Existentialism

Okay, existentialism, that's our topic for today. The existentialists are a group after the Second World War, primarily, who reflect on the meaning of existence. The main figures the people will be talking about most today are Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Here are some of their main works; those are just things I happen to have lying around in my office. Existentialism is centered around the question of existence, as the name suggests. The central problem really is: what does life mean? What is it all about? Okay, it's sort of a vague question in a way. What's

the point of existing? There are certain themes that are characteristic of the existentialists. One is alienation—not really the Marxist alienation of “my work is something that I feel alienated from, it's not expressing me, I'm forced to do it.” It's not that sort of thing; it's more an alienation from the world as a whole, a sense that you're alone in the world, a sense that the world is somehow foreign to you, that you're a stranger in the world. There's also a theme of absurdity. You look carefully at things; ordinarily, you take everything for granted. But then

you look carefully at things, and you realize, “Wait, this doesn't make any sense.” So you have these moments, at least, where you have that sense—almost as in Proust—of peering through the mask and seeing the underlying reality, except that in this case, it's not some horrifying thing that you're eager to cover up again; it's just blank. What you perceive is a nothingness, a lack of meaning, a lack of integrity, you might say, in yourself and in the world around you. Camus puts this in especially dramatic form. He says the central philosophical problem is that of suicide,

which really means just: what's the point of it all? Okay, does life have a meaning? Is there any actual point to living? Now, even if you told me the answer is no, there's no real point to living, I wouldn't say, “Ah, well then I'm going to kill myself.” I'll just say, “Okay, well then I'll just eat, drink, and be merry.” But his idea is really: look, what do you say to the person who is suicidal? You want to say, “Life has a purpose. Life has a meaning.” But what's the real answer to that question? Does

life really have a purpose? Does it have a meaning? In the end, he affirms that yes, you shouldn't commit suicide; yes, it does have a sort of meaning. But, as we'll see, it doesn't have any intrinsic meaning. From his point of view, it has whatever meaning you give it. And so that's a scary prospect, but also an exciting one. You can give it any meaning you want—that's his position. Now, here's the traditional view: what do human beings want? What do we strive for? Well, happiness—okay, living well, flourishing, thriving—that's what we want. And our excellence consists

in, well, fulfilling our function well. But what is our function? What are we for? This is the way Aristotle frames the question, and indeed his answer is, well, it's a question of how we differ from animals. We've seen his answer to that is through rational activity. I act according to rational plans; I'm capable of actually planning, having extended sort of “trees,” you might say, of decisions, plans that I institute, that I decide upon, that take some time to implement. Animals seem to be able to plan a little bit—a monkey can pile one box on top

of another to get to the banana—but not very extensively; monkey plans, cat plans, and so on do not consume years. Think about your current plan: getting a college education—that's something that's not a quick and easy thing, right? It's not just, “Oh, do this, do that, and then it's done.” It's something that takes years of effort, years of coordinated effort, and that's something only human beings seem to be capable of. Well, the existentialists have, in a way, a different response to this, and it defines the movement. Sartre, pictured there with Simone de Beauvoir, puts it this

way: “Existence precedes essence.” He says existentialism is the view that existence precedes essence, and what he means is that there is nothing that is intrinsically essential to being a human being. We have no essence; we have no intrinsic function. Yes, maybe we have some sort of biological characteristics, but really, that's not what's essential to us. Is there a function? Is there a purpose to us, as Aristotle thought there was? No; we're really free to define ourselves as we choose. He argues that humans are radically free—not only to do this or that thing, but really to

define our lives and give our lives whatever meaning we want. He puts this in terms of a distinction between “being in itself” and “being for itself.” Now, was Nietzsche an existentialist? That's a good question. Was Nietzsche an existentialist? If we go back and think about this, does he think there's anything essential to us? And power? Yeah, maybe in the end, the will to power. At an earlier stage, he seems to reduce us in a way to our sort of biochemistry. But what's really essential to us? Nietzsche is somebody that I consider like Kierkegaard or a

number of other thinkers before the war. I think of them as proto-existentialists. They're almost existentialists; they make several of the most important moves to get there, but in my view, they never really take that final step and affirm, “Look, we have no essence at all; it's up to us to make this up.” He looks inside himself and says, “Well, I should be the person I am.” But what is... Nich's view of the person I truly am inside the existentialist says that's licensed for me to be whatever I want. Um, but there's a way of reading

N that would say, "Well, I look inside and I be the 'I' I am to be the person I am," but maybe there is something to being who I am. Right? Maybe there is some essence within me, and I think it's just unclear in N which way he intends it. So that's why I see him as going right up to the door of existentialism, opening it, but not quite walking through. All you would have to do to walk through is to say you should be the person you are, and that can be whatever you want.

