wand streichen ideen bilder
this lecture, and the next, are probably themost explicitly philosophical lectures of the course. then, we move into psychometrics, and biologicalpsychology. those are going to be the most scientificlectures of the course. i was thinking, this morning, while i waspreparing this lecture, about why i approach these topics this way. part of the answer is, probably, that it isnot clear that the study of personality - at least, insofar as the concern is to furtherthe development of personality, which is a term associated with the desire for mentalhealth, or "subjective well-being," a term
i really do not like, or "meaning" - can bestrictly scientific pursuits. so, then, if they're not strictly scientificpursuits, what should you do about understanding them? if you look at studies, after studies, theproblem is you get a very narrow slice of the domain. it's often not very comprehensible because,in order to understand the results of a study, you have to have the knowledge - the underlyingknowledge - that is necessary to put the study in some sort of framework. that framework is going to be developed bystudying the relevant scientific literature
and psychological literature. behind that, the framework has to be expandedto include the relevant philosophical assumptions. i do not really think that you can understandthe details without understanding the assumptions. i also think you are relegated to memorizationif you do not understand the fundamentals. memorization has very little to do with knowledge. you might be able to memorize procedures thatwould enable you to act on something, perhaps to fix an automobile or to play a piece onthe piano. it is not like those things are not worthdoing. but for these ideas to take root and haveaffect and meaning, you have to understand
them at the right level of analysis. one of the things i really like about personalitytheory, especially the clinical end of it, though not exclusively the clinical end ofit, is that the people who were conducting clinical practice and writing clinical theoryduring the 20th century were in fact dealing with the most profound problems that affectpeople. i started my academic career as a politicalscientist, while in so far as you're any sort of political scientist when you are an undergraduate. i was not interested in it at all by my thirdyear because what i found was that, at least at this time - and i don't know how much ithas changed - the political scientists had
already decided that people were basicallymotivated by economic concerns. to me that was no use at all because i wantedto know why they were motivated by economic concerns. it is easy to understand people in some senseif you already decide what they value. but if you can't figure out what they value,or what they should value, that is a whole different issue - and that's psychology. it is a deep question because it isn't evenobvious whether the question "are there things you should value" is a reasonable questionor that it can be reasonably answered. the thing i can tell you about that is mostclosely allied with my own experience.
i do not mean personal experience, but say,experience as a clinician, is that aimless people are in real trouble. now i do not necessarily know why that is. and i do not necessarily know what that meansfor what your aim should be, but i have certainly seen, for example, if you had to make a choice whichall of you will in the next five years or so between pursuing something diligently andestablishing a fixed identity because of that, or remaining bereft of choice and drifting. i can tell you that if you drift, by the timeyou are 30, you are going to be one miserable
person. now i am not sure why that is exactly, andi am not exactly sure that that necessarily means that picking something and stickingto it, which is a form of apprenticeship, is better than drifting. it depends what you mean by better. but i can tell you that not catalyzing anidentity seems to be a mistake, and it is a fatal mistake by the time you are 40. it is very difficult to recover from it atthat point. because you are not young anymore, at thatpoint.
if you try to catalyze an identity at thattime, which sometimes can happen, you are competing with all these young shiny people,who are fuller of potential from the perspective of an employer, for example, then you are. it gets pretty dismal. anyways, today we're going to go deeper intophilosophical presuppositions than we have in the past. i want to familiarize you with what i thinkare the great philosophical and psychological movements of the 20th century because theyshape you and they shape the world you live in, in ways that are incalculable.
if you do not understand them, you do notreally know where you are. you do not know where you are in history andyou do not know what ideas you are possessed by. i think i told you when we were studying jung,that jung said that - people do not have ideas, that ideas have people - which i believe tobe true. one of jung's lasting contributions in somesense, was that you should know what ideas possess you because otherwise you will notknow what the hell they are doing with you. when you think about all the irrational andapparently counterproductive things that people do as individuals and also in a mass, youhave to ask yourself if you want to be caught
up in that sort of thing. if you could be free from it, if you are caughtup in it, just exactly where is it that you are headed. which was also something that jung thoughtyou should figure out in case where you are headed was not necessarily where you wouldgo if you were making a fully informed conscious choice. i think that material that we're dealing withinthe next two lectures, is the most relevant of all the material were going to cover withregards to the possession of people by ideas. the existentialists, who are tightly alignedphilosophically with the phenomenologists,
basically emerged as a psychological movementafter world war ii.there are reasons for this. one of the reasons was that it was quite obvious,not only that world war ii was an ideological battle fundamentally between fascism and westerndemocracy roughly speaking, and it was immediately supplanted by anotherideological battle, which was the one between communism and liberalism, roughly speaking. the issue of ideological possession and therelationship between the individual, who is ideologically possessed, and their responsibilityand the actions of the state, became paramount concerns in the 1950s, as they should have. one of the lasting questions that remainedafter world war ii that still has been insufficiently
answered is, when the mass goes insane, what is the culpabilityof the individuals who compose the mass? now you can circumvent that question withregards to what happened in nazi germany by assuming that it was top-down coercion thatturned the mass of ordinary german citizens into majority nazis. i do not think that there is any evidencethat those sorts of ideas are true. there is research bearing on people's willingnessto conform to authority figures. you know the famous experiments on the prisonexperiment. for example, at stanford, where undergraduateswere divided arbitrarily into guards and prisoners,
and then they ran a simulation of the prison,and of course the guards turned into sadistic psychopaths, some of them did anyways. the prisoners turned into cringing victimsin no time flat. there is obviously an element there that demonstratesthat people are very responsive to situational cues and that they can go out of hand veryrapidly. but that does not necessarily mean that youcan use your tendency to be accommodating to authority or the human tendency to be accommodatingto authority, as an explanation for the rise of mass movements like nazism or communism,because the explanation does not really help.
okay, some people in the mass were mere followers. what about the leaders? well, maybe they were all followers' rightup to hitler, so it is hitler's fault. it is all hitler's fault? you are elevating the guy of the status ofa god at that point. now an evil god, but still, if he has gotall the motive power, you cannot separate him from the idea of lucifer. he has become an archetypical figure of evilat that point. it's the same with stalin and mao.
