You did the homework — or some version of it. Perhaps not the way it was set, but the question stayed with you, the way it has stayed with you all month. Who was the "I" that chose? Where did it get the standard it chose by? And you went looking, in your own life, for the author of that choice — the self that stands outside everything, that picked the smaller life on that Tuesday because it was what it wanted. And here is the thing worth beginning with tonight, because it is the thing nobody warns you about. When you could not find that self — when you reached for the author and found instead a tangle of things you had been handed, a role you had been given, a story already under way — many of you felt something you did not expect.
You felt relief.
Be honest about that, because it matters. There was something almost restful in it. It is not all on me. I am not standing alone outside my whole life, required to invent its meaning from nothing. The responsibility is not even mine. There is a story larger and older than I am, and I have only to find my part in it and carry it. After a month of losing one thing after another — first the feeling, then desire, then the standard you thought you could measure by, and last week the author himself — that last loss arrived with a strange comfort attached. The demand lifted. You did not have to invent the meaning of your life from nothing, because it turned out you were never the kind of thing that could.
That relief is worth stopping over. Do not trust it yet. Because there is a thinker coming tonight whose life's work was the claim that this exact feeling — the relief of the responsibility is not mine — is the most dangerous falsehood a frightened person can tell themselves. He is not a crank. He is one of the most serious people who ever thought about human freedom. And he will say that last week, in taking the responsibility out of your hands and calling it a comfort, this series did the cruellest thing it has done to you.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required.
This is the seventh episode of eight. Last week was the hardest. It set out Alasdair MacIntyre's central claim at full force: the point of a life is not something a person writes by consulting what they want; it is something they find, set by practices, by a tradition, and by a community whose story was under way before they arrived. The self that authors its own life from outside, alone in the driveway, was said to be a fiction. And there was a sting in it — that a life with a real point might ask for something smaller, harder, and far less one's own than either rest or ambition had wanted. That claim was put as hard as it could be. And then it was stopped, deliberately, with a plain admission: it was a claim, not a proof. Two thinkers were coming who hold it to be wrong; they are not fools; and it would be a cheat to answer them quickly.
Tonight they answer, both at full strength. And here is the shape of it, stated now so that no one spends the hour waiting for the tie to be broken: it will not be broken. The first thinker says the responsibility was yours all along — that MacIntyre talked you out of the truest thing about you. The second goes further, and stranger, and asks why anyone believed a life was a story in the first place. By the end there will be three answers to one question; they cannot all be right; and which one is right will not be settled here. That is not evasion. It is the honest state of the argument.
The thinker is Jean-Paul Sartre, and we should take him at his strongest, because he is the most fully worked-out form of the impulse that chose the smaller life and felt free in doing it. He is not the enemy of that feeling. He is its philosopher. His argument is more tightly built than people usually remember, and it bears directly on everything last week established. The clearest statement of it is a public lecture he gave in Paris in 1945, later published as Existentialism Is a Humanism.
Begin with a paper-knife — Sartre's own example, a small blade for slitting envelopes. Before that knife existed, someone had the idea of it: a thing for cutting paper, made this shape, this sharp, for this purpose. The idea of the knife — what it is for, what counts as a good one — came first, in the mind of the maker; the metal object came second, made to fit the idea. Sartre has a phrase for that order: for the paper-knife, essence precedes existence. What it is for was fixed before it ever was. And nothing about the knife is up to the knife. It cannot decide it would rather be a spoon. Its whole purpose was settled by someone else before it was made.
Now consider, Sartre says, how almost everyone has quietly thought about a human being. For most of Western history there was a maker — God — a kind of supreme craftsman; and just as the craftsman had the idea of the knife, God had the concept of a human being before making one. There is a human nature, a design, a purpose we were built for, fixed in advance in the mind of the one who made us. On that picture, a person's essence precedes their existence too. You arrive already meaning something, already aimed at something, made to a specification you did not write — exactly as the knife is.
