What is nihilism?
Rahul: … Your first book, After Nihilism. I’ve got to say, I really enjoyed it. I was one of the proofreaders, and the initial draft was a complete mess until I proofread it. Obviously.
Okay, before we get into After Nihilism, what for you is nihilism?
Euwyn: What I normally describe to the laymen around me is this basic proposition. You know how, every time you chat to people and ask them what the meaning of life is, what the future holds, what we should look forward to, whether there’s any hope, they typically respond with some kind of irony or cynicism at its core? What I’m trying to address isn’t the old nihilism, a general sense of spiritual malaise. It’s more the irony people default to these days when there’s too much information. Whether it’s through technology, or because people see too many bad things going on: the climate’s going to collapse, people shouldn’t have kids, there’s so much evil, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. Or, as Žižek says, the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.
That’s what I mean by nihilism: this widespread feeling that there is no hope. One reference I like to go to, for those a bit more well-read, is Capitalist Realism. Fisher lays out quite a poignant take on how we’re stuck in a certain way of doing things, a certain system, whatever you call it, and there seems to be no way out. We have to try to find a way out, but we’re not sure how. But we have to try. That prevailing atmosphere is what I’m trying to write from. And the question is: is there a way forward? That’s it.
Rahul: The oncoming train, yeah. Something you and I have discussed before, Euwyn: the modern human condition, whether or not you’re religious, has been... what’s the word, when a doctor finds a symptom?
Euwyn: Diagnosed?
Rahul: Diagnosed, that’s it. This cultural malaise has been diagnosed as a kind of postmodern cynicism, where everything’s a joke. And I think there’s something to it. The tone we most commonly use is cringe, where people live life...
Euwyn: Completing each other’s sentences. There we go.
Rahul: ...with the detachment of a ten-foot pole. You don’t want to be too attached to anything. And it’s funny, because we’re back to one of our master signifiers. It’s the whole Western Buddhism thing: everything is a cosmic phenomenon, let’s just observe the world without attaching ourselves too much to it. It’s the rise of Stoicism in that regard too. Call it a bastardised Stoicism, where you don’t want to commit yourself too much to the world. Don’t be reactive; take it in, then let it go. New-age stuff.
And then, once you’ve diagnosed the symptom, I think the cure is to fall in love. When you fall in love and let the love-event happen, as it were, there’s no detaching yourself. You fall fully into the world. And in the Badiouian sense, the fidelity you keep to that love-event is, I’d even argue, the ethically and morally right act. You commit yourself to it. For Badiou, as you know, it’s politics, science, art and love. I think the theory of the event is his most beautiful theory: this disjuncture that takes place in your being, and you commit yourself to it. Which I find is truly an antidote to what you’re pointing at. Call it being too cool for life. Don’t commit yourself too much to life.
Two rivers of tears
Euwyn: Actually, I have a small anecdote here, which is quite funny. Most of the time when I mention After Nihilism to people, I lay out what I said earlier: here’s the premise, here’s nihilism, this is the general mood today. Then I say the question I’m trying to ask is whether there’s a way forward. And then they ask me: so, is there one? And that’s the moment where I usually go, ah, well, read the book to find out.
Rahul: Your marketing propaganda.
Euwyn: But if you’ve read self-help books, you expect some kind of practical lesson at the end. Here’s an ethic for navigating the modern void, the abyss, whatever you call it.
Rahul: 12 Rules for Life.
Euwyn: Or if you’re more versed in literary books, you might be expecting something like Dante’s Divine Comedy, where you go down through hell, all the way up through heaven, and everything’s okay at the end of it.
I always find it a tricky question to answer. Today everything feels nihilistic. Is there a way forward? I think it’s an interesting question to ask. Is there a simple answer? I don’t think so. There’s what you just mentioned, Rahul: the ethic becomes love. Or, as people like McGowan would say, living with contradiction as opposed to shying away from it. Or Land, who has a different take again: let everything be, let the volcano erupt and consume you. There are many varieties of answers, which is why I refrain from a simple one.
But you mentioned the event. Where my book culminates is quite simple, at least philosophically. At the midpoint, the book works through nihilism philosophically, and the movement is simple: nihilism becomes nihilistic over itself, because it’s a movement that does not complete.
I write about it this way. First, you cry the first tear. This is one small part of the book. You tear up when you realise you’re not happy. You don’t have the job you want, the girl you want, whatever. But then the second tear happens. You cry the second tear when you realise that life itself has the immanent possibility of such things happening. Life has the capacity to disappoint you. So first you become disappointed, you start despairing, and then you’re disappointed over the fact that disappointment is possible. And it keeps redoubling and redoubling.
Through this simple move, I show that nihilism is not the final act. It’s more of a freeze frame: you think the pain of the present is all there is and there’s nothing else to come. And I don’t think that’s only the layman’s nihilism, where people are a bit depressed, everything is grey, there’s nothing to look forward to, no kids. Even with philosophers. Take Camus, to use a more elementary one: one must imagine Sisyphus happy. Countless young people like to cite this quote. But to me, without going too in depth, that’s basically nihilism in the hidden garb of courage. I bear my nihilism upon me like a warrior’s armour. That’s still nihilism. That’s still cynicism. It’s still a freeze frame of today, as something only despair can do justice to, with no place for hope.
And I push this even further. What about what the likes of McGowan and Žižek say, the Christian atheist types? All there is is contradiction. When Christ died on the cross, that marked a primordial puncture where even God was separated from himself, and the fall was reflected in the body and being of God himself. Here’s where I take another tangent towards the end of the book: perhaps that’s not all there is. There’s still a freeze frame, even of the crucifixion. Instead of thinking about resurrection and all the things those people might deem naive tropes or naive optimism, you take the death, the void, the abyss, as the horizon. You take that as the truth, as the freeze frame, and there’s no longer any openness to the event. Whether that’s the event of a resurrection, or a second coming as per Christian eschatology, or, in Fisher’s sense, a new kind of capitalism that isn’t the sins of today, or, in Žižek’s sense, perhaps the realisation of true communism. I’m not sure.
After Nihilism is a meditation on being
Rahul: Okay, I’m going to narcissistically read out my review of the book. I wrote this when I’d read the Descent and just started the Ascent. I was probably around page 73 or 79, but I think it still captures what I felt. You were talking about this notion of... not totality in the philosophical sense, but your analogy with communism. I’d say the ultimate ideology of today, which is now being deeply challenged, is neoliberalism and the markets: the way through is radical decentralisation, which is what all these crypto bros are obsessed with. That’s still a determinate whole. It says, this is where reality stops; it’s fully determined. And it’s a subtle argument, because I think the same thing could be said about... what’s it called, the Buddhist thing... the karmic cycle of birth and rebirth. That itself is a determinate whole. And ultimately, I defend reason. The point of reason is to break through even that determinate whole, to find how determinate being itself leads to contradictions.
So the reason I’m reading this out is that I want you to challenge it. Do you think I’ve got it right? Tell me where I’m wrong, where you’d push me further, or even counter what I’m saying.
“We are told a crisis of meaning blights modernity, a crisis leading to an insurmountable alienation and a despair that stubbornly lingers in the modern psyche. We are all nihilists in one way or another. The rationalist resolutely evangelises science and reason as our salvation, while the conservative has a nostalgia for a past that never existed. The New Ager hopes to find salvation by the euphoric prolapse of the inner, while the technooptimist follows suit vicariously through the machine. Conversely, Euwyn’s metaphysical contention is that reality is non-determined. Ergo, nihilism is far from the end but the beginning. The antidote, as it were, for the nihilist is to recognise they have not gone far enough.”
That, for me, is the beauty of this book. Says me, reading out my own review narcissistically. But this was my sincere take, not a review because someone asked me for one, especially not you. So push me. Tell me where I get it wrong.