we know that they were very, very bad men. there is no doubt about it. but to localize all the evil in them and toconsider everyone else victimized followers, is a convenient idea, but it is not helpful. that just makes the followers pathetic fora different reason. they're not actively self-engaged in crueltyfor their own purposes apart from conformity, but they are just as pathetic and evil asthey would be if they were doing it on their own volition. i do not see the difference between a bullyand a bully's henchmen.
in fact, i think the bully probably has morecourage than the henchmen. it is courage of a fairly peculiar sort. this is what the existentialists were concernedabout. the locus of their concern was basically nietzsche. you all know that the reason i concentrateon nietzsche and also on dostoyevsky's because i think those two people summed up the 19thcentury. i really think that. the problems that they laid out and predictedwould unfold in the 20th century, were the problems that unfolded in the 20th century.
they got their predictions right and i thinkthey got their causality right too. given the inability of social scientists,including psychologists, to predict large term mass events, the fact that these twopeople managed at 30 to 40 years before the events unfolded and even longer that not seemsto me that it is pretty much worthwhile to consider them psychologists. certainly nietzsche thought that of himself. and so did dostoyevsky for that matter, andthey had immense influence on people like freud and jung and rogers, all the peoplethat we have been studying. their thinking is lying underneath every issuewe have discussed.
this is one of nietzsche's great statements. of what is great one must either be silentor speak with greatness. with greatness, that means cynically and withinnocence. what i relate is the history of the next twocenturies. i describe what is coming, what can no longercome differently, the advent of nihilism. our whole european culture is moving fromsome time now, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade, as towarda catastrophe restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end,that no longer reflects. it's afraid to reflect.
he that speaks here has, conversely, donenothing so far but to reflect as a philosopher and solitary by instinct, who was found hisadvantage in standing aside, outside. why has the advent of nihilism become necessary? because the values we have had hitherto thusdraw their final consequence. because nihilism represents the ultimate logicalextension of our great values and ideals. because we must experience nihilism beforewe can find out what value these values really had. so one of nietzsche's claims, for example,was that as christianity in europe transformed itself into science, he felt that one of theadvantage to the catholic domination of europe
for so many centuries, was that the mind ofthe catholic adherents who took the discipline seriously, or the dogma seriously, learnedto interpret all events under the under the schema of a single theory. he thought about that as a form of discipline. imagine that if i want to teach you how totheorize, i might teach you a theory and have you adopt it. nietzsche's point would be that while youknow a theory, but it also means something else. it also means that now you know how to theorizeand the important consequence of learning
a theory may not be the theory. it may be that you learn to theorize. nietzsche also pointed out that once you learnto theorize, you can separate yourself from the theory that gave rise to that knowledge. and so you can start to theorize even aboutthe theory that you mastered, and he thought that is what happened to europe as a consequenceof its domination by christianity, especially because of christianity's essential insistenceon the utility of the truth. he thought that was transformed after catholicism,into scientific investigation, but that the spirit of theorizing in truth, remained intact.
the consequence of that was that the europeanmind was disciplined by a dogma. that it freed itself from the dogma, thatit turned its power on the dogma, and noted that the dogma itself, seemed to be groundedin nothing that you could get a grip on. the way you grip things with an empiricalmind. and so it fell apart. that's not saying much more than science poseda fatal challenge to religion, but it's saying it in a much more profound and interestingway. it also explains why he makes this claim,that nihilism is the logical conclusion of the great values and ideals.
he did not think about nihilism as a counterproposition, say to dogmatic christianity. he thought about it as the logical outcomeof that. is that relevant? why is that relevant? well think it's relevant for a lot of reasons. the first observation might be that a tremendousamount of mental illness, this is an existential claim, is grounded in nihilism. when someone who is depressed, comes to seeyou, what they often say is, i cannot see any point in life.
that isn't what they mean. what they mean is, they see the meaning oflife as suffering, which is a meaning, right? and that is not bearable. and then the question is, why bother withit? and that is the fundamental question of suicide. it is a philosophical question. i think it was camus who said, the only realphilosophical question was whether or not to commit suicide. now you know, that is a little dark, cominglike well maybe camus could use some ssri's,
but you get the point. and it is inappropriate, in my estimation,to even discuss depression with someone who is depressed, especially if they are intelligentand open, and therefore more tilted towards philosophical wanderings without actuallyaddressing the issue. why live in the face of suffering? okay, so that is one problem.to the degreethat you will find it difficult in your life to build anything solid under your feet thatyou can stand on and believe, have faith in, let's say, you are going to be adrift. the reason for that is a lot of the thingsare going to have to do will be difficult
and they will involve suffering, which isalso an existential claim. so, the existentialist for example, they donot make the same claim freud does. freud claims that, in some sense that thenormal person is mentally healthy apart from the mild distress of normal life, and in orderto be psychopathological, you have to have been hurt, maybe multiple times or, there are other thingsthat could contribute to that the existentialist would say no, no, let us just wait a minutehere. maybe the fundamental condition of human beingsis nihilism and suffering, and that something has to be produced to counter that in orderfor life to be tolerable.
well, i think that is a perfectly reasonableproposition. it's a strange proposition because i haveseen in my lifetime, people who are tormented by existential ideas who cannot get them outof their mind. you know, ideas that relate to the meaningof life, other people and concern about death, for example, and the extinguishing of everythingthat seems to have any value. it is a primary concern with them. i have seen other people for whom those questionsnever seem to arise. now, i think those people are conservativepeople, not very open and probably rather low with neuroticism.
they are not philosophically curious. they do not go up chains of abstractions. even if they do, they do not necessarily getdisturbed in the most profound areas of their being by the questioning. that still leaves plenty of people in theother category. nihilism and atheism are closely related. they are not identical by any stretch of theimagination. although i think it is difficult for atheismto describe why it is not essentially nihilistic. that is dostoyevsky's big criticism.
