SIO238: Skye Cleary on Existentialism and Love

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. Oh, Jamie, I'm so happy to be here. How are you doing?

0:00:35 Jamie: I am super excited tonight. We have a phenomenal guest.

0:00:37 Thomas: Oh, yeah, why is that? That's awesome. I'm excited too. Why don't you tell me and the audience who our special guest is today?

0:00:47 Jamie: So our special guest is Skye Cleary. She is a philosopher and author of Existentialism and Romantic Love, and the co-editor of How to Live a Good Life, A Guide to Choosing Your Personal Philosophy with Massimo Pigliucci and Daniel Kaufman. She teaches philosophy and leadership at Columbia University and Barnard College. And most importantly, she is just an all around wonderful human being. So I'm so enthused she's here tonight.

0:01:14 Skye: Thank you. Thank

0:01:16 Thomas: Welcome, Skye. Thanks so much for coming on. Take it, I take, then we're not going to be raging about politics today. Sounds like maybe not the topic.

0:01:18 Skye: No thanks so much for having me

0:01:25 Thomas: Ah, good.

0:01:25 Jamie: No, no, maybe we'll just set that

0:01:27 Thomas: Take a break.

0:01:27 Jamie: Aside for the time being and try to enjoy some of the light that's still left in the universe.

0:01:32 Thomas: Awesome. Well, I am so excited. Excited to uh to talk to Sky, uh, Jamie, do you want to lead us off? Oh.

0:01:38 Jamie: Yeah, so Skye, you are most well known for your work on existentialism and romantic love. But I'd like to begin with the new book, How to Live a Good Life. Can you tell us a little bit about that project, how it came to be and what's included in it?

0:01:54 Skye: So sure, the idea for the book came about from a discussion that Massimo and I had on YouTube about stoicism and existentialism. And we were both saying how philosophy had radically changed the course of our lives. And so we decided that maybe we should write a book about this. And what came about was we decided to ask a bunch of people, other philosophers who kind of specialized in certain philosophies, but also lived their philosophies. So we talked to them and asked them to write a chapter about how it helped them to lead better lives. And there are lots of different philosophies of life, so it was really hard to narrow it down.

0:02:39 Skye: And so in the book we just have 15 different philosophies and we tried to include a mix. So we have some of the big ones like Buddhism and Confucianism and Daoism and Islam and Hinduism and Stoicism. But we also wanted to mix in some interesting philosophies and and maybe some that people hadn't heard of, like ethical culture and effect. I mean, a lot of people have heard of these, but just some more unusual ones, effective altruism, epicureanism and secular humanism, and of course, existentialism.

But the premise is that if you have two things, so a metaphysics, which is an idea about how the world works, and if you Have an ethics, which is, um, an idea about how you should treat other people, then you have a philosophy of life even if you don't know it. Um, and so why is that? Well, most people inherit a philosophy of life from their parents, you know, if that, if your parents are religious, often you are brought up going to religious ceremonies. But the problem is that most people don't reflect on whether their philosophy of life is a good one. And you know, we thought that, you know, the philosophies of life, like our philosophies of life, actually were really helpful and inspired us to live better lives.

0:04:05 Jamie: Awesome. So in the book, you have a chapter on existentialism, obviously. Would you mind telling us how you came to choose existentialism over the options available to you? Or maybe exactly how philosophy changed the trajectory of your life?

0:04:20 Skye: So I mean, it wasn't like I was shopping around specifically for a philosophy of life. And I, yeah, so I was kind of, it was in my 20s and I was kind of drifting through life wondering what I should do with it. And I had studied some philosophy in my undergraduate degree, but it didn't really, I wasn't really taken by it back then because it was a heavily analytical introduction. So, and then later on I, I was doing an MBA and it was kind of a collision of a whole lot of factors. I was asking questions about not just what I should do with my life, but I had boyfriends and I was thinking about getting married and I was asking questions about how do you know if you found the one, and is there even such a thing as the one?

0:05:11 Skye: And I had friends getting married. And around that time, a book came out called Tête à Tête by Hazel Rowley, which was about the relationship between Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. And also in my MBA, there were some philosophers on faculty. And in one of the classes, the professor started talking about existential philosophy. And it seemed to me like they were at least dealing with some of the same questions that I was dealing with. The question is, is there a formula for a good life or a happy life? And especially when it comes to, say, relationships and marriages, I was looking around and seeing so many marriages ending in divorce, and it didn't really seem like a good formula for a happy life.

