Episode 72 - Why Live? with Céline Leboeuf Transcript

David: 0:12

Welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:14

The podcast where two philosophy professors contemplate the nature of everyday existence.

David: 0:19

I'm Dr. David Peña-Guzmán,

Ellie: 0:21

And I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson.

David: 0:23

We wanna give you a heads up that today's episode will involve some discussion of suicide, not in any graphic detail, but periodically as a theme.

Ellie: 0:32

To be or not to be.

David: 0:34

That is the question.

Ellie: 0:37

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them to die to sleep no more.

David: 0:50

We get it. You're a theater queen.

Ellie: 0:54

I wish I could say I remember that all by heart. I did once know it by heart, but I pulled it up to read it for you. I will stop there though. That's, that's enough of Hamlet's soliloquy.

David: 1:03

You, you were reading that? I honestly was quite impressed that you were just reciting that from memory.

Ellie: 1:08

I did, like I said, I did used to know it, but no longer. So this is Hamlet if you, if you didn't pick up on that.

David: 1:14

And you know, when Hamlet asks himself this question, he is of course, thinking about the possibility of death. And the reason that this is one of Western literature's most important scenes is because it captures in the form of a very simple question, what we could argue is a universal feature of human experience, which is that moment when each of us confronts the ungroundedness of our own existence, of our own being.

Ellie: 1:42

Of course, this is truly an OG soliloquy, one of the most famous ever in Western literature, and I think it's for good reason. I mean, we're obviously a philosophy podcast and Shakespeare is a playwright, although many would also consider him a philosopher. But whether or not you consider Shakespeare himself a philosopher, or whether you even think that there is a historical Shakespeare, because I know there's lots of debates around that. Anyway, okay. The the theater kid is coming out again, The point is that there is a lot to delve into in this soliloquy. So you're right, David, that in starting out, there's this recognition that even though we find ourselves already existing in a world, whether or not we continue to exist is a question for us. And I read that in an existential sense, in the sense that we are the kinds of beings for whom our being is an issue, as Heidegger puts it. What else are you getting from this soliloquy?

David: 2:38

Well, I mean, I, I like the part of the soliloquy where Hamlet associates this undiscovered country, which is death, as the place from which no traveler returns. And so there is this awareness that the choice to not be is irreversible in a way that the choice to continue to be is not. But I don't know if you remember this, Ellie, when we were in graduate school, there was a professor who came to give a speech at Emory, a talk, a speech. Sounds weird. He came to give a declaration.

Ellie: 3:09

Not an academic parlance.

David: 3:11

Yes, the State of the Union, and he made a really interesting argument, which is that we need to start reading Shakespeare as a philosopher because through his writings we get a uniquely different take on modernity than if we read modernity through the classical source, which is Descartes. So he compared Descartes I think therefore, I am precisely to Hamlet's question be or not to be.

Ellie: 3:36

I do not remember that talk, although it sounds very good. David, I wanna go back though for a moment to what you said a couple minutes ago, which is this idea of the undiscovered country. Can you remind us of that part of the soliloquy? I think that was past where I stopped my dramatic reading.

David: 3:51

Well, there is this moment in the soliloquy where Hamlet calls death, the undiscovered country again, from whose born no traveler returns. And the idea is that this undiscovered quality, this alienness or this strangeness to this other worldly dimension injects dread into us because we have no idea what to find there because of course no traveler to that country has ever returned us what it's like. And so we're in a position of absolute unconditional ignorance in relation to it.

Ellie: 4:24

Okay. So this is that ancient point about death, which is death, is the end of experience. And so we actually can't anything about death as such because nobody has experienced death. There are many people who have experienced dying or maybe near death experiences, but once you undergo death, experience precisely is foreclosed. And so strictly speaking, nobody has experienced death.

David: 4:49

Correct, except I think there is a slight difference, whereas the ancients, like Socrates will say, well, I'm obviously not dead and I don't know what death is, so why should I be afraid of it? Hamlet actually goes the other way, and he says, once you become aware of your ignorance about death, that awareness makes us all cowards. So it's actually not a reason to be courageous necessarily in the face of death. It's to recognize that we don't know what we're getting into and that's that. That's very scary.

Ellie: 5:22

And Hamlet is traditionally holding York's skull during this scene. And I think that also reveals that what is lasting after death, at least as far as the living or concerned, are mere corpses, not the actual living themselves. Right. And so to speak to, uh, skull is not really to speak to anyone, which is why this is a soliloquy and not a monologue. And I think. One of the reasons we wanted to give a content warning about suicide for this episode is because this is what the soliloquy is about. Hamlet is deciding whether or not to live right. Should we suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune because so much of our lives are out of our control. Or should we, as he puts it, take arms against a sea of troubles?

David: 6:12

And the image of Hamlet holding a skull speaking to it is just so morbid and vivid and immediate, and it's always reminded me of that illustration from Andreas Vesalius, the father of Anatomy, of Western Anatomy, which is that drawing of a human skeleton, which here represents humanity holding a skull and seeing itself stripped off everything that represents vitality in life, like flesh, blood, and skin.

Ellie: 6:42

It's like that body's exhibit, but back in the day.

David: 6:45

Yes. Have you been to that?

Ellie: 6:47

No, I'm too. If you've listed a disgust episode, you probably can imagine I, I can't hang with that kind of exhibit, although maybe I should force myself.

