You Are Not a Great Writer Until You Write the Book

Lex Fridman opens with Sean Kelly, a Harvard philosopher of phenomenology and existentialism, and asks what the word even means. Kelly is teaching a course on existentialism in literature and film, and he refuses the usual museum label: a mid-twentieth-century French movement with Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and maybe Martin Heidegger. Most of those people denied the name, he says, and the current of thought runs much longer than a Paris decade. What they share is a claim about how a life gets its shape.

Sartre's slogan is that existence precedes essence, and Kelly unpacks it without mercy. Nothing is true about who you are until you start living, and living, for Sartre, is deciding: taking a stand on yourself by doing this rather than that. You do not choose because God commands it, because a utilitarian calculus recommends it, or because a theory licenses it. In the moment there is only the fact that you, a conscious being, are the one deciding.

If the mind were nothing but a brain under physical law, the ground of the choice would be the universe, and responsibility would drain away. Sartre's wager is that what used to be special about God is now special about us: we become the being who chooses as we do, which is almost to stand in God's place, and it is terrifying because it never stops. How you sit, whether you hold someone's gaze, whether you jot a note — all of it counts, and you do not get to say you are a great writer who simply has not written the book yet. If you have not written it, you are not; human beings, in his phrase, are "condemned to be free."

If choices constitute you, Kelly asks, can you still criticize a life, including your own? Sartre's answer is yes: you can fail to take responsibility. In Being and Nothingness he watches a café waiter whose every move is a little too exact — the lean, the tray, the authority of a man who knows how the evening is supposed to go. The problem is that "just so." The waiter is acting because that is how a waiter should act, passing the burden of his gestures onto a role whose contours were drawn by someone else. Sartre calls this bad faith, and Kelly adds that teenagers try on roles in the same way; the trouble is staying there.

The second example is more intimate. On a first date the evening reaches the moment when one person might take the other's hand. You decide it is time and you reach. The other person, on Sartre's view, should also decide: refuse the hand and own the refusal, or take it back. Sometimes the hand stays there, cold and clammy, neither rejecting nor answering. That, Sartre says, is worse bad faith, because it pretends you can get through the moment without choosing. Leaving the hand untouched is already a choice. You are only pretending it does not belong to you.

Fridman presses the social point: isn't conversation itself a way of handing responsibility across the table, and isn't wearing clothes already trying on a role the culture wrote? Kelly agrees that this is the pressure Sartre feels, which is why he also says "Hell is other people." Other people are choosing too, and their choices nudge you to copy what looks good. If you dress a certain way because that guy looked good doing it, the resource is real and the faith is still bad. God, in the old picture, would not be moved by anyone else's decision. If that is the ideal, other people really are hell.

Fridman asks the obvious human question: what about parents? God does not have any. Kelly takes the hit. Sartre is aiming at an inhuman ideal. We are not self-generating. We are raised into traditions, norms, and a sense of what is appropriate long before we can choose any of it. Martin Heidegger, the German phenomenologist Sartre thought he was following, names this thrownness: we are thrown into a history, a lineage, a language, a beginning we never picked and an end we keep trying to postpone. Kelly's first correction is descriptive. Sartre has missed how much about us is already settled before we settle anything.

You cannot escape that altogether. You can still ride the wave. The surf is not yours; you do not control it; but as you stand on the board you make judgments, and those judgments are yours to answer for. The chain of decisions matters because it constitutes you. It makes you the person you are, against a much older picture of the self.

That older picture, Kelly says, is most of philosophy from Plato forward. In the Republic, people are born with gold, silver, or bronze souls, sorted forever into philosopher-kings, warriors, or laborers, independent of anything they later do. The modern versions swap myth for IQ, genetic makeup, or the percentage of fast-twitch muscle. Sartre is the philosopher of radical freedom: the space of possible decisions is not closed in advance. Other existentialists keep the freedom and insist on the limits. If we were free the way a medieval God was free, we would not be the finite beings we actually are.

Nihilism, Kelly says, is the other cluster of ideas against which existentialism defines itself. Nietzsche made the word famous as a description of the late nineteenth century, not as a manifesto. In 1300, to be human was to be made in God's image, marked by original sin, and tasked with living virtuously in that condition. By Nietzsche's moment that role no longer worked. "God is dead" means the being who used to ground who we are cannot play that part anymore. What remains is nihil, nothing. Nihilism is the claim that nothing outside us grounds our existence.

