Kelly, Sean
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Kelly frames existentialism not as a fixed doctrine but as a recurring idea across thinkers (many of whom rejected the label) organized around Sartre's phrase "existence precedes essence": there is no god-given or fixed fact about what you are, so you become who you are entirely through the choices you make, and — since no external authority (God, utilitarian calculus, philosophical theory) grounds those choices — you alone are responsible for them. He explains Sartre's concept of "bad faith" through two examples: a waiter who conceals his own agency by pretending to merely execute a predetermined social role, and the passivity of leaving a hand "cold, dead and clammy" on a first date rather than actively accepting or rejecting it — both illustrating attempts to evade the constant responsibility that Sartre thinks defines human existence ("condemned to be free"). Kelly contrasts this radical-freedom view with the traditional philosophical picture (going back to Plato's "myth of the metals") that some fixed, pre-existing fact (soul type, IQ, genetics) determines and limits who a person can become.
He distinguishes Sartre's atheistic existentialism from Nietzsche's response to nihilism (the diagnosis that nothing external any longer grounds meaning, summarized in "God is dead"): rather than radical, unconstrained freedom, Nietzsche's ideal is closer to artistic improvisation — illustrated by Herbie Hancock's famous story of playing a "wrong" chord during a Miles Davis performance, which Davis instantly reframed with his own playing to make retroactively "right." Kelly argues this shows creativity isn't creation from nothing, but a skilled, responsive engagement with a given situation — a model he thinks better describes meaningful living than Sartre's unlimited freedom. He also discusses living in a "secular age" (drawing on the idea, associated with Charles Taylor, that religious belief persists but no longer licenses judging outsiders as lesser) as an ambivalent achievement: liberalizing, but also unable to ground a religious believer's certainty the way it once could.
Kelly surveys several literary/philosophical figures central to his existentialism course: Dostoevsky (particularly The Brothers Karamazov), whom he frames as running Sartre's "if there is no God, everything is permitted" argument in reverse — since we demonstrably do feel guilt and responsibility even for harms we didn't intend, this suggests not everything is permitted, and therefore (on Dostoevsky's view) some ground like God exists; Camus, whose The Myth of Sisyphus frames existence as "absurd" (presenting itself as meaningful while withholding actual significance) and counsels defiant embrace of a Sisyphean existence rather than suicide — a view Kelly finds compelling but incomplete, since it treats the "deadening" experience of routine as revealing the whole truth about life rather than also missing moments of what he calls "aliveness" (citing peak creative or connective moments, like Hancock's chord or a reciprocated first-date hand-hold); and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, which Kelly reads as proposing salvation not through monotheistic unity but through a plural, polytheistic re-enchantment of the world's many local meanings, contrasted with Hemingway's more melancholic, individually-focused The Old Man and the Sea.
He discusses Martin Heidegger's concept of the "technological age" — the largely unchosen, historically specific way modern people understand themselves and everything else as optimizable, efficient "standing reserve" — as a "supreme danger" that, per Heidegger (quoting Hölderlin), also contains a "saving possibility": recognizing that our current self-understanding is a contingent, updatable "gift" we're implicated in, not an unchangeable fact, opens a path to a different, more attentive relationship with existence. Kelly candidly discusses Heidegger's Nazism as an unavoidable, disturbing biographical fact to reckon with, and uses it to segue into a broader reflection on collective responsibility — arguing individuals bear some responsibility for the "broken norms" of communities they belong to even without personally choosing or endorsing them, illustrated by Alyosha Karamazov's realization that his unconscious avoidance of a woman he found sexually threatening was experienced by her as moral judgment and rejection — while cautioning (in a brief aside prompted by the host) that movements correcting social norms must also self-scrutinize to avoid replicating the harms they oppose.
On David Foster Wallace, Kelly identifies two competing threads: Wallace's diagnosis of contemporary life as a "constant temptation to diversion through entertainment," and his proposed solution (articulated in his Kenyon commencement speech) of radical freedom to reinterpret any frustrating situation charitably — which Kelly argues Wallace overstates, since reinterpretation only liberates us when it's actually true to the situation, not simply chosen; he also flags Wallace's fictional portrayal of achieving "levitating" bliss amid total boredom (in the unfinished novel The Pale King) as an unlivable ideal, preferring Wallace's less-developed alternative — described in his essay on Roger Federer — of transcendent, embodied peak moments as more attainable. Kelly connects Wallace's own suicide, in part physiologically rooted, to a possible pattern of self-imposed isolation (comparing Wallace's self-described role as a detached observational "roving eyeball" to Ivan Karamazov's habit of witnessing tragedies without emotional involvement), suggesting an aspiration to pure observational sensitivity can itself become dangerously isolating.
Kelly also discusses his intellectual debt to his late mentor Hubert Dreyfus (whose critique of "good old-fashioned" symbolic AI first drew Kelly toward phenomenology), and, prompted by the host's interest in AI, argues that true artistic creativity requires being "socially embedded" — a genuinely communicative act that changes how an audience understands a domain (citing the initially-rejected but later foundational reception of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring) — and expresses skepticism that a narrowly-scoped system like AlphaZero, however surprising its chess or Go moves, meets this bar absent genuine social embeddedness, while remaining open to AI eventually achieving it in less combinatorially bounded domains like language. He closes by rejecting simple characterizations of human distinctiveness as mere rationality, instead describing humans as beings capable of simultaneously experiencing the total "ungroundedness" of existence and its real significance — and offers philosopher Albert Borgmann's practical framework for a meaningful life: aiming to fill it with moments about which one can genuinely say "there's no place I'd rather be, no thing I'd rather be doing, no body I'd rather be with, and this I will remember well."
Excerpts
On Sartre's account of "bad faith" through the example of an unreturned hand-hold:
“The other person leaves the hand there, cold and dead and clammy, neither rejecting it nor embracing it — and Sartre says that's also bad faith, that's also acting as if we're a kind of being that we're not, because it pretends that it's possible not to make a choice, and we're the beings who are always making choices.”
On why he thinks Camus's account of the absurd is incomplete:
“For me there's an extra part to it, which is somehow — yes, that's the way things are, and it's inadequate, and there's something that's missing from that aspect of our existence that could be there... that's what I think we do have — the experience of the presence of that in moments when you feel truly alive.”
On Heidegger's "supreme danger" of the technological age and its "saving possibility":
“It's the understanding that we've been thrown into, that we've been given — it's the gift that was given to us. It's supremely dangerous if we let ourselves live that way, we'll destroy ourselves. But it's also the saving possibility because if we recognize that we never chose that... we could find a way to supersede it.”