David: 6:55

So, you know, it's really funny because when I was in Paris last time the body's exhibit was there, and I proposed it to my partner who is a doctor does surgery and deals with very kind of gory medical scenes on, on the daily, and he refused to go because it unsettled him.

Ellie: 7:14

Really?

David: 7:16

It, it's really interesting to think of, of a doctor finding that somewhat eerie because they are too lifelike in

Ellie: 7:25

Hmm.

David: 7:26

in their bare anatomy.

Ellie: 7:28

Ah, which also takes us back to Hamlet's point about the difference in kind between life and death. Today we are asking why live?

David: 7:40

Is life worth living or is it just a series of blips of suffering with no higher purpose?

Ellie: 7:45

How can we find meaning in our lives when the world seems random and indifferent to our interest?

David: 7:51

We talked with philosopher Céline Leboeuf about her personal experience with an existential crisis and her philosophical search for a way out of it.

Ellie: 8:02

David, I've been feeling a little bit nervous about this episode because even though I specialize in existentialism and I can tell you all about existential crises, I feel out of my element when it comes to talking about this very question around which we've centered the episode. Why live? So that's one reason that I'm really grateful we have a guest today because she, I think, has a perspective on it that's rooted in her personal experience that she is excited to share with others. But I think for myself, I just want to remind our listeners that David, you and I are philosophy professors. We are not mental health professionals, and so are you are struggling with, with thoughts that we cannot really address in this podcast that are, that are really the true, true Hamlet questions, then I strongly suggest talking with a mental health professional about them.

David: 8:49

No, that's a, that's a really good point to begin with actually, Ellie, because the topic of suicide, I think at risks sometimes getting over intellectualized from the perspective of philosophy, and there's a very real danger there. So I'm, I'm happy that you, you say that upfront because we will talk about one way of thinking about this question, why live? But we recognize that for people who are posing that question in an immediate way, maybe

Ellie: 9:15

Maybe this isn't the the most helpful thing to listen to.

David: 9:18

Yeah. Thank you. That's the, that's the right way to say it.

Ellie: 9:21

Because we are, after all, a podcast called Overthink, and we are going to be talking about the question why live from an intellectual perspective. That said, I do want to clarify that the thinkers that we're talking about in the episode today did really see this question as a live question for them, and I don't think treating it intellectually necessarily means to overintellectualize it. And so this is a great segue for us to talk about somebody I've been wanting to talk about for a while, David, and that is Albert Camus. In his book, the Myth of Sisyphus. Albert Camus begins by saying that the problem of suicide is the only truly serious philosophical problem. Forget the question of whether or not we have free will. Forget the question of whether or not there is a God. Forget the question of how we know whether the external world exists or not. For Camus. All of those questions are overly abstract, and we need to begin with the most important question, which is why live. He says he is interested in figuring out the meaning of life from an individual point of view, rather than as a social phenomenon. For Camus, most of us go around in our everyday lives occupied by the circumstances in which we find ourselves and the activities in which we find ourselves involved, right? We go through Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, work home, work, home, uh, maybe some friends here and there going out to the cafe if you're in Paris, et cetera, et cetera. We're immersed in our routines.

David: 10:49

In this routine existence that you're alluding to, Ellie is what Camus himself calls mechanical life. It's life on repeat. When we just sort of throw ourselves into a series of repetitive activities without thinking much about the nature of existence, but he says occasionally there are these moments that just rip us out of the flow of that mechanical life and force us to confront in a very direct manner what he calls the absurd. And he says it could be the smallest detail, the most insignificant feature of your environment, that sort of tips things over the balance and becomes the feather that broke the camel's back. So for example, he says sometimes when people ask you, what are you thinking about right now? Two things can happen. Either you are thinking something and you don't wanna say, because maybe it's about the person that asked you. And he says, you know, anybody who's ever been in love knows this moment very well. your lover asks you, what are you thinking about right now? Tell me. And you don't want to. But then there are also cases when maybe there's been a silence in a social dynamic for some time, and somebody poses that question and then you realize, oh my God, I haven't been thinking about anything. Actually, the answer is nothing. I haven't been thinking for God knows how long. And according to Camus in that moment, when you realize that you have been lost in a kind of empty nothingness, that realization can trigger a recognition and a confrontation with the absurd because who am I? What kind of being am I that just loses himself into the nothingness without even being aware of it. And that has to do with the fact that for a Camus, the absurd is associated with the inhuman. And so if you're a being who doesn't think you become aware that there's an element of inhumanity in you and it triggers an existential crisis.

Ellie: 12:58

Well, specifically the absurd is a relation or involves a relation between the inhuman and the human. So Camus says that what happens in these situations. Is that we come face to face with the fact that there is no security of meaning in the world. The world itself cannot give us and does not give us the answers to the questions that we have. And so we are this peculiar kind of being who is asking questions about why we are here, but the world just has this, what he calls unreasonable silence in the face of it, there is gap between our desire for meaning and the world's silence in the face of that desire.

David: 13:37

Yeah. And that silence, that absolute radical indifference of the world to the questions that we ask of it can come hit us in the face again in the most random ways. Like, what are you thinking about right now? Nothing. What's happening to my existence, or even just in terms of our experience of temporality. He has another concrete illustration that I want to throw in the mix here, which has to do, I, it just felt very close to home because he talks about being in your thirties, and we are in our thirties, so I think this is gonna hit a little close to home for us. But he says, when you're a teenager, like in your teens and maybe even in your twenties, you're constantly waiting for tomorrow. You know, you, you want the future to arrive. You're looking forward to what's to come. But once you pass over into your thirties, something happens in terms of your relationship to time where you suddenly realize that tomorrow is actually the problem because you're growing older and older, and that means that you're getting closer and closer to the precipice of death. And so whereas in your twenties, you can't wait to get older. By the time your thirties come around, you start experiencing that anxiety or that fear of death that features so prominently in existentialist writing. And that too is a kind of relationship between our humanity and the inhumanity of death itself. And therefore the absurd, right? It's the confrontation between my desire to exist and my awareness that that existence is in fact finite.