Euwyn: Actually, we should have said this at the start. You’re not only my best mate, and we’re not only doing a podcast about the book. You wrote the first page of the book. I have it right beside me. So, no small thing. Thank you.
When I read that, I immediately felt you’d captured the philosophical move I’m trying to make. But as I said earlier, the move is quite a simple one. I don’t think it’s very original, at least in the scheme of philosophy these days. There are much more interesting wedges philosophers are working at, not worth listing, especially over the last two hundred years.
But here’s where I’d reorient the frame. My project as a whole wasn’t only a philosophical one. With After Nihilism I was trying to unify a work of art and a work of philosophy. Again, not very original; many people have tried. Land comes to mind, and Lyotard, whom I’m reading right now. A work of art attempts to put the reader within a certain mood or atmosphere. A work of philosophy aims to clarify something via conceptual means, even if those means are polemical or rhetorical.
If I describe what’s actually in the book: there’s a Descent and an Ascent. It goes down, and then it goes up. But at the very beginning there’s an Overture, which is a set of journals. That’s very important to me. The beginning is meant to put the reader within that mood, like when a film puts you in a frame and tells you: this is what you’re to inhabit, this is the feeling you’re to draw the rest from.
So on the outset, from the title and your brilliant review (you are a genius), it appears to be a polemic on nihilism. But I think it’s a bit more than that. For me, it’s a meditation on being. The whole book is a meditation on what it is to be. Not just the self of the senses, which is what a work of art tries to reach, but being itself: the self as it appears both to the senses and to cognition, as something that first exists and then exists to figure out that existence, or the paradox of its existence. So I’d call After Nihilism a deeply existential text, and within that texture there’s the philosophical move Rahul just brilliantly summarised. I’m building a kind of schematic around what it is to be, especially when hope is lost, when desire feels ambiguous and there’s nothing to anchor it, when knowledge and the will feel feeble, and when faith, any sense of belief or trust, feels paradoxical and all contradiction. That’s being in this sense. So there’s an implicit ontology, an implicit metaphysic.
Rahul: Thank you, Euwyn. I know, I know I’m a genius. Appreciate that.
Euwyn: So it’s not just that we’re nihilists today and here’s how to get out of nihilism. It’s that we as human beings are pulled toward something beyond ourselves at all times. Something we want, which we can’t anticipate, can’t understand. Whether it’s something we once were or something we want to be but are yet to be: a becoming that’s also our unbecoming. Or, to put it in Kierkegaard’s sense: thought wants to think what thought cannot think. Being wants to be what being cannot be; that’s my own spin on it. I know this is along the lines of what people call anti-philosophy: writing philosophically about that thing which is always pulling us from ourselves, which we always try to reach but can’t quite leap across.
So yes, I’m putting up the guise of trying to solve nihilism, to put it naively. But the larger project is to put forward what I see being to be: what being is like, and what being feels like. And there’s an implicit telos in it. We’re trying to move there. When we become nihilists, that’s when the sense arrives that there’s no way forward. That the thought which wants to be thought cannot be thought. And when you say that decisively, you become a nihilist.
Nihilism is not depression
Rahul: Sorry, I’ll let you finish, but this is really important. And here’s where I’ll be a good analytic philosopher...
Euwyn: Go, go.
Rahul: ...and be precise with language. When we use the term nihilist, I think people colloquially equate it with being depressed. They make it a mental-health thing. That’s not something I thought of at all when I was reading the book. But it reminded me of something from one of my heroes, Peter Rollins, a brilliant theologian and amazing storyteller. I think he was doing a livestream on Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. And sorry, a side note, I just want to put this out there: this would have been the book Kierkegaard wrote if he’d ended up with Regine.
Euwyn: I take that as a criticism, because I think all of Kierkegaard’s great writing came from the fact that he wasn’t with Regine.
Rahul: So Peter makes this really important point, and this is where I’ll defend philosophy to my death. You mentioned anti-philosophy; I’d count that as philosophy too, but I won’t go on tangents. Peter says that in the human condition, there are biological symptoms. You get sick; we’re physical, biological beings. These can be fixed through medicine, through advances in science and technology. Then there’s the psychological. And I’d say all the terms we use right now have been subsumed into the psychological, which is why I said nihilism isn’t depression, or anxiety, or a mental-health thing. I’m a defender of psychology and mental health, of course. Go see a therapist, a counsellor; to a certain extent, people can deal with these things that way.
But then there’s one other peculiar state of being, which only human beings experience, as far as I know. I’m anthropocentric here, I admit. It’s the existential dimension of existence. Even though we borrow terms from psychology for it, it isn’t a psychological condition. It can’t be resolved through therapy or medication, despite our current ideology. Call it therapism. People try to find cures in psychology. And the other part, which makes me retch, is spirituality. Go to Bali to find yourself, do a meditation retreat. I’m being somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
But it’s important that when you write about nihilism, it’s not something that can be analysed and diagnosed via a scientific paradigm and then resolved. In fact, the very idea that it can be resolved is part of the problem: trying to find the answer, to finally get the thing. And I understand, because after all you’re a poet-philosopher, Kierkegaardian in the way you try to express that state of being. I think for you it’s ultimately art: beauty, aesthetic expression. Personally, I believe this can also be explored through philosophy. But philosophy has its limits, in that it’s linguistic. At the end of the day, philosophy is conceptual analysis. So the question is: these states of being we’re trying to articulate, but necessarily fail to articulate, can we have a philosophical project that gets at them? I think some philosophers have done this, to the best of their ability. But maybe here’s where you need something like art. A practice, as it were, to house this. I don’t even want to say survive, because that sounds too biological. To house it.
Diagramming oneself out of a whirlpool
Euwyn: Okay, you’re pulling a lot of threads here. On philosophy and anti-philosophy, I fully agree: it’s not a binary. Not between philosophy and anti-philosophy, and not between philosophy and art. But here’s where I find philosophy uncanny at times. As I described earlier, life, being itself, is always caught up in a forward motion. There’s a pull, a gravity exerting itself at all times. So when philosophy happens, and I mean philosophy in a strict sense, the way Kierkegaard might describe it, since he calls himself a poet and not a philosopher...
Rahul: Sorry, can I interrupt? I think that’s the right move. One always has to speak of philosophy in the strictest possible sense. I’ll explain why later, but I totally second that.
Euwyn: Like the true philosopher. But yes, Kierkegaard calls himself a poet, not a philosopher. But would you call Kierkegaard a philosopher? Yes. Philosophy can absorb everything, even its opponents par excellence. Still, when you try to do pure philosophy, philosophy in the strict sense, a work of conceptual clarification or, as Deleuze might say, of inventing concepts, it feels to me like someone trying to diagram their way out of a whirlpool.
That’s why I have a lot of sympathy for people like Land, who write as someone caught in a whirlpool. Land has this line I love: the floor is also a wall. I want to be fully consumed, fully annihilated, but even the floor is a wall. I can’t get past it. So I’m caught in a whirlpool in which I can’t fully die and can’t fully live, can’t fully rest and can’t fully move the way I want to. And that produces a kind of sublime feeling, of being caught within the movement, which itself started as a paradox, because when you think back to how the whole movement began, you land in further confusion and vexation. You’re caught up in it, and you’re trying to find clarity, a standstill: clarity in the mind, clarity in the soul, some kind of psychological resonance. But you can’t write of the sublime, meaning the feeling of thinking within that gap, in non-sublime terms.
That’s why it feels to me like a double consciousness. Here’s an analogy. When someone sells you a course on how to make money, you’re instantly aware of the double consciousness: you know they’re making money by telling you how to make money. But when we read philosophy, we tend to get seduced by the glitter and sparkle of conceptual heavyweights, and we lose that double awareness. We forget that the philosopher is trying to offer clarity, to sell you truth, while being in the mode of untruth. Playing a sublime game with a non-sublime medium. Having their cake and eating it too.