Then Sartre asks the decisive question. What if there is no maker? No God, no divine craftsman, no one who had the idea of you before you arrived. Then there is no human nature waiting in advance, because there is no mind in which it could have waited. There is no specification. There is no design you are built to fit. And so for a human being — and only for a human being — the order reverses. You exist first. You arrive in the world, real before you are anything in particular, and only afterwards, by living, by choosing, do you become something. That is his famous line, and it is doing real work, not serving as a slogan: existence precedes essence. First you are; then, out of your own choices and nothing else, you make what you are. "Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself." There is no purpose waiting to be found, no story already written that you walked into halfway. There is a person, here, now, with no fixed nature and no assigned purpose — and the freedom, and the burden, of making one, or failing to.
Consider what this does to last week. Last week's claim was that the point of your life is not yours to set. Sartre's reply is that it was never anyone else's to set either. There is no author above a human life handing down its purpose, because there is no maker, and so no purpose to hand down. MacIntyre pointed to a story already under way before any of us arrives — our roles, our inheritance, our community — and said that this is where a life's point comes from, the thing to be found and continued. Sartre looks at exactly the same facts and says: yes, all of it is there. You were born into a family, a country, a language, a moment, none of which you chose. He denies none of it. He calls it your situation — the circumstances you are given. But none of it tells you what it means. The facts do not arrive with their meaning attached. Your father, your country, the work you were handed — these are the given materials. What you make them mean, what you do with them, whether you continue the story or break from it, is written nowhere. That is yours. What a life means rests with the person living it, and always did; the circumstances of your birth no more settle what your life means than they settle anything on their own.
He has a name for the condition this puts you in, and it is not a comfortable one. He says you are condemned to be free. Condemned, because you did not choose to be free, did not ask for the responsibility, and cannot lay it down. Every attempt to hand it to something else — to a tradition, to a role, to God, to what a story is said to require — is itself a choice: the choice to obey. And it remains yours, and you know it. There is no escape into being told. And because there is no maker and no human nature to point to, when you choose, you choose with — his word — no excuse. "We are left alone, without excuse." You cannot say, "I had to; it is my role; it is what a son does; it is what the story required." There is no fixed thing that required it. You did it because you chose it, the whole weight of it falls on you, and there is no one else to hold responsible.
Now comes the sharpest part of Sartre's case, the reason he is here tonight. He has a name for what MacIntyre offered last week, and it is not a flattering one. When a person who is free, and fully responsible, and alone with the choice, tells himself I am not really free; my life's meaning is handed to me by my roles, my tradition, the story I was born into; I am only continuing what was already under way — Sartre says that person is in bad faith. Bad faith — the term is from his 1943 book Being and Nothingness — is lying to yourself about your own freedom in order to escape how much it weighs. It is pretending to be the paper-knife, a thing whose purpose was stamped in from outside, because that is restful, and being responsible for your own purpose is frightening. And he would look at the relief you felt this week — good, the responsibility is not mine after all — and say: there it is. That is what it sounds like. That is the exact comfort a person reaches for when the freedom becomes too heavy. On his account, you did not discover that you were not the author of your life. You fled the responsibility of authoring it, and dressed the flight as humility, as wisdom, as finding your place in a larger story. "Discover your quest in the tradition you were handed" is, Sartre says, the most sophisticated bad faith there is, precisely because it sounds so much like maturity.
His most famous case puts this where a person actually lives. A young man came to Sartre during the war, genuinely torn, wanting advice. The young man's older brother had been killed; his father had drifted toward collaboration; and the young man was the one thing keeping his mother going — for her, the single reason to get up. He faced a choice: stay, and be the whole world to one grieving woman who needed him; or leave, slip away to England, join the Free French, and fight for his country, for a cause vastly larger than his mother's kitchen — knowing the leaving might destroy her and the fighting might come to nothing. Stay with the mother, or go to the war. And he wanted Sartre to tell him. He wanted a rule — Christian ethics says love your neighbour, so stay; some larger ethics says serve the many, so go — he wanted the answer to come from outside, from a doctrine, from his role, from the story. Sartre's reply is the whole of his position in a sentence: no doctrine can tell you. No rule reaches down far enough to decide it for you. Whichever way he went, he would be the one who chose what mattered more — and in choosing, he would not be reading off a value that was already there; he would be creating the value, deciding, with his life, what a life like his is for. "I had no choice; it was my duty as a son" — bad faith. "I had no choice; my country needed me" — bad faith. There was a choice. There is always the choice. That, Sartre says, is the condemnation and the dignity at once, and they are the same thing.