dostoyevsky's claim was that without any fundamentalvalue assumed, then there is no reason why you cannot do anything you want. and that is his famous line. "if there is no god, then everything is permitted". all of dostoyevsky's novel writing is an explorationof that idea. sometimes it is an exploration of what thatidea might mean if it was acted out in the life of the given individual, crime and punishment. another would be, in his book, the devilsor the possessed. it is an examination of what that idea meansif it is gripped by an individual who has
social and political ambitions. that is when dostoyevsky basically prophesied,so to speak, that one of the consequences of the death of god would be the rise, basically,of communist of totalitarianism because essentially, that is what he predicted in the devils. it is pretty dead on accurate prediction. it was really quite stunning to me when icame across it. nietzsche made exactly the same prediction,by the way. for those two men, the death of an ultimatemeaning system, especially one that you see when you think about something like europeanchristianity at its misleading, in some sense,
because the system of beliefs that that constitutedeuropean christianity and other great belief systems wasn't 2000 years old. it was 25,000 years old. you know you can think about it as beginningat year zero but it is a mistake from a historical perspective. the ideas that profound religious traditionsare predicated on are generally grounded in ideas that are much older than the traditionsthemselves. in some sense when at the end of the 19thcentury when things fell apart for us and we can no longer rely on our history predicatedmorality to guide us.
it wasn't merely that we lost an overlay,a psychological overlay that it be laid on humanity for 2000 years. it was way deeper than that. we do not even know how old those how willthose ideas are. we know we have some idea about how old theyare there. they are at least as old as written culture. but we also know that the people who havebeen brought into the main streams of history, you know, as the world has united people whowere not literate had mythologies that drew from the same themes.
some of those people, as far as we can tell,had lived a lifestyle that was essentially unchanged for 25,000 years. australian aborigines are like that. there is plenty of evidence that these ideasare extraordinarily old. what that means is, when we separate fromthem in some sense, not only do we separate from our philosophical presuppositions, butwe separate from the historical consequences of our biology. it is a serious problem. i think that is partly why it is very difficultto distinguish between someone who is nihilistic
and someone who is mentally ill. it is not a radical claim. people, especially those on the depressedside of the distribution, will tell you that they are nihilistic. they may not use that terminology, althoughthey often do. i just cannot see any point, what why doesthat matter or why does it matter. it seems to be a fact that it matters. it is an interesting fact, that is a phenomenologicalfact in some sense, because one of the things that heidegger pointed out, he was a founderof the phenomenological school, was that your
primary orientation to the world, he thinksin a strange way, that your primary orientation to the world was one of care. you could say, what characterizes your experience? what sort of creature are you? heidegger's answer would be, you are a creaturewho cares about things, in so far as your engaged in the world, your primary orientationis one of care. you can think about that as a value. it is a consequence of your value orientation. god only knows where that comes from.
part of it is biological, part of it is developmental,part of it is historical. it is very, very complex. but if you stop caring about everything, youare in trouble. that is one of the things that seems to indicatethat caring is actually a fundamental reality. you stop caring about things, you do not stopsuffering. it seems that unless the caring counterbalancesthe suffering, you cannot maintain an even keel. that is partly because it does not seem just. when terrible things happen to people, theyalways say two things.
how it is that being could be constitutedin this manner? what the hell's going on at the fundamentallevels of reality, that such suffering has to be the case? you will certainly ask that if you have achild was diagnosed with cancer, for example. or you might think, why is this cruelty asit appears necessarily aimed at me right now in this place, when hypothetically it couldhave not happened at all, or perhaps been visited on someone more deserving. which is the good remain the good are punishedand the evil remain unpunished something like that.
for human beings that produces a cry for justice. how can the world be constituted that way? that seems to be built into us. those aren't questions we can just avoid. they're questions that will arise in yourpsyche. they will arise as fundamental questions whensufficiently terrible things happen to you. so the existentialists would say, those areconditions of existence, you are just stuck with that. it's part of human nature.
it's part of human being to be perplexed bythose questions. then the question is, at least in part, isthere any way of answering them? nietzsche said, we required some time, newvalues. nihilism stands at the door. whence comes this uncanniest of all guests? point of departure. it is an error to consider social distressor physiological degeneration or corruption of all things as the cause of nihilism. now that is a typical nietzschian phrase becausethere are three profound ideas in that sentence.
each one is in a different phrase. nietzsche said at one point, i can write ina sentence what other people write in a book. then he said, what other people cannot evenwrite in a book. this sentence is a good example of that. so what is he say? if you see that peopleare suffering and in trouble, one thing you can say that is that the reason for that isthat the economic system is unjust and they are layered along the bottom and that is thefundamental cause of their suffering. but nietzsche does not allow that to be acausal interpretation because he says there are multiple ways of interpreting your position.
near absence of material luxury does not necessarilydestine you to one perspective or another. physiological degeneration. people are unhappy or suffering because theyare ill in some manner. you could make that a matter of definitionby saying, that if you're suffering or unhappy, you are ill. but that is not a causal argument. it is just a different way of categorizingthe data. nietzche would reject that because he wouldalso note that there is some correlation between physiological health and meaning in life.
but the correlation does not imply causality. even if it did, the relationship is by nomeans perfect to the degree that you would want a relationship to be before you acceptedit as relevant. or corruption of all things, that would bethe idea that being itself is evil, like an evil trick, which is what tolstoy said, bythe way, when he wrote his confessions. tolstoy, at the height of his intellectualpower, he was the most famous novelist in the world and unbelievably well regarded wellthroughout the world, but particularly in russia. he was a very socially benevolent man andwell regarded for his wisdom.
for years he was afraid to go outside witha rope or a gun because he thought he would either hang or shoot himself. the reason for that was that he had been struckby the idea that life is so unbearable, that it should be eradicated. he could not think his way out of that. it was a form of thought that was actuallyvery characteristic of intellectuals in russia during his time and in his place. dostoyevsky wrote about exactly the same sortsof things. even tolstoy noticed that merely observingthat the world was a corrupt and evil place
was not necessarily enough to tilt peopletowards nihilism because there seem to be people who weren't nihilistic despite thefact that that seem self-evident to him. tolstoy actually turned to the russian people,you know what he was very entranced by the idea of the folk and folk wisdom, and he turnedto the russian people as a source of new inspiration like the peasantry. tolstoy actually fought for the freedom ofthe peasantry and he felt that their simple faith, so to speak, was something truly admirablerather than something pathetic and weak from an intellectual perspective. he strove to emulate that criticism-less faith.
but of course he could not do it because onceyou taking a bite out of apple, there is no going back, so to speak. nietzsche says, distress, whether psychic,physical or intellectual, need not at all produce nihilism. that is, the radical rejection of value, meaningand desirability. such distress always permits a variety ofinterpretations. rather, it is one particular interpretation,the christian moral one, that nihilism is rooted. the end of christianity, at the hands of itsown morality, which cannot be replaced.
