The book of Ecclesiastes has puzzled readers for millennia with its unflinching observations about absurdity, meaninglessness, vanity, and futility. Biblical scholar Jesse Peterson joins Evan Rosa to discuss his book, *Qoheleth and the Philosophy of Value*, bringing contemporary philosophy into dialogue with this ancient text and reflecting on what happens when a sage confronts the gap between expectation and reality. "Can you view your work, your toil, not just as a means to a further end? Can you rather turn to simply enjoy the work itself?" Together they discuss the distinction between meaning and value, why Qoheleth denies lasting significance while affirming joy, the harm of death and the death of memory, Ecclesiastes and Camus's absurdism, and the book's surprising message about enjoyment as an intrinsic good. Episode Highlights "I think what's at the heart of the Book of Ecclesiastes is just to say, maybe not, maybe there isn't a direct line between what you do and what the result will be." "It's not just that you'll physically die, but meaning that you've accrued in your life, if there was such a thing, that dies with you." "In this moment of working on what I'm working on, whatever it is, I am fully alive." "You have a little piece of the pie, and just own it. Absorb yourself into whatever that may be." "Can you view your work, your toil, not just as a means to a further end? Can you rather turn to simply enjoy the work itself?" About Jesse Peterson Jesse Peterson is an Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies in the School of Theology and Honors Program at George Fox University. He previously taught at Purdue University, Fordham University, and St. John's University. He earned a PhD in Hebrew Bible from Durham University (UK), an MDiv from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and a BA in music and Jewish studies from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. His work on Ecclesiastes has appeared in Harvard Theological Review, Vetus Testamentum, and the Journal of Theological Studies. He is the author of Qoheleth and the Philosophy of Value (Cambridge University Press). Helpful Links and Resources Qoheleth and the Philosophy of Value, by Jesse Peterson https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/qoheleth-and-the-philosophy-of-value/877B040C17EE8B9DD60174DEC7C306F7 Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061339202 Featured music by the Jesse Peterson Quartet https://jessepetersonquartet.bandcamp.com/album/man-of-the-earth Show Notes - The most philosophical book in the Bible - Bringing Ecclesiastes into dialogue with contemporary philosophy of value - Jaco Gericke's Hebrew Bible and Philosophy of Religion as catalyst - Authorship: why scholars date Ecclesiastes to the 3rd century BCE - The Solomonic persona and the epilogue problem - Amal (toil) and yitron (gain): does life add up? - Qoheleth as businessman: commercial language for philosophy - Three theories of meaning: subjectivism, consequentialism, intersubjectivism - "Maybe there isn't a direct line between what you do and what the result will be" - Brueggemann's orientation, disorientation, new orientation - The absurd: expectation vs. reality, linking Qoheleth to Camus - "Meaning that you've accrued in your life, if there was such a thing, that dies with you" - The same fate for all: wise and foolish, human and animal - Epicurus and the harm of death - Hebrew anthropology: dust plus life-breath, no afterlife - The carpe diem passages: "Go eat your bread with joy" - Joy as robust, not narcotic—enjoying toil as an end in itself - "In this moment of working on what I'm working on, I am fully alive" - Csikszentmihalyi's Flow and the autotelic experience - "Just own it. Absorb yourself into whatever that may be." #Ecclesiastes #Qoheleth #PhilosophyOfValue #MeaningInLife #BiblicalStudies #HebrewBible #WisdomLiterature #CarpeDiem #Absurdity #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld Production Notes - This podcast featured Jesse Peterson - Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa - Hosted by Evan Rosa - Production Assistance by Noah Senthil - A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about - Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
The book of Ecclesiastes has puzzled readers for millennia with its unflinching observations about absurdity, meaninglessness, vanity, and futility. Biblical scholar Jesse Peterson joins Evan Rosa to discuss his book, Qoheleth and the Philosophy of Value, bringing contemporary philosophy into dialogue with this ancient text and reflecting on what happens when a sage confronts the gap between expectation and reality.
"Can you view your work, your toil, not just as a means to a further end? Can you rather turn to simply enjoy the work itself?"