Yeah, uh, who's the first person to say that? Because there's no God, we're free—because that seems like a theme. Yeah, right, I think the first person to really articulate that was D.F. Ki in The Brothers Karamazov. It's Ivan who tells that story of the grand inquisitor who, earlier in the novel, says, "Look, if God is dead, then everything is permitted." He says, "You know, if God is not there to monitor us and give us a standard of behavior outside of ourselves, then there is no standard of behavior outside of ourselves." Most philosophers, by the way,

have thought there still would be, like Aristotle, for example; he doesn't really rely on God to give you an ethics. He thinks we do have a purpose, we do have an essence, and that that characterizes human excellence apart from anything religious. But Dosi lays it out very starkly, and so I think he's the one who really says, "Look, if God is dead, then everything is permitted." N comes along and says, "Well, God is dead," and doesn't draw the conclusion then, "So everything is permitted." Um, well, certainly the old ways of understanding what's permitted and what's

not go away. Uh, he says, "Look, what do I think is true? The value of everything has to be determined." Um, but is there a way that's supposed to go, or are we free to do it however we want? That's again, it's the same spot really where I think N doesn't quite say whether there's a preferred way or not. In the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil, he actually says maybe there needs to be a physiology of value. He almost implies that there is something about our physiological characteristics, our biological beings, that may determine what

human thriving is, and that if that's right, then it wouldn't be just up to us to let it be whatever it is. There really is something that would be essential to us as biological beings. But in later works, he moves more away from that toward the will to power, as you say, and toward this idea that, well, maybe we are free to make it up however we want. So as his thought goes on, I think he gets closer and closer to existentialism. In any case, that's really the idea: there isn't anything that you have to

be; there isn't anything you have to do. It's up to you; you can give your life any kind of meaning you want. So a central concept for S is really projects. We engage in certain projects, like getting a college education, and given that you're engaged in that project, there are all sorts of things you ought to do, but it's all contingent on your decision to do that. It's not really required by anything outside of you; it's not even required by anything inside of you. It's up to you to do whatever you want. Well, the idea

is, look, yeah, some things about us can't be changed. Some things are just given; our past is given. The physical objects of the world just give—it's not like the world can be anything I want. I can't just say I wish this blackboard, since I don't use it, were really a magic fairy who could flutter around the room, okay, and tap students on the shoulder and say, "Hey, pay attention; this is cool," okay? Um, but I can't make that happen just by wishing it, right? However, yeah, things are like that, but there are some things that

are not fixed. We ourselves are not fixed; we're radically free to shape our lives as we want. We're radically free to do what we want. So we are self-interpreting animals, as Charles Taylor is saying. If anything is essential to us, it's that—it's being self-interpreting; it's having the ability to define our own essence. So you might say our only essence is really being able to characterize our essence however we want. If there's anything that's special about people, it's that. Perhaps the first existentialist who really does walk through the door self-consciously is Martin Heidegger. Now, Heidegger is

not a figure I admire particularly for a couple of reasons. One is that he was an ardent Nazi, and I think that's not very admirable. Uh, but part of it is that he wrote in a very, I don't know, purposely obscure style. There is a certain kind of German philosopher who decides that instead of writing to be clear, he wants to write to be mysterious, and so Heidegger is sort of like that. Some people find that exciting; I find it annoying. Um, but in any case, he says all sorts of things like "nothingness" and makes

strange claims. I've tried to read his great work, Being and Time; I'd rather read things about it that tell me what he thinks because I think his thought is very interesting insofar as you can understand it, but reading him... Is torture, in any case? Here's the basic idea that he advances. He says, "Look, I can give my life meaning. Why or how? Well, by selecting certain projects, I can decide I want to do this with my life; I want to do that. I can make those choices, and that gives me a freedom. But that freedom

is bounded, not by my essence really, but just by the fact that I am thrown into the world." This is one of his main ideas: I am thrown into the world, and so the way I come into the world and where I come in, and so on—the place and time of my birth—all of that is something I'm in no control of, right? And so I happen to be right now alive in the 21st century. I didn't choose that; I was tossed into the world, and I was born an American. That's not something I chose. It's

not like God walked up to me and said, "Would you like to go to Nepal, or would you like to be born in Italy? Lots of pizza!" Or would you—I didn't have that choice, right? I just get tossed into the world at some point in a way that is not under my control. However, once I'm there, I can actually then define the purpose of my existence. I can define what I do within those constraints. So, the constraints come from outside of me, but not really a normative thought sort of thing of, "God, this must be

done. Thou shalt. Thou shalt not." No, it's just through the contingency of my birth. I cannot, for example, we've talked about this, I can't decide to be a Roman senator, for example. I can't decide to invent the motorcar; it's been done. So now here's what I think is strange: Heidegger and the rest of the existentialists think that it's inevitable, because of that lack of control, because I've been thrown into the world, I inevitably feel alienated from it. I inevitably feel like a stranger in the world. "Who am I? What am I doing here?" Okay, everybody

