Ep. 362: Ecclesiastes: Biblical Existentialism? (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: Hey, this is the Partially Examined Life. You're listening to episode 362 on Ecclesiastes Part 2 here with our bud Jesse Peterson talking about his book. Talking about the book itself, I think we're going to really get into quotes. If folks want to get the the 11 page version that we have linked to, that might even be fun for you. But it's not going to be a straight close reading. I'm sure we're still going to do our normal thing. We're still in chapter one talking about all the things that are hebel oh, what do people gain from the toil? It's just a bunch of bullshit. The sun rises and goes down, the wind goes round and round. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full. It's just all. It's all wearisome, even seeking wisdom. All right, so somebody read from verse 12 there.

0:55 Seth: Okay. I, the Teacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem, applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. It is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with. I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun, and see all is vanity and chasing after wind. What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted. I said to myself, I have acquired great wisdom surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me. And my mind has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge. And I applied my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceive that this also is but a chasing after wind. For in much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.

1:46 Wes: This should be something familiar to anyone who has studied philosophy for any length of time.

1:51 Mark: I was just gonna say, yeah, and sounds like Sextus. The end sounds like skepticism. In much Wisdom as much vexation. Those who increase knowledge increase sorrow. Right. Just bringing up questions, they unsettle you and all the important questions are going to be unanswerable. So isn't it better to just eschew wisdom altogether? He later says, you know, you don't want to actually be a fool because you're going to fail at obvious things in your life. You're not going to manage your money. Well, you're not going to, you know, so it's okay, like be wise in that way, get your shit together. But this philosophical wisdom, maybe that's just pretension and vanity.

2:30 Wes: Yeah. So why doesn't you. Knowledge. Knowledge is a potential solution to the problem of meaning, especially philosophical knowledge. And the question is why? Why does that fail?

2:42 Dylan: It fails here because you end up sorrowful. Increasing knowledge doesn't make you happy.

2:49 Wes: Yeah. So increasing knowledge, you know, depends on what you mean by what we mean by sorrow. It could turn us into nihilists, for instance. That's one problem. It could put us in the position of just thinking too much about everything and being less focused on pleasure.

3:06 Dylan: Doom scrolling.

3:07 Wes: There's an epicurean solution to all of this. Or it could undermine faith. That's if that's another possible solution to all of this. So you can we move to knowledge because human beings by nature desire to know and because knowledge of right the potentially of the absolute as appealing. There are many reasons why it could serve. Philosophical knowledge could serve the function of meaning. But on the other hand, beyond the fact that we don't seem to ever get there unless we're Hegel, it can have the very opposite effect of undermining.

3:42 Seth: What is the. I mean, you know, the first section starts off talking about, you know, all is vanity. What do you gain from all that you do right? And it's basically nothing. And then you say well, the futility of what if instead of doing right, we seek wisdom instead of toiling under the sun. And it this kind of reads to me more like wisdom is knowing that all is vanity. Like wisdom be. Becoming wise means just being led to the point where you're aware that everything we do is futile.

4:23 Dylan: So wisdom leads to existential crisis.

4:25 Seth: Yeah. So there's no. You would think that it would get you to an answer, but instead all it does is make you realize that there, there is no answer. And in fact what you believe to be true, namely that all your efforts are, you know, for not is actually the case.

4:43 Wes: Well, we should say, yeah, what is it he learned? He tells us what it is that wisdom gave him. And, and that is this at the very middle of the section. What is crooked cannot be straight and what is lacking cannot be counted. That is what he learned by searching out wisdom and examining all the deeds that are done under the sun. This is the big insight that he's gotten to. And so what do we make of those two lines? What does that mean? What is crooked cannot be Made straight. And what is lacking cannot be counted. And why would toil be focused on that anyway, right?

5:17 Mark: It seems like you can't make fundamental change in the universe. You can't. Like as he was saying before, where, you know, all streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full, right? You spend your life filling up a bucket and things are draining out the bottom of it. So if you say, hey, let's perfect, man, let us make a perfect political system with perfect citizens, no, what human nature is going to rule that out altogether, so why bother even trying?

5:45 Wes: That's spot on, right? So we can make, obviously, when we make artifacts, when we are engaged in techne, when we are doing a lot of aspects of human work, we are doing, we're precisely making crooked things straight, right? If we just do carpentry, we are fashioning what is crooked into what is straight. So it can't mean that, right? In some literal sense that work doesn't do that. But it doesn't. Thinking of Marx again, right? Finding ourselves in those fashionings, finding ourselves in that work doesn't make us straight. I would say it doesn't.

Human character is much harder to alter. And in fact, you know, one might even say human nature, these doings and our attempts to find ourselves in these doings, it's just by. It's not an aspect of human nature that we can find fulfillment in that. That this recognition function can be served by our work. I don't think I'm putting that back very well. So someone picked that up.