Before the other side comes back in, try this one on your own account, because it only works if it is yours and not the young man's. Go back to the relief named at the start of the hour — the lightness you felt last week when the author could not be found and the weight came off. Do not ask whether MacIntyre was right. Ask Sartre's question about your own reaction: was that relief the sound of a truth you finally saw, or the sound of a weight you were desperate to put down? Be exact with yourself. You were tired. You have been tired this whole series; the tiredness is where we started. And "the responsibility is not mine; the story holds it" is the kind of thing an exhausted person would be glad to believe, whether or not it is true. So which was it? Did you see something real last week, or did someone offer a tired person an excuse, and did the tired person take it and call it wisdom? You will not be able to tell for certain. That is the point. Sartre has introduced a doubt into the one comfort the month finally offered, and it cannot be removed for you — not by him either, because to remove it he would have to hand you a doctrine, and that is the one thing he refuses to do.
That is Sartre, in full. Now comes the promise made last week: not to let him win simply by speaking last. MacIntyre is not without a reply, and it turns on the one thing Sartre's picture requires and never quite shows — the chooser himself, the self that is supposed to do the choosing.
Sartre's whole account rests on a self who chooses: a self thrown into the world, granted, with a situation he did not pick, but who then stands at the point of decision — as the young man stood between his mother and the war — and chooses, and in choosing creates a value that was not there before. MacIntyre asks one quiet question about that self. Where is he standing when he chooses? What is he made of, this chooser, before he chooses?
We have met this question before. Weeks ago, on different ground, the series went looking for the self-made man, and could not find him. Each time we reached for the part of a person that was purely his own, we found instead something he had been given. The chooser standing outside everything, making himself from nothing, turned out not to exist. There was always a self already there, made of unchosen things, doing the so-called choosing.
That self, MacIntyre says, is exactly the self Sartre's argument requires. Look again at the young man, the one Sartre says is creating a value when he chooses between his mother and the war. Why is the choice agonising? Because he loves his mother. That love does the whole work of the dilemma; without it there is no pull to stay, no weight on that side, no anguish at all — only a young man leaving a house. And did he choose to love her? Did he stand somewhere prior, without values, and decide that she would be the one whose grief could hold him? Of course not. The love was already there. It was the unchosen material the so-called free choice was made out of. So Sartre shows us a man freely creating his values from nothing — and the man is plainly running on values he did not create and could not have. The choosing, MacIntyre says, is done by a self shaped entirely by a story it did not write. There is no author standing outside the whole of it, because there is no outside to stand in. It is the same missing self as before; Sartre has simply moved it to the place where freedom is supposed to live.
That is a real objection, and it costs Sartre something. But he does not fall. He has a reply to the reply, and it keeps him standing.
Sartre can say: of course the young man did not choose to love his mother. I never said he chose his situation — I said the opposite, that he is thrown into it: the love, the mother, the war, all of it. Granted, fully granted; you do not pick your starting materials. But that was never my claim. My claim is about what happens next. The love is given — but what he does with the love, whether he stays for it or leaves in spite of it, what he decides it finally means for how he will live, is not given. It is not contained in the love; it is not written in the mother or the country or the role. That is still his, still without excuse, and no amount of "you were shaped by what you did not choose" reaches up to make the decision for him. You have shown that the self was shaped by the story. Granted. The self still has to decide. And nothing in the story makes the decision. The person does.