confronts those questions, and he thinks that I inevitably feel like a stranger, like, "Huh, I didn't choose to be here. What's going on? Why am I here?" And now, to say everybody raises those questions at some point in their life: "What is life all about?" Yeah, I'm a philosophy professor; I think everybody does confront those questions at some point. But why should I feel alien? Why should I feel as if there's no answer? Well, why is there a reason? I mean, is there a reason why recognizing the contingency of the place and time of my

birth, the circumstances of my birth, I should feel alienated from the world, from my surroundings? Yeah, I don't know—I don't know how to answer that question. I decided to answer it with some Pittsburgh pictures. This is the place of my birth, okay? And that's actually where I got my PhD, but it's also like a mile from the hospital where I was born. Do I feel alienated from it? This isn't my house, but there's no reason why you have to feel alienated from the place of your birth, right? You might celebrate it! Here I am with

my daughter at Heinz Field. There's my family, the other side of my family, okay? I don't feel alienated. I don't think, "Gosh, I was born into that family," so, "Oh, I feel like a stranger; I don't get it." Or the same thing with that family. I mean, I don't look at those people and think, "Oh, what a stranger I am! What a—we're a bunch of weirdos!" Well, sometimes I do, got to admit; sometimes I do. But my wife's family is so much worse; my family seems normal by comparison, yeah. Do you think that because of

the fact that you're put into those situations with the constraints, he feels like he's othered from the other people that are in situations, and since there are so many other situations, constraints that everybody else is in, therefore he's alienated from all the other beings? Well, that would be an interesting point, right? Suppose I say, "Yeah, look, the circumstances of my birth—the place, the time, who my family members are, and all of that—they are kind of unique to me, and so maybe that divides us." Right? Maybe I feel like, "Well, yeah, okay, there's something I can

identify with; maybe I don't feel alienated from that." But the problem is everybody else has their own thing, right? We all maybe feel alienated or not from different things, and so that would raise a problem. And it is a problem that concerns Heidegger: Are we so bound by these various accidents of our birth that we're actually necessarily separated from other people? His concept for this, by the way, he thinks of our being as necessarily situated in particular places; he calls that "Dasein," sort of being there, being in a place, being at a time. But he

raises this question of what he refers to as "Mitsein"—being with. Can I really communicate? Can I really feel a kindred spirit with other people? And he sees that as a problem. I don't think he ever really gives a firm argument that it cannot be done; in fact, at a certain point, I think he thinks it's the key to solving this problem. But it is at least a problem: Are those contingencies of my circumstances things that can divide me from other people, or do they unite me with other people? And for him, that's a kind of

problem that has to be thought through carefully. Now, as we'll see, most of the later existentialists ignore that possibility. What about us solving this problem together? And feeling like not strangers but like we're in this together, like we're family: isn't that possible? Well, in the end, I think Haider thinks it is possible. Maybe we can confront this together, and that makes a difference. As we'll see, I think that's Bellow's key idea: I can recognize my common humanity with others, and maybe we can solve the problems together. But in Sartre, in Camus, I'm strangely alone in

all of this, so I think they think that actually forces me to confront existence all by myself, and I can't get help from anybody else. Well, why would I feel this way? They all think that, at certain times, we're just forced to confront the meaninglessness of existence. Cartoons: why do we exist? Well, I can't speak for you, but I'm here for the margaritas. Um, here's another one: Claire suddenly realized that existence precedes essence, and she was free to kill all the old gods—or the cat, okay? Torment. Um, these are really marvelous. If you haven't seen

the Enre videos, you've got to watch them. Uh, I don't want to take up five minutes of watching a cat go around muttering in a French accent and so on, but they're really, really wonderful. There's a whole series of them; they'll give you a good feeling of what existentialism, at least in its French version, is all about. Question back there? No? Oh, okay, all right. Well, so we do sometimes confront the absurd. We seek meaning in the world, and we don't find it. Sometimes the gap between our expectations of what we find is so large

that we're really stunned, and we find existence somehow absurd. It happens when we turn into ourselves too; we find that we really aren't what we are. Who are you really? Well, you might think, “Well, I'm so-and-so. I do this, I do that.” But then if you stop and think, “Wait, do those things really define me?” you realize, no. I mean, I'm not just defined by those masks, those roles that I play, and so I'm not really what I would ordinarily seem to be. But what am I truly? Well, something underneath those. Again, it's a little