which turns against the christian god. the sense of truthfulness, highly developedby christianity is nauseated by the falseness and mendaciousness of all christian interpretationsof the world and of history. it is a rebound from god is the truth to theequally fanatical faith. all is false. an act of buddhism. scepticism regarding morality is what is decisive. the end of the moral interpretation of theworld, which no longer has any sanction after it's tried to escape into some beyond, leadsto nihilism.
all lacks meaning. that is rooted in nietzsche's criticism ofchristianity because he believed that christianity was exceptionally morally flawed because allit offered its followers was the possibility of salvation and redemption from their sufferingafter they were dead. it was projected into some other world. as far as nietzsche was concerned, alleviatedpeople of their local responsibility to try to improve things here and now and jung's comments about that were essentially,that it was the proto-scientists recognition of the fact that the spiritual salvation thatchristianity promised was no longer sufficient,
that motivated the development of science. so, for the early christians this is partof the tension between christianity and science. for the early christians, the idea was thatthe earth in some sense was ineradicably corrupt. that all you can hope for in your earthlylife was suffering and that you should accept your suffering and hope for salvation in thefuture after you're dead. obviously that philosophy appeared insufficientfor people. in jung's hypothesis about the developmentof science was that a counter fantasy developed in the unconscious of the europeans whichwas that the material realm, which had been definedas evil, and therefore not worthy of any study
or any pursuit whatsoever actually held theseeds of the redemption that was lacking. that was jung's commentary on the idea ofthe philosopher's stone because the alchemists, who were proto-scientists, were trying tofind a material substance that would be the philosopher's stone that would offer its holderswealth, health and eternal life. why are we pursuing science? well, hopefully, because we think it willdo us some good here and now, in our bodies. jung regarded science itself as stemming fromthat compensatory dream, brilliant idea. it is actually the only idea i have ever readthat seems to do a reasonable psychological account for the emergence of science as adiscipline.
it is a very strange practice. you have to narrow your interests tremendouslyto be a scientist. you have to focus on one set of phenomenathat might appear as useless to contemplate as how many angels can dance on the head ofa pin. you have to devote decades to the study ofthat thing to make incremental progress. why in the world would people ever be motivatedto do that? jung's interpretation was, there was a deepcounter movement towards the over spiritualisation of the psyche and that was the revaluationof matter and its possibilities. while nietzsche believed that christianityas it stood, at the end of the 1800s, was
an untenable philosophy because he thoughtit had abandoned its moral obligations by escaping into some beyond, and therefore damnedlife as it was actually lived by human beings. he felt that the demise was a good thing. he points out one other thing. this is the difference between having a theoryand then learning to theorize. he says look, if you have been raised in thetradition, whatever that tradition happens to be, you have a belief system, whateverthat belief system happens to be, and it falls apart on you, at any one point you suffer for two reasons.
the first is, your belief system fell apartand that is not a good thing. it leaves everything unfixed and open, andyou drown in possibility, in a sense. that is a kierkegaard phrase. but the second consequence is even worse. once you've learned that one belief systemthat is solid could be demolished and fall apart, then it's very difficult ever againto have any faith in any belief systems whatsoever. not only do you become a doubter of your owncreed, you become a meta doubter, which is the doubter of all belief systems. the step from that to nihilism, maybe thoseare exactly the same thing.
you could think about that in some sense asthe disease of the critical rational mind. it can saw off any branch that it is sittingon. and you know the utility of that is? leave no stone unturned, right? you are supposed to question things. the utility of that is, you learn new things. but the price you pay for it, is that youare not necessarily ever certain about anything. you could say, maybe you shouldn't be certainabout anything but you can forget that. you are going to have to act as if you arecertain many times in your life.
when you choose a permanent mate, for example,if you do that which you probably will, because you're university educated and universityeducated people still do that. although no one else does. so, you are going to pick a career and youare going to make decisions, one after the other about which, if you are not certain,you cannot make. in which case you have no life. you are just a whirlwind of chaos, so youare stuck with the necessity of following a course of action, which is acted out certaintythat your intellect cannot regard as appropriate. and that is hard on people.
why should i choose this instead of this? why should i act this way instead of thatway? i do not know is not a very useful answerwhen you are a creature that is cognitively able, as we are. this is something absolutely brilliant. it is very difficult for me to believe thatit was written so long ago. so this is dostoyevsky's criticism of communismforty years before communism was a political force. dostoyevsky's thinking really hard about thisnihilism problem.
by the way, nietzsche read dostoyevsky quiteextensively. he is thinking about it. he thinks well, there seems to be two alternatives. one is this superhuman nihilism, which issort of a variant of what nietzsche proposed, because nietzsche proposed that it would become the responsibility of everyhuman being after the death of their religious tradition, to establish their own values. he did not think people could do it. he thought there'd have to be a new kind ofperson who could manage it, because you know,
he is basically asking you to generate a coherentand pragmatically applicable philosophical structure, out of nothing, during your lifetime. good luck with that. you know, plus, he assumed that people createvalues or that they could create values. that is true to some degree. we'll talk about this more when we get intothe phenomenological end of things. but it is not self-evident, right? because one of the things you may notice isthat you cannot force yourself to love someone, right?
but you cannot just decide to value someoneand then, poof, that happens. in fact, you may want with all your heart,or at least with all your mind, to value someone because they deserve it. they had never mistreated you. maybe you've said you would be loyal to them,and poof, someone comes along and you're tremendously attracted to them and off you go, like someonewho is possessed. well, did you create that value? and then, closer to your own experience, canyou actually make yourself interested in something you are bored about?
good luck trying that, you know. you'd rather clean up underneath your bedthan read a paper you do not want to read. you cannot just tell yourself, well, i needto read this paper for the following reasons, and proof, it becomes interesting. no no, your value systems, whatever they happento be, are off doing their own thing. the reason for that, in large part, is becausethey're possessed by ideas that you do not know about, that have these historical roots and thatplay you in some sense, like they play puppets and the stuff is no joke.