6:39 Jesse: But I think this relates to a question that I did want to ask you guys, your thoughts on, which is, what is the basic problem here? Is it a problem with the world? Is the world somehow bad in some abstract sense of what we mean by the world? Is it. You mentioned human nature? Is it human nature that's corrupt and can't be changed or made better? Is it, as Fox kind of gets at in that article, is it the relation between human expectation and what the world is, that the world doesn't answer to human expectation. So then even out of those two, what is the problem? Is it the world or is it the human expectation? And then maybe what you could change is only your expectation of what reality will offer you. But yeah, how would you put. What is the core of the problem here?

7:28 Wes: For him? Yeah, the way I've always thought about this is that the problem of meaning is that the world is somehow at the same time very suitable to our interests and very unsuitable at the same time. And so this manifests itself in problem of freedom and determinism and the mind body problem. A lot of this, I think, comes down to the problem of a subjectivity that's located somehow in a material world. Right. So the material world gives rise to subjectivity, but that's. It's hard to see how that works epistemologically. We are subjects in contact with the world, but it's hard to see how that works.

And we seem to have these psychological requirements in relation to the world. And we were given those requirements, this need for meaning or recognition, for instance. We are given those requirements by natural processes. Right. We are creatures of the world and yet the world can't live up to that. So there's a lot of this, I think is about the. What's absurd is just the very consciousness, per se, in a way, is absurd in the context that it finds itself.

8:37 Seth: I agree with that assessment and I'll just hold off on extempores.

8:43 Wes: Find a soft way to put this. Do a feedback sandwich. Yeah.

8:48 Seth: So if we go with that interpretation that what we're looking at here is a disconnect between human expectation and the world, the question becomes that there's the normative aspect of it, that this is a bad thing, that we should be disappointed and upset because there's nothing only makes sense if you have a framework where you believe there's some kind of force that's supposed to be ensuring the goodness or justice or righteousness of the world. So it's his complaint, in a certain sense. He's saying, I did all these things. I expected some kind of reward.

I have no guarantee of what's going to happen after I die. All of which would just be, oh, well, yeah, that's kind of the way it is. Unless you believe there's a God in this case that's good, that is somehow underwriting, you know, and ensuring that in fact your expectations and your good deeds and your toil do add up to some kind of reward in this. In this life or intersubjectively the. Your. Your post life. And so I think we have to. You know, I started off earlier in the first episode. I was talking about this being a biographical kind of lament about this person, but it's also this person's really.

It's a crisis of faith, or I should say this really only makes sense. You would assume the motivation for this is it shouldn't be the way that it is. And I have to find a way to explain that to myself and explain it to other people.

10:27 Dylan: I feel like Those two threads are distinct, though. So there's this activity of trying, of reaching out to know. And that reaching out to know involves a kind of synthetic grasping of the world, making things into a coherent narrative about our experience, about how the world works, our inclination for cosmology, our inclination to make things fit together, to write them. And that feels like one distinct activity. And then there's this morally normative question about benefits and align. You know, the relieving of suffering or the alignment with justice in the sense of right and wrong, that gets added on to that.

And to me, that part goes towards the recognition part, that the effect that you have on the world, maybe sometimes to make the crooked straight, or that you are merely just leaving a mark in some way that says maybe something as simple as you existed. And that's a core piece of the meaning. But those two things seem to me to be different from one another. Just normativeness isn't the same thing as the synthetic. The notion of understanding or trying to put things together in a coherent narrative, both, I think, end up failing. And so you get struck by this absurdity problem.

The narrative doesn't completely work. Right.

11:56 Mark: We should probably get into the second section here. Well, the subtitle, which I assume is Editor inserted, is the Futility of Self Indulgence and then reflect on how this applies to wisdom as well. So it's this idea of the hedonic treadmill. And this is very, you know, if you read Epicureans or the Stoics, Number two is about. I said to myself, come now, I'll make a test of pleasure. Enjoy yourself. But again, this was also hebel, and he goes through, right. I made myself gardens and parks, planted them, all kinds of fruit trees. I made myself pools from which to water the forests of growing trees. I had slaves. I had.

12:32 Wes: What could. What could be wrong with life? He had slaves.

12:35 Mark: Yeah.

12:36 Wes: What could go wrong?

12:37 Mark: But all this was hebel. It was not ultimately satisfying. And so the idea is that, well, at least with these pleasures of the flesh, right. This is why Socrates didn't like him either, then they're not. They're going to be fleeting. They're going to be hebel in the sense of. And we haven't mentioned, you know, the hebel, I guess literally means wind. So that's like the wind and the chasing after wind. So there's a connection there. I don't know. In the Hebrew words, are those that similar? Is it hebble and the. So what's the chasing after wind? What is that? Is that related in Hebrew, or is that just a different. Is it redundant, is what I'm asking?