0:05:59 Skye: So I guess existentialism came to me at a time where I was kind of confused about life and asking a lot of questions, specifically, can you choose to love or can you choose not to love? And I mean, they were dealing with questions about freedom and anxiety and relationships and how to live and love as authentically as possible. And that really appealed to me.

0:06:25 Thomas: A lot of times when I read any philosophy like this, I wonder how much are humans just not built to have right answers on these things? Because coming from where I come from, which is a very scientific evolutionary worldview, I suppose, I sometimes wonder, do you leave the room that there just might not be good answers or ways that, like, love, for example, or your romantic partner, whatever it's going to be, that just, that isn't really designed or meant in any way or any meaningful way to make us happy in every possible way? Wait, do you understand the question? Sorry if I'm not wording it well.

0:07:05 Skye: Yeah, well, I think I do. So I have some things to say about that. And And one thing I want to make clear is that, you know, I don't think existentialism or really any philosophy has all the answers. I mean, some have explanations For how the world works. Some people have kind of, you know, guideposts in a way, or frameworks for thinking about it. That's what I find existentialism to be, more like a framework or a set of ideas that help us be reflective and think about our own lives. And so certainly with existential philosophy, there's no specific formula to living a good life or being happy. And you know, happiness is actually kind of a red herring, and if anything, happiness is just a, you know, a side effect of doing things that, that we find meaningful.

0:07:19 Thomas: I

0:07:54 Skye: But you know, what appealed to me about existentialism was precisely the fact that there are no specific answers, and that, but what we can think about, or what maybe we should think, think about, is, you know, how do we behave in the world. And, um, you know, one of the key principles is that existence precedes essence, so we exist first and then discover who we are, you know, through our actions.

And, as we grow, and, you know, it means we, we are thrown into the world, but, and so we can't choose to be here, we didn't choose to be born, but once we're here, we're free to choose our actions, or at least we should be free. And you, sometimes we're obstructed from, you know, exercising our free actions due to oppression or poverty or ignorance or things like that. But you know, this I really gravitated towards this idea of freedom and how we're free to create the relationships that are right for us.

And specifically with love relationships, it's like, you know, I had been watching too many, you know, romantic comedies that, you know, talked about, you know, that there's, you know, a soulmate out there, you've just got to find them, or you just got to be open to them. And the existential narrative is like, no, that's rubbish, there's, there's no such thing. It's, um, it's us, it's love isn't something that we find, relationships are something that we create, um, and that's not at all easy, but it's also like quite liberating. Um, and so it kind of took me away from, you know, the standard narrative of

0:09:26 Skye: Um, finding the one, um, falling in love, of getting married and living happily ever after. And I realized that, you know, there were other options and I didn't have to choose, like, or I didn't have to be railroaded down that particular path.

0:09:41 Thomas: Love that. Hey, Jamie, does that, so am I an existentialist then? Is that, because I liked all that. That sounds

0:09:44 Skye: Yeah.

0:09:47 Jamie: So I think that, yeah, I mean, I think the thing about being an existentialist is that you can't call yourself one if you are one. The sky would know better, but that's sort of my understanding.

0:09:48 Thomas: Nice. Oh, okay.

0:10:00 Skye: Well, I mean, the thing is that, well, what is an existentialist, like, what does an existentialist do, you know? I mean, they say, you know, you're free to choose your actions and you know that you're responsible for your choices and that creates, it's anxiety. So, but beyond that, it's like, well, you know, what actions does that involve? And the answer is, well, it's up to you to decide. And so, um, no wonder we're all plagued with anxiety. But, um, you know, I don't think they have all the answers, but just putting the emphasis back on, you know, the individual within a web of relationships and focusing on the choices that we do have, um, I found very powerful. And it's not to say that, um, you know, of course the existential is focused on freedom and free will, but Simone de Beauvoir talked about it in terms of facticity and transcendence.

0:10:50 Skye: So certainly there are facts of our lives that we can't change. I mean, not only that we cannot choose to be born, but we can not choose the bodies and the situations that we are here in. But what is important is to figure out what we are free to do. And human nature, if there is such a thing as human nature, is to consistently strive to overcome, overcome our given situations and and push ourselves forward in the world and and work towards, I guess, projects and, um, goals.