Ellie: 15:13

It's so funny. I don't remember that part of The Myth of Sisyphus at all, but I, I feel like I should, because that's definitely relevant given our current life circumstances. And I think what, what you're getting at is one of the interesting things about Camus' description of the absurd, which is that technically speaking, the awakening to the absurd isn't triggered by anything external. It's this perception of the nothingness in which the nothingness itself speaks. And to that extent, Camus is cribbing, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, these philosophers who came before him. And so we can't say that the nothingness caused it because the nothingness is nothing. And so strictly speaking, nothing caused it.

David: 15:50

Caused it.

Ellie: 15:51

Yet there's also this suggestion that there might be certain circumstances that lead to the perception of this nothingness more than others. I think from perhaps like a sociological or historical standpoint, some people would say that it takes a certain level of material security in order to have this question arise to begin with, or this is an extraordinarily banal example from my own life. I feel like sometimes when I'm a little dehydrated, I'm more prone to an existential crisis, which is perhaps why I'm always compulsively drinking water

David: 16:26

That's actually your existential escape mechanism. It's maniacally and compulsively carrying a water bottle with you everywhere you go. That's how you keep death at bay.

Ellie: 16:35

Exactly. I saw a student at a talk last week and he was like, oh, you are you okay? You look kind of tired. And I was like, I forgot my water bottle. I haven't had a sip of water in an hour. I, I wouldn't last for a second in the, you know, in the wilderness of like the TV show Alone, which I've been watching a lot of recently, but

David: 16:53

Survivor.

Ellie: 16:54

Yeah. Yeah. So, which are, which perhaps, you know, trigger existential crises of another kind. Those shows I would love to talk about at some point. But I do wanna talk about the classic example actually that Camus gives in this text more classic than the 30 year old that I have no memory of.

David: 17:10

That forgot or never acknowledged.

Ellie: 17:13

I swear to God, I know I teach this like all the time. I swear to God. I do not remember the 30 year old example at all. But the titular example is what I'd to think about a little bit here, which is the guy Sisyphus, who is doomed by the gods, he's this ancient Greek mythical figure, doomed by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity. And he, every morning starts to roll this giant boulder up the hill. And at the end of the day, he finally makes it to the top. He's like, yes, I made it. And then the boulder rolls back down and he has to begin the process over and over and over again for Camus, Sisyphus, who, as my students pointed out recently actually is kind of a strange example of the absurd, because he is not a finite creature. Sisyphus is living in the underworld, and so he's gonna be rolling the boulder up and down for eternity. But he's a metaphor for our own existence, our own mechanical existence, and the way that as finite creatures, we actually cannot escape this doom to just repeat activities over and over again, no matter how hard we try. And so it all depends on our attitude. What kind of attitude are we having? The question is, life worth living is not determinable from an external standpoint. It's only answerable from within.

David: 18:36

Yeah, and what draws Camus to this particular myth is the fact that Sisyphus represents for him one illustration among many, because there are other figures that he talks about, but you're right, this is the most important one and a particular one. But essentially, Sisyphus represents for him an example or embodiment of what he calls the absurd man, and that is the individual who refuses to give up on life even though he is aware of the fact that he will suffer immensely. And even though he knows as Camus puts it at one point, actually at a, at a few points, because he uses this expression multiple times, that there is quote, no appeal to any higher purpose. In other words, Sisyphus knows that there's no redo. His punishment is not gonna go away, and there is no afterlife for him that will somehow retroactively justify the suffering that he has endured. So in, in a very simple way, Sisyphus knows that this life here that he has of endlessly incessantly rolling the boulder up the hill over and over again. That's it. And from an existential standpoint, again, Camus says, and still Sisyphus continues to push. So what this myth figure embodies is a combination of lucidity, again, that awareness that there is no higher purpose and a lack of hope for salvation, but that doesn't turn into a desire for suicide. So Sisyphus affirms life in an absurd way by embracing, rather than mitigating the absurdity of his own condition.

Ellie: 20:21

Mm-hmm, he has to keep the awareness of the absurd front of mind at all times. And his emphasis on awareness is quite individual in a sense. Right. The individual is staging a personal revolt that is without hope, which can be difficult to swallow because it means that you have go on living. He's answering "to be" to Hamlet's question not, "not to be" without any sense that things will make sense in the grand scheme of things.

David: 20:46

Yeah, and I, I mean, yes, it's a very tough pill to swallow, to embrace absurdity on its own terms. Although the question I think remains whether the absence of hope for some kind of transcendental meaning with a capital M really means the absence of of all hope period. And it seems like that's the case in The Myth of Sisyphus. But there are some people who have read Camus, who think about existentialism in a slightly different way, and one of them is the American philosopher John Jay McDermott, who passed away just a few years ago in 2018, and who wrote an essay entitled, "Why Bother: Is Life Worth Living?" in which he argues that maybe Camus was wrong in thinking that the absence of a transcendental signification or justification for life means that we have to be like Sisyphus, which is to say entirely hopeless. And he begins by saying, look, we know that there is no meaning in life. There is no meaning at the beginning of life when you're born because you have no choice over it. And there is no meaning at the end of life when you die because there is nothing on the other side of that door. At the end. We die often, a tragic death that cannot be justified. At best, our death will be not painful, but that's still not very good. And so if there is no meaning at the end and at the beginning, perhaps we ought to look for meaning in the middle, ie, in the actual unfolding of our existence,

Ellie: 22:23

In mechanical life.

