Well, can't people desire all sorts of crazy, contradictory things?

52:06 Wes: Well, she's going to address that. Yeah, so that's actually the next session. So she basically, right after that, she asks the question, well, how then can it be objective? And then she's going to try and say how it can be objective.

52:16 Dylan: Right now she's not even stating the solution to the problem. Right. She's characterizing where emotion comes from in human beings. Right before what Wes just read, value is this lacking being of which freedom makes itself a lack of. And because the latter makes itself a lack, that value appears. I find myself stumbling over this. I guess this is the nothingness in Sartre, where a lack is actually a thing or a being. And what you talked about at the beginning, Mark, where you perceive the missingness of something.

52:49 Mark: I think this gets cleared up on page 14, which is right after where Wes was reading before the first sentence that he already read. The first implication of such an attitude is that the genuine man will not agree to recognize any foreign absolute. And it continues when a man projects into an ideal heaven that impossible synthesis of the for-itself and the in-itself that is called God is because he wishes the regard of this existing being to change his existence into being. But if he agrees not to be in order to exist genuinely, he will abandon the dream of an inhuman objectivity.

He will understand that it is not a matter of being right in the eyes of a God, but being right in his own eyes, renouncing the thought of seeking the guarantee for his existence outside of himself. He will also refuse to believe in unconditioned values which would set themselves up athwart his freedom. Like things, value is this lacking being of which freedom makes itself a lack. So it's value, which is another way of saying desire, like you were saying, Wes, value is this lacking being of which freedom makes itself a lack. And it's because this latter makes itself a lack that value appears.

So freedom makes itself a lack of. Therefore value appears. And then the next sentence is the one that you just read, Wes. It is desire which creates a desire ball and the project which sets up the end. So does filling in that detail say a little more of why we're not talking about ontology here? In terms of is a nothingness a thing? I don't think that's going to be clear from anything that's in this essay at all. And I think that's. No, no, I don't even want to try. We can understand how value is making. Well, yeah, value is this lacking being of freedom, of which freedom makes itself a lack.

54:29 Dylan: You don't have to go down the road of trying to understand that nothingness is a being to just understand that. You're using lack as a noun. You're talking about it as I want to use the word as a something. Right. But it's holding a place. The lack is holding a place. You're talking about the hole in the donut, right? I mean, whatever it is.

54:48 Mark: Yes.

54:49 Dylan: You don't have to go all being of nothing on it just to understand. I liked Wes's formulation of it being parallel to a desire. To have a desire is to want to fill in something that you are missing.

55:03 Wes: Yeah. And the larger thing is that we're getting at a defense of the possibility of an existentialist ethics. And people are disturbed by the fact that when you say values aren't abstract, absolute, and they're not outside of us, and she's saying, well, actually, really, to have a coherent ethics, we have to acknowledge that they come from inside of us, that it's our own lack which ends up positing these. And it really is actually a function of freedom. So instead of being these sort of passive recipients of desire for something or other that is objectively good outside of us. We are free to create the lack in ourselves and to direct ourselves where we will.

55:43 Mark: So we are talking next about this is page 15. But if man is free to define for himself the conditions of a life which is valid in his own eyes, can he not choose whatever he likes and act however he likes? Dostoevsky asserted, if God does not exist, everything is permitted. So this is the big question that we had entered into discussion to try to answer. Why does existentialist ethics, not just subjectivist, allowing for horrible brutes to use it and say, oh, I have values, my values, I want to kill you, or whatever.

56:14 Seth: I think it's worth reading a quote because I think her framing of this is really nice. Today's believers use this formula for their own advantage to re establish man at the heart of his destiny is they claim to repudiate all ethics. However, far from God's absence of authorizing all license, the contrary is the case. Because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements, he bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed in his victories as well.

A God can pardon, efface and compensate. But if God does not exist, man's faults are inexpiable. So what she's doing is turning this notion on its head that the only justification you've heard people, you know, heard this, people say this, oh, you know, if it wasn't for God, right, People would murder. Like as if you need some sort of external justification to keep from being evil. And she's saying in fact it's an excuse because you can be pardoned. And that if there is no God, then you actually have responsibility and accountability for your actions, which is something I have long believed but seldom found so well articulated.

57:36 Dylan: One cannot start by saying that our earthly destiny has or has not importance, for it depends upon us to give it importance. It is up to man to make it important to be a man, and he alone can feel his success or failure.

57:51 Wes: In a way, as cool as all that is, it doesn't really tell us how ethics can be objective. It's a kind of psychological argument about the feeling of responsibility. So it's really a two parter. So on page 16 we got into this a little bit, but she basically appeals to Descartes and the German idealist and this idea that existentialists aren't the only ones who say that subjectivity can give rise to Objectivity that's already done in Kant and the German idealist. They themselves already said ethics has to be grounded in the will and gave very cogent critiques of why it was hard to ground it in any other way.

And I'm just on the same track. And then there's that part I read which distinguishes her from them, where it's a matter of the plurality of concrete particular men and their own ends, as opposed to the universal men. So it's kind of a sketch. And because it's kind of just vaguely appealing to these other thinkers, it might not be that satisfying. But I think that's the whole idea of the grounding of objectivity, of a subjective ethics here.

58:54 Mark: To me, what she says just reads like the eternal recurrence argument in Nietzsche, except less colorful. Because man is abandoned to earth, his acts are definitive. They're absolute engagements. And even just saying that man's faults are inexpiable, that implies that we have faults, that there are objective faults. But this was. We did a whole episode on Alasdair MacIntyre, who was giving a teleological view of ethics, you know, where it's objective because of human nature, and explicitly rejected existentialist ethics on the grounds that if the faults are just in your mind, you decide, you know, whether deciding is a matter of whim or not.

I guess that's really what it comes down to. This picture that de Beauvoir and Sartre have given us is more that they're not something we can just whimsically pick. It's something that we kind of affirm through every action we take throughout our lives. So just having a coherent life requires some sort of projects is the way we were describing it. And that's kind of what gives rise to ends, what gives rise to values. And if these projects inevitably involve other people and have to kind of be compatible in some way with other people's projects, in that my project cannot be to kill all of you, then there's some objectivity there.

Just the way she's putting it here, it doesn't give us that. It's just the faults are inexpiable.

1:00:15 Wes: Well, yeah, that's why I referred to the part on page 16. Yeah. Because to get the objectivity, you need some sort of appeal to this idea of values coming from the will. I mean, ultimately the idea is going to be right. I can't just posit any value for myself, like going around killing people, because to truly will my freedom, I must will the freedom of other people. She's going to say that again, reminiscent of Kant. So I can't go around violating others. I need others ultimately for this whole freedom and ethical project. But that comes later.

1:00:47 Mark: Of course, the emotional tone of these two sentences is something that was made very explicit in Sartre and was something we really objected to, had a lot of trouble with in Sartre, that it's this we bear responsibility for the world. It's not that either human nature or God has set up the world and we're just born into it. It's that by our engagements, our acts, we bear the responsibility for who we are in the situation that we're in. And our faults are inexpiable. They're in. Does that just mean inexcusable?

1:01:20 Wes: They can't be pardoned, they can't be forgiven, expiated.