okay so this is what dostoyevsky said, wayback in the late 1800s. this was in a book called "notes from underground",and it is about a man who is like hamlet. in some sense, he is a modern man. he's a 20th century man really and his problemis, he is hyper- intelligent and he cannot figure out what the hell he should do withhis life. and it is really bothering him and it is worse than that, because not onlyis it really bothering him, that he cannot get his act together, and act with any degreeof consistency in character, but he knows, that he cannot do that.
and he tortures himself about his weaknessat the same time. so he is a very neurotic character. but he is a sophisticated and intelligentneurotic. and so he has run through all the argumentsthat you might conjure up, to sort of, talk yourself out of being neurotic and suffering. he has nothing but contempt for his own character. he thinks he is much weaker than people, whocan just act without thinking. and he's in this pit, this horrible pit. and it is a wonderful thing to read.
it is quite blackly comical and it is a greatphilosophical and psychological study. anyways, in one of the sections of this book,dostoyevsky's protagonist, starts to talk about alternatives to his nihilistic hopelessness.and he thinks about utopianism as a potential alternative. so what is utopianism? well, in some sense, medieval christianitypromised people redemption after they died. while a utopian creed does the same thing,except it promises it, here and now. communism was a particular utopian creed andfascism had the same element. although it was, i do not know how to describe,it was less intellectually sophisticated than
communism. communists basically said look, if you guysjust stop being selfish and share, we can transform the world into a place where everyonewill have enough of everything, and everyone will be able to do what they want to do. and because of the natural goodness of people,if selfishness can be overcome, that will be the next best thing to a paradise. it was a powerful idea for people, you know? 80 years of our history was spent assessingand battling out the validity of that idea. hundreds of millions of people died as a consequenceof it.
and you can understand why it was so attractive. i mean, still utopian ideologies are attractiveto people and it is hard to read radical islam as anything other than a utopian ideology. you know, the idea is, once you establishrigid sharia, then poof, you know, you got the kingdom of god on earth. and part of the reason that the radical muslimsare fighting against the west, is because they see what they are doing as a counterposition to western nihilism. and is partly because they do not want tofall into that, you know. we would say well that is progress.
yeah, it is progress, by our standards, andit comes at a price. and also we do not even understand how itwas that we paid the price. so the reason i am telling you this, is because,you do not be thinking, for any time at all, that these sorts of issues have disappearedor that they are not relevant. they're relevant. now the guy who is advising putin. his name is alexander dugan and he is no admirerof western liberalism. he thinks about it as fundamentally nihilistic. he thinks that its universal application wouldresult in the dissolution of all local culture
and the production of this sort of materialistichyper- individuality. he's an admirer of tradition. and you know, specifically russian orthodoxtradition. and he believes that the cultures, india,russia and china in particular, should develop their own local cultures, keep the west thehell out, and act as a counter position to nihilistic liberalism. now you know, you can say what you want aboutthat. i think dugan's biggest problem is that, youknow, he does not want that the diverse ideas that characterize the west to bump up againstrussia and dissolve it.
but what he fails to understand is those sameideas are going to emerge within russia, anyways and if you know, if you want to keep themaway outside, you have to keep them away inside and the soviets already tried that for 70years with pretty dire results. so i don't think he can get around the problemmerely by putting up walls, but he is going to try. and that is what putin is doing. so these ideas haven't disappeared at all. they underlie all of the great conflicts thatcharacterize the modern age. dostoyevsky criticized utopianism and it itsbrilliant, his formulation, so i am going
to read it to you. in short, one may say anything about the historyof the world. anything that might enter the most disorderedimagination. the only thing one can say is that it is rational. the very word sticks in one's throat, andindeed, this is the odd thing that is continually happening. they're continually turning up in life, moraland rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity, who make it their object to liveall their lives as morally and rationally as possible.
to be, so to speak, alike to their neighbours,simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this world. and yet we all know that these very people,soon or later, have been false to themselves playing some queer trick, often a most unseemlyone. now i ask you: what can be expected of mansince he is a being endowed with such strange qualities? shower upon him every earthly blessing. drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothingbut bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface. give him economic prosperity, such that heshould have nothing else to do but sleep,
eat cakes and busy himself with the continuationof his species. and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheerspite, man would play you some nasty trick. he would even risk his cakes and would deliberatelydesire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all thispositive good sense, his fatal fantastic element. it is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgarfolly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself, as though thatwere so necessary, that men still are men, and not the keys ofa piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control completely, so completely, thatone will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar.
clearly that is dostoyevsky's criticism ofmaterialistic determinism, which he felt as a spiritual threat fundamentally, its propositionbeing that animals and human beings were deterministic machines. it is a newtonian worldview and because ofthat, everything could be calculated and planned ahead of time, because it could be predictedand measured, and that is not all. even if man really were nothing but a pianokey, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he wouldnot become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude,simply to gain his point. and if he does not find means, he will contrivedestruction and chaos, sufferings of all sorts,
only to gain his point. he will launch a curse upon the world, andas only man can curse, it is his privilege, and the primary distinction between him andother animals, maybe by his curse alone he will attain his object and convince himselfthat he is a man and not a piano key. if you say that all this, too, can be calculatedand tabulated, chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculatingit all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposelygo mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point. i believe in it, i answer for it.
for the whole work of man really seems toconsist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a pianokey. it may be at the cost of his skin. it might be by cannibalism. and this being so, can one help being temptedto rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something wedon't know? you will scream at me, that is, if you condescendto do so. that no one is touching my free will, thatall they're concerned with is that my will should of, should of itself, of its own freewill, coincide with my own normal interests,
with the laws of nature, and arithmetic. good heavens gentleman, what sort of freewill is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic. when it will all be a case of twice two makesfour. twice two makes four without my will. as if free will meant that. so what's his point? it's sort of a garden of eden point, you know? what are people like?
imagine you can reconstruct a paradise onearth? you know? hypothetically that's what everyone wants. we can go live in a paradise, and that wouldbe the end of the problem. we'd all live happily ever after. but in the original paradise story, that'swhat people were provided with. and the first thing they did when they wereput there, was to do the one thing that they were told not to do, that would bring it allcrashing down. and that was immediately what they did.
and so dostoyevsky's stories are actuallya retelling of that idea. the idea was that people aren't like the utopiansthink. we don't want it easy. we don't want it comfortable. we don't want it good. and the reason for that is, we'd be boredstiff. and so that if anybody ever did put us inthe kind of nursery, that would require us never to exert any effort to do anything atall whatsoever ever again, even if it meant going insane, we'd destroy it.