Sartre answers with radical freedom. Nietzsche answers with a different picture: we are artists of life. An artist does not invent from a blank page so much as respond. You find yourself in a situation and you say, this is the sentence, this is the dance, this is how the music has to go. There are constraints, but seeing what they are is part of living. Kelly thinks jazz improvisation is the right image, even though jazz did not exist when Nietzsche wrote. Creation here is not God's creation out of nothing. It is an answer to what is already there.

The story Kelly loves is Herbie Hancock's. In the 1960s, playing in Stuttgart with Miles Davis, Hancock hit a chord that was simply wrong. He was sure he had wrecked the set for the man about to solo. Miles paused, then played something that made the chord right — everyone in the room could hear it. Not anything would have worked. Most notes would have sounded terrible. The constraints came from these listeners, these players, this already-botched moment. That, Kelly says, is Nietzsche's reply to nihilism: you are responsible for creating, and you do not create in a void. The clammy hand on a first date is the same assignment. You have to make music out of what you were given, which means you also have to listen.

When people now say we live in a secular age, Kelly hears Nietzsche's diagnosis under a new name. It does not mean churches are empty. It means religious belief no longer licenses the old conclusion that the outsider is less than human, the conclusion that once grounded crusades. That liberalism lets a thousand flowers bloom, and it also unsettles the believer, because faith can no longer ground a life the way it did in Dante's century. A secular world can still be full of meaning. The hard question, which is the question of existence, is what we are doing when we live well without that old ground.

Kelly's syllabus reaches back to Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky, who treat Christianity as a way of living rather than a set of justified beliefs, and forward to Camus, Frantz Fanon, and Heidegger. Fridman wants Dostoevsky. Kelly goes to The Brothers Karamazov, a murder mystery in which a vile father is killed and several sons have motive. The novel is an inquiry into grades of guilt, the right way to take responsibility, and whether salvation — Dostoevsky's word — can happen here and now. One character shrugs off paradise after death: that does not make this life good, and it does not justify the harm already done.

Sartre, developing his view, quotes a line close to Dostoevsky: if there is no God, everything is permitted. He treats it as modus ponens. There is no God; therefore everything is permitted; therefore radical freedom. Kelly thinks the novel as a whole runs modus tollens. If there is no God, everything is permitted — but look at your life. Not everything is permitted. You can be implicated in your father's death and have to pay a price, in guilt and in responsibility, even when you did not intend the blow. We are not beings for whom everything is allowed; therefore, in Dostoevsky's sense, there is a God. That God is not a timeless entity. It is the question whether we can live in the mood Christianity names as joy.

Fridman, a Russian speaker, asks how much is lost if you do not live in the language. Kelly is embarrassed by his own limits and still thinks the loss is real: languages open some ways of being and close others. Heidegger's line is that language is the house of being. When an Irish reader who understands Joyce speaks a sentence, the cadence pulls different thoughts out of you; the interesting part of language is not its logical form. Kelly tells students to compare translations, because the places translators diverge show that English words do not have the same contours as the Russian. Even Meister Eckhart, preaching Christianity in German instead of Latin, had to use grunt — ground, soil, what you can run your fingers through — a word Latin did not have, and a whole picture of God as our ground came with it.

Camus is the existentialist Kelly finds most readable, and for years he would not teach him. The Myth of Sisyphus opens with the line that there is but one truly significant philosophical question, and that is suicide. Kelly did not want that in a room of eighteen-year-olds. When he finally sat down with the essay, he was relieved to find Camus against suicide — and still stuck with a bleak picture of what a human life amounts to. Absurd, for Camus, is a technical term: every episode, and the life as a whole, presents itself as if it had a meaning, and it does not.

You walk past a window and see someone on the phone, animated, as if the call really mattered. Camus says it is a dumb show: not only foolish, but silent, significance withheld. Our days can feel the same. A colleague once told Kelly, around October, that he had gotten on the conveyor belt at the start of the semester and was just being carried along. That, for Camus, is Sisyphus: the boulder, the hill, the night, the walk down, the same work at dawn. We are condemned to it. The one freedom left is to embrace the sentence and stick it to the gods who put us here, rather than give up. Kelly thought that was a kind of happy ending, and also a dim account of what we are worth.

An essay Kelly wrote on aliveness is, he admits, a secret criticism of Camus. When a day goes dead and you do the usual things in the usual way, Camus thinks you have seen the truth. Kelly thinks you have also felt an inadequacy, a missing piece that could be there. Life is not only putting up with the conveyor belt. It is seeking what the absence points to, and we do meet that presence in moments of being truly alive — Miles answering the chord, a hand taken on a first date, a peak of sport. Clinical depression shows the other pole: people who look in the mirror and find that whether to keep living does not even matter. That, Kelly says, is chemistry. Camus's question is deep if you hear it as asking what would make these lives desirable, because meaning needs risk and vulnerability. It is a poor last word if you treat suicide as a completed action before you have walked the rest of the hotel.