13:10 Jesse: No, that word is ruach, the word for wind in that phrase. But of course, this gets just. It comes back to the whole question of what does qohelet mean by his use of hevel. Wind or breath is more breath or even vapor is like an original concrete. Ironic to call that concrete, but concrete sense of the term. And then from there it develops and is used in different ways. And that was in the Fox article, so we don't have to go back to that. But just to say that I don't know if it necessarily, in his usage here, it would be intended to mean wind or that kind. I think it might be a more conceptual sense.

13:48 Mark: Sure. Well, in any case, these things are ultimately unfulfilling. But then, per what we were just talking about, even when you rise above pleasure and, oh, well, I'm going to pursue spiritual goodness, I'm going to pursue intellectual goodness. That's going to make me happy. In a way, this is Socrates. Plato's strategy is that these things in the flesh are not to be relied on. But once I go up the ladder of the symposium to the spiritual things, those will be satisfied. It seems like he said, well, those are also hebel. And you know, the Christian response or the Christian readers of this will say, well, that's, you know, so secular philosophy, that's going to be hebel.

But, you know, once you open yourself to God's judgment, then it's going to flow through you. It's going to be, actually will fill that hole in your soul. And I don't think there's anything in here, at least before that last section that you, you say is added by someone that indicates that it actually seems like no part of philosophy would be being religious in this conventional sense. And again, you can give, you can give lip service. You can say, well, okay, things look like they're not fair, but that's the way God decreed it. That's God's will that the just and unjust will both die.

Just accepting that doesn't make it better either. Like, it seems like the hedonic treadmill logic. You know, you think you've achieved some enlightened state, but actually that itself ends up not being, being hebel as well. Is that, can we read that this section, chapter two, directly back into the wisdom section?

15:15 Wes: Well, the next section kind of addresses wisdom more. Right? So you go from pleasures of the flesh and all the rest of it to saying, but what I saw that wisdom excels folly as Light excels darkness, so do seem to be benefits in this life for wisdom, significant benefits. And one could even think of this in terms of virtue, ethics and character, Right. In terms of eudaimonia, just to read into it, you could build a conception of the good life out of wisdom and virtue and actualization and all that stuff. But the complaint here that he moves on to is that regardless of that, the same fate befalls everyone.

So again, just if I'm thinking of this in Aristotelian terms, just trying to build out the case, even if I become a good person and have a happy life predicated on being a good person, that doesn't solve this, what I'm calling the recognition problem. And the fact that the same fate is going to befall me as the fool. And all the work, right. If we're thinking of making crooked things straight and the work that goes into one's own character, because this is part of the way we think of toil. We don't just think of doing things and making things.

We think of gaining expertise. We think of all the work that goes into becoming a philosopher or a musician. Right. We spend a lifetime building up these habits and character traits and skills, all these things that we're kind of amending ourselves and fleshing out ourselves. And what happens to that that vanishes into dust. And not only that, but if we were doing it because for some recognition in the broad sense. Right. Not just prestige in this life, but some broader sense of recognition, well, even that is not available. So why do all that?

The same fate befalls the fool and the wise person.

17:11 Jesse: Yeah, it's an equalizer. It's death as the great leveler. Death is the great equalizer. As you're saying, you spend all this time creating distinctions, you know, the wise person. Oh, I've got these degrees. I've got whatever. And I'm not like the fool who just sits around on the couch doing nothing all day. And then eventually you're both six feet under, you're in exactly the same position,

17:32 Wes: and you can leave behind books, I guess, if you're a wise philosopher or beautiful works of art. And I think even if we imagine, even if we suppose that, well, those do stand the test of time, those persist. And let's suppose that they persist as long as human history persists. I think that would not be enough for him, you know? Right, right. So he's in this section. He's also worried about his legacy and what happens to the toil of his labors. And you can think of the same things Right. If you leave behind the book, and a wise book, it's still subject to future generations and their interpretation and their receptivity to it. It becomes part of a dialogue. So, you know, one's character, in a way, is stamped in that book and maybe stamped in the influence that that book has, but it sort of gets diluted into this knowledge stream, let's say.

18:26 Dylan: Or.

18:27 Wes: And you could, you know, it's like you're dust being scattered to the wind, in a sense. So any imprint of oneself on history is. Is bound to be diluted into nothing as time goes on.

18:39 Dylan: Wouldn't we also double down on this? I mean, Qohelet might not have, but just understanding the tiny minute period of cosmic history that human beings have been around and the full expectation that the sun, death of the universe, of the solar system will destroy everything right there isn't eternity available for any of the things you're talking about.