and then he takes that further, he says, andthat is a good thing. kierkegaard writing earlier, about 40 yearsearlier, said something quite similar. it is now about four years ago that i gotthe notion of wanting to try my luck as an author i remember quite clearly, it was ona sunday. yes, that is it, a sunday afternoon. i was seated as usual, out-of-doors at thecaf� in the fredericksburg garden. i had been a student for half a score of years. although never lazy, all my activity, neverthelesswas like a glittering inactivity, a kind of occupation for which i still have great partialityand for which, perhaps, i even have a little
genius. i read much, spent the remainder of the dayidling and thinking, or thinking and idling, but that was all it came to. so there i sat and smoked my cigar until ilapsed into thought. among other thoughts i remember these. you are going on, i said to myself, to becomean old man without being anything and really without undertaking to do anything. on the other hand, wherever you look aboutyou in literature and in life, you see the celebrated names and figures, the preciousand much heralded men, who were coming into
prominence and are much talked about. the many benefactors of the age who know howto benefit mankind by making life easier and easier. some by railways, others by omnibuses andsteamboats others by the telegraph, others quite easily apprehended compendiums and shortrecitals of everything worth knowing. finally, the true benefactors of the age makespiritual existence in virtue of thought easier and easier yet more and more significant. and what are you doing? here my soliloquy was interrupted for my cigarwas smoked out and a new one had to be lit.
so i smoked again, and then suddenly thisthought flashed through my mind. you must do something, but inasmuch as withyour limited capacities will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become. you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasmas the others, undertake to make something harder. this notion pleased me immensely and at thesame time, it flattered me to think that i, like the rest of them, would be loved andesteemed by the whole community. for when all combine in every way to makeeverything easier, there remains only one possible danger.
namely, that the ease become so great, thatit becomes altogether too great. then there is only one want left, though itis not yet felt want. when people will want difficulty. out of love for mankind and out of despairat my embarrassing situation, seeing that i had accomplished nothing, and was unable to make anything easier thanit already been made, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy,i conceived it as my task to create difficulties, everywhere. now, one of the things you might ask yourselfis, sometimes you come to university and people
talk about happiness. for example, they talk about positive psychology. i am not a fan of positive psychology, bythe way. because happiness is basically extraversionminus neuroticism and we knew that 15 years ago. so we didn't need to make a lot of noise aboutit. so anyways, one of the things you might askyourself is, well, why did you come to university? did you actually come to university to makeyourself happier? well, let's think about that for a minute.
here's one thing to think about? we know that if you put animals in a relativelyboring situation, like rats, in a boring situation and you give them free access to cocaine,they'll just take cocaine until they are dead basically. now rats in a normal environment won't dothat, but bored rats that are sort of isolated, cocaine is really an excellent thing, as faras they are concerned. they'll ignore sex, they'll ignore food. i think they'll still drink water, if i remembercorrectly. but it is cocaine all the way.
and if you could inject an electrode intotheir minds, their brains, which people have done, you can inject the electrode down intothe hypothalamus, into the part that is associated with the reward centres. it is the source of the dopaminergic tractand you can set them up so that if the rat pushes a button, they get a jolt of happiness,basically, and the rat will sit there and push that happiness button in a rather franticway, as if it is looking for something else, in some sense. but it will certainly do it, because it isa peculiar kind of reward. now the question might be, would you allowyourself to be wired up like that?
now you might think there might be some timesin your life where you think that might just be perfectly fine idea, but most of you, isuppose, i presume, wouldn't do that for second, for the same reasons, perhaps, that you donot avail yourself of unlimited access to cocaine. which is a stimulant that is very good atproducing positive emotion. it is a powerful psychomotor stimulant andso it affects the parts of your brain that are active when you are doing something thatyou think is worthwhile and productive. so why not just do that all the time? that is the question that aldous huxley askedin brave new world.
you've got everything you want, take a drugto keep you calm and happy, poof; perfect. well, is that what you want? and if answer is no, then you might ask yourself,what the hell do you want? you know, one of the things i thought a lotabout lately is, lately being 10 years, i suppose is there are these statues that i've seen. i've looked at pictures of them online. there are statues of atlas, and you know atlas,he's this god who has the world on his shoulders. and that is his destiny or his curse, to havethe world on his shoulders.
and he might say, well, you know, poor atlas. maybe he should just put the damn world downand you know, go out for a beer or something. but then you might also think, well what isthat figure trying to, what is that that idea trying to indicate cause it's an old idea. it is a profound idea. there's something divine about a figure withthe world on its shoulders. well, i might say that's the reason you arein university whether you know it or not. you are here to take the world on your shoulders,because that is a sufficiently profound and worthwhile exercise, so that all the sufferingthat you are going to have, might be regarded
as worthwhile. because the value of what you are doing isso high, because that is something you might ask, is there something that you could do,whose value is so high, that the fact, for the existentialists, it's a fact, thatyou're mortal and vulnerable and prone to suffering, inescapably. that you would find that not only acceptable,but desirable. you might say that you would pay that price. you might say that is the existential question. and one of the things it is very interestingabout that question.
i am going to talk about this a lot next class. what happens if you make the opposite choice? i think the 20th century actually showed uswhat happened when people made the opposite because as far as i can tell, when peopleabandon their divine responsibility, let us say, to the utopian claims of a totalitarianstate, or to hopeless nihilism, the consequence on the one hand, with nihilismwas despair and illness, and the consequence on the totalitarian end of things, the utopianend was that you might not die, but you are certainly going to have a hand in making surethat a lot of other people do. and so, to some degree it depends on whatyou want for proof with regards to what you
should do. now, the conclusion i have drawn from allthis, from reading the existentialist is that, if it is the pointless suffering of humanityand the inability to extract meaning from that, that makes you a nihilist and that justifiesit, let us say. you are making a claim right? the claim is, the implicit claim is, thatsuffering is bad and should be halted. it is something like that. and so maybe you will do that by becomingsuicidal or maybe you do that by becoming ultimately genocidal, which is also an optionthat's open to more than a few people.