1:01:23 Mark: But it seems like one of the things that so called objective morality foist on us, that Nietzsche so objected to was guilt, was this heavy responsibility, you know, that version of existentialism, and that he instead recommended something that's more light hearted. Now I just, you know, said that it's the eternal recurrence argument comes from Nietzsche. So obviously there's some ambivalence or complexity to this view, but the idea, this focusing on, wow, this is all your fault, you chose to do that and so screw you if you chose like, I don't know, this seems the difference

1:01:59 Dylan: is she's going to get through it by allowing for transformation. That your faults or the things you're guilty of are things that you're guilty of, but things, including you, can change. And so that's what's going to be different.

1:02:15 Mark: But so the things would include the values, the values themselves. If we are makers of values and we can change, then the values can change, right?

1:02:23 Wes: That's true, we can undergo a conversion.

1:02:25 Mark: So something that I considered a fault yesterday, I can decide, you know, I only considered that a fault because the man had instilled this crappy ethics into my mind. And now that I've converted what I yesterday considered a fault, I no longer consider a fault. So in that sense my fault.

1:02:40 Wes: You're blaming external circumstances.

1:02:42 Mark: Inexpiable was expiable because I changed my mind about it.

1:02:47 Dylan: Well, I think that we're going to have to get further into it. Mar, I think that you are raising a criticism that she's working through in this chapter and the next chapter to try to argue against what you're claiming as a criticism of the existential ethics.

1:03:03 Wes: Here's one way to think about it. It's not necessarily that every desire is a willing, in this case, you know, a free willing, certainly. Right. Ultimately, the things that we do that are faulty, she'll end up calling them flights from freedom or evasions or escapes from freedom, which is something we freely do. So it's a kind of tricky thing to talk about because she's going to want to say, we're free in any case. And there's this great responsibility. But many actions actually represent a running away from freedom. And that's how you sort of, I think, draw the line.

So the structure of the will defines a kind of general way that we're supposed to approach our ends. Right. Not treating them as absolutely. And so on and so forth. And you kind of fail. You're at fault when you're willing your ends in that serious way, for instance, or in the passionate way. And all those things that she'll detail in the next chapter.

1:03:56 Mark: So I think it's just that initial formula, which, very briefly, when she quoted Sartre, man is a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being. To do that correctly involves following that whole chain, which it sounds like. There's only two steps. You make yourself a lack of being. And then in order that there might be being, she unpacks that into a series of steps. And if you don't sort of go the whole way, which is really what it means to self consistently embrace your freedom, to embrace your freedom wholly, then you end up willing these positive things that respect other people's freedom.

And if you don't, then you are fleeing from some part of the story of your freedom, even if you are embracing a part of it. You know, you could have an initial, well, screw you and your value systems that you're trying to push on me. I'll do whatever I want. But that's not really being free. That's only part of it.

1:04:50 Wes: Yeah. Think of it as two tiers. So in any action, I'm freely doing something, you know, and I'm responsible because I'm free. So on that basic level. But then there's the meta level of whether or not that action entails me willing my own freedom. On that meta level, I'm either willing my own freedom. I can't, as she says, will myself not to be free. She rules that out. But I can not will myself to be free when I'm acting. So I can freely act while not willing myself to be free. And that's the problem. I know I've jumped ahead, but I just think since we're confused here, you know.

1:05:23 Mark: No, this is. I think we need to kind of get moving. So let's start telling the story of the critique. What else in chapter one do we. We want to make sure we hit before we move on to these different types of failure in chapter two.

1:05:35 Dylan: Yeah, there's a section right around 23 which I think addresses what we're talking about right now. Maybe it's just a recapitulation of it, but she has this kind of definition of ethics. The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost, and to teach man the means of winning. And she goes on saying again that man also wills himself to be a disclosure of being, to wish for the disclosure of the world, and to assert oneself as freedom are one and the same movement. Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring.

It is the original condition of all justification of existence. The man who seeks to justify his life must want freedom itself absolutely and above everything else. At the same time that it requires the realization of concrete ends of particular projects, it requires itself universally. So that's part of the movement for being objective. Very similar to Kant is this requirement of it being universal and consistent. And that's going to be part of what gives it its objectivity.

1:06:41 Wes: Well, also, if you were to think about this in terms of a diagram, you could think of the willing sort of there being an arrow out towards the concrete object or the end that you're willing. And then there's a little self referential arrow that curls back onto freedom, which is the willing of freedom itself. I just want to emphasize that point which is the essential component to making something ethical. That little reflective arrow.

1:07:06 Dylan: Yeah, well, that become more clear especially when we get into section two, because it's the maintaining of that freedom, attending to that reflective arrow that distinguishes failures of ethics. Ethical failure is often just characterized by the failure of tending to that reflective arrow and maintaining your freedom.

1:07:27 Mark: So just lower on that page, on page 24 on my version, she asks what meaning can there be in the words to will oneself free? Since at the beginning we are free, it is contradictory to set freedom up as something conquered, if at first it is something given this objection would mean something only if freedom were a thing or a quality naturally attached to a thing, then in effect one would either have it or not have it. But the fact that it merges with the very movement of this ambiguous reality, which is called existence, and which is only by making itself be to such an extent that is precisely only by having to be conquered that it gives itself to will oneself free is to effect the transition from nature to morality by establishing a genuine freedom on the original upsurge of our existence. So maybe we should unpack that.

1:08:14 Wes: Well, you might want to read a little more.

1:08:16 Mark: Yeah, I guess the unpacking is just the next paragraph.

1:08:19 Wes: She talks about Epictetus, and it's good stuff, spontaneity.

1:08:22 Mark: Every man is originally free in the sense that he spontaneously casts himself into the world. But if we can consider this spontaneity in its facticity, it appears to us only as a pure contingency, an upsurging as stupid as the clinamen of the Epicurean atom, which turned up at any moment whatsoever, from any direction whatsoever. So do we care? It's just Epicurus had an idea of

1:08:43 Dylan: atoms that are moving well, that have a spontaneous swerve.

1:08:47 Mark: Okay.

1:08:47 Wes: It's the same idea of where people now try and relate freedom to quantum mechanics. It's the idea that there can be this random event. Right.

1:08:57 Dylan: Unexplained spontaneity.

1:08:58 Wes: Yeah. So we're talking here about spontaneity as sort of a kind of lower level grounding for freedom. And she's going to say we can look at it from two angles, we could look at it from the objective standpoint, in which case we're thinking about something like a swerve in the Epicurean atom, that's a kind of spontaneous thing, the swerve. But if we ask ourselves subjectively, you know, at the subjective level, what that spontaneity is, it must be a matter of intention or choice. That's going to be her argument. So there's this sort of subjective correlate to the swerve, which is actually choice.

1:09:35 Mark: So it seems like we've got this fundamental energy, the spontaneous energy. And she even talks about later how was it one of the Nazis at his trial, like, was showing forth just this energy, and it kind of, even though he was on trial for war crimes, it kind of made people sympathetic to her, like, was a little mesmerizing. And so that's maybe the source of the thing that Nietzsche was arguing for, you know, whether you want to call it will to power, but even will to power gives the idea of a direction, which is what she's going for here. But if it's just a movement, if it's just an energy, this movement was not justified by this result which had not been chosen.

It remained absurd. Thus, human spontaneity always projects itself towards Something for a meaning to justify the transcendence which discloses it. It must itself be founded, which it will never be if I do not choose to found it myself.

1:10:23 Dylan: So there it is. This is the activity of your freedom, which is to found the motion. Right. So you have this inherent spontaneity. It's just true. And it's our act of freedom that directs it, that discloses our being.

1:10:39 Mark: It directs it and interprets it as it's doing it. Right. It's giving an interpretation.