Together they discuss the distinction between meaning and value, why Qoheleth denies lasting significance while affirming joy, the harm of death and the death of memory, Ecclesiastes and Camus's absurdism, and the book's surprising message about enjoyment as an intrinsic good.
Episode Highlights
"I think what's at the heart of the Book of Ecclesiastes is just to say, maybe not, maybe there isn't a direct line between what you do and what the result will be."
"It's not just that you'll physically die, but meaning that you've accrued in your life, if there was such a thing, that dies with you."
"In this moment of working on what I'm working on, whatever it is, I am fully alive."
"You have a little piece of the pie, and just own it. Absorb yourself into whatever that may be."
"Can you view your work, your toil, not just as a means to a further end? Can you rather turn to simply enjoy the work itself?"
About Jesse Peterson
Jesse Peterson is an Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies in the School of Theology and Honors Program at George Fox University. He previously taught at Purdue University, Fordham University, and St. John's University. He earned a PhD in Hebrew Bible from Durham University (UK), an MDiv from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and a BA in music and Jewish studies from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. His work on Ecclesiastes has appeared in Harvard Theological Review, Vetus Testamentum, and the Journal of Theological Studies. He is the author of Qoheleth and the Philosophy of Value (Cambridge University Press).
Helpful Links and Resources
Qoheleth and the Philosophy of Value, by Jesse Peterson https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/qoheleth-and-the-philosophy-of-value/877B040C17EE8B9DD60174DEC7C306F7
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061339202
Featured music by the Jesse Peterson Quartet https://jessepetersonquartet.bandcamp.com/album/man-of-the-earth
Show Notes
#Ecclesiastes #Qoheleth #PhilosophyOfValue #MeaningInLife #BiblicalStudies #HebrewBible #WisdomLiterature #CarpeDiem #Absurdity #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld
Production Notes
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: From the Yale Center For Faith and Culture, this is for the life of the world. A podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Jesse Peterson: Qoheleth assumes living has a kind of cost just to, you know, maintain our own survival at the bare minimum. But to have a job feed yourself, maintain relationships like it, there's a cost you, you're putting in all this effort and all of that assumes, doesn't it, that something that justifies the cost on the other side of the ledger.
And so often what is assumed to justify it is a sense of meaning that you're working. Toward something, you're working on something because that thing is gonna have impact and everyone's gonna love it and whatever it is, everyone's gonna love you for doing something great. You know, in all sorts of different arenas, right?
What everyone's job is, we tend to think that way as human beings.
Evan Rosa: What does all this living add up to? Is life really just a ledger, all the effort, all the costs, just a kind of balance sheet of income and expenses, even if you normally don't think of it that way. Most of us are hoping that all of this adds up to something
Jesse Peterson: and yeah, he seems to be just using a red marker and just putting a giant X through that. Idea that there is this fulfillment on the other end of all of your effort. And so then it just raises the question like, well, okay, if not, what keeps me going? What, what motivates me to live? If it's not the case that all of my actions that are done in a kind of means to end manner, I'm aiming at some goal.
And, and again, I would say that Koal would say something like, well, either it's not gonna come ever. Or if it does, it's not gonna be what you thought it was going to be. It's not gonna be as satisfying as you thought it was going to be. Or, you know, you're gonna have it for five minutes and then someone else will take it away.
Like, there's just all these possibilities of why life doesn't turn out in the way we might expect.
Evan Rosa: That is the question at the center of our conversation today, written sometime in the third century BC. The book of Ecclesiastes doesn't flinch from some of the most difficult questions that we could ask.
What do you actually gain from everything that you pour your life into? What contribution, what legacy? What's the point of doing anything? What's the point of being anything? And the book offers no pollyannish or rose colored responses offering observations you might not be hoping for.
Jesse Peterson: The absurd is the divorce, the chasm between your expectations for what the world would be and the reality of the cold hard truth of the way the world really is. There's that, that mismatch, that chasm, that dissonance, that absurdity.
For Koal, the disorientation of seeing life as the Hebrew word. Behind that is havo could be translated as indeed absurd or futile or meaningless, things like that.
Evan Rosa: 20th century existentialist, Albert Kemu called it the absurd, the author of Ecclesiastes coed called it Cave Vapor Breath, a Chasing After Wind Vanity of Vanities.