0:11:19 Jamie: One of the things that I really liked about your essay in the new book, How to Live a Good Life, is that it sort of paralleled the same responses or objections to existentialism that Sartre was responding to in 1945 in his essay, Existentialism is a Humanism. As we already talked about, existentialism is fundamentally something that you do, but it's also a philosophy that highlights our connectedness to others that you were just mentioning, despite its reputation for being sort of selfish and maybe even solipsistic. Why do the existentialists or why do you think others are what is most important in our understanding of ourselves? And how does this relate to the role of reciprocity that was such a big theme in so much of Simone de Beauvoir's work?

0:12:06 Skye: Um, so I mean, maybe a good place to start on that is with the fact that, you know, as Nietzsche declared, you know, God is dead and we have killed him, meaning that, um, you know, we arrive into the world and we're kind of here, you know, without a guidebook, or the guidebooks that we do have are highly suspicious, like the Bible. But Nietzsche was saying that we live in a world that's built on these religious, or in the West, Christian foundations, but God doesn't really guide our behavior in life.

And so what that means is if God is dead, then it's up to each of us to create our own reason for being. And we can only find meaning through, like, engaging in the world and engaging with other people, um, so I mean, from a high level, and kind of bringing it back down, Jean-Paul Sartre thought that, um, you know, he said we wouldn't know ourselves without other people, and what he meant by that was that there are a few different ways that we can, um, we come to know about ourselves. And he said one of, of the goal, maybe the goal of life is to know ourselves.

And, you know, we can do kind of self-reflection and introspection, but the problem with that is, like, the eye cannot see itself. And we, we look in a mirror, but mirror doesn't give us, you, deep insights into our being, but other people can. Other people give us insights into ourselves and our being that that we wouldn't know about if they weren't there, like, telling us about it.

0:13:50 Skye: And then the question becomes, you know, how much of other people's opinions should we pay attention to? Because, on the one hand, you don't want to be, you know, completely beholden to other people's opinions of you. But on the other hand, you know, if you don't take into account anyone's feedback or anyone's opinions about you, then, you know, you're not really a person. That's at least as Sartre said, now, that person's not really a man or a woman, I guess.

And then the issue with that is that, okay, if we need to take other people, part of our being is taking other people's views into account of us, then, you know, whose views should we take into account? And he talked about someone looking through a keyhole, and he says, you know, imagine you hear someone, you know, walking behind you, and he's like, if you don't know that person, then of course you're not going to care about, you know, what they think of you. But if you're if you love that person, then you're going to probably feel shame about looking through the keyhole, and because you're seeing yourself through the gaze of an important other. And so the more you care about another person, the more their opinions matter to you.

And, you know, as Sartre concluded, the more you want to control them. And so that's why he's quite famous for his discussion of sadomasochism, is that we always want to try and control the other person to get hold of, you know, their views of us. And now Simone de Beauvoir's response to that was

0:15:24 Skye: Reciprocity, I guess. And reciprocity was kind of her way out of Sartre's vicious cycle of of sadomasochism. And I mean, she wasn't talking about reciprocity in terms of like mutual dependence or owing each other, but rather a reciprocity of recognition. So recognizing each other as free and equal. And so I think she kind of came to the conclusion that, you know, a reciprocal relationship was kind of more like a good friendship. And she thought friendship was a kind of, or something like friendship was a really good foundation for all relationships.

0:15:59 Jamie: So that's really interesting. I wonder, though, how do we make sense of the way our different relationships, our different loving relationships, our friend relationships sort of sometimes conflict or even contradict each other? Like, what if we're a really good friend or teacher, but a terrible romantic partner? How do we understand who we are? Which person's view of ourselves should we view as sort of being the most instructive in order to understand, like, what the correct narrative of who we take ourselves to be is?

0:16:38 Skye: Yeah, so that's a really good question, and I'm not sure I know the answer to that. But I mean, I will say that I don't think, and I don't think the existentialist would have said that there should be one dominant narrative. But the reality is that society does tend to value, or people in society tend to view, as romantic attachments above most others, if not all others. And one of the relationships that we do tend to neglect is friendship. You know, friends are the first to go when, you know, your friend gets a new boyfriend or gets married, and, you know, that's understandable because people, you know, need to invest time and energy into new relationships, um, but I think, so, and romantic relationships, it's an interesting one.

And you talked about a teacher, and I think teaching relationships are, you know, they're quite strongly codified, so, you know, you have, for teaching, you have job descriptions and you have syllabi and things like that. So there are lots of, there's a big framework, and often a solid framework around those relationships already, and what's allowed, what's not allowed. And then, on the other end of the spectrum, you kind of have friendships, which are much freer and much more, maybe, transient sometimes, but there are fewer demands on them. You know, you don't have like a friendship contract or something. But romantic relationships are kind of stuck in this weird place in the middle, I think, because you don't have contracts for romantic relationships.

