Pressfield, Steven

author of "The War of Art," "Turning Pro," "Gates of Fire," "The Virtues of War," "The Lion's Gate," and other nonfiction and historical fiction

Steven Pressfield: The War of Art

Lex Fridman Podcast · Jun 20, 2020

• Steven Pressfield
• The War of Art
• Resistance
• creativity
• the muse
• writing process
• war and conflict
• Israeli-Palestinian conflict
• artist discipline
• Jungian psychology

Core ideas

Pressfield opens by arguing humans remain essentially the same tribal, "us versus them" creatures we were in prehistory, and that the urge toward conquest (citing Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon) is a near-universal historical imperative, especially among men — while suggesting sport and other sublimated competitive activities offer a healthier outlet for the same instinct, since competitors can embrace each other once "the game is over." He is explicit, though, that his real interest in writing about war (Thermopylae, Alexander's campaigns, the 1967 Six-Day War) is metaphorical rather than military-historical: each conflict represents to him a different internal, spiritual struggle — the Six-Day War as a "return from exile" after 2,000 years of diaspora, Alexander's conquests as a path for followers to transcend their origins, and the Spartans at Thermopylae as a collective enactment of self-sacrifice for a greater cause, comparable in his view to Christ's crucifixion. Discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict specifically (told, by his own account, entirely from the Israeli/Jewish side), he argues that lasting peace between opposed groups requires both mutual respect and mutual fear (each side confident the other won't dare cross a line), contrasting this with the historical vulnerability of diaspora Jews, and expresses belief that even ancient, deep-seated hatreds can eventually dissolve under the right conditions, though he's uncertain whether this requires generational turnover or can happen within an individual's own "spiritual" transformation.

On the psychology of violence, Pressfield relays a Spartan king's lament ("alas, valor is no more") upon seeing a long-range weapon that could kill without personal risk, suggesting something is lost when combat becomes de-personalized and ritualized codes of honorable, equally-matched combat disappear; he also recounts secondhand testimony from Israeli combat veterans (including a fighter pilot who watched his bullets hit a tank crewman's face) that killing another person "changes you utterly forever," a horror understood, in his account, only by those who've experienced it directly. He speculates that social media may be reducing appetite for actual war by letting people vent tribal hatred harmlessly online, while noting the strange disconnect between people acting out extreme violence in video games or online rhetoric and their likely real-world squeamishness.

The bulk of the conversation elaborates Pressfield's central thesis from "The War of Art": that creative work is blocked by "Resistance" (capitalized), a force he locates in a Jungian/Kabbalistic framework as the voice of the fearful ego (which believes in death, separateness, and scarcity) versus the "Self" (which touches a "divine ground" — his term for the muse or goddess — and operates from love, unity, and a disbelief in death's finality, exemplified by the Spartans at Thermopylae or Christ's sacrifice). He argues Resistance persists precisely because the ego is existentially threatened whenever an artist or scientist opens themselves to this transpersonal "Self," and that in most stories the villain represents ego/Resistance/fear while the hero represents Self/sacrifice — with Donald Trump offered as his example of ego-driven, zero-sum thinking and Martin Luther King and Gandhi as self-oriented figures who paid for it with their lives. He connects Resistance's persistence to the Garden of Eden myth (humanity's expulsion into fear and struggle after acquiring forbidden knowledge) and argues, paralleling his view on death, that Resistance actually supplies meaning to creative life even though he also considers it fundamentally illusory — something to be "surrendered to" or dissolved rather than defeated once and for all, since it always returns "the next morning."

Pressfield describes the muse not as a mere psychological metaphor but as something closer to a literal external intelligence or force (invoking Kabbalistic concepts of the soul/neshama residing on a higher plane, Greek mythological interventions in the Iliad, and the film City of Angels) that already "knows" an artist's entire future body of work and communicates through a kind of prayer-like attention during the creative act; he cites Bruce Springsteen's discography as evidence of an underlying destined arc no external observer could have predicted in advance but which appears inevitable in retrospect. Getting into a receptive state to "hear" this voice, in his account, took roughly thirty years of effortful practice before he learned to let go of trying too hard — a process he likens to meditation, martial arts drilling, or athletic training more than any single technique or "hack." He describes his own daily discipline (waking very early, an intense gym session as a form of "resistance training" both literally and metaphorically, then a strict ~3-hour writing block during which he tries to enter the work immediately, stopping each day at a point where he already knows what comes next, per advice attributed to Hemingway/Steinbeck) and credits his longtime editor Sean Coyne with providing the outside perspective a writer, too close to their own work, cannot supply for themselves — noting most successful writers, in his view, need an equivalent editorial partnership unless they are exceptionally self-sufficient.

On sustaining a creative life, Pressfield takes the "health matters" side of a debate the host frames around figures like Arianna Huffington and Elon Musk, arguing that even during periods of total freedom from obligation he maintained a disciplined routine (exercise, diet, sleep) similar to elite athletes like Steph Curry, and notes that writing itself imposes a natural ceiling (he's never managed more than about four hours of real writing per day), which happens to leave ample time to protect health — contrasted with fields requiring longer sustained "non-muse" hours. He closes by describing the writing process as never lonely (populated by characters he grows genuinely attached to, "like children who've gone off to college"), warns against visualizing future success or literary awards during creative work (calling this a dangerous surrender to ego, unlike athletic visualization of process/flow, which he considers legitimate), and says he has never been able to predict his own future projects in advance — his first book (The Legend of Bagger Vance) and each subsequent one arrived, in his account, as a surprise he simply had to remain open to.

Excerpts