bit like this Pendelo-type of image, but what is that? What is the reality of myself underneath those masks, those images, those roles? I find I don't know, and so that's what shocks me. Yes, that's Dorothy reading Ja Pulsar. Okay, so yes, I've now read—I now have every Discworld book. Building a Kindle collection seems pointless. Yeah, I know the DRM probably means I'll lose them someday. No, no, no, pointless in general. Sure, you satisfy deep mag-like urges by building neat collections; you still die alone. Sorry. Sometimes I mistake your existential crises for technical insights. Sometimes I

mistake this for a universe that cares. So all of these give you the sense of what existentialism is about. Well, we're going to talk mostly today about existentialism as it appears in the writings of Albert Camus. He is, I think, the most accessible writer of the existentialists and also the one with a real dramatic flair. He writes literature as well as works of philosophy. He was born in Algeria but wrote in French. Um, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957; he was the second youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize. The youngest

was Kipling. He was also the first writer who was born in Africa to win the prize. And you see, he did have this flair for the dramatic. What? This existentialism: you sit, you know, or stand in the rain in Paris in an overcoat, smoking a cigarette, looking cool. Okay, um, yeah, there he is looking deep. He started a literary magazine devoted to existential themes with a number of friends, and here's a photograph of Camus there on the left with his colleagues, who are the editorial staff of that magazine. Here he is again, smoking on a

little balcony in Paris. I tried to convince them that to be authentic doing existentialism, we all had to fly to Paris and film my lecture there. That didn't work. This is a rich university, but not that rich. In any case, he joined the Communist Party in 1935 when he was 22; he was expelled two years later for being a free thinker. He then became an anarchist. He was also a pacifist until the Nazis invaded France and began shooting people, and then he joined the French Resistance. Now, it's easy to make fun of some of his,

you know, flip-flopping political allegiances and so on. On the other hand, there is something I really admire about Camus, which is that he looks at the world around him and adapts his ideas to the world. There are a lot of thinkers that, in my view, don't do that. They have an idea, they have an insight, and they run with it. And if the world starts throwing at them contrary data or things that don't make sense given their theory, they say, "Forget the world; I'm going with my theory." He's not like that. He adapts to what

he sees happening around him, and I think that's an admirable philosophical instinct. In any case, he thinks we run into absurd walls, as he puts it. We confront the absurd in a number of situations. Sometimes we're just weary of the routine: you wake up, you start going through the motions, and you start thinking, “Why am I doing this?” Okay, I don't know what you do in the morning when you wake up. I think I've mentioned I used to wake up and drink several big glasses of ice water. That was healthy. Then I started hanging out

with Mormons and started a business with a... A bunch of Mormon partners and then I started drinking coffee just because they always wanted to meet at Starbucks, even though none of them drank coffee. So they corrupted me. Um, so now I make coffee. But in any case, you know, you go through this routine; you don't really think about it. But sometimes you stop and you think about it. You think, "I don't want to do this today." Okay, actually, you're students; I'm sure you confront this, right? In fact, probably every 15% of the people aren't here

today. It's Friday; I've noticed that on Fridays, a lot of people in this class seem to wake up and say, "Yeah, I don't want to do this today." Okay, so I'm sure you can understand that sense of weariness with the routine. Sometimes you just see something out of context; you run into somebody you know, but in a context where you're not expecting them. It's like, "Whoa, what are you doing here?" And there's a little bit of that jarring of expectations that is a confrontation with the Absurd. Or maybe you see somebody, you're watching through the

window in class, and you see somebody gesturing and talking about existentialism dramatically and so on. You can't hear what they're saying, and it just looks ridiculous, right? "Oh, look at me, I'm a professor!" Or sometimes we just recognize our own inability to act or understand we're in a situation we can't make any sense of. We say, "Look, this is happening, but I don't know why; I don't get it." And that sense that the world is really foreign to us, operating by principles we don't understand, can be a wall where we confront the Absurd. Well, what

is his goal? It's really, ultimately, to live without appeal. I can't resist my stupid joke: Mango says to the banana, "What do you want out of life?" Banana says, "To live without appeal." It's not that funny a joke, but it does make you remember this. On the exam, you will thank me. You'll thank me later for having told that stupid joke. In any case, what does he mean to live without appeal? To anything external to myself; to just live on my own terms, do what I want, make my decisions, engage in the projects I want

to engage in. I don't appeal to anything else for justification. I don't say, "Well, I think this is what God would approve of." I don't say even, "This is for the good of mankind." I just say, "I chose to do it, and that's it." Okay, so I live without appeal to anything outside me. I just appeal to myself, and I say, "That was my choice." So we create our own meaning. There is no outside authority or standard, but he couples this with the idea that we are responsible. So does Sartre. This is not a get-out-of-jail-free