19:06 Wes: I'm thinking of Annie Hall. Do you remember the scene in Annie hall where the Alvy singer's uncle is like, the universe is not going to. Is not going to disintegrate for billions of years, Alvy. Billions of years. It's not enough.

19:21 Jesse: There's a Father John Misty released a song recently called Time Just Makes Fools of Us All. This is basically the point. Add enough time and whatever it is that you think is great, like, just becomes Folly.

19:33 Mark: So verse 18. I hated all the toil in which I had toiled under the sun, seeing I must leave it to those who come after me. Who knows whether they'd be wise or foolish. I write this good book and probably in a few thousand years, some goober podcasters are going to be discussing it. Podcasters are hebel.

19:51 Wes: They put the link to it online, but it's the wrong translation and they're

19:56 Jesse: misreading all of my precious lines.

19:58 Mark: Reading it, I was surprised how much was made out of that particular sentiment.

20:03 Seth: Right.

20:04 Mark: To continue a little bit. So I turned and gave my heart up to despair concerning the. All of the toil of my labors under the sun. Because sometimes one who's toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill, must leave it all to be enjoyed by another who did not toil for it. This is also vanity and a great evil.

20:21 Dylan: They don't deserve it, damn it.

20:23 Mark: Right. Which actually seems to be the. The sense of vanity that is not intended here. Right. Aren't you being a little vain, like, nobody's gonna do it as well as I can. It's gonna be, you know,

20:36 Seth: what matters.

20:36 Mark: I want to keep it. I want to clutch it, clutch my activities in the coffin. I want you to load all of my possessions in the coffin with me.

20:45 Jesse: Yeah. This is one of the points I made in the book is like, inasmuch as Qohelet seems very modern for a biblical writer in many of the things that he says, this is where he's very much not, like, he's not an egalitarian, he's just a straight up competitive. Like, no, I deserve to be recognized. You guys don't. I'm not going to be either. But like, we're not all equal here.

21:08 Dylan: Yeah. Then that way reminds me of the struggle of understanding something like the Iliad and Seth brought up earlier and the conflict that Achilles has with Agamemnon and over recognition and honors. It's often very hard to get people to understand the depth of that. Or maybe you have to kind of walk them to the way in which they feel exactly the same way. It's just that the particular circumstances, they don't recognize that actually we do participate in wanting to have honors and recognition. That's not all that different. And that it matters to us.

21:46 Wes: We might not.

21:46 Jesse: Yeah, maybe we're just not as explicit. Like, would you say that our values today are basically the same? We just wouldn't be so explicit in saying, like, I want the honor and I don't want the other. I mean, unless you are maybe the current president or someone. But most of us wouldn't quite say it that way as explicitly as he is.

22:03 Dylan: Well, I think part of that is that. And part of it is you get tripped up on the notion that you get honor from killing thousands of people all by yourself. And that's a big part of. I think people get tripped up over that.

22:17 Seth: Yeah, this is. This,

22:20 Wes: oops.

22:20 Seth: This actually sort of gets us to a point I was hoping we'd get to, but I assumed it would be towards the end. And you bring it up, Jesse, in chapter three of your book about the discussion about can you be happy after death? And this notion that the value and meaning is intersubjective. And I think actually this is a crucial, crucial point about this text and about what Dylan just mentioned, which is, I think the societal or the commonly accepted notion of subjectivity, what it meant to be an individual in a society, what the role of the individual in the society and the family was, and the notion of the participation, the intersubjective relationships that you have is very different.

I think from our modern perspective, we are now, you know, we've Got this post Cartesian obsession with our own individual ego and this belief that it's somehow separate and transcendent from the body. It's transcendent of the body and it's separate from other subjectivities. But I don't think that in the history of human society that was always the case that people felt that way. And so, you know, the way to read Achilles lament in the Iliad and the way to read this here is to understand the. These are not people that are thinking of themselves as isolated atomic individuals, egos.

Rather they are integrated into their society in a really critical way. So if you think about that, then I think it's easier to kind of understand the power of thumos and the need for recognition, social approval and so forth, because it's critical to the identity of these of people back then prior to sort of the developments in Western intellectual tradition.

24:16 Wes: Jesse, you write in your book on page 86, when it comes to this intersubjective view of meaning, you're quoting Stephen Darwall, something can give meaning to our lives only if we believe it to have intersubjective value. That is, if others can recognize it and affirm it. Did you want to say anything to Seth's point there?

24:38 Jesse: I think one thing that comes to mind now is that I think Qohelet is in a period of transition where before this time, I mean, just going off the Bible, in particular the Hebrew Bible, much of the talk around death before Qohelet, because Qohelet is very late in the biblical period, it's just like, well, you have a good name, you develop a good reputation, you have a bunch of kids, you got descendants, your memory will live on. You'll be a blessing for future generations. And they don't seem to have what we now think of as this modern existential angst regarding death.