1:10:43 Wes: Yeah.

1:10:44 Dylan: And she gives here examples of the way in which that fails. That is, you know, how can you mess this up? And she says, now I can evade this choice. We have said that it would be contradictory deliberately to will oneself not free. But one can choose not to will himself free. In laziness, heedlessness, capriciousness, cowardice, impatience, one can test the meaning of the project at the very moment that one defines it. The spontaneity of the subject is then merely a vain living palpitation. Its movement toward the object is a flight, and itself is an absence. To convert the absence into presence, to convert my flight into will, I must assume my project positively. That is, you must use your freedom to positively shape your spontaneity.

1:11:33 Wes: But also you must, again, do that reflective thing of willing your freedom. And she's going to even, I think, use this word reflective. So, for instance, it is through this end that it sets up my spontaneous. That it sets up, that my spontaneity confirms itself by reflecting upon itself. So in other words, you know, when I. My will is directed towards some end, it could be doing that. It's freely doing that in some sense, and that's grounded in our spontaneity. But it can be compromised and irresponsible if I'm not also, you know, willing my own freedom in the act. I can be running away. I can be trying to escape.

1:12:13 Mark: So, yeah, and she seemed to say that, you know, of course, it's post hoc rationalization, that you're just fundamentally do stuff. She even refers to psychoanalysis and how even if we have just a nervous reaction to something, the psychoanalyst will look at that and kind of put some intentionality behind it. And that's what we have to do to ourselves. No matter kind of whatever weird animal source the spontaneous actions are coming from, we have to tell the story of our lives and give this a narrative such that, at least on the whole, not every sneeze that comes out of me, but that I interpret my series of actions as being Part of an intentional project.

If I just let myself get pushed around, you know, by my inner workings or by what people tell me to do. Which, of course, those two coincide. If I'm acting just out of fear or out of just habit of obeying or whatever. There are lots of ways in which I can abrogate my decision making. Say, this is not really my decision. It's somebody else who made this decision. And so I don't even really have a sense, other than maybe a trust of this person who's ordering me around. But that's not enough to call this my project. Those are all different forms of denying that you're truly free, that you really.

Even if people are ordering you around, you don't have to take that shit.

1:13:35 Dylan: Well, I mean, what you're describing, you're moving right into the next paragraph. Where it's avoiding the absurdity of the pure moment. By connecting the past with the present through that moment in order to create a narrative. And that's the process of disclosing your freedom. And I found this part really interesting because it seemed to me that she was trying to pinpoint the notion of absurdity that's in existence to a kind of. If you only understand existentialism as manifesting and contemplating absurdity, you're making a mistake. By focusing only on the moment, she says, one escapes the absurdity of the clinamen of the swerve only by escaping the absurdity of the pure moment.

And existence would be unable to found itself if, moment by moment, it crumbled into nothingness. That is why no moral question presents itself to the child. As long as he is still incapable of recognizing himself in the past or seeing himself in the future. It is only when the moments of his life begin to be organized into behavior that he can choose and decide.

1:14:45 Wes: And the other part here on page 27 is, she says, to will is to engage myself, to preserve in my will. And confirming our values indefinitely. Means, or the value of a willing. Is to treat it as a point of departure towards a new act of surpassing. So I think the overall point here is. If you think that each act of willing is just this momentary thing, then each time you do that, the particular act falls into the past. And the willing itself falls away. That's sort of the freedom of it. So I have to sort of collect over time in the same way to be conscious of an object, I have to an imagination and a memory, right?

And collect things together, synthesize. In order to get an object, I have to collect up all These different acts and treat them as part of a larger project and treat them as a point of departure for new acts. That's a sort of way of sustaining the will going forward so that it doesn't just like beep. It doesn't just beep out one free thing and then fall away and then come back with another that's unrelated to the previous thing.

1:15:53 Mark: So does this constitute a synthesis of one of the parts of the contradiction that is human existence? The fundamental ambiguity that she gave us in the first page of the book. So at every moment he can grasp the non temporal truth of his existence. But between the past, which no longer is, and the future, which is not yet, this moment when he exists is nothing. So those were two phenomenological points he was trying to make. That yes, this sounds very much like Augustine, who apparently she did study. The moment that currently exists is nothing and the past, which no longer exists in the future, which is not yet, but yet at every moment the human being can grasp the non temporal truth of his existence.

I guess it sounds like thinking of yourself as a historical being that has projects. And actually one of the many ways in which we are tied to other people is the project cannot live and die with me that if I want there to be being in the world, that implies that other people continue the project, respect the project, recognize the project, have some relation to the project.

1:16:57 Wes: That's actually the next part of this. So I mean, now I think we're talking about integration within a single person. And then she'll go on to say that in order to really sustain our will, we have to take others into account.

1:17:10 Mark: I guess I was also thinking about what she has to say later about artists. This is later in chapter two where she's saying what the artist is trying to do is to make works that are stable being pretty much to create eternity. And that seems part and parcel of this at least initial phenomenological observation that we see the non temporal aspect of ourselves. We see consciousness as something that transcends time. I think in both cases, in the description of the artist and this initial description, maybe she's just giving some rough observational data that ultimately turns out to be illusory. We don't exist as immortal beings beyond space and time, no matter how much it might kind of seem to us like that.

1:17:54 Wes: Yeah, I didn't know what she meant by that. You know, I couldn't figure that one out. It's the non temporality, whether it just meant historical being or. Anyway, but shall we move, move forward yeah.

1:18:04 Mark: Are we done with chapter one, finally, or is there another point or two?

1:18:08 Dylan: Well, the only thing we haven't talked about is the next section on limits,

1:18:12 Wes: which I thought was important, Failure.

1:18:15 Dylan: Well, what I mean is just the thing that usually you bring up when talking about, well, man creates the world. We're manifesting our freedom is, you say, well, look, man doesn't create the world. There are limits. We are contingent beings. We are embedded in the world, and the world happens to us. This is on page 28. She has this nice sentence. In the face of an obstacle which it is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid. If I persist in beating my fist against a stone wall, my freedom exhausts itself in this useless gesture. Without succeeding in giving itself a content, it debases itself in a vain contingency.

1:18:55 Mark: Yeah, even like the previous paragraph, man does not create the world. He succeeds in disclosing it only through the resistance which the world opposes to him. The world is defined only by raising obstacles and by the contingency of facticity. Certain obstacles let themselves be conquered and others do not.

1:19:09 Wes: And the whole way we deal with that. This is why I called this the failure section. This is, you know, where she talks about regretting miscarriages of the past can lead to inaction. And the failure condemns the whole part of ourselves in which we had engaged in the effort. So the only way out of that, the only way not to fall into resignation, because it's a fact that not all of our willing is going to have a positive result. And this is where she contrasts herself to the Stoics, again, is that we direct our will, we make freedom itself our end, so that if the particular end itself is no longer available.

So, for instance, he uses the example of Van Gogh, where he has to accept the fact that he's no longer going to be able to paint. But if his end isn't just the concrete goal of painting, if it's more fundamentally directed towards freedom itself as a way of affirming my freedom, then I could go into the asylum and still be exercising that in different concrete ways, so that I can suffer that particular loss of a project and still go on. Because I know that my loss of that particular project is not the death of my will.