card. This is not a, "Hey, I chose to do it, and nobody can judge me." It's rather, "I chose to do it; I take full responsibility." Sartre thinks it's bad faith to try to point a finger outside of yourself and say, "Oh, I'm doing it because they made me do it," or "God made me do it," or "My parents made me do it," or "The circumstances made me do it." No, you made that decision; you have to take responsibility. And so they did join the resistance. They hated the French who actually collaborated with the Nazis,

and that was an important thing. They thought, "Look, you made that choice; you were free to make it, but we're also free to condemn you for it." So there's no outside authority or standard, but there is a sense of normativity that arises from our own decisions. He draws a number of consequences from this. He says the three consequences I draw from the Absurd are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. My revolt: I revolt against the meaningless meaninglessness of existence. I peel back the mask; I realize there's nothing there, and I revolt against the nothing.

That's why I don't commit suicide. That's why I don't decide life has no meaning. I realize I protest the fact that life has no meaning. It's up to me to give it a meaning; I'm going to give it one. And so I revolt against this nothingness that I see behind the surfaces, and I decide I'm going to fill it in with something. The second thing: my freedom. I'm free to fill it in however I want. True, my circumstances place certain boundaries on me. I'm born at a certain place in time; I'm thrown into the world.

I can't really get out of that. But on the other hand, within any set of circumstances—even if I'm, as the stranger is, on death row, confined to a cell—nevertheless I have a certain kind of freedom: a freedom to assign my existence any kind of meaning I want. And so recognizing that radical freedom enables me to realize not only am I in protest against the meaninglessness, I'm going to assign meaning, and it's up to me to assign it. It can be anything I want. Then finally, my passion. Because the meaning of life is something that I

am giving it, then of course I'm passionate about it. It's my meaning that I'm giving it; those are my decisions. And so I don't have to feel like I'm going through the motions because somebody else expects me to do it. Here I am, thrown into this world, and this person's telling me to do that and that person's telling me to do that and blah, blah, blah. I have to do it? No, I realize, look, it's a blank slate; I can make it whatever I want. I want it's my responsibility, but it's also my freedom, and

it's something I can be excited about because it's my project. Yes, so it seems hopeless, but at the same time, it's kind of like telling you to stop wallowing in your self-pity. It was what you did and what you decided on your own. That's true, it's... yeah, there's no need for self-pity about this; you're making the decision. Even if you've done what the stranger does and commit a murder rather pointlessly, um, yeah, okay, you're sentenced to die, but still, even if you don't physically have the freedom to leave that cell or post that death, nevertheless,

there's a sense in which you're free to think about it however you want. One of the images he gives in another book, *The Myth of Sisyphus,* is of Sisyphus, who rolls this heavy rock all the way up to the top of the hill only to have it roll back down again. He's sentenced eternally to just do that. Now, from one point of view, he's not free at all; he has to do it. He can do nothing except push this rock up the hill, and then there's no sense of achievement; it just rolls back down. So,

is that a horrible fate? Camus says I imagine Sisyphus might. Why? Because he realizes that even though he can't control what he does, he can control how he thinks about it. He can control the meaning that he gives it, and so, in fact, he is in that sense radically free. He imagines him pushing that rock with passion and smiling. "CU, that's his thing," he can actively choose that. He doesn't have to be, "Oh, I have to do it again." It can be rather, "This is my life; this is how I give it meaning." And so

even in those circumstances, he thinks this is possible. Now, yeah, what kind of life does this lead? Well, Camus was married twice: first to Simone, who was pictured there, and then to Francine there. They had two children. But suppose I really do live by this standard, right? I decide I will live without appeal, and here are my principles: my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. What kind of person am I going to be? This is going to have real practical consequences, isn't it? But what kinds of practical consequences? Now, it's not as if I'm free

of moral responsibility. After all, he thinks, yeah, certain people collaborated with the Nazis, and that was a terrible thing. They had the freedom to choose it, but they chose poorly. And so he thinks it's possible to still judge people's choices. In fact, this radical freedom does entail a radical responsibility for what you do and how you give your life meaning. But what will it mean for the way you actually live? I'm going to live in a way that's filled with passion that emphasizes my own freedom. Nobody else is going to put any chains on me.