It's just like, oh, you'll live on. It's fine, you'll live on. But not literally in afterlife. But this kind of, as I put it in the book, metaphorical afterlife. But Qohelet, he's coming out of that tradition and that kind of background, but he's actually one of the first, it seems along this historical timeline to really take serious that no death, you're actually not going to be remembered. He takes issue with that idea. And therefore death really is this kind of evil that it hadn't been identified as in previous generations, at least within Hebrew culture.

And certainly you can could say the broader ancient Near Eastern culture, though there was differences because Egyptians did believe in an afterlife. And so it's actually right around the time of Qohelet or pretty soon after that. In ancient Judaism, ideas of the afterlife do begin to get developed, specifically in what's called the apocalyptic literature. And you see that manifested in the New Testament, by the time of which there is a very robust notion of afterlife in a literal sense. So I always feel like Qohelet's sort of stuck in between, like before him.

Yeah, they didn't. At least again in the Hebrew culture, they didn't believe in a literal afterlife, but it was okay. They had a metaphorical afterlife and you live on in your memory and descendants. And after him, they do develop a literal afterlife, so they feel okay. But he's in this period where it's like he's got nothing. He's got literal afterlife has not developed yet. And he is not satisfied with the idea of metaphor, metaphorical afterlife. So that's why I think he develops this kind of angst and feels so like proto existential. He has nothing to rely on in the face of death.

26:52 Wes: Interesting, Seth.

26:53 Mark: I like your bringing up the. Is he a social animal? That the individualism of modern philosophy and of modern politics is not something we should read into the ancients in any way. But this seems like if you really were communitarian and derive your own value and your own individual subjectivity from your society, then at least it seems like there would be a gesture to. It doesn't matter if I particularly am remembered so long as this mark, this, this enterprise, this thing that I care about, this activity continues and is passed down. Whereas the objection is not so much just that, well, it could be passed down to someone foolish, but the fact that it's not me, the fact that somebody else is going to enjoy this, that really does seem to be.

There seems to be a tension there. It seems like that, at least with this translation, I'm wanting to read it as having that modern sense of individualism, because when I as an individual wink out of existence, that's going to be a horrible thing. It's going to be. Whereas if you really had more social view of the self, then it wouldn't be right. It doesn't. I as an individual ant, as the individual unit in society don't matter so much as the society going on. And yes, the society itself is going to eventually wink out. So we could go further, but like, I don't know, shouldn't there be some consolation in the social aspect you're talking about?

28:24 Dylan: The harm of death is depriving us of the things that we would be doing or could be doing. And then the question is, shouldn't we ameliorate the harm of death by the benefit of the things that we've done, the marks we've made, being carried on after us? And then you would get to the discussion that Wes brought up earlier, which is there would then be the possibility of harming you after death in the sense of wrecking that or calling into question those accomplishments, those. Those that effect that you had on the world. So you, you know, you could be harmed after death in that respect, I guess even just.

29:04 Mark: Just being consumed with the harm that an individual undergoes as opposed to.

29:09 Dylan: Right.

29:10 Mark: Jesse was. Was contrasting in his book the My life as an individual versus my life as a story. So. But that's still. If you're egoistic about it, as he seems, the author seems to be here, it's my reputation. I can be harmed after death, whereas it should be just the work I'm giving myself. You know, what will give myself life meaning. It's not clutching to this individual. It is seeing myself as part of the organism that is nature or that is humanity and making the work important. Right. Isn't that.

29:42 Dylan: But you're saying Qohelet doesn't do that. He has an egoistic view.

29:45 Mark: Sure doesn't look like it.

29:46 Dylan: No, no, I agree with you. I was just making.

29:48 Mark: Okay, it looks like he's being vain in the ordinary sense, even though he's in his condemnation of the whole situation as bogus, as absurd as vanity. Seems like he is being vain in a way that one would not expect. Given what you just said, Seth, about the lack of individualism in this stage in history.

30:05 Jesse: I guess the last thing I said, I didn't completely finish what I originally had in mind when I started getting to that point, which is that I also think, Seth, in relation to what you brought up, that it's also a transition in terms of society moving in a more individualistic direction from a collective. That's why he can value someone who dies in an earlier period, can value just living on the descendants because they do have that more notion of the social self. They're tied up with the others. Whereas my theory is that through Greek influence here, because he's writing in the time when the Greeks are in charge and a lot of the Greek literature is getting out even into Palestine, that there is more that what we now think of as a modern notion of individualism and modern European individualism.

Really, you see that in many ways in the Greeks, not the Homeric Greeks, but let's say the post Platonic Greeks. And so I think it's this kind of individualism is developing that partly creates the problem. He can't be satisfied with the social notion of the self and therefore the social death and the goods that a social death would provide, because he just doesn't see himself wrapped up in either his ancestors or his descendants all that much. It's sort of what is he going to do with his little time on earth as an individual, I guess.