but there is a logical inconsistency in thatas far as i can tell which is that your initial presupposition is that the suffering is actuallybad. it should be mitigated. that should be it should be reduced. it should perhaps even be eliminated. if you pick up the cloak of nihilism, or maybeyou pick up the cloak of ideological totalitarianism, then we know what the consequence of thatis. the consequence is that everything that isalready really bad, becomes so much worse, that it is almost unimaginable.
and so, even by the standards of the nihilist,who says that the suffering of being should result in its elimination. the consequences of thinking that way, orflipping to the other side and adopting some sort of defensive ideology is that, thingsgo from being, you know, merely the sort of bad state of the earth as it is now, to something as hellish as the soviet gulags,or the russian concentration camps or mao's great experiment in the cultural revolution,which probably killed 100 million people. you know, about which we generally hear nothing. now you know one of the things the existentialistwould say is, what is the relationship between
mental health and responsibility? now that's a good question because it alsohas to do with something like the definition of mental health and responsibility. it is like, if you want your life to be wellconstituted, let us say, whatever that means. and it does not mean being happy. the reason it can't mean being happy is there'sgoing to be times in your life or you're to be called on to act, when you are not happy. so, for example, when one of your parentsdies, you're going to make a choice. you are not going to be happy.
hopefully, you won't be. otherwise you are tangled in some sort offreudian nightmare. but let us assume that that is not the case. you are not going to be happy about it. you're going to be hurt and maybe even partlybroken. so what the hell you supposed to do, then? well the answer is, you should be more usethan trouble. under some such circumstances, that's a goodthing to strive for, you know? because your mother would be, if it is yourfather.
and your mother's to be equally distraughtand so are your siblings and everyone else you care for. maybe by that time, you should be tough enoughso that in that situation, you are good for something. someone has to make the damn funeral arrangements. someone has to settle out the will. someone has to make sure the family does notdegenerate into horrific squabbling, which is something that often happens after thedeath of a parent. and you are not going to be motivated to dothat by happiness.
and what if you have a sick child, when youare a parent. maybe it is a chronic illness. you are not going to be happy about that. you know it will be a weight that you carrywith you all the time and it is one of those things. it seems particularly unjust. then, you are no longer happy. if being happy is the purpose of life, thenyou are basically, that is pretty much it for you.
and you know these catastrophes that i amspeaking of. you can be certain that you are going to beexposed to many of those during your life. you know. it will be a rare period, i think it is rare,in anyone's life where one or more of such things is not going on chronically. it is not you, with some terrible health problem,or some other terrible problem, then it is a parent or a sibling or a child. because you know, you are connected to otherpeople and their vulnerable to so that is the law of human beings.
and so if it is happiness and this is whatsolzhenitsyn said about happiness too. he said happiness is a philosophy, who's broughtto ruin by the first blow of a guard's truncheon. like yeah, that is about as bluntly as youcan put it. here is another, i have time to read bothof these. i think this is from kierkegaard as well. kierkegaard, by the way, was really the firstthinker who identified what we would describe in modern terms as anxiety, especially asexistential anxiety or angst. and it would be associated with the conditionof questioning the nature of existence, the utility of existence, and so kierkegaard wasreally the first person who formalized that
into something resembling a philosophy ora psychology and that he was trying to think about howthat might be overcome. given that it seemed to be rooted in fact,the factual observation. that is the observation of suffering and this is a corollary to dostoyevsky's commentseven though kierkegaard's comments were written decades earlier. dostoyevsky's critique basically said, youcannot solve the problem of suffering by formalizing a utopia and then enjoining it like a massanimal. you cannot do that because you are not thatkind of creature.
even if it was possible, you would not acceptit, you cause trouble because you are interested in trouble. you are probably more interested in troublethan you are at being happy. so i mean, you know people like that. that is another marker of serious personalitydisorder, right? i have clients, have many of them, who areway more interested in causing trouble in some dramatic way than they are in being boringand stable. they will take any form of suffering and inflictany form of suffering on any number of people they can possibly get their hooks into inorder merely to escape, you know, drab and
secure normality. you know, you call those people dramatic,overly dramatic. that is one way of looking at it. and they make, as far as i can tell, a relativelyconscious choice. trouble is more interesting than safety. kierkegaard says something similar. but in a manner that is more constructive, in some sense, with regards to what you should dowith all that insane energy that you are not going to be able to encapsulate inside a utopia.
and it has to do with individual responsibility. there is a view of life, which conceives thatwhere the crowd is, there is also the truth. and then, in truth itself, there is need ofhaving the crowd on its side. i was on a panel at one point about. i think we were discussing gender differencesbetween, obviously between men and women and there are lots of people. the social constructionists, in particular,who think that all the differences; there is biological sex and then there is genderand gender is socially constructed and that all gender differences are socially constructed.
and there is no biological differences ingender between the two sexes. now, virtually no evidence supports that proposition. if you look at the hard-core psychologicalevidence, in fact, it is completely the opposite. and not only that, as you make societies moreegalitarian, men and women get more different, instead of more the same. now the reason that happens is because, onceyou iron out the environmental variability, by equalizing everything, all that is leftis genetic variability. so it springs to the forefront. and so the biggest gender differences in theworld are between men and women in scandinavia.
and those are partly personality differences. women are higher in negative emotion and moreagreeable, among other things, but more particularly, the differences seem to be those of interest. so the biggest differences between men andwomen seem to be, what they are interested in. and roughly speaking, women are more interestedin people and roughly speaking, men are more interested in things. and so in scandinavia, for example, you have20 to 1 proportion of women to men in nursing, and a 20 to 1 proportion of men to women inengineering. and so, you know, the scandinavia governments,now and then, try to move that, so there are
more male nurses and more female engineers. and if they really push, they can move theratios somewhat, for a few years. but as they relax, they snap right back to20 to 1. so anyways, i was sighting some of these studies,and one of the people that i was discussing said, what are we supposed to do with that? and i said, i do not know what you mean. those are scientific findings. he said that, yeah, truth has to be establishedby consensus. and i thought i do not want to live in whateverworld you are going to end up ruling, because
truth is not merely established by consensus. or if you think it does. if you think it is, then while you are ina position that kierkegaard describes, which is that, as long as everyone else believesit, then the appropriate thing is for you to believe it, and also that is the truth. like, it is a pretty damn dismal philosophyand it gets people into tremendous trouble because no matter how many people think thereisn't a wall there, anyone who runs at it head first, is in for a vicious surprise. there is a view of life, which conceives thatwhere the crowd is, there is also the truth
and in that truth, is in truth itself. there is need of having a crowd on its side. there is a view of life, which conceives thatwherever there is a crowd there is untruth. so that to consider for a moment, the extremecase. even if every individual, each for himselfin private, were to be in possession of the truth. yet, in case they are all to get togetherin a crowd, a crowd to which any sort of decisive significance is attributed; avoiding, voting,noisy, audible crowd, untruth would immediately be in evidence.