0:18:11 Skye: There are no strict rules or anything around them, like you have for a teaching relationship. But yet we have this long history of kind of a romantic precedent of what is supposed to happen in romantic relationships, like, you get, um, like, you if you find someone attractive, you know, ideally you fall in love, and the romantic ideal that we've come to understand is one that culminates in marriage, um, and so, we I mean, I know this, and this is changing a lot, and it's changing for the better, and I think, you know, I feel people are getting married and more people are getting divorced, um, although that that tends to be an exception.

And, you know, this, the dominant narrative still is that romantic relationships are the ones that, um, people tend to define themselves by. But I guess my view is that, um, you know, we tend to undervalue friendships and, um, uh, so, and it's also really, if I can say, it's quite, um, difficult, love is a difficult term, I think, in in English specifically. I mean, think about the ancient Greeks, they had so many different words for love. Um, but you know, I have a friend who says, oh yeah, I love you, like, just, you know, in a friendly way, it's not romantic.

But, you know, I think how nice would it be if we could say to friends, oh, I love you, but not, like, have it be weird. Um, and this is why I kind of am attracted to, you know, Beauvoir's idea of authentic love, where she says it must be founded on a reciprocal

0:19:45 Skye: Recognition, recognition of two freedoms, because that kind of love, it's not just applying to romantic relationships, but to all different forms of close attachments.

0:19:54 Thomas: Are, I would love to know what these people would have done with social media. You you're talking about with how to judge ourselves and whose opinions of ourselves should care about and whose we shouldn't. That is certainly, I think for just basically anybody on today's world and social media, that's a problem, but also, you know, for, for people like, I don't know, Jamie and I, or anybody who does anything puts out content on social media. And I, I imagine Sky, you too, I, don't know you that well, but I'm sure given that you've done videos and stuff and, and all kinds of public stuff, you hear tons about yourself that I'm Sure you probably wouldn't care to hear. Just like I get tons of comments about myself that I really don't care to hear. And it's really a challenge of just like, okay, why does this bother me? And how can I make it not bother me.

0:19:54 Jamie: Yes,

0:20:40 Thomas: But also, if you shut it all out, then am I going to have like a good objective idea of myself? Am I going to be able to improve? So I don't know, that's just what I was thinking of earlier when you were discussing that. But I don't know if you have any further thoughts on that?

0:20:56 Skye: That's a really fun thought experiment you know what would they have done on social media. So, I mean, looking to Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre specifically, I mean, they had a very tight, tight inner circle of really close friends that they invested a lot of time and energy into and were very caring. And so, I mean, we only have so much time to go around. And I think it's natural that we have some tight friend groups. It doesn't mean people can't come and go from those friend groups. But the other thing is, Simone de Beauvoir in particular wrote a lot, lot of letters, not only to those in her inner circle, but also to readers and people who who wrote letters to her. She would often write back to them, and she had these, like, an epistolary relationship with with a lot of different people. And so, I guess that's, um, you know, the closest that they came to social media in a way, um, but, of course, it was more in depth. But she got plenty, plenty of hate mail.

0:21:00 Thomas: Oh,

0:22:00 Skye: And I guess I think she, and so I think it's a matter of, yeah, protecting ourselves from, you know, blocking the trolls and, you know, just making sure that we engage productively on social media and, you know, make sure it's fun. And, you know, yeah, if you, if you read too much, or, you know, take into account what people think who are just trying to, I guess, get a rise out of you, then yeah, that's absolutely problematic, uh, yeah.

0:22:34 Jamie: I think Simone de Beauvoir would be awesome on Twitter. I'm not sure Sartre would tweet very much, though. It just seems like he would think it was beneath him.

0:22:36 Skye: Yeah. You're probably right, I think he would also have a problem with the 140 character limit, um, because he tend to write, he tend, he tended to write quite excessively.

0:22:54 Thomas: We're up to 280. So I'm sure it's fine.

0:22:57 Skye: 280, sorry.

0:22:57 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah,

0:22:57 Skye: Oh.

0:22:58 Jamie: Yeah, I still think he would have hated it. It would have been really fun to, like, tweet crab emojis at him, though, I would have enjoyed that.

0:23:07 Skye: Should.

0:23:08 Jamie: But, so, we've talked about Love. Um.