31:23 Mark: Looking forward to verse 24 there. There's nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink and find enjoyment in their toil. This also I saw is from the hand of God. For apart from him who can eat and who can have enjoyment, for to the one who pleases him, God gives wisdom and knowledge and joy. But to the sinner he gives the worth work of gathering and heaping only to give to one who pleases God. This is also vanity in chasing after the wind. So it sounds like, oh wait, we're giving some positive things. And you know, this, this may be. Wait, is, is this a later interpolation?

Because not only does does being wise make you not make foolish financial decisions and you know, things are not going to turn out as well for you in your life, but no, God actually likes the, you know, when we find enjoyment in our toil and, and in fact, you can't really enjoy your toil unless you're doing it for some greater purpose for God.

32:14 Wes: Right?

32:14 Mark: You're not just being a pure individualist, but even that, even putting your faith in God and getting enjoyment out of that and trying to, you know, take things as they come, even that's bullshit. Is that, is that what's being said here?

32:27 Jesse: Potentially, it depends on if you take the vanity or hevel in the last phrase there to apply to all of 24 through 26, or just the latter part of it, the gathering and heaping. I think I would be inclined to think he's just there referring to the latter part. This is one of the seven passages in the book that I and others call like the joy passages or the enjoyment passages, specifically verse 24 here, there's nothing better than to eat and drink and find enjoyment. But as you may recall reading through the book, he says that same kind of thing several times.

He says it in chapter 3, verse 12 and 13. He says it in chapter 3, verse 22, 5, the end of chapter 5 again at, I think 8, 15, 9, 7 through 10, and 11, 7 through 10, they all. And it actually expands as he. This is the first time he brings that up. It's quite short, but as you get nearer to the end of the book, there are these quite long passages that I just mentioned where it's that kind of theme. So, just so, for example, starting at chapter nine, verse seven, go eat your bread with enjoyment and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has long ago approved what you do.

Let your garments always be white. Do not let oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life or heavy life that are given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil, at which you toil under the sun, whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might. For there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol to which you are going. So you can see that it's more expansive than the early one. You could still ask the question that you were just asking Mark, which is, well, is he still calling all of this hevel?

He does say right in there, all the days of your vain life that are given you under the sun. But even if he does, does that cancel out the joy? Maybe they coexist in some way. I'm curious what other people think about how this. There is this clear enjoyment emphasis. Is it still just sort of heavily pointless? I mean, in a certain sense, perhaps it is. But I guess, is he undermining all of it with those references to vanity in the midst of these passages? Or is it authentic?

34:44 Seth: This is a hard one for me. So I think one. One way to look at it is to say, referring back to things that he says earlier in the text, that there's a sense in which he and others toiled and never stopped to take time to enjoy, you know, the fruits of their labors. So they work and they work and they work to get, build, to get to build. And then they wake up one day and they can't enjoy it. And it's like 20 years have gone by. And I never stopped to enjoy. All I did was toil. So, you know, there's one reading of this where you could say he's saying to pause and actually try to enjoy what you're doing while you're doing it.

Because if you wait, thinking that you're going to reach a point like retirement, it'll be too late. You'll have missed out. But then there's another part he says somewhere in the text, talking about people doing simple work and being happy versus people who are doing, like, important Kingly type stuff. And in that sense it seems like he's talking about actually enjoying the work itself, like being happy with the toil. And he says, you know, basically saying. And again, this brings in this notion of kind of like what you talked about Jesse earlier, of equal and unequal.

Like there's unequal work, but they're all capable of providing an equal level of enjoyment, which is why the peasant work or the simple work that's done, those people can be happy in their toil, even though it's not palace work or whatever. And I honestly don't know between the two interpretations, where to delineate or whether we even need to.

36:31 Mark: Yeah. What do other folks think about this positive thing is, you know, is this.

36:36 Seth: The.

36:36 Mark: Sounds very Eastern. This whole enjoy the moment, it's all fleeting, it's all nothingness, but yet, you know, we exist. It's still what we are given, it is our fate. So isn't wisdom to enjoy what we can, you know, enjoy it righteously, be ethical, etc.

36:56 Dylan: Well, I mean, don't we have to join it? Join what? We just read up with the next section, section 11 or the paragraphs 11, 11, 12. Again. I saw under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle of the strong, nor the bread to the wise, nor the riches to the intelligent, nor the favorite of the skillful. But time and chance happen to them all. So these two lines, there's good luck and bad luck. But then the next section, I've also seen the example of wisdom under the sun and it seemed great to me. And he says in 16. So I said, wisdom is better than might.