Fridman puts it that way: a bad room is not a verdict on the building. Kelly hears Ivan Karamazov in the question, a brother who asks whether the world is worth living in and who may be, in some chemical sense, ill. Dostoevsky's further claim is that brain chemistry does not sit alone. How we care for one another, or isolate ourselves, changes the mood we are in. If Ivan can be saved, it will be through the love of his brother Alyosha. Humor belongs in the same family of risk. A classmate of Kelly's, Eric Kaplan, wrote a dissertation on Kierkegaard and the funny: a joke sets you on stable ground, then the punchline pulls the rug, and for a moment nothing holds you. That fall is kin to the vulnerability without which a life cannot mean much.

Fridman brings up The Big Lebowski, with its German-accented "nihilists" who do not care, and the Dude who drinks White Russians and lets the world be. Kelly has never taught the film. He did rewatch it, and he thinks the gang who call themselves nihilists have a bad reading of the idea. In the 1920s, Leopold and Loeb, students steeped in a Nazi-friendly misreading of Nietzsche, murdered a stranger to prove that nothing meant anything and that the will could desire a pointless crime. That is the opposite of Miles Davis. They thought there were no constraints, not even the situation's, and that you become who you are by violating what used to look like a limit. The Lebowski nihilists, Kelly suspects, inherit that mistake.

Apathy is the sharper question. The Greek is apatheia, without passions, and the Stoics wanted that, because passions scramble clear thought. The existentialists Kelly cares about — Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Heidegger, Sartre in his own way — go the other direction. Heidegger says care is the being of Dasein: what it is to be us is already to care. You can pretend not to, the way Sartre says you can pretend not to choose, but not-caring is still a way of caring. Sitting back is not a way out of the condition.

Ayn Rand, Fridman notes, is hugely read and often ignored by academic philosophy. Kelly is not interested, and he admits the verdict may rest on high-school memories of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. His caricature is a cousin of Sartre: we are radically free, the admirable people make something from nothing, and we are not brave enough when we fail to. Fridman fills in objectivism: reality is knowable, reason is the method, the virtue of selfishness means taking responsibility for your own life first. Kelly hears, in that picture, someone who either denies thrownness or wants us to act as if it were not there.

Beauvoir, he says, is almost the opposite, and she saw thrownness earlier than Sartre because she was a woman. "One is not born, but becomes, a woman": you are thrown into a culture that treats you a certain way because of gender, and by the time you are grown you are formed. The same is true of Sartre; privilege made it harder for him to notice. Fanon, their contemporary, wrote in the 1950s about being a Black man in a Paris elevator with a woman who did not know him and whose reaction still placed him. If you have not had that experience, it is much harder to feel how heavy the throw is. Rand's ambition to treat us as identical rational beings who would optimize ourselves if we got the axioms right feels to Kelly like the end of a road Plato and the Enlightenment already opened — a road that has led us astray.

Heidegger was born in 1889, the same year as Wittgenstein and Hitler, and he was a Nazi. In 1933 he became rector of the University of Freiburg, a political appointment. Anyone who wants his thought, Kelly says, has to contend with that. Fridman asks what existentialism says about standing up to evil. Kelly's own view, from this tradition, is that if a community's norms drag people down, you are already implicated. You may have reviled those norms and still given in to them. You do not get to isolate yourself and declare that the culture is not yours. Isolation is another way of taking responsibility by refusing it. The work is to face the implication and try to act so that the norms update.

The scene that holds this for him is Alyosha and Grushenka. Alyosha is a young monk, almost a saint; Grushenka is marked as a fallen woman, intensely erotic. He is attracted and ashamed, so each time they pass in the street he looks away. She reads the averted gaze as judgment: he can see what she is, and he must protect his purity. That is not what he intended, and it is how it is lived. He realizes he is dragging down someone whose life is already hard, instead of seeing the difficulty in her face. The demand, Kelly says, is almost radical empathy — to listen to the world well enough to notice the harm you did not mean.

Fridman adds that so-called woke culture has bullying built into it, the same species of evil it claims to fight. Standing in a wave of social justice still requires asking whether you are going too far, whether you are doing to people what you condemn in others. Certainty is how tribes have always named an enemy and then committed evil in the naming. Kelly agrees. A life that accepts responsibility for the norms it inhabits has to keep questioning itself, keep listening, and not be crushed by any single realization. Dmitri Karamazov says God and the devil are fighting, and the battlefield is the heart of man. There is no purely good way of doing things. Everything we do is undermined by some aspect of itself, which is why empathy is not optional.