David: 22:24

Not in mechanical life because not all existence is necessarily mechanical for McDermott or, or actually for Camus because sometimes there are these experiences that we talked about that draws out of mechanical life. And here McDermott actually latches onto one specific phrase from The Myth of Sisyphus, which is a phrase that the absurd man will ask himself or herself. I mean, it's gendered in the original text, so I'll just say the absurd man.

Ellie: 22:52

I actually use the absurd man when I'm speaking to my students about this because I do think that Camus' picture is fundamentally masculine, but that's a story for another time. There's still lots to be gained from it for people of all genders.

David: 23:03

Yeah. And so the, the phrase that the absurd man asks himself, and this is a quote from The Myth of Sisyphus, is I want to know if I can live with what I know. And only with that, that's the real question. Given everything that I know up until this moment of my existence, is that enough for me to keep going? Now, McDermott says, well, what exactly do I know up until this point? What fundamental truths do I have access to? And they're not particularly uplifting. On the one hand, I know that life is suffering, there is war, there is genocide, there is injustice, disease, famine, and I cannot control that. But I also know something else. And that is that many people in the world suffer a lot more than I do, and that therefore I am in a position to help them, even if I cannot entirely make those problems disappear. And so McDermott introduces this pathway into existentialism. He calls it the amelioration pathway. And he says the answer to the question, why live is actually another question. And that is, can I believe in helping others even when I know there is no absolute solution to human suffering?

Ellie: 24:28

This is interesting because it's really different from where Camus ends up. Camus says that what we know is our feeling of the world. So in that sense, he's actually quite similar to Miguel de Unamuno, who I think we talked about in one episode. I cannot remember which one, who replaces Descartes', I think therefore I am with I feel therefore am, Camus ends up in this kind of feeling based place, but remains extraordinarily individualistic.

David: 24:53

Yes. And so that's where I'm going. That's why I introduced McDermott, because McDermott actually ends on a much more collective action driven existentialist position where we justify continuing to live not for ourselves, but for the sake of helping others. But still, he adds, and this is what still makes him an existentialist. Without the hope help that we offer will fix the fundamental indifference of the world to our need for meaning.

Ellie: 25:22

In terms of what this looks like in the every day, how we go on living after having faced this existential crisis, I think our guest will have some thoughts.

David: 25:52

Dr. Céline Leboeuf is assistant Professor of Philosophy at Florida International University. Her current research discusses the ways in which social identities such as gender and race affect our experience of our bodies. She has published about issues such as body positivity, racial ambiguity, and most recently has finished a book project about the titular question for our episode today. Why live?

Ellie: 26:17

Welcome, Céline.

David: 26:18

Hi, Céline.

Céline: 26:20

Hi. Thank you.

David: 26:21

We are really excited to talk to you about this article that you recently published and titled, "Why Live The Three Authors Who Saved Me During An Existential Crisis," and you opened this essay by talking about experiencing an existential crisis in your early thirties, which then prompted you to question in a very fundamental way, the meaning of life. So talk to us a little bit about this crisis.

Céline: 26:47

Thank you. I'm glad to have the opportunity to talk about this so the crisis began in as, as you said, in my thirties, I was returning from a fellowship that I had at Penn State and I was back in Miami about to start the school semester. And I like teaching, but there is something about the idea of starting another task that would yield to another task, the school semester over and over, maybe retirements and then finally my death. But there was something unsettling and unsatisfying about the idea of my life built around tasks, whether it's teaching or professional or you know, personal task. It was the idea that going do something over and over again and then you're going die. And that's it. And I had already thought about this question before and had hoped, you know, as someone who has an interest in writing to kind of pursue my life in some sort of alternate form through books, you know, publishing stuff. I think that's something that appeals to a lot of people who like writing or publishing, but even people who want to extend their lives, you know, quote unquote, through having children or contributing to communities, political organizations, religious organizations, and the like there's this hope, I think, for many of us to have an impact. And that appeals to me. But if you think hard enough about it, that impact itself is relatively short-lived. People who know you, they're going to die and forget about you or whatever organization, what have you, whatever you're going to create that may outlast your death, that itself is going to come to an end too. So when I was thinking about this question, I was reminded of Leo Tolstoy's idea that your life and your legacy will come to stench and worms and it's, it's pretty morbid, thinking the stench and worms left me to, with a sense of futility, um, futility about my life, or also this sense of weariness. Like, why go on. What's the point of doing this or doing anything in the first place?

Ellie: 28:54

And so when you're experiencing this crisis, what was the felt sense of it? Like did it make it difficult to go about your daily tasks or was it something that didn't inhibit your daily tasks but was sort of in the background?

Céline: 29:09

I would say that it was in the background of my professional life. I still went to school, I did my teaching and all of that. I remember I saw you at a conference that year and I was still doing all of those things.

Ellie: 29:23

Little did I know that this was going on while we were hanging out, you know?