So I’m drawn to this mode of writing and thinking, and I think my book reflects that. It’s pretty unphilosophical. For one, I resisted the urge to add footnotes. I quoted Hegel, I quoted Lacan out of my ass. Chances are I misquoted and misunderstood them. I didn’t really care. I just quoted people. To me, the best kind of writing is the merging of art and philosophy. Call it a kind of anti-philosophy: inhabiting the whirlpool and writing from out of it, not against it. There are more things from your review I wanted to address, but I’ll pause here so I don’t open too many threads.
Contradiction as a lazy master signifier
Rahul: Two things. First, I want to change my blurb to say the ultimate message of Euwyn Goh’s book is that philosophy is Amway. It’s a pyramid scheme.
Euwyn: It could be.
Rahul: That makes a lot more sense. Next edition. Second: the only way to walk through this philosophically is in the strictest possible sense, starting with the highbrow statement of what philosophy does. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but in the past couple of months I’ve stopped using the term contradiction in our chats. Two people told me this: [inaudible], and the analytic philosopher Graham Priest, when I interviewed him. Brilliant guy, amazing thinker. It’s a vibe I picked up from people moving around Ljubljana School circles, the Slovenian school: everything is contradiction. Not in their writing, though. I think a lot of people make the mistake of not reading Žižek and that school. You’ve got to read them. That’s where you get the real good stuff. The interviews are frankly just entertainment. The texts are where it’s all at.
Euwyn: Just to interrupt, that reminds me of how Lacan used to run his seminars. It’s a performance. Reading Lacan is different from hearing Lacan.
Rahul: He did the other thing too. In the outer lectures he’d talk about the most esoteric, crazy things, but the inner circle got the most basic stuff. You think when you get to the elite you’ll find the secrets. No, there’s no secret stuff. The inner circle was the most basic.
Euwyn: Not quite.
Rahul: And I realised it’s a mistake, an intellectually lazy approach, to say, oh, it’s a contradiction. Here I’m a good naturalist, an empiricist. There are many things where you can put in the hard work, what I’d call your existential energy, into empirically verifying them. If it’s something to do with society, you can do it sociologically, the way the late Marx did. In a way he went from being a philosopher to a kind of scientist, writing Capital: really careful, analytic reasoning. One mistake we all make is using a concept as a kind of boring, spurious master signifier: oh, it’s all contradiction. That’s why, even though I very much resonate with the crucifixion and the Christian atheist theology, even its orientation to Christianity, it’s a mistake to just say: Christ goes to the crucifixion, God is dead, God dies on the cross. To defeat this nihilism, for lack of a better term, I think it requires something beyond that. Which I still believe philosophy can achieve, because I am, after all, a defender of reason. But there are other avenues one has to explore.
The last thing I’ll say before I give it back to you: that’s why, when it comes to the most technical thinking I do in philosophy, I always appreciate philosophy that’s in dialogue with another discipline. For me it’s usually philosophy of science, and philosophy of AI, which is a subset of it. Or political philosophy, whatever. Because I don’t want to get into metaphysical woo-woo games where you lazily terminate thought using thinking. That could happen to all of us, out of sheer laziness. Anyway, I’ll give it back to you before I continue my yapping.
The freeze-frame of the crucifixion
Euwyn: For sure. Going back to what you said, Rahul, that’s also my gripe with that whole group, and I’d include Peter Rollins. Although Žižek has been interesting lately. I think he wrote something on Substack recently about Christianity, and I found it quite different from the Žižek we’re used to. So things might be changing. Or maybe it always was that way and I need to check again. I’ll check and get back to you.
But I do feel that when you treat the crucifixion as the absolute event, that’s once again nihilism as a freeze frame. That’s why I like to look at the whole myth. The crucifixion didn’t end there. It ended in a resurrection, and in a promise. One thing I find very interesting in Christianity, which I find absolutely lost in these modern Christian atheist thinkers, is the thinking of eschatology and, not resurrection actually, salvation. There’s no sense of salvation or eschatology in these thinkers. I think that comes out of their philosophical influences: you end up at a sophisticated kind of nihilism, where the horizon becomes bleak and the crucifixion says everything. Then you freeze that frame and skip the rest, or call the rest naivety, naive optimism. It also reminds me of Julie Reshe, who has this idea of negative philosophy, negative psychoanalysis...
But there’s a non-naive kind of ascent, which I write about in the second part of the book. You’re not ascending from a descent for good, where all of a sudden everything is sunflowers and sunlight and everyone’s happy. That’s not the case.
Terribly syncopated harmony
Euwyn: There’s a Bataille line I like a lot. But first, the analogy I wrote in the book itself. The piano is a musical instrument, and it’s a beautiful thing. Especially in classical times, people treated it as a medium for worship, for celebration, for joy. Only in recent times, because of our hard scientificity, have we broken the piano down: it’s just wood and ceramic and a bunch of black and white keys. And even more peculiarly, if you go into music theory, the piano is actually out of tune. Ever so slightly out of tune. So what business does an out-of-tune piece of wood have being used for meaningful worship?
Here’s the kicker. If you tuned it perfectly according to one key, it would only make sense in that one key. It would only be perfect there. If you want it to sing in twelve keys, you have to make it not perfect, ever so slightly in error. This structural wrongness is what makes room for what we call beauty. And I think that’s a sublime sort of fact to ponder. But where does that bring us? Let me get my thoughts together.
Rahul: You were talking about the Ascent. Go ahead.
Euwyn: Yes. I landed that whole analogy with a Bataille quote I really like: life, being itself, is a terribly syncopated dance, conscious of the horror it is in key with. But it’s a dance and a harmony nonetheless. So when you get to the Ascent, there’s a non-naive version. Not just that everything is despair, there’s no hope, no meaning, and it’s about living with that. No. You can cultivate a certain relationship to it that’s, to put it in absolutely dumb terms I hate, optimal for your wellbeing. Or perhaps better: a way of relating to it that’s more just.
The Second Coming
In the last part of the book I talk about salvation and eschatology, to go back to how I started. Salvation, to me, looks like something resembling openness to the event. In the beginning you become disillusioned, because you don’t get what you want, life throws you lemons, life is disappointing. Then you become a nihilist and find out that this isn’t quite all there is. The floor is also a wall, and it doubles upon itself; disappointment becomes an infinite regress, a dialectical development of a bad infinity. And at the end of the day you realise there’s something more. Perhaps within the bad infinity itself, within the dialectic, both sides exist, and you can learn to relate to the whole swing, the whole ebb and flow.
But I’m not going to fall into the Eastern philosophical or religious thing where you’re supposed to sit in the middle, like the Tao, and mediate all the forces. I don’t think you can do that. Paradoxically, when you become aware of the ebb and flow, of the goods and the bads, the extremes, and that you inhabit neither at once, you somehow slide all the way up into the good. You develop an affinity, an awareness: that terribly syncopated dance, conscious of the horror it’s in key with, but a dance nevertheless. A harmony in itself, even if a distorted one.
So salvation, to me, is this. You’ve discovered the abyss. You’ve spoken to God. You realise God is infinitely far from you and, at the same time, infinitely deep inside you, as per Augustine. And if you’re open to the event, if you don’t close things up or lock the horizon in upon your disappointment (because the future always tends to surprise and shock you), then that is the event of salvation, when it happens genuinely and authentically in a human being. Salvation becomes the moment at which fidelity to the event, openness to the event, begins to mean something.