The large claim in Heidegger, Kelly says, is that philosophy from Plato forward — maybe from the pre-Socratics — has been running on an assumption it had no right to make, and that assumption has led us astray. The right name for our time is a technological age. That does not mean we have a lot of gadgets. It means we live inside an understanding, never quite chosen, of what it is for anything to be at all: to stand there as an infinitely flexible reserve, to be optimized and made efficient. We treat a river that way when we put a hydroelectric plant on it. We treat ourselves that way too.

Kelly asks his students what their calendars look like. Is the goal of the day to pack it? Do you feel you have failed unless life is efficient enough that nothing slips by? That pressure is a clue. Other ages understood being differently: as a subject representing objects, as a creature in God's image, as what whooshes up, lingers, and fades — thunderstorms, Achilles' battle fury, flowers in spring. Heidegger thinks whatever stands at the ground of our understanding is not another entity, not God and not us. There is giving going on. Social norms we did not choose make anything intelligible at all, and those norms are always updating, with us implicated in the update. Call it the groundless ground: not a solid, eternal thing, but a basis that keeps changing.

The supreme danger of the age is that we never chose this picture and may live it until we destroy ourselves. Heidegger, quoting Hölderlin, says that in the supreme danger lies the saving possibility. If we notice that the picture was given, that we are involved in its being given, and that it can be superseded — if we listen the way Miles Davis listened — we are relating to it rightly. Optimization is dangerous when it is so obviously "the" value that you never ask whether it is the right one. No earlier epoch was nihilistic in our sense, so no earlier people felt efficiency as salvation. Homer's world is almost comically uninterested in it. Odysseus, wrecked and starving, is taken to a palace, and they hold three days of banquets before anyone asks his name, because Zeus is the god of strangers and a guest is where significance lies. We do not have to live that way. The point is that meaning can appear in places optimization would close.

Hubert Dreyfus, Kelly's teacher at Berkeley, died in 2017. In a period when English-speaking philosophy mostly ignored twentieth-century French and German thought, he was the crucial interpreter of Heidegger, and an astonishing teacher: he would tell a hall of three hundred students that he had read a text for forty years and never asked their question, and it would be true. Kelly arrived from math, computer science, and computational neuroscience, already bored by symbolic AI — once you made a system do the task, the task no longer seemed worth doing. Dreyfus's attacks on GOFAI, good old-fashioned AI, named a lack Kelly had only felt. The arguments came from the phenomenological tradition, and the debt eventually became a book, All Things Shining (2011), a tour of Western classics in a secular age, with a huge chapter on Melville that Kelly would not have had the chutzpah to attempt alone.

Moby-Dick, he says, is the other great novel of the nineteenth century, and it is the opposite of Karamazov. Dostoevsky offers an existential reading of Russian Orthodoxy. Melville starts from a Christianity that is already broken for Ishmael, the nobody on the ship, named for Abraham's other son, the one outside the Jewish and Christian line. The book opens in a dark November mood; Ishmael signs onto a whaler to get out of his hypos. Captain Ahab is rich, famous, charismatic, and megalomaniacally fixed on one whale, the largest and whitest, which once took his leg. The hunt is a religious project: what does my suffering mean, and who am I such that the leviathan at the world's center should treat me this way? A whale's eyes sit on the sides of a vast forehead, so you can never look it in the face — a metaphor for God. Ahab still wants to strike through the pasteboard mask.

Ishmael is saved, if he is saved, through Queequeg, a South Pacific pagan tattooed head to toe with his culture's writing of the universe's immutable mysteries, which nobody on the ship can read. Melville's bet, Kelly says, is that salvation comes not from getting monotheism right but from getting polytheism right: not one meaning but many local worlds that do not cohere. Love is Aphrodite's realm; battle fury is Ares'; they barely overlap. Melville wants to lure back the merry May-day gods of old and enthrone them in a sky that physics has left unhaunted. Meaning is fragmented. Trying to unify it again is the wrong ambition.

Dreyfus did not care about David Foster Wallace. Kelly was fascinated, and wrote a whole chapter on him as a comic observer of the present. Wallace's core diagnosis is the constant temptation of diversion through entertainment — the other face of Heidegger's efficiency. You are drawn to the stupid show precisely because it pulls you off the project of optimizing yourself. Wallace committed suicide after decades of medication and electroshock; Kelly does not pretend the physiological story is secondary. He still wanted to know whether the writing named a saving task that Wallace also felt could not be done.