Céline: 29:28

Yeah, exactly. But outside of my professional life, I did feel, and this is another Tolstoy expression, that my life came to a standstill. So I did my best with regular job related tasks, but outside of it, I did feel this sense of fatigue on me, whatever term you want to insert to capture that lack of interest in certain activities that once, you know, gave you a sense of excitement or, or engagement.

Ellie: 29:59

And that's an interesting response because I could see someone potentially concluding that there is no cure and this leading them really into a sense of despair. And so I wonder how you might respond to that and see that in contrast with your own description of the response. Because in your article of course, you talk about how philosophy ultimately helped you through the crisis because you had an instinct as a philosophy professor too, as you put it, dig into works on the meaning of life. So I'm wondering how specific to you or others trained in philosophy already this response might be and what you might say to somebody undergoing a similar experience without philosophical training or who might not have as much of a sense of hope that there is a way out at all.

Céline: 30:50

Yeah. I think that the approach I adopted is, tied to my professional background, I, I did have an instinct as a philosophy professor. I also had an instinct that was built on the fact that I was a TA in grad school for a course on the meaning of life. So I was already familiar with many of the texts that I ended up rereading over the course of that journey.

Ellie: 31:14

So TAing, that class didn't prevent you from the existential crisis.

Céline: 31:19

No, not quite. I had to get through, I don't know, my early thirties to get to that sense that, yeah, this is on repeat and I need to resolve whether it's, uh, whether I should go on, you know, with that sense of futility. Anyways, so I had this instinct, or I knew there were, there was a set of texts that I could turn to and I turned to them over the course of that year. But I don't think that the solution or the set of solutions, the texts that I found interesting are only interesting to philosophy professors. I teach a course on the philosophy of death at my university at Florida International University. And the bulk, maybe a third of the course is on the meaning of life. And I, my students identify with the type of question that bothered me so much at the beginning of the crisis. For the most part, they're not even in their thirties, but they do question, what's the point of going on? What sense of purpose I need to gain from life or can I gain from life? So even outside the philosophy classroom, I also believe that people have these questions and that texts can answer them. I think the tradition is to turn to religion for this type of question and to find answers in it. So people from different religious backgrounds will turn to texts from their tradition. And so I recommend that people who are faced with this type of crisis, they can turn to philosophy or they can turn to texts from their own tradition and then expand outwards. So I turn to religion from philosophy or someone from religion into philosophical texts or texts from traditions that they're not yet familiar with. So I think this is an exploration that other people can get into. It's just that as a philosophy professor, that was my natural home. The particular text that I first started reading.

David: 33:17

You know, this is a, a really good segue into a question that I had about your, your essay, which is that in it you talk about three possible paths out of this existential crisis that you considered as you were going through it. And one of them was the religious pathway, the other two were the atheistic pathway and what you call the spiritual pathway. And so I would like you to tell us about these paths and which one you ultimately found most helpful and why.

Céline: 33:48

Yes, so the different paths I chose for the article three representative authors, Leo Tolstoy, Albert Camus, and William James, but I think that there are other authors who would also represent each of those paths equally well. I started with Tolstoy because, as I said, I TA'ed for a course that started with Tolstoy, so this was really already embedded in my experience. I found Tolstoy very interesting because he had the sense of weariness that also bothered me. I followed him. I read a confession and went through the different steps that he envisioned to try to get himself out of the crisis. He wanted to extend his life through works of art, realized that that wasn't enough. He also turned to people around him, who he also said, yeah, they don't really get the question of the meaning of life any better than I do. And finally he saw that he had to gain a sense of whether life is worth living from people who already knew had a deep sense that life was worth living and for him, that was the Russian peasantry. What appealed to Tolstoy was the idea that if you followed a certain set of religious principles, adopted certain ethical rules, then you could aspire to something like heaven that would bridge your finite life and give it a sense of meaning. So that appealed to me. Like logically, you can say, okay, if I abide by these principles, adopt this religious outlook, then yes, there will be something worth redeeming in my finite life. What did not appeal to me in Tolstoy, and the reason I eventually moved on from him was the embrace soul of what he calls irrational knowledge. That did not appeal as someone, yeah, as philosopher, as someone who came from a largely secular background who has a very rationalistic bent of mind in the first place.

Ellie: 35:52

You're half French after all.

Céline: 35:55

Yeah. Irrational knowledge was not my, uh, cup of tea. So there was some value in Tolstory for me, both from a sense of kinship, from the way he reasoned himself out of the crisis. But ultimately I was like, I'm not going to go the Tolstoy route.

Ellie: 36:14

Tell us about this, this second path, the atheistic path?

Céline: 36:18

Yeah. The atheistic path, I use Camus because I think it's a clear cut position that's the polar opposite of Tolstoy's. Camus rejects the idea that you should take a leap of faith, he's like, stand on this dizzying crew looking down on the, about to take the leap of faith. And as there was something appealing to his idea that yeah, you're not gonna find a capital M grand meaning to life, Camus though there was still something lacking in his ideas and what I found lacking was captured in the very end of The Myth of Sisyphus, is Sisyphus pushing the boulder up and down the hill. Okay, that match maybe pushing the boulder of the semester up and down the hill, or you know, if you're in a different job, whatever the project or cycle that's relevant. But this idea that scorn or defiance these particular attitudes that he thinks will allow you to flip from sorrow about your task to joy about this life, I just did not see that conclusion or see how embracing that attitude could yield to finding life worth living. He says, one must imagine Sisyphus happy and I always going through the thought process with say no, I do not imagine Sisyphus happy. I just could never get on board with it no matter how hard I tried to adopt that kind of mindset.