0:23:08 Thomas: Not going to pretend to understand that. But okay,

0:23:11 Jamie: Yeah. So,

0:23:11 Thomas: Sure.

0:23:12 Skye: We say, Jamie, why don't you say something, something about that.

0:23:15 Jamie: Um, I guess he had done, he had had like a really bad trip, was it LSD um, or acid?

0:23:20 Skye: Mescaline, whatever.

0:23:22 Jamie: Mescaline. Um. And He had hallucinated crabs, and he was, this hallucination was ongoing and residual, and he used to like have this sensation of being like harassed by crustaceans. Um, just very funny story.

0:23:23 Skye: That is. Yeah. Yeah.

0:23:40 Skye: They followed, yeah, apparently they followed him around, and um, he would call them, I don't know, my little friends or something, and you know, he really struggled to get rid of them until, I think, how it ended was one day he said, right, I'm just not going to talk to them anymore, and uh, they went away.

0:23:57 Jamie: Yeah, so he had a really unrelenting case of crabs, but not, you know, not the kind that you would think given his sexual proclivities.

0:24:02 Thomas: Yeah. I don't know which kind of crab sounds worse. Itchiness or something of just nagging you all the time.

0:24:10 Jamie: I don't know. I think the hallucinatory crabs might be more discomforting, actually. But yeah, so for those who don't know, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had this sort of almost infamous pact where they decided that they were one another's essential loves, but they would be able to have contingent loves, right? And that caused a lot of collateral damage over the years, but it went to become this sort of iconic relationship. And yet it's iconic in a way that's very different from how our more modern, I guess, that's not even the right word, but how relationships tend to be played out more commonly, right? We tend to kind of pair off into monogamous relationships. And that was very much not how Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir lived their lives.

0:24:18 Thomas: Yeah could be.

0:24:21 Skye: Yeah. Yeah.

0:25:06 Jamie: And so the question I have is, is there an insight here that can help us, help guide us into what can be authentic for couples? Is it less about doing any one particular thing so much as it is the couple coming together and deciding for themselves to decide on a trajectory of the relationship that might work for them? And that could take, you know, a variety of different sorts of paths and would include defining romantic terms to one another to maybe mean things that they don't always mean, right? To get very clear about what it means when you say that you love one another or that I'm yours in a way that's different than how we'd normally take those kinds of phrases to function. Yeah.

0:25:51 Skye: I mean, you're absolutely right, it was really, their relationship was really outrageous at the time, um, but you know, and that's one of the, I mean, I, I'm not polyamorous and or I don't have an open relationship, but what I admired was that they did kind of, um, throw all these like social expectations out the window and kind of created a relationship on their own terms. And I think, Jamie, you're absolutely right when you say, you know, it's, it can be hard to avoid certain terms.

And yeah, I think defining the relationship on your own terms and defining specific terms, I think it does help to talk about, you know, not only what you mean by certain things, but also, you know, what's really important is talking about what you expect out of the relationship, relationship. And I think some of the language of love kind of perpetuates harmful notions, especially, you know, possessiveness and submissiveness, especially when it's used in manipulative ways, like, you're my girlfriend, therefore you owe me devotion or whatever it is. And when we start to kind of compel duty on the other person for being in a relationship, I think that closes down people's freedom. And I think it's, would be really, um, valuable if more people kind of practiced in more accurate ways of expressing themselves and and their love.

I mean, for example, um, my partner and I kind of joke that, you know, how's the, how's marriage going, you know, so far so good, um, and you know, it seems dismissive, but for us that's really meaningful, because what it means is that we're not specifically tied by the marriage contract,

0:27:35 Skye: But we both recognize that relationships are contingent and that either one of us could walk away if one person breaks the reciprocity or one person kind of really violates the agreement that we've come to. And we're not trapped in the relationship forevermore. And I think for me, like being, having that kind of, um, honesty is is really romantic for me. So, um, and it's not only what you say, but, um, it's also, you know, what you do, because for the existential philosophers I think, um, love really does exist in the actions of love, um, as well as the language, but it's, I guess, my point is that it's not just about talking the talk, it's also walking the walk, to use a cliche.

0:28:24 Jamie: So one thing I'm curious about with this, you talk about how it's our relationships to one another that help us understand who we are, right? And our genuine sense of self comes from knowing others. And I worry about the difficulty with expressing romantic feelings in a way that can be taken to be genuine in that framework. Because if I can't know myself until I'm relating to other people, if I somehow lack self-knowledge or setting aside something metaphysically problematic like the self not existing or whatever like that, how can I genuinely communicate feelings of affection to my lover? Or is romantic expression just fundamentally disingenuous until we have a clearer sense of who we are and how do we come by that?