1:20:17 Mark: Just having projects at all has everything to do with obstacles. That ironically, God's creating the world is not a project. There's no obstacles. He just said, there you go. There was the stuff. It's only when man has free will and is giving God sass, then there are projects Involved causing the flood as a project in remaking man. This again. It sounds like it's bad that we're a negation. We're a hole of lack of being in the world. That's what consciousness is. That sounds purely negative, but no, no. Having this lack, these desires, these ends, running into problems actually is what it is then to accomplish something. To let being be is really to create being. Disclosing being is not just disclosing any old thing. It's trying to make the world into at least something resembling what you wanted it to be, what you were trying to make it be.

1:21:15 Wes: Yeah. It's doing stuff, and it just doesn't

1:21:18 Mark: count as doing if it didn't take any. If there are no obstacles at all.

1:21:22 Wes: So the next section, if we're ready just to. Because there are just two more sections that I think are really important before we move to the next chapter.

1:21:30 Mark: Sure.

1:21:30 Wes: This is where it brings in the freedom of others. So, you know, she's made this point about freedom needing to maintain itself. And sort of by integrating willing over time. And now we see that it's not just over my particular lifetime that I need to integrate the will, but I must do it even more generally than that. By making the freedom of others my end. It's by making the freedom of others my end that I truly, in a way, I'm indefinitely maintaining my will. Even after. Well, I think after death is not the right way to put it outside

1:22:03 Mark: of my particular efforts.

1:22:04 Wes: Right. Because people's projects, other people's projects will continue without me. Their will wills will continue on. And there's something death defying about willing them to. To will, let's say, or to be. To be free.

1:22:20 Mark: So, Seth, do you want to start us on the chapter two here?

1:22:24 Seth: Did you guys read the quote from the last page? Unlike Kant, we do not see man as being essentially a positive will. On the contrary, he is first defined as a negativity. He is first at a distance from himself. He can coincide with himself only by agreeing never to rejoin himself. There is within him a perpetual playing with the negative. And he thereby escapes himself. He escapes his freedom. And it is precisely because an evil will is here possible that the words to will oneself free have amused meaning. Therefore, not only do we assert that the existentialist doctrine permits the elaboration of an ethics, but it even appears to us as the only philosophy in which an ethics has its place.

For in the metaphysics of transcendence, in the classical sense of the term, evil is reduced to error. And in Humanistic philosophies, it is impossible to account for it. Man being defined as a complete in a complete world. Existentialism alone gives, like religions, a real role to evil. And it is this, perhaps, which makes its judgments so gloomy. Men do not like to feel themselves in danger. Yet it is because there are real dangers, real failures, and real earthly damnation that words like victory, wisdom or joy have meaning. Nothing is decided in advance.

And it is because man has something to lose and because he can lose that he can also win.

1:23:53 Wes: Yeah. So where traditional ethics will say, you know, like Plato, no person knowingly does evil. Right. It's just an error. They're an error that they have just failed to comprehend what's good. Right? Yep. In this case, you can really willfully do evil. It's a matter not of error, but in a sense, it's a matter of aversion, of cowardice, of flight from oneself. And it sounds very much like Augustine, actually. Right. Remember the whole pair thing and willfully doing something evil and that being a way of fleeing oneself.

1:24:29 Mark: Well, that provides a great introduction to chapter two, which gives us just a breakdown of the different ways we can fail. That we don't take the project of willing freely all the way to willing that being be, and that it be independent of me and, you know, reflect not only my projects, but that it encourages freedom in others. This whole. Which I still think. Can't you just misunderstand that. Can't you say, I think I'm acting freely and that means that I don't have to pay attention to what you want. There's no values written in the universe.

I'm making up my own values. And those involve me being callous and detaching, you know, or being a stoic and just. I will adjust my subjectivity. I have complete control over it. And so I can adjust it to have it be smooth sailing. If something is an obstacle, I'll just redefine it as no longer an obstacle. These are all failures that are not just misunderstandings of the human condition, but they are willful ignorance on. It seems, according to this existentialist doctrine,

1:25:38 Wes: well, you undermine your own freedom. The point is that you're freely acting all the time, even when you deviate, even when you're being unethical. But there's a sense in which, again, you undermine your own autonomy. So this whole idea, for instance, of escape or flight from yourself, of sort of getting lost in this fantasy of being, of being compared to complete and all of that stuff. And in this chapter, she'll talk a lot about. We get hints of kind of the anguish that can create. Right. First of all, you're going to be perpetually disappointed if you think that you're going to get ultimate fulfillment out of something and simply avoid the lack. It's an unrealistic. It's an unrealistic approach to life. We're kind of back to saying, how can there be an objective ethics?

1:26:24 Mark: How can there be an objective ethics is one of the things. And another way of thinking that you could just get rid of the lack permanently is just having this view of desire is ultimately fulfillable. Remember, she's kind of two steps removed from Schopenhauer here, who had this picture of human nature that we just have desire and then fine, we might satisfy it and we'll be satisfied a little bit, but then it's going to come back. And so you might say that that picture of human nature is so gloomy and want to deny that and say, well, no, that's only because your desires are excessive, let's be good Stoics say, which is sort of solution, and temper our desires and so we actually will be fulfilled without all these vain things.

But de Beauvoir is going to, following Nietzsche's solution, is going to have to say no. It's actually perpetually dynamic. It might not be warlike in the way that Schopenhauer and Nietzsche thought it would be that one thing gets fulfilled, but then another passion seizes you. No, it's more active than that. You're the one driving. But that's the dynamic of desire and human life. And if you think that somehow you can get everything you want and then you'll be fulfilled and live happily ever after, that's not human life at all. That's just another, you know, illusion that would lead you to deny your own freedom.

So chapter two is called Personal Freedom. And others say.

1:27:49 Wes: I thought the first part of this chapter was really, really interesting. So childhood gives us this impression that sort of there's these quasi divine adults and their values are absolutes. We don't think of those values as coming from flawed, vulnerable human beings like ourselves. We are children and one day we're going to grow up and be like all these completed godlike adult people. But in the meantime we are sort of sheltered from the responsibility of those values. We can, within that structure we kind of joyfully play and do our own thing.

And the interesting thing about that dynamic is that she's trying to give an explanation for the flight from freedom and how it's Sort of grounded in childhood. And the first part of that explanation is that we get indoctrinated with this idea that there are these absolute values that's sort of our relationship to. To adults. And then we also get a taste of what it means to live without responsibility, and we're never going to forget it. So it kind of dooms us to have a tendency in that direction of fleeing our freedom.

1:28:55 Dylan: I liked her starting with childhood because it makes in situating our relationship to freedom in unrealized and unfulfilled relationship to freedom in childhood. And I guess, as you said, Wes kind of condemning us in a certain way or like providing the example of not actualizing our freedom. It makes the whole process of our own coming to be as growing up. Right. And it makes, you know, her list of failures in some ways easy to understand.

1:29:31 Wes: Then it deludes us into. We think, for instance, when we take on these absolute values, which is part of one of these things that we get from childhood, we think we're doing the right thing. Right. We might think this is the way to go. I've identified the absolutely true and I'm going to devote my life to it. And that for her, is we're fleeing ourselves, we're fleeing our own negativity, we're engaging in this fantasy of completeness, and we're fleeing our own responsibility. Strangely enough, even though we might think that we are willing the perfectly, absolutely right thing in childhood, we get that dual thing where we know what it's like not to have responsibility. And then we're told that what responsibility is going to be involves these absolutes, when, for existentialism, it simply doesn't involve that at all. That's not what adulthood is.