Ellie: 37:53

It's also such a weird moment in the text because I feel like it's so random. He doesn't talk about happiness at all in The Myth of Sisyphus, and then suddenly it's like one must imagine Sisyphus happy.

David: 38:06

It's injunction.

Ellie: 38:07

Yeah. And, and I think too that that point you raised Céline is really interesting because this attitude, not only an attitude of defines specifically, but also Camus' idea of an attitude in general, namely that all we have to do in order to find meaning in our lives is to create it through a different kind of attitude, strikes a lot of folks, including myself and also many of my students when I teach this as somewhat ineffectual because it reduces to, there's no way that you actually need to change your life to make it more fulfilling. All you have to do is adopt a different attitude on any kind of life that you're going to lead. And I, I just find that quite wrong. I think that there are material conditions that foster our thriving and others that don't foster our thriving. And it's in our best interest as far as we are able to put ourselves in the way of those conditions that foster our thriving.

Céline: 38:59

Absolutely. I think we're on the same page about Camus.

David: 39:03

So it seems like these two paths out of an existential crisis that we've just heard about there is the religious path that you found in Tolstoy that ultimately you found uncompelling because of its commitment to unreason. Then we have this second more atheistic approach that maybe what was lacking in it was a sense of meaning that could root our projects, as you just said, in the grand scheme of things. So something that transcends the here and now. Something that transcends human nature or nature itself. And so it seems like maybe the third pathway, which we have not yet talked about, what you call the spiritual pathway, lies somewhere in between those two. Is that right? I, I just wanna hear more about than this third spiritual pathway and how it compares to the religious and the atheistic.

Céline: 39:58

Yes. What I found ultimately gave me, you know, helped me overcome the crisis was William James' Is Life Worth Living, which is a lecture that he gave in 1895 to the Harvard YMCA. I'll say as a little tidbit, include it or not. I Googled is life worth living? And that's how I first discovered the James text, so.

Ellie: 40:21

That's awesome.

Céline: 40:21

Google can help.

David: 40:23

I thought you were gonna say, I Googled YMCA then you came.

Ellie: 40:27

Oh my You know, I wrote my undergrad thesis on William James. I thought I was gonna be a James Scholar. That was my intention when I went into philosophy, and then I became a Derrida scholar and then had a crisis after that. And anyway, that's a sidebar, but yes. Great, great essay. Glad found it on the interwebs.

Céline: 40:46

James's essay really captivated me because I identified with what he called this dilemma, where you're rooted in skepticism. You don't see the point of going on. You're caught in the type of question that I was caught in at the beginning of my crisis. But what I found kind of version 2.0 compared to Tolstoy was the idea that you did not have to embrace this type of irrational knowledge. He goes so far as to say that you have to rebel against traditional conceptions of religion before taking a new step in some sort of other direction. He actually, I'll just add as a kind of asterisks that he calls his vision, religious, or his outlook religious, but I called it spiritual in the essay just to distinguish it from traditional religious pathways.

Ellie: 41:39

Mm-hmm.

Céline: 41:39

But for James, the religious outlook or the spiritual outlook in my terms, was built onto two ideas. The first is that we should honor the legacies of those who came before us. So James points out that whether it's human lives or non-human animal lives, our own existence is built on the sufferings and actions of people who came before us and that we should have the honor to carry on their legacy. Not everyone has a sense of honor, but that also appealed to me, this rejecting the traditional religious outlook, having the sense of honor to carry on other people's actions. But ultimately, what sealed the deal was an image that I found more compelling than Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the hill. And this is the image that James gives at the end of his text, which is that you're mountain climbing and you see this chasm and there's no way you're either going, just get stuck there and die, or you have to jump. And he says, the more you think about how can I land safely? Am I going get this right, the more likely you're going to stumble and fall into a chasm and die, or you can just make the leap with confidence and you're more likely to find your footing. And that appealed to me. I was like, I should recommit to life and just do it. So he says at the end, believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. But it's not just merely, okay, I'm gonna recommit to life without thinking about the issues, you know, the background issues about our place in the cosmos or our finitude, James thinks that you, I use this metaphor kind of Red Bull, you know, gives you wings.

David: 43:25

Mm.

Céline: 43:25

I think James's religious or spiritual outlook can also give you wings. This hope that maybe beyond your finite life, there is a grand realm that will make sense of your sufferings, the suffering of others. It's the sense of hope. I think that's a relevant attitude. The sense of hope allows you to find your footing. And once I read that as like, yes, this is the kind of perspective that will help me make sense of my own life and reclaim my will to live.

Ellie: 43:57

I think there's so much in what you just said, Céline, that's really profound. For one, the idea that hope can actually help us act, I think, goes against a lot of the philosophical accounts of hope that associate it with just mere wishing, for instance. But I also was reminded when you were talking about that just do it mentality of something that my sister, who's a mental health professional has told me about depression, which is that depression is often benefited from what's called behavioral activation. Which is just doing things, even if you totally don't feel like doing them, because if you get back into your habits or if you get out of the house and you start doing things, then that can help you get over the depression much more than collecting your thoughts and trying to find a reason to go out and do those things first. That inhibits a lot of people from overcoming depression, is this idea that they need to regain their will to live before going back out and resuming daily activities. But I also wonder about those people who would find it difficult, if not impossible to imagine doing that. And I'm thinking here about the classic philosophical problem of akrasia or weakness of will. How might we address, in your view, the folks who find it impossible to move from the step of having this crisis to taking any activity at all. So, so not even getting to the point where they're reading the Tolstoy or they're equivalent that going out and taking a run.