Both figures were describing the same kind of rupture. The distance between expectation and reality between logic and illogic. That yawning chasm where we try to make sense of our lives. A lot of voices out there want to simply jump over that chasm. But coed, the author of Ecclesiastes, just sits right at the bottom of it and therein lies its value.
Jesse Peterson: And I think it's because in these passages he's advocating a kind of mental shift and attitude shift. It's, it's this, can you view your work, your toil, not just as a means to some further end that, that you have no idea whether it will come about that further end. Can you rather turn? To simply enjoy the work itself.
Now we have modern day phrases for this, you know, that it's about the process, not the product, these kind of things. But I do think that's what he is actually getting at. I think that's the heart of the message of the book, is to turn away from a kind of future based obsession with how things will turn out and, uh, an approach to life where you're not stopping and smelling the roses as it were.
Turning from that kind of means to end approach to viewing things as an end in themselves, whatever comes of it. Doesn't matter, whatever people think of it later on. Doesn't matter. In this moment of working on what I'm working on, whatever it is, I am fully alive. I'm exercises, the capacities I have from God as a human being.
Whatever you have to do, whatever your hands find to do, do it with all your mind. So I, I think that's, uh, a much more robust conception of joy than that. It's this just kind of like empty, passive pleasure.
Evan Rosa: And there is the fulcrum, the turning, not nihilism, not resignation. Something more difficult, something that keeps you honest, a reorientation toward the only thing that's actually available to you, a present moment, and what your hands find to do in it. The nearby words are meaning, purpose, thriving, flourishing, life worth living.
Jesse Peterson: Yeah, I'm just, I'm just completely absorbed in the present moment. I'm not distracted. I don't, I'm not checking my phone every five minutes.
Evan Rosa: I can imagine that jazz drumming does this.
Jesse Peterson: Yes, yes. I think I know why you brought that up. Absolutely. Being a musician who attempts to to be a decent jazz drummer, the act of improvising in that moment, you're being confronted with a challenge moment by moment.
It's how do you react? How can you create the best music possible? But it's not for something down the road. It's just to completely own the present moment and to bring it to life.
Evan Rosa: My guest today has spent years inside Ecclesiastes. Jesse Peterson is a philosopher and biblical scholar at George Fox University, whose new book on Ecclesiastes brings the tools of contemporary value theory to one of the most provocative texts in the biblical canon.
In our conversation, he walks through what ette this voice at. The center of Ecclesiastes actually believed about meaning, about death, about joy, and about what a life well spent a life worth living might look like. Jesse's also a jazz drummer, phenomenally talented. And all the music you hear under this episode is his own playing and not by accident.
'cause if you had to choose a single genre of music that goes along with Ecclesiastes, I would argue it would have to be jazz. Jazz. Is this art form built on impermanence? Phrasing that's improvised that reach, but don't resolve on dissonance that doesn't apologize for itself. A conversation between musicians who trusting themselves don't exactly know where a song might go, or are at least guiding the listener into unknown territory.
Jazz is a kind of chasing after something, maybe a chasing after the wind, maybe leaving life unresolved. As soon as you think you've caught it, it vanishes. That is ve, that is vapor. That's the wind that JA blows in.
In this conversation. Jesse Peterson and I discuss his 2025 book, Collette, and the philosophy of value uncovering how to read Ecclesiastes and looking at this biblical text through the filters of meaning and value. In the lenses of toil and absurdity, he suggests that the book's famous meaninglessness is not actually nihilism, but a precise and honest diagnosis of our unmet expectations as human beings.
He maps the book surprising, turn towards joy, not as a consolation or escape, but a radical reorientation of attention toward work relationship, and the value of the present moment all always ends in and of themselves, but underneath it all runs the double shadow of death, not just a physical ending, but the extinction of our memory, all informing Collette's invitation to fully inhabit your life in all of its urgency, all of its ache, and all of its beauty.
Thanks for listening today, Jesse. Thanks for joining me on for the Life of the World.
Jesse Peterson: Thank you, Evan. Good to be here.
Evan Rosa: I think it's really cool that you wrote a book about Ecclesiastes. I do too. Why did you choose. This particular project, what does it mean to you and what's your personal history with the book of Ecclesiastes?