1:30:17 Mark: So maybe we can get out the list, at least, of the different kinds of failures which makes up the majority of this chapter. And then once those are on the table, we could see if there are any particular quotes or elaborations that we want to dwell on before we wrap up.

1:30:33 Dylan: Isn't there sort of. I guess I found there to be a couple broad categories. I mean, there's the subman, which is the very first one. Then there's this category of the serious man, and then there's the nihilist, and

1:30:46 Wes: then there's the adventurer after that, and then the passionate man.

1:30:51 Dylan: Yep.

1:30:52 Wes: And then there's a kind of bucket of categories of intellectuals, artists and writers.

1:30:57 Mark: So these are all, though supposedly different. Like if you picture just a horizontal line, like a timeline, like, which is the entire movement of exerting your Freedom. And it's only if you get all the way to the end of it that you're doing it right, that you have an ethics, that you are being self consistent.

1:31:15 Wes: Well, she uses this word hierarchy. So we're moving from the most irresponsible, from the slacker, from the subman, the subman, which I think of as the slacker, all the way forward towards responsibility. So we have all these gradations in between.

1:31:33 Seth: Well, against what are all of these things deficient? Why are they bad?

1:31:37 Mark: Against a self consistent exertion of freedom.

1:31:40 Seth: Can you cash that out a little bit and be more specific?

1:31:44 Mark: So the short version of that again was man is something that makes himself a lack. And that by making yourself a lack, you will something into being.

1:31:53 Seth: She has a much more concrete way of characterizing it in this chapter.

1:31:58 Mark: Is there another description of the entire movement that we can read the quote of?

1:32:02 Seth: It's right after she ends talking about the developmental aspect with the child. The way she cast this is she says that there's a moment of justification. And the justification is the subject taking the end for himself freely and saying this is the thing that I am going to do or this is the thing that I'm going to value. And doing it springing from an internal justification and not because something external says that this is the thing that has value or this is the thing that should be done. And all of the classes of character that she describes after this, the ones you guys just named, are all going to in one way shape or another be failures. Around this self justification of ends. She actually used the language of ends selecting an end.

1:32:55 Wes: Yeah, I think I can read this. It's on page 44 in my text.

1:32:59 Seth: Okay.

1:33:00 Wes: It is in this moment of justification, a moment which extends throughout his whole adult life, that the attitude of man is placed on a moral plane. The contingent spontaneity cannot be judged in the name of freedom. It is up to each one to make himself a lack of more or less various profound and rich aspects of being. And she goes on to talk about vitality, including sensitivity and intelligence.

1:33:26 Mark: They're not ready made qualities. They're a way of casting oneself into the world and of disclosing being.

1:33:31 Wes: Exactly. So I thought kind of Seth was kind of hinting at that by saying it doesn't come from outside. And it's we.

1:33:36 Seth: Yeah, I had an. In my head I remembered it and in my notes I had something I thought I saw that she sort of very clearly articulated in this notion of ends. His acts are never positive choices. Right. You have to make a positive choice, to choose something for yourself, to manifest freedom in your existence. And each one of these characters that you described somehow fails to do that. In the case of the subman, submen are like children.

1:34:06 Wes: I wonder about that. Because children get to play. And the subman is apathetic and passionless.

1:34:13 Seth: Right.

1:34:14 Wes: That's why I was thinking of him as a slacker.

1:34:16 Mark: Apathetic and passionless. The subman is the initial move. To exist is to make oneself a lack of being, to cast oneself in the world. So if you simply do that, what is it to simply do that and not in turn, then let the beings be. It's to just kind of like. It's not even just apathy and saying, I'm not going to produce any projects. I'm not going to try to do anything. Because he thinks then that the result is not necessarily a slacker. It ends up being a member of a mob. Like, you don't have any projects, so you can be thrown by anybody that really wants to focus you.

1:34:52 Seth: It's because.

1:34:53 Mark: Into doing horrors.

1:34:54 Seth: It's because you choose nothing. The subman chooses positively, chooses nothing and so becomes a member of the mob. And it's a tool for anyone. He's a victim one day a monarchist, the next day an anarchist. He is more readily anti Semitic, anti clerical or anti republican, as we have defined him as a denial and a flight. He's not harmless. And he's not harmless because by denying the move towards freedom, by not making that positive choice, by feeling impotent, then you generate rage which is channeled by tyrants and by movements and by causes.

1:35:30 Dylan: Those who actually do the actual dirty work of lynchings and pogroms and bloody movements of fanaticism are recruited from among the submen.

1:35:39 Wes: Yes. The point there is that. So here's a quote. The subman rejects this passion which is the human condition, the laceration and failure of that drive toward being which always misses its goal, but which thereby is the very existence which he rejects. So that makes him vulnerable to basically people who are hawking what she will call the serious. So he can't make his own values. So he. This is the whole idea of him being readily recruited to a mob. Right. Someone comes along and says, I know what the real values are and come with me. And so of course he's vulnerable to that because he's not defining any passions for himself.

1:36:18 Dylan: Let's make America great again.

1:36:21 Wes: Yes. Yep, I thought about that.

1:36:25 Mark: Well, it's just we have this metaphor of sheep as being the people that are readily controlled. But you can see that doesn't work very well. The sheep do not become the torturers and the henchmen. It's a different kind of animal.

1:36:36 Seth: The next is the Serious Man.

1:36:38 Mark: I like this one because the subman, okay, everybody is disgusted by that of people who are basically, you know, sheep or whatever. New metaphor. But the series man covers almost everybody that would be considered moral by the traditional morality.

1:36:53 Wes: Basically, it just means you have a job. Just kidding.

1:36:56 Unknown speaker: No,

1:36:59 Mark: it's fun to read it like that. The Serious man gets rid of his freedom by claiming to subordinate it to values which would be unconditioned. So that's a matter of choosing to live in an infantile world. It's not letting yourself just be manipulated being sheep. It's actively jumping on this and saying, I'm upholding traditional values or whatever it is. You know, she had this whole part in the previous chapter that we didn't talk about about followers of the Communist Party of Marxists. And if you say I will give my life for this cause or whatever. Yeah, that's the thing you're pursuing. If it's I'm going to be a rock star or bust, it doesn't even matter. It's not just a diss to traditional morality. It's against taking anything so seriously that like the this is your end and you're giving your life to it. Which is interestingly what I've even heard. The meaning of life as defined by.

1:37:49 Seth: Right.

1:37:49 Mark: The meaning of life is. I don't remember what movie this was, but it's just one thing. It's just you pick something that's your project and you give meaning and, you know, so this sounds like a very positive romanticist or even existentialist, you know, Nietzschean kind of thing. Like I'm going to be a great writer and that's it. But if you really are that maniacal about it. Well, she says, not only is that, as you were saying before, then you're not sufficiently flexible. You're kind of denying that you're the one that posited that in the first place.

So you need to be again, not bashing yourself against an obstacle. If your rock star dream doesn't work out, you gotta switch to something else or, you know, be open minded to other things, to arguments that might be against traditional religion or whatever. The thing you're communism, whatever you're subordinating yourself to. Then when you get outside of that realm of the serious. So, you know, I'm a serious businessman My life is about my business. And if you really put all your eggs in that one basket, then when you're not actively pursuing that thing, you're actually going to be like the subman, because you don't give a shit about anything else, right?