Yeah, honestly, on the positive side, he could be seen as extremely charismatic and also extremely successful, depending on how things turn out. Okay, good. Yeah, it does lend a certain kind of charisma, right? It's not very charismatic to be like this. I mean, imagine you meet somebody in a bar, right? And that person's just sitting there, and you say, "Hey, I'm so-and-so, how are you?" I say, "Uh, life sucks." "Oh, what do you do?" "I do this, I don't like it." So like, what does that job mean? I mean, what, like, what do you actually

do in your days? "I have a bunch of crap others tell me." Are you going to say, "Whoa, this is the kind of person I want to hang out with?" Probably not. But suppose you sit down and say, "I just started my own business. I quit my old job. I decided I wasn't going to do what other people tell me anymore. I'm going to do my own thing, and here's what I'm doing, and I'm excited about it," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's the sort of thing you might think, "All right, I want to hang

out with this person. This person's interesting," right? So there's a certain charisma that just follows from that automatically, you might say. And indeed, he was a very charismatic figure. On the other hand, suppose you're relying on somebody over the long term—like you're hiring somebody, and you hope they'll stay to the end of that project. Are you going to want to hire an existentialist? Maybe, maybe not, right? It's like, "You're not going to tell me what to do. Hey, I don't feel like working on that project today; I'm going to go blah, blah, blah." So that's

sort of a danger, right? Right, and indeed I got to read you some letters from 1959. This is the year before Camus died; he died on December 29, 1960. He wrote to his mistress. He was still married to Francine, but he wrote to his mistress announcing that he would shortly be returning to Paris from Algiers, where he had spent the summer with his wife and children. "This frightful separation will at least have made us feel more than ever the constant need we have for each other." The next day, he writes, "Just to let you know

I'm arriving Tuesday back. I am so happy at the idea of seeing you again, but I am laughing as I write." The next day, "See you Tuesday, my dear. I'm kissing you already and bless you from the bottom of my heart." There was another letter setting up a date in New York. They were all a different woman, okay? And then I started looking for pictures of the various paramours of Albert Camus. And this goes on for a while; there are quite a lot of them. See what I meant? So, constancy, maybe not; on the other

hand, charisma, definitely yes. Well, in any case, his novel *The Stranger*—I've already mentioned it a couple of times—I just want to say a few things about it. It was published in 1942, right at the beginning of the war, and actually after France had already fallen. Um, the hero, if you can call him that, M, is a stranger. He's an outsider; he's detached. He doesn't feel any sort of attachment to anything; he's unconnected. All of those are meanings of the French term. He has no reaction to his mother's death early in the novel. He sets Roul's

girlfriend up to be beaten; he kills a friend of her brother who would attack Roul, his friend. Um, he does all these things kind of randomly. He realizes now he's been sentenced to death for the murder, and he's thinking, "Is there a way out? Is there a loophole? Is there some way out of my predicament?" He couldn't stomach the brutal certitude of his fate, but then he realizes he confronts the absurd. He realizes there are all sorts of ridiculous things. I'm skipping a lot here. He asks himself whether life is worth living. The chaplain says,

"Come to God, my son," and he says, "No, I can't do that." He faces death, and the chaplain says, "This is going to be difficult," but he flies into a rage, starts beating up the chaplain, and then he decides, "Look, what does it mean? Okay, I did this; I hadn’t done that, so what? What did any of this mean?" And he concludes, "Well, it means whatever I want it to mean." He says, "All the time I've been waiting for this present moment—for that dawn, tomorrow's or other days—which was to justify me. In other words, I

was looking for something outside myself that would justify my life, that would explain me, that would actually give me a reason for living one way rather than another." He says, "Nothing. Nothing had the least importance," and I knew quite well why. He, too—that is, the chaplain—knew why. And so he starts concluding, "Nothing matters. What does it matter if Ramon was as much my pal as Celeste, who was a far worthier man? What did it matter if, at this very moment, Marie, his girlfriend, was kissing a new boyfriend? As a condemned man myself, couldn't he grasp

what I meant by that dark wind blowing from my future?" He starts concluding, "Look, all of us are, in a sense, condemned; all of us were condemned to die. It's just sooner in his case than it is for most of us." And then he says, "I suddenly laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe." The French is *l'indifférence bienveillante*. Okay, this tender indifference. Yes, the world is not actually cruel; it is strange. It's indifferent to us; it doesn't have any intrinsic meaning. But the tenderness is—he starts realizing, "Wait a minute, I can

make of it what I want." And so in the end he says, "I realize I've been happy, and I was happy still for all to be accomplished for me to feel less lonely. All that remained to hope was, on the day of my execution, there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration." So he starts thinking, "That's the meaning of my life. I'm going to go to the guillotine, and I'm going to be there hoping they scream at me with hatred, and the point of my life

will be basically, 'Okay, whatever it is.' I mean, it doesn't matter what it is; it'll be what I want, and that will make me happy." So why is Ceesus smiling? Well, because Copes realizes it's up to him to give this whatever meaning he wants. Now, I have a few minutes left to talk about Bellow. Bellow is reacting to the same kinds of problems the existentialists are, but he's giving a rather different answer. Here he is pictured in his sort of—he had a sense of style, and he described his own intellectual development. This said, "I read