And here’s where eschatology comes into the picture, which I end the book with. There is the promise of a second coming. I don’t treat this literally, like a white guy with a beard coming down from the sky and bringing us all up with him. It’s the embodiment of the future itself, which comes to receive everything we desire. To go back to the beginning: being wants to be what it cannot be; thought wants to think what it cannot think. There’s a pull toward something, something to do with clarity. I’m very conscious that it’s easy to slide into some end-of-history theorisation of metaphysics, so I want to leave it open-ended, undetermined. But at the same time there’s reason to hope, because something will resolve it, no matter how absurd it may be.
That’s why I love Kierkegaard. He’s all about fidelity toward the paradox. And I think the paradox, even in the Kierkegaardian vision, is a paradox that comes from the future, even though it can announce itself from all directions of time and space. If you can achieve a certain fidelity toward that, that’s salvation. Salvation grounded on the promise of a second coming: basically, Christian eschatology.
So, a lot of threads. Again, there are a lot of naive ways to take this, a lot of ways to turn it into a metaphysical assumption, and I’m wary of overstepping. But implicit in the writing of After Nihilism, I’m polemically putting forward these suggestions. And hopefully, whoever reads it, if they feel a certain kinship with the thoughts, will be pulled toward it as necessary.
The (un)true, the (un)good, and the (un)beautiful
Rahul: Isn’t it also interesting that when one tries to find this equilibrium, this middle state, it always goes wrong? I mean in this caricatured Eastern-philosophy or Eastern-spirituality way, and I’d argue it is a caricature. It always goes awry. We all know stories of this, probably because of the circles we’re in: people who get into the spirituality stuff and become the most obnoxious kind, the kind you just want to punch in the face. And even worse, they end up going further down into their depression, to the point where it becomes quite self-destructive. Which is quite unfortunate.
And the second thing comes from the point you made. You’re going to think I’m being a bit crazy. When you learn to embody and orient yourself toward this paradox, this contradiction, and mediate it, when you take that ethical stance, you’re driven toward the true, the good and the beautiful, the classic concepts of philosophy. And that’s why I’m against AI alignment. I think if you truly had AGI, it wouldn’t do what the tech CEOs say, that AGI is going to take over the world and make us humans its slaves. The CEOs have that in their own heads to get some kind of jouissance out of, I don’t know, exploding people, I guess. But if you really had reasoning, intelligent beings, machines, I believe the whole point of their reason would be to learn to mediate this paradox, and then even to ethically orient themselves toward the true, the good and the beautiful. Because ultimately what makes life worth living is beauty: the true, the good, the beautiful. I’d even go as far as saying that’s not something we do in spite of life, but because of life. And for me, that’s ultimately my Christianity. I orient myself toward that.
Euwyn: Okay, wait. I just want to make a clarification. The beautiful, the good and the true are amazing, awesome, very uplifting classical principles. But here’s where I’d put the Bataillean spin on it: this is a beauty marred with ugliness, a goodness that’s evil, a truth that’s untruth. When I say thought wants to think what thought cannot think, being wants to be what being cannot be, both are pursuing something eternally elusive. Whether it’s being or thought or a combination of both, and here’s where the neorationalists have a lot to say that I have nothing to add to. And I suppose the ideal there is truth, rather than the classical ideals, which might feel unnecessarily transcendent. Not truth in the objective sense. Truth is subjectivity: the truth that hits you, reorients you from the inside of your intestines, rejects you, puts you in a washing machine. Sorry, just a quick clarification.
Rahul: Yeah. And I want to clarify too: I don’t mean any of this in a transcendent sense. For me it’s something here. I’m a naturalist. I’ve been thinking about these things philosophically, with little regard to my lived experience. It’s very common to talk about lived experience, and I think lived experience is a bit overrated. Get over yourself.
“The Meaning Crisis”
Rahul: I want to touch on the problem of meaning. A bit of context for the listener, because it’s important here: apart from being a writer, Euwyn is also heavily in the startup world. He’s been part of accelerators, and he even did Balaji’s Network School. So, very much in the tech-bro world.
Euwyn: Unfortunately.
Rahul: Hey, I didn’t say it. He said it.
Euwyn: For capital. For capital.
Rahul: He’s one of Balaji’s slaves at the Network School. I can cut that out if you want. Anyway, one essay in this world, for those not in touch with the tech stuff, is Machines of Loving Grace by Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic. In chapter five he talks about what happens once AI, or AGI, solves all our problems. Climate change is solved, cancer is cured, we all live in this utopia. Then the problem becomes the problem of meaning. Where do human beings get meaning from, when so much of our meaning comes from work, from having a vocation? Of course that’s not all meaning is, but it’s a big part of it. At least for me: I enjoy my job, I like what I do, and as alienating as it can be at times, I find meaning in my work.
So there’s that angle: when AGI takes over the world, what are we going to do as humans? That’s somewhat fanciful. But there are also a lot more legitimate, well-thought-out concerns. John Vervaeke talks about the meaning crisis that’s arrived as a symptom of modernity. He might even say it’s because of secularism, though I’d totally push back on that; that’s a different conversation. And then there’s Daniel Schmachtenberger talking about the polycrisis: climate change, economic inequality, migration. That’s its own kind of crisis alongside the meaning crisis. In my view, Vervaeke and Schmachtenberger have thought about these things a lot more deeply than whatever essay Dario wrote.
So let me pose the question this way, Euwyn: how would you juxtapose After Nihilism with the problem of meaning? Or, to put a bit of ornamentation on it, the meaning crisis?
Euwyn: The medium is the message, to put it in McLuhan’s sense. Actually, I have some thoughts on how we should think about nihilism, but I’ll put that aside for now and go through these one by one.
Dario’s is the one I was thinking about most as you were talking. The medium of the message is that Anthropic is probably going to IPO soon. So they’re putting out words that are, and have to be, in their own interest. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what those interests are: the interest of capital. What do you get by putting out a message that the world is going to change, be vastly different from what it once was, tapping into a worldwide anxiety? You get views, attention, people thinking about it. I’m not saying it’s in bad faith. It could very well be in good faith. But truth becomes filtered through capital, because the incentive becomes the game. They’re playing a great marketing game. Anthropic, and I think even OpenAI these days: every single month they’ve invented a new groundbreaking model that will kill us all and replace our scientists and our philosophers. That’s the game. If I were Dario, I’d put out the message that would increase my stock price and pay back my shareholders. And yes, I work in the game. I’m a co-founder myself, and I used to work in venture capital, so I understand how it works.
So that’s the bad-faith part. The good-faith part is him saying: all these things are going to happen post-AI, so what happens then? That’s legitimate. We don’t know what AI is going to do to actual workers, in a Marxist sense. There’s some kind of anxiety: who’s going to make it out alive, who’s going to be able to eat, who are going to be the new overlords. But honestly, I think the good-faith part is overstated, so I can’t help flipping back to the bad-faith part. In every single age there’s a doom and an apocalypse. Our age just happens to be vastly more informed: information travels at the speed of light, and anxiety multiplies with the volume of information. The world was always going to end, ever since the Bible was written. So in a way, this is the modern, capitalist overlords tapping into that, whether in good faith or bad. Is something going to happen? Look, I don’t know.
Nihilism is an attitude toward time
But here’s where I can segue back into what I think nihilism actually is. I thought about this and just wrote it down: nihilism is specifically an attitude toward time. That’s always been the case, whether now in the age of AI or back when the Roman Empire was falling. The present moment isn’t flat. It’s the stretch of the past concaving into the future. Think of whenever we talk about the world ending, or anything to do with the mood of the day, the spirit of the age. That life has no more meaning, there’s no more hope. Cybernetic, climate or environmental doomerism. Or the various spiritual, religious or philosophical coping mechanisms we come up with to handle it. It all rises and falls on the same thing: our relationship to time. How we attend to the present moment as the nexus of the past and the future.