0:29:16 Skye: Yeah. So, I mean, this is a tough question, but I think, so for example, Nietzsche would say that, you know, to love, you have to be firmly grounded in yourself and you have to be able to stand bravely on your own two feet. So Nietzsche kind of says, yes, absolutely. Self-mastery is basically a prerequisite for being in a great loving loving relationship. But I think for the later existential views is that, yeah, you can't really ever know yourself, you know, because as Sartre said, we are being and nothingness and, you know, you cannot know nothingness. I mean, you may know that I know nothing, but that's still, yeah.

So, you know, for Sartre, the goal of life is to know ourselves, to become our our own foundation, um, but you know, that's actually impossible, because, um, part of, like, an aspect of our being lies with other people and actually we won't ever really know ourselves until death. Um, but I think what we need to do in in that situation is kind of try and be comfortable with the fact that we are not yet, because, you know, as Beauvoir says, you know, the human condition is is ambiguous. We can't fully know ourselves. We can't really know another person, but that shouldn't stop us from loving and from acting.

0:30:41 Skye: One of the things that, you know, one of the, I guess, the implications of the existence precedes essence is that sometimes we don't know what we want or don't, that we're in love until, you know, we kind of pursue a romantic relationship or throw ourselves into into loving. And so I don't know, that I think we can still like talk about love in an honest way and express our feelings, but I I don't think that, you know, knowing ourselves is either possible or, you know, even necessarily desirable.

0:31:17 Thomas: To, when you talk about love in this way, I think, you know, there's... there's like a chemical component and there's more like an intellectual component. Do you think that's right, or do you, how do you think about that? I mean, when it comes to, like, for example, my kids, there's not really much thought involved, you know, it's just instant for me anyway, uh, instant love, about maximizing the brain chemicals, um, for me, cause they're, they're still very, you know, they're, they're under two and under, so it's, so it's easy. Um, but, uh, but like, and, and I think that that can be true too, when you first, you know, meet someone or maybe early on the honeymoon phases, they say, um versus later on, maybe there's different kinds of love that evolves. Um, there any, does that ring true to you or do you have thoughts on that?

0:31:43 Skye: Absolutely.

0:31:58 Skye: And I mean, a lot of the philosophers talked about this before neuroscience discovered, like, oxytocin and, um, what are, what, what are the the other brain chemicals, and then neuropeptides or whatever they are. So Yeah, I mean, I think people have known about these phases regardless. And yeah, it's true that, you know, these brain chemicals tend to spike in the early stages of love that tend to last, I don't know, anywhere between six to 24 months, depending on which study you look at. And I mean that's certainly not incompatible with the existential view of love and I think that would fit into this, you know, the facts of our existence and they, I mean they don't seem to talk much about why we fall in love with particular people, or I mean, if we, why we fell in love, I mean yes there are chemicals, but I mean there are so many different reasons

0:32:06 Thomas: Yeah, it'S good stuff. Mainly that one. Yeah.

0:32:52 Thomas: Right.

0:32:52 Skye: That why we're attracted to other people that. But, you know, and it's going to be different for every single person.

0:32:53 Thomas: Yeah.

0:33:00 Skye: And so I think maybe these, you know, the chemicals and this sort of thing is kind of maybe part of the, you know, facticity of our existence that I mentioned earlier. And but the question is, you know, maybe you're attracted to someone. But the question is, how are you going to act on that attraction? You know, we're not animals who suddenly we're attracted to someone, we try and have sex with them. Well, I mean, maybe some people do, but Okay.

0:33:24 Jamie: No.

0:33:26 Skye: Maybe

0:33:26 Jamie: That's where it's been going wrong.

0:33:27 Skye: Yeah.

0:33:27 Thomas: I mean just Just the president of the United States. And sorry, no politics. No. Yeah. Um.

0:33:28 Skye: But Uh, yeah, so I mean the point is that we can choose whether to act on that animal attraction or not, and we can chose our behaviour in response to it, so we seem to be able to override those kind of animal lusty feelings, and that's kind of where the existential freedom and choices kind of, uh, start to kick in. Sure.