Look, then, at where this leaves us, because it is a victory for no one, and it should not be mistaken for one. MacIntyre says there is no author standing outside the story; the chooser is made of things he did not choose, all the way down. Sartre says: granted — and he still has to choose, without excuse, and that choosing is the whole of his freedom, and you cannot dissolve it by pointing at his childhood. The two do not resolve. One of them looks at a human being and sees, underneath everything, a part being carried in a story. The other looks at the same human being and sees, underneath everything, a choice being made with no excuse. And the honest position, the one it would be a lie to hide, is that you can look at your own case and see both. You can see the part you were handed. And you can feel that you are still the one who has to decide what to do about it. Neither view is obviously wrong. This is the first of the disagreements, and it stays open: is the point of a life something already there to be found, or something a person makes? MacIntyre says found. Sartre says made. I award the victory to neither, because neither has defeated the other, and you can feel in your own case that they have not.
But there is something both of them take for granted. Their whole quarrel — who determines the point of a life — assumes one thing in common: that a life is a story. They differ only over who writes the point of it. There is a third figure, kept waiting since Episode five, who does not grant even that, and who asks the question neither MacIntyre nor Sartre stopped to put: why suppose a life is a story at all?
His name is Galen Strawson, and you have met him once before — in Episode five, allowed a single interruption and then held back until now. In an essay called "Against Narrativity," published in the journal Ratio in 2004, he makes an objection aimed at neither MacIntyre nor Sartre in particular, but at the assumption they share. Sartre and MacIntyre argue over who determines the point of the story. Strawson's response to the whole quarrel is that both sides are mistaken at the root: a life is not a story in the first place.
Here is what he noticed that the others did not stop to notice. The whole series — and most of the way educated people now talk about their lives — runs on one assumption so deep it is rarely stated: that a human life is a story. That it has the shape of a narrative — a single self moving through time from a past toward an end, an arc, a plot, a thing that adds up. MacIntyre says it is a story you did not write. Sartre says it is a story you write yourself. The wellness culture says it is a story you ought to make beautiful and deliberate. Everyone agrees it is a story. Strawson says that this is not an obvious truth. It is a fashionable assumption, and he does not accept it.
He separates it into two distinct claims, and it is worth keeping them apart, because people run them together. The first is a claim about fact — about how human beings actually experience their lives: the idea that we all, naturally, experience our existence as a narrative, a story unfolding. Call that the psychological claim: people do live their lives as stories. The second is a claim about value — that experiencing your life as a story is a good thing, that you ought to, that a rich sense of your life as a narrative is part of living well and being a full person. Call that the ethical claim: you should live your life as a story. The first says we do; the second says we should. Strawson's position is blunt: the first is false for large numbers of people, and the second is not merely false but harmful.
Here is what he says about himself, and he means it literally, and notice how strange it sounds: "I have absolutely no sense of my life as a narrative with form, or indeed as a narrative without form." None. He does not experience himself as a single character moving through a plot. He has a past; he knows things happened to a person with his name; but he does not feel himself to be that person stretched across time, the central figure of a continuing tale aimed somewhere. He lives, by his own report, mostly now. Today. This problem, this conversation, this piece of work, this walk. And then tomorrow, which is also a now. He gives this a name. People who experience themselves as continuous across time, as the ongoing central figure of one long story, he calls Diachronic. People who do not — who live fully in a series of presents, with no felt thread tying them into one plotted whole — he calls Episodic. And his whole point is that the Episodic person is not defective. Not shallow, not damaged, not someone who has failed to understand himself. Simply a different, equally good, equally deep way of being a person — one the narrative view cannot even recognise, because it is too busy insisting that everyone find their arc.