In the book I look at the past and the future as two different consequences. First, the past is always revisable. There’s a chapter in the Ascent where I say: don’t foreclose upon things. Remember not the former things, in the words of the prophet Isaiah. So you never say: we were once happy before mobile phones (in the sense of Jonathan Haidt), the world was okay, the children were happy.
Rahul: This is where it’s very common to blame everything on social media.
Euwyn: Yes, that’s one thing, and there are so many others. Now the world is unsafe because of whatever. No. You could even put Marx in the same category.
Rahul: Right, of course. This is where Marx meets Hegel. But let’s not go there.
Euwyn: So, the past: don’t foreclose on it. Remember not the former things. The past is infinitely revisable. The past as I perceive it right now will be different from the past as I perceive it in ten years. That’s nihilism with respect to the past: not foreclosing on a certain freeze frame, but knowing that things change. Once again, openness to the event.
On the other side, looking to the future, and to put it once again philosophically naively, it’s the possibility of the impossible. That’s what openness to the event is. Openness to a revelation, to put it in more Christian terms, or a eureka, which I used in my book once just for fun. Openness to an epiphany that will reorient me, change me from the inside. Truth as subjectivity, as Kierkegaard talks about it. And to put the eschatological spin on it: God has come, God is present, and God will come again. To ring it in the highest and lowest keys of music. I like to think about things aurally.
So nihilism is an attitude with respect to time. With Dario, I think the message is marred by his incentives. Vervaeke, as you mentioned, is more interesting, because I don’t think he has the same incentives. He’s not out there for views; he’s out there to spread a message. But here’s where I think he falls into what I’d call a situational trap. He says these things are unique to our age because of so-and-so. I’d say no: the world was always going to end, ever since Christ came. Look through biblical history. Why was Revelation written in the beginning, in such an obscure, unreadable, symbolically messed-up way? I think it’s writing the sublime: writing, sublimely, the event of the second coming, which is to come in whatever shape or form, to all the ages that would proceed from the Christian age. So if the world was always going to end, and the Bible had already written about this two thousand years ago, and nihilism is all about an attitude toward the past and the future, then it’s no surprise that today we have the same pattern: Dario doing his thing on the capital side, and Vervaeke doing his on the this-age-is-different side.
At the same time, I don’t like to flatten history into an eternal recurrence. It’s not just an eternal cycle; something is actually happening. But in the context of nihilism, of how we relate to things, I’d prefer to think of it as the same as ever. And with respect to the future: something is going to happen that we can’t expect, and things will turn out for the better. That’s it, whatever it may be.
The Day after the Last Day
Rahul: Obviously I’m with you. We should say that you and I are deeply Christian in this thinking, in many regards. This notion of the end times, the apocalypse, eschatological thinking. There have been many end times, probably ever since we’ve had writing. But the other problem, the annoying thing about the end times, is that the bloody thing never ends. The apocalypse never comes. That’s the worst part.
Euwyn: Oh yes. There’s a line I really like, which I used in the last chapter: the Messiah will come not on the last day, but the day after the last day. I love that.
Rahul: Indeed. And that’s the problem. It would have been a lot more convenient if the damn thing ended. But it doesn’t end, so we’ve got to figure it out.
Euwyn: Okay, here’s one more spin, which actually goes past my book; maybe it’s a future book. In the book I kind of glorify openness to the event, and again, that’s not very philosophically original. People like John Caputo, postmodern theologians, already write in this vein, drawing on both Kierkegaard and Derrida: the à venir, the to-come. Openness to that is the fidelity, the salvation and eschatology. But I think it’s more than that. And this is why I love Kierkegaard: fidelity to possibility is also torture. It’s torment.
That goes back to Christianity. Read The Sickness Unto Death. When you become aware of your own despair, you become more yourself.
Rahul: Indeed.
Euwyn: You become aware of your disappointments, of your capacity to be disappointed, and you become disappointed over that. You become more human when that happens. Kierkegaard places himself as a physician of sorts: you become healthy by knowing that you’re sick, which is also a very Christian argument. That’s the whole concept of sin. Men are sinful creatures. To put it more philosophically: we’re infinitely split apart from that which we aspire to. I don’t know, that sounds Kantian, but I’m sure there are other ways to formulate it. There’s an infinite gulf. That’s sin. We aren’t able to cross it. When we’re aware of it, we become more ourselves, but at the same time we’re tormented by it.
And when we’re saved, we’re saved by virtue of our fidelity to both: that awareness, that despair, and the possibility of the impossible, that one day we might cross that gulf. Though again, I frame it too actively, because we can’t cross the gap by virtue of ourselves. In a way we’re eternally passive. The truth comes at us, relative to our receptivity to it. So the more openness and fidelity you have to the event, the more aware you are of your capacity to be disappointed, and the more torment there is as well. In a sense salvation is a good thing, because your attitude toward time becomes more open-ended and more hopeful. At the same time, it becomes more ambiguous and more absurd. That’s what Camus complains about. And Kierkegaard speaks about the absurd as the paradox: the paradox is the active thing, our receptivity is always passive in relation to it, and we can only ever receive ourselves, as a condition, from the paradox. Which I like, if we put it in the schema of everything we’ve just discussed. But I’ll pause here.
The torment (pathos) of the sublime
Rahul: I agree, I get what you’re saying. But maybe it’s just my punch-on here. I can’t help pushing back a little on the notion of torment, because that’s also its own determination. It’s like you fall in love with the torment. You fall in love with your own suffering: oh my God, this openness is so dizzying, I can’t take how open-minded I am. Part of the reason I’m pushing back is technical, and part of it is probably just my punch-on. It goes back to why I defend reason.
Two examples. One is psychoanalytic. And please, whatever I say about psychoanalysis is just from theory, from what I’ve read. In no way am I saying this is what takes place in a proper clinical setting, the way an analyst would work, or the way you’d go through transference. But here’s one way I understand it. The analysand comes to the realisation that there is no cure. That’s the end, the cure, as it were. You see your split subjectivity, and you learn to house that fundamental contradiction at your core as a subject: split, incomplete, all the terms theorists use. And when you go through the process, that realisation is kind of unspeakable. It doesn’t mean: okay, I’m a split subject, I desire the objet a, the object I’ll never acquire, now I’ll get on with my life. You can come to that place rationally, with reason, but you’re still going to suffer. You’re still going to be heartbroken, still desire things, still have that yearning. But I still think something fundamentally changes in that realisation. It’s similar to how you said you learn to mediate the paradox, and that creates some kind of hope, or even moves you toward the good. So it’s not: oh God, it’s all terrible, and you wallow in your own contradiction. There’s something there.
The other example is the famous one from Sartre, in Existentialism Is a Humanism. A student comes to him and asks: do I take care of my mother, or do I go to England and fight the Nazis? This is when the Nazis had overrun France. And Sartre tells him, essentially, that it’s a decision only he can make. The reason I bring it up is that, yes, as you say, the apocalypse is a motif in all religions. But nonetheless, in our subjective selves, in our time, in our thrownness into this world, we still have to face it. We still have to have the courage to be, to use Tillich’s phrase (I really like that book), and work through the contradictions. Work through the crisis AI is creating, the crisis climate change is creating. Even though, at some formal level, you could say the bloody thing never ends. The world never ends. For goodness’ sake, it’s annoying. It just keeps on going.
Euwyn: Okay, but sorry, I want to pull against that. People like Caputo have already written a lot about openness to the event as the source of salvation and fidelity. It’s somewhat similar to the analysand being told there’s no cure. But being told there’s no cure is, in the Kierkegaardian sense, precisely the sickness, which is the funny part. To put a spin on it, I’m also wary of overstating it. Being saved doesn’t mean you’re going to be happy, whether in a Christian sense or in the sense we just discussed. If you’re aware of your despair and you learn to relate to it, to relate to the abyss, you don’t end up in a happy relationship. In fact, you end up in a very unhappy relationship.