1:38:54 Wes: So it's not that you can't want to be a great businessman or rock star or writer, it's just that you have to have a particular relationship towards that end. It cannot be salvation, it cannot be again the thing that is going to complete you. And in a sense you really want to maintain the tension, right? You always want to have something to shoot for, you always want to have a goal, you want to have the lack that's directed towards getting better and better. And if you lose again the particular concrete project in the way that Van Gogh lost painting, it's not devastating if you have the right relationship to it. So you can want to be a great writer and lose that and not be devastated if you don't think it's this objective value outside of you, that if you don't get it, life is over.

1:39:39 Dylan: It raises an interesting question of it. At what point does that self reflective sense of context kick in? Right? Such that you can on the one hand maintain enough single minded fanaticism to keep moving and overcome adversity, but on the other hand maintain enough equanimity such that you're actually maintain your freedom while maintaining directionality. Because if you're too just sort of, well, you know what, it'll just work out, then you either just take, well, whatever, it'll be fine later, or you become kind of sanguine, you lose that ambition.

1:40:24 Wes: Yeah, I mean, this is why she talked about stoicism and she wants to distinguish herself and say, look, I'm not talking about withdrawal, I'm not talking about repressing desire here and I'm not talking about not being passionate. I can still be passionate within this scheme.

1:40:39 Mark: But yeah, her version of stoicism is the same one we outlined in our Epictetus episode, but then we had our subsequent stoicism episode which gave a much more nuanced take, which I think is quite compatible with what she's describing here. So there you go. So all these things, part of their failure is that they lead to people being Nazis or they could potentially that if you are serious about this particular end, say the greatness of your country, then what that means is that nothing

1:41:12 Wes: else really matters, including other people's.

1:41:14 Mark: And so, yeah, exactly. People's lives get subordinated to the cause, not only your life. But you are ready to subordinate other people's lives to the cause, whether or not they've signed on to the cause or not. That sort of logically follows from your really being serious about it.

1:41:29 Dylan: That kind of political consequence of these ethics is not even lurking. It's like sort of she's less worried about people, you know, sitting around in a cafe in a beret, just anguishing about how empty the world is over some coffee and cigarettes. She's worried about people becoming fanatics and killing lots of people.

1:41:50 Mark: Yeah, because this was the 40s, in the 60s is the existentialists were doing that.

1:41:55 Dylan: Yes. And so you know, that problem of the various ways in which you end up with tyrants and people who follow tyrants is just imbued in this whole thing.

1:42:05 Wes: So there's a good quote, although this comes up in kind of every section. Right. With every type, the same kind of concern. But for the serious man, it's page 53 in my text. But dishonestly ignoring the subjectivity of his choice, he pretends that the unconditioned value of the object is being asserted through him. And by the same token, he also ignores the value of the subjectivity and the freedom of others to such an extent that sacrificing them to the thing, he persuades himself that what he sacrifices is nothing. The colonial administrator who has raised the highway to the stature of an idol will have no scruple about assuring its construction at the price of a great number of lives of the natives.

For what value has the life of a native who is incompetent, lazy and clumsy when it comes to building highways? The serious leads to a fanaticism which is as formidable as the fanaticism of the passion.

1:42:57 Mark: So there's going to be a bunch of things in this chapter that we don't get to. And I think we can just take them up next time because we're going to be talking about the political. So there's that point and there's already the point that she's made regarding the childhood thing that she talks about. Well, people who are raised to be slaves. It's not an accident that, you know, in the slaveholding times in the US they talked about the slaves as grown up children. It's because they were denied any real decision making power. So yes, they treated the master's will as sort of natural law, at least a lot of them did, if they kind of signed on and resigned themselves to their slavery.

1:43:33 Wes: But she makes a point that you could still be free in her sense. As a slave or as a Western woman who's subjected to the patriarchy. Even in very constrained situations, there's still a possibility of exercise of freedom. You're not doomed, right.

1:43:48 Mark: So you're still to be blamed. You're a serious person. If you're a slave of this sort, you're either a subman or you're a serious man, whether you're a man or woman.

1:43:58 Wes: So she criticizes women for behaving childishly in relationship to men and basically says that is a complicity with the patriarchy.

1:44:09 Seth: Yeah, actually there's. It's one of the nice things about her analysis is that there's a nuance where she doesn't do victim blaming or shaming. That she makes a distinction early on in this chapter about there appearing a possibility of liberation. And she says once there appears the possibility of liberation, it is a resignation of freedom not to exploit it. But she says, you know, for the oppressed colonial people and women in some cultures, that possibility never exists. And so, for example, you can't blame certain populaces and certain people for not rising up in revolt, which will become a major theme, by the way, revolt in the second half of the book, if the possibility of liberation just never even came up. So I think that's important.

1:44:56 Mark: Well, another way a slave could fail is by not just being a serious man and signing on to the patriarchy or whatever, but by becoming a nihilist, or nihilist, depending on how you like to pronounce that word, which is a serious person, a serious man who the aim has failed. And so you put all your eggs in the basket of being a great rock star or whatever, and it doesn't work out. And so you're just like, screw everything.

1:45:22 Wes: I don't believe in anything, man.

1:45:24 Mark: If one denies the subjective tension of freedom, one is evidently forbidding himself universally to will freedom in an indefinite movement. By virtue of the fact that he refuses to recognize that he's freely establishing the value of the end. He sets up the serious man, makes himself the slave of that end. So that is.

1:45:42 Wes: I thought you were about to get into nihilism.

1:45:44 Mark: Well, for some reason I put that after in my notes as the thing that describes why you get nihilism.

1:45:52 Dylan: Well, I mean, at the end of the nihilism section in mind, page 61 and continues on 62, she says the nihilist attitude manifests a certain truth. In this attitude one experiences the ambiguity of the human condition. But the mistake is that it defines man not as a positive existence of a lack but as a lack at the heart of existence. Whereas the truth is that existence is not a lack as such. The nihilist is right in thinking that the world possesses no justification and that he himself is nothing. But he forgets that it is up to him to justify the world and to make himself exist validly.

1:46:31 Mark: So the subman just denies the whole thing. He is a lack, but it does not acknowledge he's a lack. He doesn't really acknowledge he's anything. The serious man denies that. Yes, okay, there's this gap here, but there's an established, objectively valid end that we should all be pursuing, or at least that I should pursue. And that's what completes me. And the nihilist makes one advance over that by actually acknowledging the first half of de Beauvoir's formula and saying, yes, I acknowledge that my existence is a lack, and that's the end of the story.

1:47:06 Wes: I acknowledge that existence is a lack, and I acknowledge that nothing can complete me, therefore what's the point of willing at all? What's the point of having any ends?

1:47:14 Mark: But she says, this is an unstable position. This will to negation is forever belying itself, for it manifests itself as a presence at the very moment it displays itself. So as soon as you say nothing matters, then you yourself are making a value of nothing matters. You're asserting your power by saying there is no power to be asserted or something. Power doesn't exist. So the next step is the adventurer, which is somebody that has this nihilist attitude but says, eh, if we're a lack, why should I let that get me down? All that means is I have no pressure on me, you know, that I have to do anything in particular. I can just kind of do what I want.

1:47:55 Wes: The adventurer throws himself into various undertakings, but he's not attached to his ends, he's attached to conquest.

1:48:02 Seth: Yeah, he's attached to action, not to. He's not consciously choosing the end. He's choosing the end for the purposes of doing, of acting.