0:33:53 Jamie: That's awesome. I just noticed we're kind of running close to time. So I'm going to shift focus a little bit because there are a couple of things that I want to make sure that I get to ask you before we do run out of time. Time. As should be obvious to anybody listening to the podcast, your work has been heavily influenced by Simone de Beauvoir. And she's got quite, quite a number of works ranging from The Second Sex to her novels, to her political essays, to the speeches that she gave, to her memoirs. Could you tell us what your favorite of her works is and why it resonates with you, and also if that's different than what you would recommend somebody to read if they, if they wanted to to get to know who Simone de Beauvoir was? Yeah.

0:34:38 Skye: Um, I mean it's really hard to choose a favorite. Um, and I mean for a long time my favorite has been, uh, She Came to Stay, which is, uh, Beauvoir's first novel, um, and it's quite a juicy story based roughly on Beauvoir and Sartre's life and how they have a relationship with a younger woman, so it becomes like a whole steamy, like, like Ménage à Trois. And why I like it is because it deals very much with love and freedom and jealousy and being caught in cycles of possessiveness and submissiveness of loving relationships. And what I find interesting about it is all the characters in the novel are trying to find kind of a place of harmony with one another. Some are trying to give each other the freedom and see if that works.

0:35:26 Skye: Others are trying to be like commit to one another. Others are being devoted to one another, but, you know, all these kind of dynamics are different ways that people are trying to achieve not necessarily happiness, but I think harmony in life. So at that stage, she was very much exploring the dynamics of love.

But, you know, another favorite, it, so I guess that's a fairly um straightforward and really nice to read kind of introduction, um, but I really love The Mandarins, which is the um one that won the Prix Goncourt, which is the big French, uh, literature prize, um, and it deals with, you know, a lot of the same issues, but it also, um, the world was older when she wrote it, so it's more, I guess, more mature, and it's um also so more political, so it talks a lot about, uh, the resistance, um, post, like, around World War II, so, you know, I really love that one. Um, but if, if novels aren't, um, your thing, then I would recommend, I guess, The Ethics of Ambiguity is a really important one. It's a tough one, but it, um, is a really important, important in terms of like her philosophy, and it's not very long.

0:36:38 Jamie: It's very short, um, dense. But but not a lot of pages, um. So I also happen to know that you're a Camus fan as well, um, which is, you know, my unrelenting current obsession, um, and so in fact when I had seen you and Massimo speak at the Night of Philosophy and Ideas at the Brooklyn Public Library two years ago, I was actually struck by how readily and fluently you just sort of quoted Camus while speaking off the cuff. So I have really strong opinions on which of Camus' works are the best or where people should start. But I wanted to know if you would tell us what your favorite was and what you would recommend people start reading. That's

0:36:40 Skye: Yeah. Yeah, yep. Sure.

0:37:20 Skye: Um, yeah, that Night of Philosophy was pretty amazing. I think what you saw was at 5 a.m., so I don't really, I don't remember what I said at that time in the morning, um, so into, I mean, I guess The Stranger is such a classic, and you know, that's generally the one I would point people people to first. But actually, I find myself continually returning to, like, The Myth of Sisyphus. And I think there's something about where he talks about, you know, it's better to remain in lucid despair on the dizzying crest and rebel against the absurdity of life and, you know, rebel against death.

And so, I don't know, I've had a bit of death in my life recently, recently, um, uh, with friends, and so I I find this, um, you know, a really powerful way to, uh, to to look and to understand, um, life, and you know, I mean Camus says, you know, in the end one needs more courage to live than than to kill himself, and this I find this really powerful because it just reminds me that just getting through the day can be such a heroic feat that we sometimes underestimate to make

0:37:27 Jamie: Correct.

0:38:34 Jamie: Yeah, sometimes just being alive is a remarkable act of courage, I think he says. I'm trying to get Thomas to read The Plague. I feel like we should do that while coronavirus is the front page everywhere. We should totally do an episode on The Plague. It seems relevant.

0:38:45 Thomas: Before we get coronavirus, or, as as we get coronavirus and I'm trying to get you to watch, uh, Dustin Hoffman's Outbreak from the nineties. I mean, come on, that's my level of intellect that I'm going at the coronavirus with.

0:38:59 Jamie: I'll make a deal. I will watch Outbreak if you read The Plague. Seems fair. There.

0:39:01 Thomas: Yeah. I'm just kidding. I'll, I'd rather, I'll read the plague. It's fine. I don't want to watch it.