That’s why I like thinking about musicians and artists so much. You go from a day-to-day, practical torment to artistic torment: the torment of the sublime, which you might call the pathos of the sublime. There are two stories I wrote in my book. The first is the torment of Saint Teresa of Ávila, as she was experiencing the transverberation. Lacan actually wrote about this, not me. An angel pierced her heart, and she wailed out of pain and agony, and also out of pleasure. It’s that feeling of jouissance. Pain mixed with pleasure, but pain nonetheless.
Rahul: I do, I do.
Euwyn: And I think she ended by saying her soul was left wanting nothing more. So you come across the truth, the truth is true for you, and you take hold of it. And the gulf remains. But you’re ever more conscious of it, compared with someone who is, in a Kierkegaardian sense, less of a human being, less conscious of despair and the gulf. That’s Teresa of Ávila. The other is van Gogh: artistic torment. If you read his letters, you find he was very attuned to the sublime. He’s always writing about perceiving things he can’t realise in his painting, which is precisely the pathos of the sublime.
Rahul: What’s annoying about van Gogh is that he wasn’t only a brilliant artist. He was also a really good writer. I read his letters and thought, I wish I could write like that.
Euwyn: Yes, true. His letters are quite profound.
Rahul: God, man. Come on. Unfair.
Euwyn: He wrote at one point that God is like an eclipse: I have it and I don’t have it. And at the end of the day, he shot himself. So it’s an artistic torment, the pathos of the sublime. You can be saved; that doesn’t mean you have a happy relationship with the sublime, with the paradox, with the absurd. The absurd remains. In fact, the closer you are to it, the more tormented you’ll be by it.
But once again, say you take this as a freeze frame: torment is all there will ever be, contradiction is all there is, paradox is the only thing. That’s when you land back in the foothold of nihilism. Which is the paradoxical thing, because it keeps coming back, front and centre. I’m not saying it in a Camusian sense. I don’t believe one should imagine Sisyphus happy. Sisyphus is tormented. Look at Kierkegaard himself: all his writing came out of that artistic torment. Read him and you’ll see how much he suffers. But precisely out of that suffering comes his relationship with God. You see it in the lives of monks across the centuries. These aren’t happy people. They suffer, to put it bluntly, for the greater good, for something bigger than themselves. But it’s suffering nonetheless.
So if you want to conclude, you can’t say there’s one conclusion and this is how the world is. Because it’s so easy to say: this is how the world is, this is how it’s going to be, that’s all there is. There’s always an openness to the absurd, that something might happen that you cannot expect. And even by naming it, I’m already inducing that thing where I’m trying to get there but can’t. You and the listeners can probably tell how hyper-conscious I am of these things, for better or worse. We’re always trying to think what we can’t think. We’re trying to achieve the impossible. We know we can’t, but we try. The religious pray, and the artist strives. And even in our incapacity to get there, we still try to harmonise what we can think, or produce, with what we can’t. That’s the pathos of the sublime, which we keep returning to. And if you keep being open to that absurd thing, you’ll have a relationship that somehow looks like salvation, but not one free of torment. I know I’m running in circles here, but at the end of the day this is a relationship that itself runs in circles, so I don’t feel like I’m committing too much of a crime.
“It is what it is”
Rahul: To make up for it, though, God gave him depression. So that’s good.
Let me bring in a political angle. There’s a mutual friend of ours, a newer friend I’ve deeply learned to appreciate. I won’t mention her name, because I don’t know if she wants to be mentioned publicly. I caught up with her and she asked me: do you take yourself seriously? Are you a person who takes yourself seriously? My gut feeling was to say, of course not. I’d hate that. I find taking oneself seriously rather narcissistic. David Foster Wallace said in his famous interview that there’s something deeply narcissistic about depression, the self-obsession. But I did say: I don’t take myself seriously, but I take living ethically deeply, deeply seriously.
What I meant was this. We’ve spoken about contradiction, about split subjectivity, about jouissance and the messiness of human existence, to put it in very cliché terms. We’ve talked about how these apocalyptic things are a motif that keeps coming back. And the reason I always push back against that is that my torment is never to accept sayings like “it is what it is.” I’d say that’s an Australianism. The world is the way it is. If we all accepted the world, with what I see in Gaza... Look, I’m quite privileged, living in Australia, one of the greatest countries in the world. But even here, in one of the richest countries in the world, people are struggling to get by day to day. We see it in the rise of fascism and, more positively, in the rise of socialism and more left-wing manifestations.
So here’s the reason I push back against trying to capture the world in these formalisms. I’m not saying you’re doing that, but one could make the mistake. My torment is that I don’t ever want to accept the world the way it is. I find that not just cowardly. I find it to be a sin, if I can put it that way. To accept the inequality we see, to accept what big tech is doing to people’s psyches: I find it disgusting. That’s why, for me, the torment after nihilism is an ethical one. Yes, there’s something aesthetic there, for sure, but I can’t help being upfront about it. It’s both an ethical torment and an ethical hope. Which is why I’m a leftist. I’m a communist. I think the world can be better. I think we can have the kingdom of God in this world, now. The rebuttal would be that that’s a fantasy. But I want to live in the fantasy, because what else is there? The other side of that is to accept things the way they are, which is why I’m not an essentialist. I don’t accept any kind of “this is how things are.” So that’s my torment.
‘But’ must end in ‘Thus’
Euwyn: Fair. Neorationalism is something I’ve gotten into to a lesser degree. I know they’ve been working things out in very different areas, and I have some thoughts there I wanted to discuss with you. But basically, one reason I keep circling is that it’s always “but this, but this, but this.” I do this, but then I become a nihilist. Nihilism becomes my norm. Then I become saved, but being saved isn’t being happy. But being saved is being aware, because I’m conscious of my despair and I’m more myself than I was before. But then I can be open to the future, to the possibility of the impossible, but with that comes torment. In the Kierkegaardian sense, that’s the aesthetic-religious side of me, which just dwells constantly in this. But the buts have to end in the thus. That’s the ethical side of Kierkegaard. “But this, but this, but this” is an infinite regress, as I call it in the book, a kind of duplicitous movement that just doesn’t stop. But you have to land on the thus: thus, this is what I’m going to do about it.
That’s also why I really like Kierkegaard. It’s not just that he writes about this movement in a clean way. All his perspectives contradict each other. If I tell someone “thus,” someone would tell me “but,” and they’d be right. And I’d still say: but you have to get to the thus. Through all the buts, you land in paradoxes. You believe in God, you don’t believe in God. You’re happy, you’re not happy. You’re tormented. You’re in love, you’re not in love; you love someone, and that’s also the one you hate. I love Kierkegaard because he doesn’t only write from one point of view, which is what I find most philosophers do. He somehow displaces himself as much as he writes about that which displaces him. I find him absolutely unique in that sense.
But at the end of the day we come to the thus. What is the ethic through all of this? Honestly, here’s where I don’t know, beyond being open, being receptive. But what I do know is this: going back to van Gogh, the task of art seems to be openness toward being shocked. You want to be receptive to that which will shock you. And that’s exactly the antidote to what you just said, the world as it is. No: you will be shocked by something that is to come.
The world punches back
Rahul: The world punches back. And here’s where I defend science: the world punches back. It’s interesting. I recently had two guests who came from critical theory, and they were saying that metaphysics, ultimately, is just religion. Just making up a bunch of concepts, especially analytic metaphysics, possible worlds and all of that.
Euwyn: And the world punches back.