Yet the poor man's wisdom is despised and his words were not heeded. And the poetic lines, the quiet words of the wise are more to be heeded than the shouting of a ruler among fools. Wisdom is better than weapons of war. But one bungler destroys much good. So there's. There's a pointing to. Well, yeah, you know, there's not everything that we can control, but it's still better to know stuff and to be wise about it, to avoid destroying good and not be a bungler. And to. It's better to be wise than to just be a ruler among fools. It seems more in this section like that, that call to the benefit of wisdom.

It's sort of in the face, it's sort of optimistic in the face of the previous observations without much more than sort of cherry picking the optimism. That's what compared to other stuff. Right. Whereas before it was like I'M not going to see any optimism at all out there, because it's clear that as soon as you make the time, you're looking at infinite. If you make the. You just. You can't reconcile it.

38:35 Jesse: I mean, there is a kind of pragmatism to it, I think, in the way that he talks about wisdom. Yeah, he can go down the nihilistic rabbit hole at times and just burn it down. It's all hevel. It's all vanity, futile, whatever word you want to use. But it's like, well, if he's not commending suicide, which I don't see anywhere that he is, I don't think he is, you know, nor does Camus, of course. Then you got to get up the next morning and go to work. And it's better to do it wisely than to do it foolishly. And it's just this basic, like, you got to get along in life.

I think that's the wisdom over folly piece. It's kind of pragmatic. But then I do think, I would say distinct from that is just as distinct in these passages is the joy theme. The enjoy your life while you can, enjoy the toil in itself, apart from what comes of it, because you have no control over that. But you can enjoy the act of toiling and maybe try to do it wisely. You can bring that side of the emphasis in. But it's just. You have to keep living. And if he's not committing suicide, then he's going to try to put forth some way of making your way, some sense of waking your way through life, even if it is an absurd life.

39:52 Seth: Yeah. There was no sense at any point in reading this that it's like a Camus. The first and most important philosophical question is whether or not you should commit suicide. That does not come across at all. Again, to go back to what I said in framing it in the last episode, he's trying to answer a question. He's trying to come to terms with the realities of life as he finds them, given the belief structure that he's inherited. I'm told God is good. Everything happens for a reason. Somebody's looking out over me, but my experience of life does not accord with that.

So how can I make sense of this? And ultimately, he's looking for an interpretive solution. How can I? You know, he's like, I've done the wisdom thing. I've done the hedonism thing. I've tried all the different avenues just to answer this question, and none of them have given Me a satisfactory. A satisfactory answer. So, you know, I need to figure out why my experience of the world is not what my expectation of it is supposed to be. But at no point is this a. And if I can't find an answer, well, then I'm just going to commit suicide. That just isn't even in the cards.

And in that sense, it doesn't, you know, it's not existentialist or absurdist in. In this modern Camus sense.

41:22 Jesse: Well, Camus wasn't for suicide either. Camus whole thing, right. Was to.

41:26 Seth: No, I mean, just even asking the question. Camus didn't come down on the side of suicide, but he says this is the thing you have to answer. I don't even think this is a question. In Ecclesiastes.

41:35 Jesse: Got it.

41:36 Mark: I had heard it mentioned somewhere. Like, is he like David Benatar? The. It would be better that we were not born. Not necessarily that you should kill yourself, but, like, definitely don't have kids because, like, it's, you know, maybe we should

41:49 Wes: just say we'd be better off not born in one point.

41:53 Mark: Well, I was looking for.

41:53 Jesse: Yeah, so that's in my book. I wrote about that.

41:56 Mark: Oh, in six, he said six, verse three. A man may beget a hundred children and live many years, but however many are the days of his years, if he does not enjoy life's good things or has no burial, I still say a stillborn child is better off than he. So it's not that it's better for all of us not to be born, but, like, if you don't actually enjoy these things or you don't have posterity, there are worldly goods that would make that, you know, so. So it's not that everything is. He's not a nihilist. Like, these things are intrinsically valuable. It's just they're still ultimately, you know, from a higher point of view later in your life when you're not engaged in those things. They're heavy, but that doesn't mean that you won't enjoy them while you're doing them.

42:39 Wes: Yeah, I mean, the text seems to be inconsistent to me on this topic, but. Yeah, that's all I was going to say. Jesse.

42:45 Jesse: I was going to say, I think of it as a kind of ranking and talk about this in one of the chapters of the book where it's like, I think that his hypothetically highest value would be meaning. He's frustrated that there isn't meaning in life, so he wants there to be meaning. And I think of that as kind of like having a teleological structure, right? You're toiling. You're toiling for some good end that actually comes about and you get recognition for it and it's permanent. And all these things like, that's the greatest life. Well, I think that's all implied as what he thinks would be the best, but he doesn't think that's reality.