1:48:11 Mark: And this is what I actually saw, that she's trying to describe Nietzsche here, that according to her analysis, that he is somebody that has, yeah, there are no ends written in the world. We have to come up with our own ends. So let's do so in a joyful way and kind of be a little carefree about it. And as one would expect, the adventure

1:48:30 Wes: opposes both seriousness and nihilism, which of course Nietzsche rails against both of those things. So.

1:48:36 Seth: Well, she has a nice quote here. She says, if on page 59, if existentialism were solipsism as accused, it would have to regard the adventurer as its hero. Essentially, that tells you the adventure is all about himself. And again it becomes fascistic and tyrannical because in the pursuit of those goals without. Even though he's not prioritizing the end as a cause, capital C cause. The way the serious man is, he's only concerned with himself, which means he'll sacrifice others for the sake of gaining the conquest.

1:49:09 Wes: Before the part you read Seth, she says the adventurer basically has something very close to a genuine moral attitude. So he's aiming at existence. He makes himself a lack of being. And the problem is the detachment from the ends. Yeah, so he conforms to the, you know, from a subjective standpoint, he's conforming to all of the ethical requirements. But he doesn't get beyond solipsism.

1:49:32 Mark: Right. The ethical requirements being like Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, you know, taking your actions seriously, that what you are doing you're wholly responsible for, but just, you know, trying to make life an art. She thinks there's nothing in that formulation itself. However, you want to read Nietzsche as ruling out imposing your will upon others. And so that's her criticism, just like it was of the previous ones, that this person slides into tyranny.

1:49:57 Wes: His attitude is ethical, except insofar as he fails to take into account others and their freedom and falls into this disregard. You know, I think Seth mentioned this, you know, disregard for others, which sounds

1:50:09 Mark: so weird to us, like his behavior is totally ethical except he has a total disregard for other people.

1:50:14 Wes: No, it is unethical. I mean, it would be ethical if other people didn't matter.

1:50:21 Seth: Well, it's ethical. What she means when she says it's potentially ethical is that the adventurer at least makes choices about what to pursue from internal motives. It pursues isn't a slave to a foreign absolute. So in that sense they're contextual. You know, part of what she's trying to advocate is this notion of there being concrete and finite ends. So you make a decision and it's a decision for that point in time in your life in that circumstance. And you have to judge the merit of the decision without the benefit of any kind of a metric against which you can only look at it in hindsight and judge it. And at least the adventurer does that is not a slave to the universal. So.

1:51:01 Mark: So just the other place she mentions Nietzsche is just in the second to last paragraph of the whole thing, which I think we've already quoted at some point in Here. Thus it can be seen to what extent those people are mistaken or are lying who try to make of existentialism a solipsism like Nietzsche would exalt the bare will to power.

1:51:19 Seth: Yeah.

1:51:20 Mark: According to this interpretation, as widespread as it is erroneous, the individual knowing himself and choosing himself as creator of his own values would seek to impose them on others. The result would be a conflict of opposed wills enclosed in their solitude. But we have seen that on the contrary, to the extent that passion, pride and the spirit of adventure lead to this tyranny and its conflicts, existentialist ethics condemns them not in the name of an abstract law, but because if it is true that every project emanates from subjectivity, it is also true that this subjective movement establishes by itself a surpassing of subjectivity.

So that positive step is going to be a lot of what we're going to talk about next time. Is there just a little more. There's just a few pages in there. One stage after the adventurer where he starts to talk about, well, the passionate man and the artist. Can we kind of sum up all that briefly without reading many quotes?

1:52:12 Seth: The passionate man chooses an object as absolutely, but is not detached. So he doesn't choose an object like in the way that the serious man chooses a cause. He chooses an object as a manifestation of his own desire, his self consciously free subjective choice. It's unhealthy. He says something to the effect of if you. You think of the adventure doesn't genuinely fulfill content because he never achieves the end. It's all about the conquest. The passionate man never fulfills subjectivity. And the reason why is that when you have the basis of your being is on desire, you will always be unfulfilled. You can never achieve that end. And it's immutable, right? It's that sick passionate desire for something that you can never obtain. And that's how you never fulfill your subjectivity. You're never satisfied.

1:53:02 Mark: And of course this all can lead again into using other people and ultimately being a tyrant, right?

1:53:07 Wes: Everything else is significant in comparison to passion, including other human beings.

1:53:11 Seth: Well, when I was reading this, this is what confused me is that I thought, oh, well, then the artist must be an existentialist hero, because creating art, right, that's positively choosing an end. It's a unique expression of your own subjectivity. And it's also not a cause and it's transient. But she complains that the artists and the writers try to concretize somehow to make eternal that which is not by Virtue of creating art that's supposed to somehow make static or finite something that's infinite. I think that was the criticism. I didn't quite buy that.

1:53:51 Wes: So this is 74 in my text. So I don't know if I saw it as a criticism. She calls them genuine because. So this is the first full paragraph on 74 in my text. The artist and the writer force themselves to surmount existence in another way. They attempt to realize it as an absolute. What makes their effort genuine is that they do not propose to attain being. They distinguish themselves thereby from an engineer or a maniac. I like the way those two things go. It is existence which they are trying to pin down and make eternal. So the word, the stroke, the very marble, indicate the object insofar as it is an absence.

Only in the work of art, the lack of being returns to the positive. Time has stopped. Clear forms and finished meanings rise up. In this return, existence is confirmed and establishes its own justification. And then she talks about Kant, finality without end. So I thought she was. Before that, she had criticized critical thought critics, basically, but I thought she was coming out in favor of the artist there.

1:54:53 Mark: It seems.

1:54:53 Seth: So.

1:54:54 Mark: There are different ways of doing art that if you use the art as I will create something that would live beyond the ages. If it's like an attempt to make yourself personally immortal in some way.

1:55:05 Wes: Well, that's. She says that. She says there's a temptation as the artist to make yourself into an idol, and that's where you can slip up.

1:55:12 Mark: Yes, yes. But if you're trying to use the art to cause being to disclose itself, in other words, you're making representational art in some way. You're writing a novel that reveals deep things about human nature, which is just what she was doing before this. This was her first work of nonfiction. In fact, she didn't consider herself a philosopher. She considered herself a writer. So she wrote philosophical novels and then this and then her giant feminism book. So she knows what she's talking about. She's an artist herself.

1:55:43 Dylan: I think there'd be a distinction between the ambition to write something that will last over time and glorify yourself for your own glory's sake. I would have thought the first thing, having the ambition, disclosing your being in writing something with the intention of having it exist over time would be exactly the right kind of thing.

1:56:07 Mark: But can't you see, like, as. Maybe not her view, but as a fairly straightforward extension of this? The kind of artist that is like, I will only create sculptures in ice, and I Will only do sculptures in the sand and I will wipe them clean when they're done because I don't want the illusion of like I'm pretending to be immortal out of this. I want to acknowledge by my choice of medium the fact that we're all going to die.

1:56:32 Dylan: And it just sounds pretentious.

1:56:34 Mark: Like. Yes, there's something

1:56:38 Wes: pretentious. Men.

1:56:41 Dylan: Yeah. No, no, no, I don't.

1:56:50 Mark: Alright.

1:56:51 Dylan: I guess I don't think that she is glorifying transitoriness in this. That the response to the faults of the serious man and fanaticism and clinging to a single moment is to revel in transitoriness and constantly subvert any kind of solidity to hold it rightly so you have to be able to have the ambition to create a great work. Which I feel like she would be. Totally understand the notion of having that ambition to create something. That would be one of the criteria. One of the ways in which you'd understand that you had done something well would be to create it to last.