Céline: 45:33

Yeah, I'm trying to think through what James would say in that regard since I found his idea so compelling. Guess either you're going to die, just let yourself, let, yeah.

Ellie: 45:46

It's not what I expected.

Céline: 45:48

Okay. He, he puts in the form of a dilemma, which honestly is the way I experience that whole period. Either you go with nihilism, , you just let it seep through your existence and you stay stuck in your ways or your crisis, or you go out on a limb to use another metaphor and try something else. So for me, it was trying something else. So it's between either just sinking in deeper into nihilism or giving anything a shot. I gave Tolstoy, I gave Camus, Woolf, a bunch of other people a shot, and James finally captured my imagination, gave me a sense that life was worth living. So it's kinda either or in the end, it's, uh, option just let it, let it take hold of your life or give something, whether it's James for you or someone else, a chance.

David: 46:47

Yeah, and I think somebody like Kierkegaard who uses also a lot of metaphors of jumping and leaping, I think he would say, and there is always a fundamentally arational element to that choice, right? When you get confronted with an either or scenario, there is no grounds for either, either or, or you just choose in the moment. And that decision as theory that will later say is undecidable, right? It, it's just a choice that you make without ground. And I wanna go back a little bit to this scene that you painted of the climber that James talks about, who gets to this impasse and they have to either get stuck in the mountains or they will have to make the leap. And the way you articulated it is that for James, what matters is that you don't focus on the landing too much. So it's really a problem of over rationalizing the safety or the effect of the jump. Rather you just gather yourself into an act of courage and leap hoping simply to land. And so the hope, this is where my question is going. It seems like what for James, you're ultimately hoping for is not a grandiose meaning in the grand scheme of things that life has, meaning that there is an order rather you just hope to continue on the journey that you were already on, but that maybe got interrupted by this particular obstacle. So it seems to be a medium level kind of hope, or you're not hoping for capital M, meaning you're just hoping for continuing to live. Is that, does that seem right to you, or am I missing a spiritual dimension in that characterization?

Céline: 48:31

For James, the hope is not merely to recommit to life. I think that for him, you have to also cultivate a sense that there may be a realm that redeems your actions. It's a, maybe that's something that I do want to emphasize. He's not dogmatic in saying that there is this realm, or only if you believe in this realm will you find meaning in life. He says that we act on maybes every day. Right now. The roof could collapse on me. Any number of things could happen by persist in speaking with you. And likewise, you, the audience are all acting on maybes every day. The fact that you're going to land have your footing when you take this leap is also a, maybe. The fact that there are maybes in lives should not put an impediment to taking action.

Ellie: 49:24

And I wanna ask about whether you think there are alternate paths to the spiritual, religious, or atheistic path. And this will be the last question we have time for. I was thinking when I was reading your article that in focusing on these three axes, some folks might not necessarily identify with one of the three, and they might be thinking about sources of meaning in life beyond this plane of the spiritual, religious, atheistic. For instance, even though science appears largely as a source of nihilism in Tolstoy's work, for some it's an opportunity to participate in something larger than ourselves. Science would be a vocation that makes our life meaningful. You might also think about art as an existential anchor as it was for Nietzche, whom you mention, or I'm thinking too about a study that came out of Harvard where you did your PhD, the longest ever longitudinal study on happiness that showed that the biggest source of happiness in people's lives is their relationships. Do you see those kinds of sources of meaning as different from what you're talking about in the article, or would they somehow fit in in some way?

Céline: 50:35

I think that those sources of meaning, either artistic creation or scientific research are relevant. I don't think that they're fall entirely outside of the scope of what I examined in my article. And what makes me say this is a book that I also highly recommend besides the ones that I discuss or that we have discussed so far, which is Samuel Scheffer's, Death and the Afterlife.

Ellie: 50:59

Mm-hmm.

Céline: 51:00

And what Scheffler does is to bring the dilemma that I was faced with at a collective level. So he says, imagine this doomsday scenario 30 days after the end of your life, natural lifespan. So we're now imagining your own death to be premature. There would be a collective, like asteroid or something would bring human's existence to an end. And he asked his readers, would you still find the things that you're doing now meaningful? And he mentioned scientific activities or artistic creations, and his instinct, and he thinks other people will share that instinct, is that, no, those traditions, those research paths only have a meaning. If there's some hope that humanity will continue on, at least for some good amount of time. And I, I also was sympathetic with Scheffler's outlook. So I think that we need to subsume those two, paths either the scientific or the artistic creation and try to find a response to them along the lines that I adopted. I think they're also vulnerable to the sense that, yeah, they're gonna come to an end too. Whether it's a little longer after you die or much longer, you still need to resolve this sense that these things are finite. they're not gonna last forever and ever. So either you have to embrace something super long internal like Tolstoy does or some other path.

David: 52:25

Yeah, and this would seem to be. Connected to James's notion of honoring a legacy of those who have come before you, which is a backwards looking perspective. But I think built into that backwards looking perspective is also implicitly a forward looking perspective where you honor a past legacy in your present life, always with the assumption that you might be contributing to that legacy, which down the road others might honor. So trying to think of yourself in the present and your actions as the legacy of somebody who is not yet here.