Rahul: But they make a good point. These guys have a hermeneutic suspicion of the sciences themselves. But with art, with science, the world punches back. It can’t ever just be a story you make up in your own head. And that punching back hurts, man. That’s a punch from Mike Tyson in his prime.
Euwyn: Actually, that relates quite cleanly to the neorationalists, a strand that’s been making a lot of waves in the philosophy scene, and a lot of your listeners are probably into it. Wolfendale wrote The Revenge of Reason, which says something similar: reason punches back, to put it your way. But here’s the thing. The task of art and the task of philosophy seem to me to be two different tasks. As we said earlier, it’s not quite a binary; something can be philosophy and art at once. But art seems to me to be that which shocks you, whereas philosophy appears to be the philosopher’s preparation for being shocked. Two different things, if that makes sense.
And this is perhaps an interesting discussion, and I’m not sure what you think. But when I read Wolfendale and Brassier and Negarestani, who I think are all the rage these days, it occurs to me that their fundamental project is preparing themselves, or people, however you call it, to be shocked. Laying out the categories, the groundwork, on which surprise can happen.
Rahul: Indeed. There’s the great essay on transcendental realism. It’s very technical; you’ve got to read it carefully. One point is that the structure of thought itself points to a reality outside of thought. That pointing is, in a way, laying out the structure of thought to prepare yourself for this outside, this punching back.
Euwyn: Yes. And I’m interested in your thoughts, because you just had a long chat with Wolfendale. Given everything we’ve spoken about, nihilism is more about being in relation to that outside, in Land’s or Brassier’s sense, whatever you call it. But I think this also has fundamental implications for what truth is. For being, and maybe even for thought, though those might be two very different things a proper philosopher would carefully delineate. I’m not doing that, because I don’t call myself a philosopher in the first place.
I know Meillassoux has this big thing where being is perhaps outside of thought: you have to be able to think being outside of correlation. But I keep going back to that uncanny task of speaking of the sublime in non-sublime terms. It seems like a valid correction, perhaps. If I do a bastardised history of philosophy, at least from my own strand of interest: in the beginning, the ancient Greeks were all about something out there. Then the Copernican revolution of Kant: it’s not just out there, it’s inside, or within, in relation to the outside. Then Hegel came along: no, it’s more convoluted than that; it’s a whole that acts upon itself. And now the neorationalists come in: no, it’s too easy for that to lead to the dependence of what’s outside on what’s inside, when the inside can think the outside regardless of the connection. But that seems to me a nice way to think about categorical or conceptual clarity without regard for truth in the Kierkegaardian sense, capital-T truth. To me, that’s the truth that shocks you, which is still different from the task of preparing to be shocked by it. I’m not sure what you make of it. That’s just my gut, without having read too much of them.
Rahul: Look, I don’t know if you know this, but Wolfendale got into philosophy after he read Fear and Trembling, when he was fifteen.
Euwyn: I wasn’t aware.
Rahul: Yes. He got into philosophy through Kierkegaard, interestingly. The notion of being shocked is something I haven’t done much thinking about. Not necessarily being shocked, but the Lacanian Real, when the Real hits back, that kind of thing. I probably still think you could be shocked while preparing yourself for being shocked, using reason. That’s a cheap get-out-of-jail-free card, I know. That being said, maybe here’s where I’d say love is the ultimate thing. Love is madness, as Plato says. I saw our aforementioned friend saying on her Substack that if people loved the way she did, a weak soul would degenerate, disappear. She said something a bit hubristic. That’s how much it goes all the way.
But I get what you’re trying to say. And look, I’m not going to speak for the neorationalists, even though I deeply resonate with them. If you put it in a hierarchy, in a very bastardised way, they’d still put science and mathematics above art. I don’t think you do that. I don’t think I do either, because for me, reality punching back comes not just from what we discover through science, but also through the arts. But that’s a whole other can of worms.
Euwyn: Maybe just to close this one out. There’s a lot of cultural impact the neorationalists are having right now, not just within philosophy but outside it. A lot of people are reading them.
Rahul: Most of AI. A big, big part of it, especially Wolfendale.
Euwyn: True. So I’m not sure what to make of it, and perhaps this remains an open discussion, a possibility I’m eternally wrestling toward. But it seems the neorationalist trend has lost that transcendent object, or is deliberately trying to get away from it. Which is a fair overcorrection, because for the past two hundred years people have been going transcendent, transcendent, transcendent. And at the end of the day: no, we need clarity here, because nobody understands what they’re saying when they speak of the transcendent, and it becomes a loose metaphysic with a lot of implications.
Rahul: Look, you could say here that they’re the ultimate philosophers. Which is why I personally don’t believe mysticism is part of philosophy. This goes back to my previous point. Philosophy, rightly understood, is about conceptual clarification. It’s about questioning presuppositions. It’s about clear thinking. That’s the hill I’m willing to die on. And then, of course, wisdom.
Euwyn: Yep. But I think you hit the nail on the head there, because there’s an eternal dialectic, or dialogue, between a clear head and that which shocks you, which I’m not sure anything within the game of clear thinking can account for. Sometimes I worry that even the neorationalist strand risks losing that sense of radical openness to the event. I mean the revisability of reason, or Negarestani talking about how reason works itself out in Intelligence and Spirit, which I haven’t read; it’s just my vague understanding. Perhaps Brassier is closer, based on my early reading: the radical sense that we cannot estimate or expect or anticipate what’s going to happen.
And this is actually an age-old critique of Hegel. It’s also Kierkegaard’s critique of Socrates in Philosophical Fragments. It’s not about recollection, remembering something already intrinsic within us. It’s being open to that which is infinitely within us and, at the same time, infinitely other to us. And it’s within that outside, if you can even say outside and inside, that we get shocked with a truth. I don’t know where this music is going, but it’s a revelation.
Rahul: Revelation. Revelation. Yay. No, I get what you’re saying. I’ve mostly read Negarestani and Wolfendale, not really Brassier, but I think this is his critique of neurophilosophy too: the Churchlands, who say neuroscience can answer philosophy’s questions about our subjectivity.
An AI startup for writers. Wtf?
Rahul: So, a question for you. We’ve spoken a lot about determinate being, and at the same time you’ve been deeply critical of tech-bro-ism. So why are you co-founding an AI startup called Wordsmith?
Euwyn: That’s a great question.
Rahul: If you think AI is all this stupid thing, why an AI startup? And oh my God, I can’t believe I’m going to say this: it’s an AI startup for writers.
Euwyn: Exactly. What blasphemy, right?
Rahul: Blasphemy.
Euwyn: There’s some stuff to think through here. I’m in capital: capital C, capital everything. But it means I’m playing a game within a system I’ve been born into. I’ve been thrown into it. That doesn’t mean, as people naively say, don’t hate the player, hate the game. I don’t believe that. The player is as accountable as the game. But the reality is that in life, there’s always work. Work is always a source of meaning. I think Wolfendale makes this three-way distinction at the beginning of the book: you can be extremely passive, or you can be Promethean, or... I can’t remember the third. In short: you can let the world do what it does and just let it be. Or you can be Promethean about it and think: these are the interesting ways I want to change what is, to make an impact on what is.
Rahul: I know what you’re talking about: Prometheanism. In fact, he was talking about the classical rationalists, not the neorationalists, and the notion that reason goes beyond itself. The classical rationalists were more, to put it in a Bayesian sense, Aristotelian: reason discovers the world out there, you update your priors, that sort of thing. He was critical of that too, to be clear.
Euwyn: Yeah. So there are three fundamental attitudes. I’m extrapolating here, perhaps in a completely different context, so forgive me. Either you let the world be what it may be, completely passive, detached from the world. Which I think a lot of Christians actually do: there’s the afterlife, I’ll just wait for that, I’m saved, it’s all going to be well and fine. Which I think is kind of BS. Then there’s the second, where you try to be active, work within the realm of things and just do your thing. But at the end of the day you still get consumed by the system, because the system isn’t detached from you. It sucks you in. And then, if you’re a true Promethean, you try to change something on a meaningful level.