Marx and Bertrand Russell and Morris Cohen. I read the logical positivists; I read Freud and Adler and the gestalt psychologists and the rest. And I know how a modern man is supposed to think. The fact is, there are other, deeper motives in a human being." So Bellow is somebody who actually, I think, would be very much in sympathy with this course, looking at a bunch of people who try to reduce all of human motivation to this, or to that, or the other thing: to the will to power, or to sexual gratification in Freud, or to

just unconscious movements of physical particles in various thinkers. He reads all of those people, and he says, "Yeah, that's not what human life is about. You can't reduce human life or human motivation to one thing." So he ends up concluding, well, the title of the book is *Seize the Day* (*Carpe Diem*), or in my favorite manifestation: he was born in a suburb of Montreal, moved to Chicago when he was nine, first became a writer and got involved in the WPA Writers' Project. He ended up teaching at Minnesota, at NYU, and most of his career at

the University of Chicago in the Committee on Social Thought. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, and there are a number of themes in this novel; the main one that I wanted. In an interview, he said this: "I can sympathize with Wilh, the hero of *Seize the Day*." But I can't respect him, so we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that Tommy Wilhelm is really Bellow in disguise. He in fact thinks his own character is something about a schmuck; so, yeah, he sees that comes from a poem of Horace, which is there for

those of you who are Latin fans. And right at the end there is that the reason I put this in is "carpe diem." There it is. Um, here's the way the poem goes: "Don't ask; it's forbidden to know what end the gods will grant to me or you. Don't play with Babylonian fortune-telling either; it's better to endure whatever will be, whether Jupiter has allotted to you many more winters or this final one, which even now wears out the sea on the rocks placed opposite. Be wise; strain the wine, scale back your long hopes to a

short period. While we speak, envious time will flee. Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the future." So the whole idea is, look, what does Aristotle say? Our essence is to formulate rational plans and act on them. "Seize the day" says forget that! Forget the rational plans; just act in the moment, be in the moment, seize the day, forget the future. And it's something that's very different. Now, the overall view here is Epicurean. Horace was an Epicurean, a follower of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, and his attitudes are common in the modern world: materialism—the

world consists of material particles; determinism—we have no freedom; everything's determined by physical laws; hedonism—there's nothing to do but seek pleasure; self-control—the best way to attain happiness is nevertheless to control your desires; and finally, anonymity—my favorite one; live unknown. So I’ve said a little bit about each of those. Materialism: yeah, there's no soul; I just am my body; that's it. I'm just a material thing. Determinism: we have no freedom; everything's determined by physical laws of what's gone before. Hedonism: seek pleasure, seek freedom from fear, seek tranquility—that's what human happiness is. Self-control: to be tranquil, to attain

pleasure, you've got to know the world; you've got to limit your desires. And finally, don’t seek fame, glory, or honor; don't seek any kind of good that depends on other people. Seek your own sort of good, and especially don’t depend on strangers. I'm very fond of this last one. I'm not an Epicurean, but for years my best friend Nick Auer and I taught here, and there was no sign of any of us—of either of us—anywhere. Our offices were just blank. There was finally a rule passed saying you have to put your name outside your office

door, so somebody else put it there. But I think we were both trying; there are almost no photographs of us. The idea was really to sort of live unknown. Yeah, we’re here; if you walk into our classroom, we’re doing our thing, but there’s like nothing to advertise we’re here or have ever been here. And I don’t know why that seems attractive to me; I’m not a person who seeks fame. I sort of want to be a squirrel working in a corner. Um, I play sometimes with a jazz pianist who was talking about that. They’ve opened

up a new jazz thing in Austin, The Brass House. I said, "Well, how is that?" He said, "I don't like playing there; you're up on a stage; it's like a big thing: 'Look at me, look at me!'" He likes to play at The Elephant Room, where it’s like you go down into the cellar, right? You go all the way in the back, and there the musicians are doing their thing, and the piano is off back in the corner, not very well lit. So it’s like that guy’s doing this; he’s like a secret you have to

know about. And that's something pleasurable, I think, about being a secret—not just being... well, never mind. Enough about me. So forget this. Um, the key to the novel is actually what he talks about in another novel more explicitly: certain people are "reality instructors," and they're people who think they know the score. Now they think you don’t and they’re going to teach you. These people are usually kind of... well, they know something, but they aren’t really in control of things the way they ought to be. And so, in this novel, he calls it a charming lunatic,