In the Kenyon commencement speech, Wallace says we are free to interpret a situation however we like. A driver in an SUV cuts you off; you flip him off; you were assuming you were the center of the universe. Maybe he is racing to a dying spouse. Kelly thinks the insight is real and that the stories only free you if they might be true. Sometimes the act was aimed at you, and you still have to listen and make that situation right. Wallace writes as if you need not listen. The Pale King pushes the same freedom into hell: an IRS examiner in a warehouse that runs for miles, checking other people's returns, trying to endure boredom so complete that the hero finally levitates with bliss. That, Kelly says, is an unlivable ambition.

The other Wallace, the one Kelly wishes had been developed further, is the essay "Roger Federer as Religious Experience." A body is a limitation — soreness, exhaustion, death — and watching someone use a body like ours until the limit is partly transcended is a kind of salvation we can actually inhabit. Fridman often tells students that the key to life is to be unborable, to find levitation in everything and stay where the joy lasts. Kelly agrees halfway. Boredom is often failed attention. The perfection of that insight, that nothing should ever be less than joyful, is false. Grief is appropriate when someone dies; it intensifies joy by giving you the opposite. Alyosha's conversion comes through mourning Father Zosima, not around it. Ishmael compares himself to a Catskill eagle: even the downs happen at a great height, and they are still downs.

Wallace could describe himself as a roving eyeball on a cruise ship, noticing everything, and Kelly hears Ivan Karamazov in that stance. As a student Ivan made money by arriving first at tragedies, writing them up, and signing "eyewitness." He wanted to see, not to stop the harm. Isolation of that kind — taking yourself out of the world so you need not be attached — shows up in Notes from Underground too, and Kelly thinks it is a bad move. Sensitivity can become a way of not interfering with the specimen, until you are alone. Doing philosophy, Fridman says, changes you, and you may not know how until you look in the mirror.

Kelly wrote in MIT Technology Review that AI cannot be an artist, that creativity remains a human endeavor. Novelty is not enough. Good art is original, but not everything never done before is good art. It has to speak to an audience so that some people see themselves anew. Art is a communicative act, socially embedded. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring caused riots; it sounded like noise, a failed communication. Nietzsche said something similar about his own work: it had not yet reached its time. Now that way of writing music lives in Disney films. It changed what counts as good, which is the deep communication Kelly cares about.

Fridman does not want servant systems that leave all the mess of art to humans. He wants AI embedded the way new people are embedded, flaws included. AlphaZero surprised Go grandmasters; the magic, for him, would be if it sacrificed pieces while knowing the psychological weather it was creating — overconfidence, then nerves — and owned that as a communicative act. Kelly agrees on the condition that a community must believe the act was not random, that Stravinsky wrote that way because he was receptive to what needed to be said now. In a finite game, pattern recognition can earn that trust; players talk as if AlphaZero were playing from the future. In music or other non-finite art, Kelly finds it harder to know what the analog of that trust would be. Fridman answers that language, even a tweet, is also a combinatorial problem, and that we are too sure we are special. The harder remainder, he thinks, is touch, bodies, the music of sharing a planet; online, humans and AI are closer to starting even.

Kelly brings up Brian Christian, who kept winning the Loebner Prize's "most human human" contest and concluded that computers win Turing tests more often for two reasons: machines get more human, and humans get more like machines. Call-center workers reading a script have already given up judgment, decision, and responsibility, so you are no longer quite talking to a person even when you are. Technology solves real problems. Kelly's fear is that we are moving the norm of the good toward efficient problem-solving and away from aliveness. Fridman wonders whether that is a dinosaur's blindness to TikTok, and whether people raised inside digital devices might find a joy the elders cannot hear. Kelly surprises him by agreeing. He does not want to be a Luddite. The move is Hölderlin's again: in the supreme danger lies the saving power. Get into a relation with this picture of ourselves in which it does not control you, and in which some great joy is still recognizable. No nostalgia. No pure resistance.

Fridman saves the ridiculous question for the end: what is the meaning of life? Kelly does not know. The tradition, including the AI tradition as a descendant of Plato, says we are the rational, thinking ones. That is part of it, and there is more. We can experience, at once, the complete ungroundedness of everything meaningful and its real significance. How can it be significant and based on nothing? That contradiction is what constitutes us. We are the beings who have to hold that mystery in front of us and live in its light. He offers his students a line from Albert Borgmann, a German philosopher who taught in Montana: hope for many moments about which you can say there is no place you would rather be, nothing you would rather be doing, no one you would rather be with, and this you will remember well. Fill a life with those, and it will be meaningful. Fridman says the four conditions were met in the conversation itself.