1:57:38 Wes: Yeah, I think she's against the transitory in a way.

1:57:41 Dylan: Or they're merely transitory. Yeah, you know.

1:57:44 Wes: Yeah. You know, the whole point of willing one's own freedom is to overcome the transitory. Right. You know, there's talk of failure, there's talk of being cut off from certain ends or old ends and projects sort of vanishing into the past but serving as a launching point for new projects. The constant. There is just that there's a persisting thing underlying that all. All of that. Because all of that is kind of the flux. That's the transitory stuff. And the persistent thing is just the focus. And she kind of repeats this in the wrap up in the last few pages of this, but it's this.

An end is valid only by a return to the freedom which established it and which willed itself through this end. So that's the sort of what I think of as this underlying substance. Even though a lot of people might object to that. But the underlying substance of all this, you know, of all our different willing all our different ends, if they're ethical, it has that basic property and it persists in the sense that we also will other people's ends and integrate old ends into new ends and things like that.

1:58:54 Mark: All right, well, we'll see next time if all this makes sense.

1:58:57 Unknown speaker: This.

1:58:57 Mark: Yes, I want to will other people's ends, but yet I'm respecting their freedom and I want them to have their own ends, but I want them to play nice with my ends and continue my ends. If possible, but I'm not going to force you. I accept your response. Dylan, about the art. You know, earlier, in the nihilism part, she talks about Dadaism and surrealism, these other pretentious forms of art that sort of, she thinks, contradict themselves. This Dadaist incoherence. Following a strict injunction to commit disorder and anarchy, one achieve the abolition of all behavior and therefore of all ends and of oneself. And then the paragraph later, she's talking

1:59:35 Wes: about surrealism, drugs and suicide.

1:59:38 Mark: Yeah. So, yeah, to really follow the surreal. The problem is she doesn't outline what the Surrealist manifesto is here. She just assumes that we kind of understand that. Whereas isn't it just watches melting and dream imagery and stuff? No, but it was more revolutionary than that. Closer to what I just said about Dadaism, that some of them committed suicide. Some of them, and even surrealists who have wanted to remain faithful to themselves have been unable to avoid returning to the positive, to the serious. In other words, they produce all these works that are supposed to be revolutionary, and it ends up being their cv. They end up being put in a museum and become positive things. And that's what's left with us. That's why it's hard for us to recreate exactly how crazy and revolting literally, their works were supposed to be at the time. Any closings for today by anybody?

2:00:24 Seth: Well, I would like to say that I thought this second chapter, I mean, I know you can see it as here's all the negatives before I build up to my positive conclusion at the end. But I think it's a really nice organic story where she's. It's not an abstract description of how she thinks this manifests. She's articulating all these different personalities and however you want to describe it, characteristics in such a way that she's, I think, circumscribing what she's going to talk about as the positive ethics of existentialism, or, you know, ethics of ambiguity in such a way where you're not going to mistake it for one of these modes.

And I think if she hadn't taken the time to outline all of this, and I think also thread through this notion of tyranny and where in ethics of ambiguity, you know, the solution is going to put you into a much more challenging situation with respect to your certainty about your decision making. Again, I think this is a lot of hard work to get to the point where it sets the stage for that last chapter while simultaneously connecting it to a kind of developmental or organic function. That we all go through. So I think it was really a masterful chapter.

2:01:46 Mark: Well, I don't know that she's done the job for me of explaining for sure why existentialist ethics requires that we respect other people's rights. We read part of this third to last paragraph of the whole chapter here. This truth is found in another form when we say that freedom cannot will itself without aiming at an open future. The ends which it gives itself must be unable to be transcended by any reflection. But only the freedom of other men can extend them beyond our life. I have tried to show in Pyrrhus and Cineas, I guess that's something she wrote, that every man needs the freedom of other men and in a sense always wants it, even though he may be a tyrant.

The only thing he fails to do is to assume honestly the consequences of such a wish. Only the freedom of others keeps each one of us from hardening into the absurdity of facticity. So that seems to be the. The whole argument. Look, I had to show this. Like many existentialist things, it's easier conveyed through fiction. And so, hey, why don't you look at this other thing and maybe you'll. Because it's really a phenomenological point that she's trying to say is really you. When you think seriously about what you want. If you do the Nietzsche's eternal recurrence test and think, if I were going to do this and have to do it over and over and over again, and that would be what the world is, if what I was willing right now was going to become a universal law, to put it in a different way, then I would.

Will that other people be free?

2:03:09 Wes: We know the answer in Kant, right? It's a very similar story. And for Kant, if I am to be moral, I must have an autonomous will. I must freely will something, and I can't freely will to destroy the autonomy of others, because it always turns out that in destroying the autonomy of others, I destroy the conditions for the possibility of my own autonomy. So if everyone were to lie, I can't freely operate in that world. So if I lie to someone and I universalize that and everyone's lying, I can't actually be free within that world. I mean, I think, Mark, the quote you just read, obviously she's modifying that and reforming that.

And you could even think about Hegel here and the extent to which my own subjectivity and consciousness requires that it be an object of other subjectivities that others, you know, that I see myself in the mirror, so to speak. So I think those are the different sorts of ideas floating around. You know, with this idea that I collapse into facticity. I can't truly be an existence, say someone who's responsible and freely wills if there aren't other free willing entities around me. I'm not set up just to do it by myself.

2:04:24 Mark: All right, so next time we're going to continue to this discussion, people should pick this up and start reading it because we're going to have an after show on this that'll be on June 26th at 5pm Eastern Time. We are supported by your donations. Please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com to make a contribution. Big donor since last time have included Gail Bush, Andrew Daskowski, Brian Calandra, Jason Calmes, David Pellegrin, Guy Malcolm, Frank Markopoulos, Thibargaran Bhaskaran, Richard McManus, R. Mark Phillips, W. Mark Thompson, Kelly Neville, Hara Zhang, Peter Talley, Liz Arnold, Nancy Davis, Ralph Volatin, John Gautier, Chris Calvert Minor, Charles Wistowski, Mele Kzik, Michael Singer, Thomas Kearns, Jennifer Rhodes, Tony Gilkerson, John Jayon, Randall Rose and Megan Edwards.

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2:05:39 Seth: Good night.

2:05:39 Mark: Good night.

2:05:43 Unknown speaker: Another beautiful thing you'll never have Most likely dangerous Guess you should be glad Feelings of remorse tinged with a failure to be sad Love finds you flavorless But I guess that doesn't have to be probably yes probably all these things shall pass probably yes easily things like this lose mass and if you stayed here long enough you may have developed some class and the courage to be reasonably longing Give up most everything to keep your feelings pure I shoot this everything the scent and its allure probably you've got to be somewhat approaching sure sure enough that you'll be reasonably lonely Certain of life choices will chain into your share shackles to remind you that life isn't always fair But I don't think this is one of those cases we don't need to feed all the faces all regret entails a failure to prepare another beautiful thing you'll ever have Go stretch this line of thoughts till you're approaching glad Themes of remorse have gotten tired and old and sad Love finds you flavorless but it still might be the best that you've had from the yes, probably all these things shall pass probably, yes, easily stuff like this matters and if you stay here long enough you may have developed some press and the courage to be reasonably lonely Trouble me Yes, probably this wave will subside as circumstances shift and purchase you so pride oh, probably yes, easily you'll lose the last Implied by the courage to be reasonably long sa.