Céline: 53:05

Absolutely. I think that's a great way of capturing what James wants to argue for in his text.

Ellie: 53:11

Well with that, Céline, thank you so much for joining us. We can't wait to see how this project develops. Listeners keep an eye out for Céline's book on this topic, which should be coming out at some points, hopefully soon-ish.

Céline: 53:25

Thank you Ellie. Thank you, David.

David: 53:35

If you're enjoying, Overthink, please consider supporting the podcast by joining our Patreon. We are an independent, self-supporting podcast, and as a subscriber, you can help us cover our key production costs, gain access to our exclusive digital library of bonus content, and more.

Ellie: 53:54

It was great talking to Céline and I'm really looking forward to reading her book when it comes out. So listeners keep an eye out for that.

David: 54:02

I am dying to read her book because she's an amazing writer and so accessible for philosophical and non philosophical readers alike.

Ellie: 54:10

That's very true. And I wanna ask you actually in the few minutes that remain, David, I'm gonna cut to the chase on wanna ask you one of the questions that Céline raised in our discussion. If you knew you were going to die tomorrow, would you do anything differently?

David: 54:25

Well, I mean, I, I would hope so. Can you imagine saying no to that no, I'll just continue with my working day and go to the post office?

Ellie: 54:33

You go teach your graduate seminar after this recording,

David: 54:37

I know, I, I just wanna continue with my mechanical life, knowing that I'm dying tomorrow. What would I do if I knew I was going to die tomorrow? I think I would be somewhat Socratic about it and try to settle my accounts. And what I mean by that, I don't mean like my financial debts of which there are many uh.

Ellie: 54:56

Like leave leaving that to the folks who

David: 54:59

Actually, I'm borrowing more money knowing that I can't pay it off. No, I think I would settle my, my emotional and sentimental accounts. I would call my loved ones. I would tell them that they made my life meaningful and that they made me better by their presence.

Ellie: 55:16

Um, would I be one of those loved ones.

David: 55:18

Yeah, I think I, I think I would call you. Okay. You hesitated and then said, I think, not convinced Well, you know, like when you only have like one afternoon to settle your, your life accounts.

Ellie: 55:30

Yeah. Yeah. I'm, I'm not, I'm not first string. I'm second string.

David: 55:32

No, no, you're like fifth string for sure. Well, I mean, what would you do if my answer is so questionable?

Ellie: 55:41

I mean, I sure as hell wouldn't keep working on the article about Simone de Beauvoir that I'm trying to make headway on this afternoon. No shade. Uh, just maybe not top priority final day on Earth. I, yeah, I would, oh my God, I, this is like too sad to even think about. Why did I ask you this question? Cuz now I have to actually think

David: 55:59

I felt my emotions going up, just answering the question.

Ellie: 56:02

I am lucky enough to live within a 20 mile radius of my immediate family, so I would spend time with them. I would maybe go to the beach. I, part of me wants to say, I would write down all the ideas that I've had and not had time to write yet. But I feel like that would just be crappy because the whole point of philosophical thinking and writing for me is that it takes time and patience, and I'm not sitting on a bunch of fully developed ideas that I think would be worth reading after my death.

David: 56:29

At Ellie's oeuvre is like listicles. Just bullet points.

Ellie: 56:36

Anyway, I, I had like border, this is such, this is such a depressing question. I thought it would be fun, which is just like such an extraordinarily naive approach to have. It seems so flip.

David: 56:48

It does feel somewhat flip even to think that you would know what to do in that moment, maybe I would just melt into a puddle of tears and then my time would be over.

Ellie: 56:58

I'm afraid that my sister, if she's listening to this episode, she's a therapist for people undergoing treatment for cancer, would be listening to me right now and being like, Ellie, come on.

David: 57:06

Come on. What?

Ellie: 57:08

Like, be, don't, don't be flip about this.

David: 57:10

Oh, well, no, no, no. Not flip. I mean, in the sense that our answers to envision a scenario and to think that you have an answer, that's what seems flip.

Ellie: 57:18

Exactly. Exactly.

David: 57:19

And it has to do with the fact that one day doesn't leave you a lot of time. So maybe a better question for tapping into the existential dimension is what would you do and would you do anything differently if you had 5, 6, 7 months to live? Because that gives you enough time to really envision a meaningful reorientation of your life for a short period of time at the end, perhaps.

Ellie: 57:43

And there are so many memoirs written by people who have undergone these kinds of experiences, often actually outlived what they believed their prognosis to be, but not always. And writing about the meaning of finitude and mortality in ways that so significant and from which we can learn so much. Because I think we do tend to live our lives as though we're not finite and as though we're gonna live together. I've been thinking about that a lot recently with some of the stuff that I've been reading. I've been reading this book called 4,000 Weeks. That's about that.

David: 58:13

It's because you're in your thirties, as Camus said. You're becoming aware of your finitude.

Ellie: 58:22

Yeah, perhaps that is true, that external catalyst. I wanna hear more about what you think about this. David, meet you in the Patreon bonus video.

David: 58:30

See you in a minute. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 58:42

You can subscribe to our Patreon for exclusive access to bonus videos, Live Q and As, and more.

David: 58:48

To reach out to us and find episode info go to overthinkpodcast.com and connect with us on Twitter and Instagram @overthink_pod

Ellie: 58:58

We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Clare A'Hearn and Samuel PK Smith for the original music.

David: 59:05

And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.