So then the next best is the smaller things. Just the enjoyment of the moment. You don't have to toil for the sake of something that's going to last hundreds of years. Just enjoy the moment. Right now, that's the next best thing. That's the portion. He uses that word sometimes. That's what God has given you. That's the portion this life offers. But then if you can't do that somehow, if you're still so obsessed. I think of the person on Wall street, the finance bro who's working 80 hours a week. And someone mentioned this idea earlier, never spending time with his family or something.

Well, you're not stopping to smell the roses. So that's pretty bad then. Because then you're about two things. Like, the only two possible values he comes up with is like this kind of teleological meaning type value versus this kind of smaller but real value of the moment type value. Those are your two options in life. Like, go with one. Well, you can't go with the first one, so you have to go with the second one. Okay? If you don't go with the second one, you are screwed. Like, there is no other option. So that's why I think in this passage, he says a stillborn is better off than the person that can't even enjoy the good things that this person has.

Because meaning is already excluded. And so there's small joys available. But if you don't have that, you have nothing. So I don't necessarily see it as being inconsistent with other things he says, but happy to hear, Wes, what you have in mind.

44:44 Wes: Yeah, I don't know that I have something coherent to say about that. I just want to know why he has the lyrics to a 1960s song in chapter three.

44:54 Mark: Well, as chapter four of the book points out, that it's so peaceful. A time to be born, a time to die, a time to plant. That it makes it sound like this is the way it should be. There's time for everything. Everything comes along when it's supposed to. And the fact that that is not what it means. It just means there are these inevitable cycles that just happen. And actually all it's all hebel. Like the fact that it is repetitious in this way. The fact that you can't avoid these things, that actually makes it a bunch of. It's not. Oh, this is a peaceful thing we should meditate on in the form of song. This is part of what he's dismissing.

45:35 Wes: This is an example of his toil being vanity in the sense of reinterpreted through the lens of 60s folk.

45:42 Seth: Yeah.

45:43 Jesse: I will say though, that title, Turn, Turn, Turn, I think. I mean, you read the. Or some of you at least read the chapter that I talk about this poem, and I think it has a cyclical notion to it. Turn, Turn, Turn is the only lyrics from that song that aren't straight up. Ecclesiastes 3:1:8. So they're adding that sort of interpretation on it. I think it's a good interpretation. They're saying it's cyclical, so I don't have a problem with that thought.

46:06 Mark: Well, and a time to love, time to hate, Time for war. You know, this is Pete Seeger, who wrote this. I swear it's not too late. A time for peace. I swear it's not too late.

46:14 Jesse: Okay, okay, fine.

46:16 Wes: Yeah, that's at it.

46:17 Mark: It's a very different message. You know, it's actually try. It's. Don't just be quietist. Don't just accept. Like, yeah, no, we. Yes, there's this. This nature is greater than we are. But, like, there is a way to be in harmony with nature. I guess that's the thing that we have in a lot of these Eastern traditions, these wisdom traditions, the idea that there is an inevitability, there is powers that we can never understand, but yet we can put ourselves in harmony with that. And I think. Well, what is. I mean, you're saying, obviously the person who wrote the appendix, Ecclesiastes, says, yes, we can be in harmony with this, just obey God's law, blah, blah, blah.

But it seems like it's ambivalent, right, that you're saying the best thing is unattainable, but there is a second best. That's okay. So that would be being in harmony with it. But certainly the notion of harmony does not explicitly come up. I don't think. Well, I think we're out of time. Thanks so much for chatting with us. We'll decide offline whether we want to have a. A part three where we just read through more of these sections. But it is, for something so short, pretty redundant. Like, we really have gotten most of the main ideas out. And of course, if you really want to dwell on it on a line by line basis, we will link to your book when it comes out or when pre orders are available.

If it's within the month, maybe pre ordering will be there by the time it comes out. So look to the blog post associated with this partiallyexaminedlife.com anything else you want to leave people with? Jesse?

47:49 Jesse: Oh, as far as my own stuff. Yeah, just check out the book if you're interested in Ecclesiastes and maybe in about a year or so from now, look for the standalone translation, how to have an Existential Crisis. That's about it.

48:00 Wes: Nice. Yeah. Thanks again.

48:02 Dylan: Thanks for joining us.

48:03 Wes: This book is great.

48:04 Jesse: Thanks for having me guys. This is really fun and I've been a fan of the show for many years, so privileged to be on here.

48:10 Mark: Next time we're talking about Franz Brentano's lecture the Origin of the Knowledge of Right and wrong from 1889. We'd like to hear from you what you want us to cover. You can email us pelshelecthavenlife.com comment on the blog post associated with this episode. Reach out to us through Facebook, through x.com any other way that you can figure out. Good night everybody.

48:30 Seth: Good night.

48:31 Jesse: Good night. Good night.