Dr. Tkin, who tries to tell Tommy how to live. And Tkin is always in the neighborhood of the truth but doesn’t really understand. Bellow has this interesting story. He says, "Look, when I was in junior high school, my next-door neighbor had a mirror that came out of its frame, and she gave me the mirror and asked me to fix it." So he said, "What did he say?" Well, anything else I had fixed, I had hit with a hammer, so I started hammering the frame back onto the mirror and broke the mirror. And so he says

the reality instructors are like that. They’re in a world full of mirrors, and they go around with a hammer trying to set things right, and they break a lot. And in this case, Dr. Tkin sort of breaks Tommy, which is not initially the way I read the story, but that’s really kind of what he intended. They’re out there among the mirrors with their little hammers. So who is Tkin? He’s this con man on the other end. He’s described in the novel as somewhere near the truth. And what does he tell Tommy? Well, he tells him

to seize the day. He ends up saying—actually, this reminds me a lot of Pandora. We actually have a lot of souls, a pretender soul, and a... Real soul people feel they have to love something or be somebody. If thou canst not love, what art thou? It sounds like he's quoting something famous, right? If thou canst not love, then what art thou? What is he quoting? Nothing. Okay, he's making it up, but that's part of what you have to see in Dr. Tamkin. Yeah, he's a charlatan, okay? He doesn't really know. It sounds like, oh, he's

quoting Shakespeare, something I'm supposed to know, but I don't actually know, and I'm not going to admit it. And no, he's just making this up. So he does say this important thing to Tommy: a man is only as good as what he loves. And there he is, I think in Bellow's view, getting close to the truth. Now he says, "What art thou?" Nothing—that's the answer. Nothing. In the heart of hearts, nothing. So you can see how similar this is, in a way, to the existentialists. I peel back the masks, and what am I really? What

is my essence? Nothing. Now, of course, you can't stand that, and you want to be something, and you try. Hence this feeling of estrangement, of alienation. So Tamkin, the officially Epicurean in the novel, is actually kind of an existentialist too. Peel back these things: what's your true essence? Nothing. But you can't stand it, so you feel alienated. You feel as if you have to do something. Now, he says, "Nature knows only one thing: the present, present, present, eternal present." Like a big, huge wave: colossal, bright, and beautiful. Okay, you must go along with the actual—the

here and now. The glory, the here and now, here and now, here now. Okay, be in the present. Grasp the hour, the moment, the instant. Hence, seize the day. That's what he's telling Tommy: "Seize the day. Forget the future. Just live for the moment. Live for the present. Choose to be whatever you want." Now, that's not the way with whom—who, by the way, Tommy is this stage name he's adopted. He gave up a medical career, decided to go to Hollywood, and became a famous actor, and blew it, right? So now he's broke, divorced, has no

job, and things are very bad. Well, he certainly feels alienated. He feels out of control. He thinks of his life as a burden—okay, a load, a hump that he has to carry around. And so he feels that's what a man’s for: to carry this lump. He felt like he was the monkey on his back, you might say. Heidegger at one point says, "Time is the monkey on our backs." Well, he sort of feels like he's his own monkey and decides his essence was to make mistakes, to get involved in one losing proposition after another. He's

weak of will; he constantly gives in to temptation. But now, why is Bellow describing this? He says, "Look, people in Western countries have been affected by Romanticism. They think it's romantic. They think it's exciting to sort of live this life that's highly stimulated—ecstatic, infinite possibilities. The individual is utterly free. Your responsibility is just to fulfill yourself, to realize your own desires." In short, he says, "Look, this romantic dream is exactly what leads you to existentialism—to saying, 'I don't have an essence; it's up to me.' And in fact, that's the excitement—that's my freedom, that's my passion:

to define my own life however I want." But he says, "Look, in the end that doesn't work." And so, there's this wonderful passage where Tommy starts realizing what he has in common with the rest of the people. He's walking at a giant stadium to buy a ticket to a ball game. On the walls, between the advertisements, were words: "Sin no more" and "Do not eat the pig." He had particularly noticed, and in the dark tunnel, in the hastening darkness, which disfigures and makes freaks and fragments of nose and eyes and teeth, all of a sudden,

a love for these imperfect and plural-looking people bursts in William's breast. He loved them—he passionately loved them. He calls them his brothers and sisters, blessing them all as well as himself. He feels this sudden sense of brotherhood, what Heidegger would have called "mitsein." He realizes there is a larger meaning. It isn't just a burden of his existence; there is something that actually is a transcendent meaning. Notice what spurs this thought: "Sin no more" and "Don't eat the pig." What are those? They're religious. They're religious things, and it springs this idea. So he ends up finally

going to this funeral—just a stranger's funeral. And he's there; he goes up to the casket, swept up in this longing. He sees the body, and he just starts crying, right? He just breaks down, and the tears just flood over him. And everybody's there saying, "Who is he? This must have been so close. Look at the way he's crying." Oh, to be loved that way—it's a total stranger, right? But somehow he feels this is his heart's ultimate need being fulfilled. What is his sense? That we all do have certain things in common. We are all beings

who love and live and strive and work and, in the end, die. Okay, next Monday no class. Wednesday we'll come back and talk about P Lis Morph.