Jesse Peterson: Yeah, when I was young, I remember reading it and just finding it fascinating because it is so philosophical and because it is clearly concerned with meaning in life. Later on, I'll maybe make a more technical case for it, being concerned with that. For, for now, I think I could just state that and I felt that, and I was always concerned with that issue as well when I was younger, like.
What is the meaning of what we are doing here? Later on, when I was in grad school, I took a class that covered it and, and I ended up writing a very long paper that got me for the first time into the academic study of the book and drawing on some great scholars of the book. I mm-hmm. Yeah. Just became very interested in some of the debates concerning it.
It also became, for me, a kind of puzzle. He uses a lot of phrases in a repeated manner, but each time it's a slightly different context. When he uses, you know, these phrases under the sun or these different things that, that were Danity
Evan Rosa: Vanities. Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: And it's like, I knew he was getting at something, but I really didn't understand what he was trying to say in the book, and so I, at that time, I felt like, well, if I go on to actually do a PhD, this is the one, this is the one that I, that I wanna write on.
Mm-hmm. This is the one I want to give. Years of my life too, which in fact is what it has been.
Evan Rosa: Amazing. Uh, and you have just completed a book of your own that is a philosophy of value regarding Ecclesiastes. And I think that this is, this is just, just added my, to my own interest in the text because you were well treating it in a, in a philosophical methodology that both honored the liturgical uses and, you know, religious history of the book, but also brought to it the tools of philosophy and contemporary concern.
Jesse Peterson: Yeah. As far as my approach with it, I had become interested in, around the time I was starting my PhD dissertation, I had become interested in approaches to biblical studies and the Hebrew Bible in particular that were bringing biblical texts into dialogue with philosophy. There was a book that I read around the time that I was starting by Yaku Gari called the Hebrew Bible and Philosophy of Religion.
And he was approaching these biblical texts from a variety of philosophical angles. And that book was kind of a ProAm to how other scholars, he was sort of inviting other scholars to also approach the text in this way. And so that just really struck home for me. Um, it just seemed like a great opportunity, especially with Ecclesiastes.
I mean, it is often considered the most philosophical book I in the Bible, and I think for good reason it's dealing with more abstract concepts than you get in a lot of other texts. Anyway, so I ran with that. And yeah, as you mentioned, I did so by pairing it with ideas about value. And in contemporary philosophy, there's kind of a, it's, it's a bit of a vague field, but there's a field you could say called philosophy of value or sometimes value theory.
It's part of it, but it's also broader than that. It's really just concern with. Values in human life. What, what is good in human life, what is bad in human life and approach from various angles. Looking at things like meaning, looking at things like deaths and happiness and joy. And I just thought that the kind of stuff that was being talked about in this, these contemporary philosophical discussions of especially the last 30 or 40 years, felt like a perfect match for the themes in this ancient biblical text.
And it just seemed like, at least heuristically a very useful way to draw out some of the ideas of that text. So that was kind of the basic approach.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. And then your introduction, you, you know, you cite, see what is good for the children of man todo under heaven during the few days of their life. What is good?
The question of value shows up there. And so it's, it's representing a long tradition of inquiring into the value of one's very life, like the very. Moment we're in, the day that we are in. Mm-hmm. Our activity within it. Mm-hmm. And what we take to be our goals, but not just our goals moving forward, but an understanding of the past and what it can cumulatively mean for us.
What would you say was the role that Ecclesiastes played in its historical context in Ancient Near East?
Jesse Peterson: To be honest, we don't really know. Um, we don't know that much about how it landed. Um, at least initially. We know a little bit later on how it landed, but the, the best we can sense is from looking within the book itself.
There are no, well, I was about to say, there are no other ancient references, meaning, let's say before the common era.
Evan Rosa: Hmm.
Jesse Peterson: That's, that's actually not true. Arguably, the book of Ben Sera or Sirach. Refers to it in chapter five. And we know that the Kuran community, uh, which what is identified with the Dead Sea Scrolls, that community, that they read it there, there's a, there's just a couple bits.