0:39:05 Jamie: Okay, um, So then the last question I have is is sort of a bonus question. I think I might have mentioned this to you, and we did an episode on the show about inner voices, and I'm, this is still blowing my mind. I was on Twitter, as I am too often, and I had seen a tweet from the MIT, like, language lab, where they were doing research about people who have an inner voice, and this person was responding, you know, sort of in shock that he couldn't believe some people didn't have an inner voice, and he was asking for opinions if anybody didn't happen. I was like, well, that's ridiculous, clearly nobody has an inner monologue where they hear their own voice, and I answered it no, because, like, obviously that's false, and it turns out that the overwhelming majority of people, when they're sort of thinking to themselves through the day, experience that something like, like having an auditory-like component.

0:40:01 Jamie: Not that they're literally hearing anything, but that it makes sense to sort of describe it that way. So now that we've had a couple philosophers come on, I'm doing an informal scientific study. And I want to know, when you sort of think to yourself during the day, do you have an inner voice in a way that it makes sense to describe it as having an, an auditory component? Oh my God!

0:40:23 Skye: Yeah. I do, and in fact

0:40:27 Jamie: So

0:40:27 Skye: In fact, it's not just my, I have so many voices in my head, like, I'm constantly having conversations, like, I'm having conversations with other people, so yeah, I don't literally hear my own voice, but I have an experience of, of words in my voice, but also of other people's voices and what they might say, like imaginary situations or going back over situations that have happened in the past, so yeah, I got a lot of voices, so

0:40:53 Thomas: I never get tired of hearing Jamie describe something that 95 percent of people have, it's, it's my favorite. Okay, so there's these weird people who have this thing, so and then it's like, yeah, well, you got lucky with the last one, the last guest we had on has neither an inner voice nor an inner image, which, wow, that, what, that's, I can't even imagine that, but, uh, yeah, I

0:41:00 Skye: How do You experience thoughts then, Jamie?

0:41:16 Jamie: They're, they're, I would describe them as language-y, but they're just sort of like automatically recognized, I guess, to, to the, the idea that, like, people have an experience that is like hearing voices, or a bunch of voices, is just, I honestly feel like you guys are trolling me. Because it's just, it's so, it's so different from what it is like for me to think that, like, like, I just, I can't even imagine it, just, that it just, I'm tired on your behalf thinking about how much noise that must be, and it's just a lot. I can't even, it's hard for me to understand.

0:41:37 Skye: Yeah. It's Exhausting, I'm so envious of you.

0:42:00 Jamie: Yeah, so,

0:42:01 Thomas: I love my inner noise, it's the best, it's that's amazing

0:42:01 Jamie: Yeah, so I mean, that's, that so far. So now, so now we have one philosopher, no inner voice, another philosopher, inner voice. So I've got, I've Got No Hypotheses yet on this.

0:42:05 Thomas: Yeah

0:42:15 Skye: And Yeah, and it's why I go to, like, a yoga, like, one of the things my yoga teacher always says is that yoga is about calming the chatter of the mind, and that really resonates with me, because I've got so much chatter going on up there, yeah.

0:42:27 Thomas: It's non-stop, it's it's so much

0:42:28 Jamie: Yeah, always just kind of assume that was a metaphor. Um, and I've, I've always really struggled with metaphor. So I just kind of chalked all up to that. Um, but Skye, thank you so much for coming on.

0:42:30 Thomas: Hey, Thank you so much, guy, I really appreciate you coming on, that was delightful, hey,

0:42:41 Jamie: Um,

0:42:45 Skye: Well, Thanks, Jamie, thanks, Thomas, I really appreciate you having me on, sure.

0:42:48 Thomas: Do you want to toss out where people can find you, if they want to find your work, any plugs that you can think of, go right ahead.

0:42:54 Skye: Um, so I have a website, skycleary.com, and I'm also on Twitter, uh, Sky, Skye underscore underscore Cleary. Or, yeah, if you follow Jamie, then I follow Jamie, so yeah, you'll, you'll see me there. Great. All right, well, thanks so much.

0:43:12 Jamie: Thank you. All

0:43:13 Thomas: You

0:43:21 Clip: Thank you so much for listening to Serious Inquiries Only. If you like the show, the absolute best thing you can do is support us at patreon.com/seriouspod. The second best thing you can do is please share it on social media or by word of mouth. Speaking of social media, if you'd like to follow Jamie on Twitter, she's at Euthyphro. And follow me at SeriousPod. If you'd like to be Facebook friends, send me a request at facebook.com Thomas podcast. If you're not up for that level of intimacy, that's fine. Maybe you want to join the discussion at facebook.com/groups/SIO members. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you next time.