for a crowd is the untruth. in a godly sense, it is true, eternally, christianly,as st. paul says that only one attains the goal. which is not meant in a comparative sense. for comparison takes others into account. it means that every individual can be thatone. god helping them therein, but only one attainsthe goal. and again, this means that every man shouldbe careful about having to do with the others. and essentially should only talk with godhimself.
for only one attains the goal. and again this means that man or to be a man is akin to deity. in a worldly and temporal sense, it will besaid by the man of bustle, sociability and amicableness, how unreasonable, that onlyone attains the goal. for is far more likely that many, by the strengthof united effort, should attain the goal. and when we were many success is more certain,and it is easier for each man severally. true enough, it is far more likely, and itis also true with respect to all earthly and material goods. if it is allowed to have its way.
however, this becomes the only true pointof view. for it does away with god in eternity andwith man's kinship with deity. it does away with it, or transforms it intoa fable. and puts in its place, the modern, or we mightsay the old pagan notion, that to be a man is to belong to a race, endowed with reason. to belong to it as a specimen, so that therace or species is higher than the individual. this is 100 years before nazism. which is to say, that there are no more individuals,but only specimens. but, eternity which arches over and high abovethe temporal.
tranquil as the starry vault at night. and god in heaven, who in the bliss of thatsublime tranquility, holds in survey, without the least sense of dizziness at such a height,those countless multitudes of men, and knows each single individual by name. he, the great examiner says that only oneattains the goal. kierkegaard was a christian existentialistprotestant. dostoyevsky was an orthodox christian existentialist. and nietzsche, who was also an existentialist,was a, perhaps the most effective anti-christian philosopher who has ever existed.
and he made it one of his conscious aims,to take a hammer to everything that was foundational against what was left of christianity at thetime that he existed. the reason i am telling you this is becauseexistentialism is a strange philosophy. it brings people with very divergent fundamentalassumptions together. they share certain assumptions. and one assumption is that life, in its essence,is suffering. and the second is that the individual hasa responsibility to adopt responsibility in the face of that suffering.
and that is the proper response the properresponse in the nihilism or ideological possession. it is something else at something that dependson the person themselves. nietzsche draws the same conclusions as kierkegaard. a traveller who had seen many countries andpeoples and several continents was asked what human traits he had found everywhere, andhe answered, men are inclined to laziness. some will feel that he might have said withgreater justice. they are all timid. they hide behind customs and opinions. at bottom, every human being knows very wellthat he is in this world just once, as something
unique and that no accident, however strange,will throw together a second time into a unity. such a curious and diffuse plurality. he knows it, but hides it like a bad conscience. why? the last lecture, when we were talking aboutrogers, not the video lecture, but last time i talk to you about rogers, i was talkingabout instrumental speech. and that is the speech that you engage inthat is inauthentic from roger and existentialist when the goal of the speech is to extractsomething from someone or something. the goal is not mere clarity of communication.
and so what that means is that, the speechbecomes separate from the person. and the speech is being used as a tool forwhat some element of the person requires. and that's the hiding behind convention thatnietzsche's talking about. because, when people use instrumental speech,they're almost always pursuing something that other people have told them that they shouldwant. it might be status. it might be career promotion. those are two of the major, it might be materialprogress of other sorts. but the problem is that it is only part ofthe person talking.
and that part, is the part that is fixatedon that local achievement. it's not the part that is attempting to inquireabout what the truth might be in this particular situation, and to describe it as carefullyas possible. and that is the clearest speech of the individual. now one of the premises of existential psychotherapyis that that is the only way you can be healthy. you have to learn to speak and act as a whole. and you have to be directed towards responsibilityand truth. and the consequences of not doing that willbe a. that you will suffer pointlessly whichis the worst kind of suffering and
b. which is worse, you will bring rack andruin onto everyone around you. and it gets worse than that, actually, becauseif you do that long enough. not only will you bring rack in ruin on everyonearound you, you will want to. and that seems at least potentially like abad outcome. well, you can say, if you adopt a firm beliefsystem that will protect you from that. it is like the terror management idea of ideologyprotecting you from death anxiety. which is a, it is a very hopeless philosophy,that. because it basically suggest that the onlyreason people have beliefs is because they are terrified without them.
and that if they engage in any sort of heroicbehaviour, it is merely a fa�ade, which in the final analysis is empty, although necessary. that is where the idea of positive illusionscame from, essentially, you know? that life is so terrible that unless you lieyourself into tranquility. you will be mentally unstable and unhealthy. a doctrine for which by the way, there isno real evidence. anyways, from fear of his neighbour who insistson convention and veils himself with it. but what is it that compels the individualhuman being to fear his neighbour. to think and act herd fashion, and not tobe glad of himself.
a sense of shame, perhaps, in a few rare cases. in the vast majority it is the desire forcomfort. inertia, in short, that inclination to lazinessof which the traveller spoke. he is right. men are even lazier than they are timid. what they fear most is the troubles with whichany unconditional honesty and nudity would burden them. only artists hate this slovenly life in borrowedmanners and loosely fitting opinions and unveil the secret, everyone's bad conscience.
the principle that every human being is aunique wonder. they dare to show us the human being as heis down to the last muscle. himself and himself alone. even more, that in this rigourous consistencyof his uniqueness, he is beautiful and worth contemplating, as novel and incredible asevery work of nature, and by no means dull. when a great thinker despises men, it is theirlaziness that he despises. for it is on account of this that they havethe appearance of factory products and appear indifferent and unworthy of companionshipor instruction. the human being, who does not wish to belongto the mass must merely cease being comfortable
with himself. let him follow his conscience, which shoutsat him. be yourself. what you are presently doing, opining, anddesiring, that is not really you. that is s good place to stop, see you thursday.