Now apply this to last week, where the effect is severe. MacIntyre's central claim last week — the one that undid the sovereign author — rested at every point on the premise that a life is a whole: a single quest, a story with a unity one can succeed or fail at continuing. The phrase was that you walked in halfway. Halfway through what? Through the story. Remove the story, and the claim has nothing to rest on. There is no quest to continue, no plot you are a chapter in, no unity a life is answerable to. And Strawson goes further. He says the demand that your life be a story — find its unity, name its quest, make it add up to something — is not deep wisdom. It can distort. Because to turn a life into a tidy narrative, you have to edit it: smooth the parts that do not fit, promote the moments that look like turning points, demote the years that were only years. You revise your own past to make a better story, and you call the revision "finding the meaning," and it is at least half invention. The narrative is not lying in the life waiting to be read. It is written backwards, after the fact, to produce a shape — and the shape, once made, is mistaken for something found. Strawson regards the whole idea that a life is a story with a point as, in the end, an illusion, and a compelling one. And he names names: MacIntyre is on his list, the line that "man is a story-telling animal" quoted as exactly the idea he opposes. The wellness culture is not on Strawson's list — that extension is mine, not his — but it is the same illusion in a cheaper form: "live your best story," "make this chapter count," sold by people who had never heard of him.
Now — stop here, because there is an exit you may be reaching for, and it is the wrong one. You are tired, and Strawson has just said your life need not be a story, need not add up to anything, can be today and then tomorrow — and some part of you thinks: then I was right all along; no plot, no purpose, no quest, just me and a small comfortable life that asks nothing and owes nothing. Stop. That is not what he said, and reaching for him in that way returns you precisely to the situation this series began in. Strawson is not giving you permission to want what you want. Episodic does not mean shapeless, or self-indulgent, or off the hook. The Episodic person still lives well or badly. He can still be answerable to the work in front of him, decent to the people in front of him, serious about the present he is actually in — and Strawson would say a good Episodic life is full of that, only without the long, plotted arc that ties a whole life together. He has dismantled the idea that your life is a story. He has not returned the idea that your life is yours to please yourself with. Those are different claims, and the second one already failed three episodes ago, at the experience machine, and Strawson does not revive it. So he is no place to rest. He offers no such comfort. He has simply removed the one shape that was holding the whole question together.
So try this one on your own account, and honestly, because this one you can actually check against your own experience in a way you could not check the others. Right now — not the story of your life, not the version you would tell at a dinner party, but right now, today, when you look at your own existence from the inside: is there a plot? Do you genuinely feel yourself to be one continuous character, moving through time from where you came from toward some end, bound to the arc of it? Or is there mostly just this — today, this week, the things actually in front of you — and "the story of your life" is something you only assemble when someone asks, constructed on demand, not really lived inside? There is no right answer; that is what makes it a real question. If you find the plot, then perhaps you are Diachronic, and MacIntyre and Sartre's whole quarrel is live for you. But if you go looking and find mostly just today, lived well or badly as you can manage, with the arc being something you would have to manufacture, then Strawson is saying something true about you, and the question the last six weeks were built on may not even be your question. And you will not be able to tell which, because you have spent your whole life being told the answer is "of course it is a story," and you have never once been given permission to check.
Does MacIntyre have a reply? He does, though it does not settle matters. He can say: all right, Strawson — grant that some people are Episodic, grant that they do not feel the long arc. A person can still be answerable to something outside his own present wanting: the standards of the work in front of him this afternoon, the people he is bound to today, even if he never experiences it as one grand quest. You need not feel like the hero of an epic to owe an honest day to the work. And Strawson can answer — and this is why it does not end — then you have given up your own thesis. Being answerable to this afternoon's work is not the narrative unity of a whole life. The narrative unity was the thing that undid the sovereign author last week: the whole, the single quest, the life that adds up. Retreat to "well, you can still be answerable to today," and you have abandoned the very claim that made the argument land. So which is it — the grand unified quest, or simply being decent to the day? You cannot have the demanding version and the modest version at once. And there they stop: both positions still standing, neither defeated.
Consider, then, where this leaves us. One question — what is a life, that it could have a point at all? — and three serious thinkers who answer it in three incompatible ways, and none of the three has been defeated tonight.