Interestingly, I like to go back to Camus here. He wrote a small piece called Create Dangerously. To me it’s almost a mantra. I’m born into a system I both love and hate. It’s good and bad, all kinds of intensities. And, to put it in a naive tech-bro sense, I’d like to leave my mark and do something I think is worth doing. And at the end of the day, I guess, be a servant of truth as it comes to be. That’s the sense in which I’m born into capital, into this game. I started my career in business. Now I have the choice. Do I just live detached, because I don’t like capitalism? Do I go out and protest against it, even though I don’t think protesting does much? Because if you read Fisher, capitalism is so sophisticated. It’s like philosophy: whatever argument you pose against it, it absorbs into itself. That’s the amazing thing about capitalism. So what can you do? I think you can be Promethean about it and try to change something meaningful within the system. It doesn’t mean we’re going to override capitalism and make the world better for everyone. But we’re sure going to try. And going back to nihilism: we can try to be open to the possibility of the impossible. That something might change, or that you might discover yourself in doing so, or that something violent might happen that upends everything and creates a new world, for better or for worse. And in doing so, you prepare yourself to be shocked in meaningful ways.
Rahul: I couldn’t agree more. This is why I’ve said I’m a communist, but I’m not anti-AI. I’m not anti-technology in any way. In many ways, we’ve got to sublate it. And that point you made about Christians, brother, is very perspicacious. That kind of infinite resignation, that detachment from the world, is again the nihilistic act. But there’s something after. Same thing I see with Wordsmith. Any writer worth their salt hates AI with all of their being. They hate LLMs, really, but they use the term AI broadly. And you’re committing almost the ultimate transgression: building an AI. Not just any AI, but an AI for writers, for publishing.
Euwyn: Okay. I’m committing the ultimate sin. Correct. For the sake of your listeners, I’ll explain a bit. The philosophical angle is there; I know why I’m doing it. So the question is the what and the how. I grew up starting businesses. It’s familiar to me. I also played a lot of sports and music, so I was very engaged naturally, and I went deeper and deeper into the startup sphere. So I have a natural advantage there, in the scheme of capital and getting things done. And if you want to create dangerously, you have to have impact, and you have to have an advantage.
Rahul: Tell them what Wordsmith does, by the way.
Euwyn: Right. Sure, I could just write books in the corner of my house and hope someone reads them. It might be the best thing in the world to me, but I don’t think that’s the best way I can create an impact. If I want to create dangerously, to actually become a Promethean and affect the way things are done, I’d better lean on my advantages. Startups happen to be that. And naturally, AI is all the rage. Not only that: I’ve recently written a book, After Nihilism, and philosophically I’m thinking a lot. Not just about nihilism and existence, but about what the new state of the world post-AI might be, and how we might take advantage of it. Not in an extractive sense, but: here’s an opportunity to build something that’s actually dangerous, in a good sense.
The basic pitch is this. Even the world of capital goes around by ideas. Sure, the after-effect of good ideas is attention, the attention economy, money and capital. But good ideas are, to me, the fundamental unit of how things go around, whether things begin as a thesis, an academic paper, or a book. Or something like Gibson’s Neuromancer, a sci-fi book by an early tech-bro writer that ends up stealing the imagination of the modern mind. Or the postmodern mind, at this point. Ideas are what make the world go around, and I don’t think that’s ever going away. A lot of people say writing is doomed, because people will just listen to their AIs and watch more TikTok. I don’t think so. At the end of the day, people will always want more meaning. They want richer content, richer material, because ultimately they want to set themselves apart from everyone else. It’s a natural human instinct. So they want something richer, something deeper, and the richest medium for communicating something rich and deep right now is words. If you want to learn about atomic bombs, the best way is a whole thesis about atomic bombs.
So my goal is: how can we help more of that happen? How can we help writers write without having to suffer through the whole monumental process of getting a book out, getting past all the obstacles? Without going into too much detail about the publishing industry, the first bottleneck we thought we could solve was this. Normally you fork out three to eight grand on an editor. Or you risk the wrong editor, one who doesn’t understand you or the ideas you’re trying to put forward, because they’re primed for something more normal. You can waste three months with the wrong editor, or with any editor. So how about we use AI to get you some of the way there?
The claim isn’t that AI will become the best writer or the best editor. It’s that if you’re a writer with good ideas, extreme ideas, sometimes the institution doesn’t like that. They want you to conform to the norms. But I think we all know the best ideas come from outside the norms, at the right time and in the right place. Not sometimes, actually: all the time. So the editing tool targets that bottleneck. It ingests a writer’s work and edits in a similar vein to a real editor, except it’s an AI that’s hyper-customised to what they’re trying to write and do. It’s not going to flatten them. It’s not going to moralise at them. It’s going to do decent work. If they find someone who’s a perfect fit, they should go with that someone. But most people, including me, struggle to find that someone in the beginning. That’s the basic goal. And we’re going pretty well. We’ve got a couple of hundred users, we’re still growing, and we’re learning a lot from a lot of people. So if anyone’s interested, I’d be happy for you to check it out.
Rahul: And I’m not just saying this because Euwyn’s my mate, but be a scientist about this. Direct your hate comments to Euwyn; go tweet at him about using AI in writing. But try it out and see what you find. I think that’s the best way. I don’t use AI in my writing. I use AI to assess my writing, and it’s been fine. I don’t feel it lessens my writing. But that itself is something I’m constantly struggling with: not letting the AI take over me. And I embrace that struggle.
Euwyn: Like a true Landian. Less of you, more of AI.
Rahul: I don’t know. Probably like a true masochist, to be honest.
Euwyn: It’s a big topic, so I’m obviously not going to resolve all the open threads. I do believe people should write. AI shouldn’t be the one writing; it should be a good supplementary resource. That’s the very safe way to say it. There’s also Nick Land and others, and a lot of people are suspicious of this right now: that AI is doing more to you than you’re getting from it. Which goes back to McLuhan and Heidegger: the tool isn’t agnostic. It’s not innocent; it’s not a neutral medium. It imposes itself on you. So there’s a lot to work through. But at the end of the day, I accept the risk. For anyone who can’t find a good editor, to me the benefits outweigh the cons. Sure, it might influence someone to write in a certain way. I still think that’s better than not having an editor at all.
I won’t preempt all the arguments. But we live in a society where there’s capital, and now AI is perhaps the child of capital. Or, as Mikey Downs would say, following Land: capital is AI, or AI is capital. And we’re still in the age where we can afford to be Promethean, because this child is still being formed. It’s not quite let loose yet. The singularity hasn’t happened. So we’re in an exciting period where we can build and try things that will hopefully affect the world for the better, and we’ll see how it turns out. It’s also an act of not being a nihilist.
Rahul: Not a neutral medium, without a doubt. I’d say the singularity will never happen, unfortunately. But that’s a whole other can of worms.
Euwyn: That goes back to what we discussed earlier.
Rahul: Indeed. Actually, not unfortunately. Fortunately. I think life without the singularity is quite fun, in a way. But that’s just me speaking from privilege. Brother, this has been wonderful. I’ll leave all the stuff we discussed in the show notes, including the book. Obviously I’m going to recommend it. No, don’t worry, it’s a book. Burn it. It’s terrible. No, I’m kidding.
Euwyn: Don’t buy it. That’s the final order.
Rahul: Don’t buy it. There’s the provocation. Bro, this has been just the best. I love you, man. Thank you for your time. This was so good.
Euwyn: Much love to you. Thanks for having me.
Rahul: A hundred, man. And thanks, everyone, for tuning in.