MacIntyre: your life is a story you did not write, and its point is found — discovered inside the practices, the tradition, and the community whose part you are carrying. Sartre: your life is a story you do write, every day, with no author above you and no excuse beneath you, and "I found my part" is the lie a frightened person tells. Strawson: stop — there may be no story at all, only today and then tomorrow, and the demand that a life add up to a single shape is an assumption you were taught to accept. Found. Made. Or never a story at all. Three answers. They cannot all be true, and the people who have thought hardest about this have not agreed which — and it would be false to pretend that an hour can settle what a century could not.
But be precise about the one thing tonight has actually done, because it is easy to misread, and the misreading is the whole danger. It would be natural, after an hour like this, to feel the pressure lift. To think: last week MacIntyre left me no answer, the point of a life was going to demand the small hard life, and now two other thinkers have arrived to argue with him, so perhaps I am off the hook; perhaps it is all opinion; perhaps I can go back to the driveway and the small comfortable life and call the whole thing a draw. No. Look closely at what the two apparent rescuers actually ask of you, because neither is a rescue.
Take Sartre first. If he is right — if you are the author of your life's meaning — then the responsibility did not lessen; it grew. Because now there is no story to blame, no tradition that made you do it, no purpose that demanded it, no "it is only my part." You chose the smaller life on that Tuesday, freely, without excuse, and it is yours, fully, and you can never again say "I had to" or "it is what I am for" — there is no one else to hold responsible. MacIntyre at least offered a story to be answerable to. Sartre removes even that and hands you the entire weight of the choice, with no one standing behind it. That is not relief. It is the heaviest version of the question there is.
And Strawson reaches the same result by another route. If he is right and there is no plot, you might think: then nothing is owed, and I can please myself. But that move was already blocked, and it is worth blocking once more, because it is the one you most want. "No story" does not mean "no standard." It means the standard, if there is one, lives in the present — in this work, these people, this day done well or badly — and not in some grand arc you can point to and rest on. Strawson does not excuse you from living well. He only denies you the comfort of a lifelong narrative that would tell you that you are on track. He leaves you with today, and only today, and the plain question of whether you are meeting it. That, too, offers no rest.
What tonight has actually done is the opposite of relief. Last week you could still hope that MacIntyre was simply wrong — that some other serious view would arrive and let you off. Tonight you met the two other serious views, and neither one does. One makes the choice heavier; the other removes the story you would lean on to justify it. The two rescues you were waiting for turn out to ask more of you than the thing they were meant to rescue you from. That is not an answer withheld to be clever. It is that all three live answers ask more of you than consulting your own desires ever did, and the only thing they disagree about is the shape of what is asked.
Next week is the last episode. Here is what it is and what it is not, so that no one sits through it waiting for the rescue. It is not where the tie is finally broken and one of the three declared right — that cannot be done, and anyone who could do it would not need to make a podcast about it. It is where all three of them, and the question they are fighting over, are carried back to the one place this series began — and where you will see what each of the three answers does to that, to the most real decision you actually made. And next week will not sell you a comfortable way out of it — not out of cruelty, but because the comfortable ways out are what put you in that situation to begin with, and you came here to get out of it, not to be handed a more comfortable version of the same thing.
So the work this week is not a takeaway; it is the thing the whole hour was for. You now have the three readings — the found story, the written story, the no-story — and you have your own life to test them against. Watch yourself settle on one. You will; everyone does, because the question is too heavy to hold all three for long. And when you feel yourself drawn to one — to MacIntyre because it is a relief not to be the author, or to Sartre because you want to be free, or to Strawson because you are tired and "there is no plot" sounds like rest — stop, and ask what you are really reaching for: am I drawn to this one because I think it is true, or because it is the one that asks the least of me right now? That is the whole of it. You do not have to know which of them is right. You only have to stop choosing your philosophy of life the way you chose the comfortable life — by what you wanted to be true.
No one can tell you whether you authored your life, or found it, or whether it was ever one story to begin with. Neither can the three who have thought hardest about it. But you can no longer pretend it is an easy question, or that handing back that promotion answered it, or that "what I want" was ever going to reach the bottom of it. What you wanted was permission to rest. Not one of the three serious people you met tonight will give it to you, and each refuses for a different reason. One more week, and we go back to the driveway.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.