There's one from, there's a portion from Chapter six Es, and I think another one that we found that have been found at Kumaran. Mm-hmm. And so we know that it was being used. But what I'm referring to as far as how it was read early on, I think the best clue comes from within the book itself. And what I have in mind by that is what's often referred to as the epilogue at the end of chapter 12.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: This is the part where Kohe, and maybe we need to come back to talk about that word kohe.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. We should
Jesse Peterson: kohe, which is often translated the teacher or the preacher is referred to here in the third person from most of the book, except for the very beginning. The first couple verses from most of the book, you have a first person speaker that identifies as Coha.
I Coha did this, did that. You, you're clearly getting his perspective throughout the book. But then when we, when we get to the end of the book, chapter 12, starting in verse nine, uh, this section starts. So besides being wise, COHA taught the people knowledge. Mm-hmm. Arranged Proverbs and so on. It describes that.
And then there's the famous ending, the end of the matter that all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments. This is the whole duty of man God will bring every deed into judgment with every secret thing, whether good or evil. That's the end of the book. So. The consensus among scholars for quite a while now is that that wasn't written by Qoheleth.
It doesn't sound like it was written by Qoheleth. It sounds like it's someone else talking about him. Then the question becomes, what was the angle of that later person? Is it someone within the Qoheletht School of thought? If there was such a thing? Mm-hmm. Is it someone who is a bit concerned about the book? Uh, you know, maybe some of the more.
Heterodox claims that one might see in the book. Is it someone that was concerned with orthodoxy and therefore gives this kind of solid Torah ending fear God and keep his commandments? That's all Koal was really getting at. Right. Um, tidying up the book maybe theologically right. I tend, I'm tend, or I, I would say that I'm inclined to read it that way, that there was a later editor who wanted to make sure that the book ended on a note that made it fit in with other biblical texts and the Torah.
Evan Rosa: Mm-hmm. Yeah. A little bit of anxiety perhaps over all of the meaninglessness that precedes it. Yeah. And the overall sense that, that, that, that even as it approaches the questions of value, it appears to come up with a very cynical, negative answer to that question.
Jesse Peterson: Yeah, I, I agree. I don't think that's the full picture.
And that's part of the reason that I use the term value in the title of the book, is that I want to make a distinction between meaning and value. Where me meaning is a certain kind of value. It's a certain kind of good that one might have in life, but it's not the only kind. So that means that if, if there's a lack of this certain phenomenon that we might call meaning mm-hmm.
It doesn't mean life is worthless or you know, it's not a advocacy of nihilism, uh, or something like that. And so I do read the book thinking that Khali is denying a certain kind of value, which we are using the English word meaning to represent. He obviously didn't have access to that word. Mm-hmm. He had words.
That I interpret as basically amounting to something similar. Uh, in my first substantial chapter in the book, I spent a lot of time trying to get at that. What is his conception of meaning? How does he flesh it out? Because people might define that idea differently. Mm-hmm. Not just the word of the general concept.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: He has a certain conception of meaning, I think, and that that thing that he establishes, he says, yeah, that doesn't exist in human life. We have to get used to the idea that that particular thing is not gonna happen for us in human life. I can come back to what I think he thinks that thing is, but I'm stating it broadly.
But then, uh, and this is why my book is divided into two halves, the negative values that we see in the book of Ecclesiastes and the positive values, he then does turn and there's this series of joy passages. Mm-hmm. I do think he's advocating seeing value in one's life. It's just that it's from a certain perspective that's different than this other thing that we think of as meaning.
Evan Rosa: What else do we need to know about authorship and the representation of this convener?
Jesse Peterson: Yeah. Traditionally the book was thought to be written by King Solomon, which we put it at a 10th century writing date, the date of composition.
Evan Rosa: A descendant of King David, right?
Jesse Peterson: Yeah. And you know, there's you, you read the book and hey, I mean, the very first verse says the words of Kohe, the son of David King in Jerusalem.
So you don't have to get very far before there is some reason for thinking that. I'll come back to what one might do with that in a second. But just to say that biblical scholarship over the last few centuries has overwhelmingly come to the conclusion that it's not possible that this was written by King Solomon because it's not possible.
It was written in the 10th century, BCE. The reason for that is to put it in the famous claim of this one Biblical scholar, NA, last name Deli. He said, if the book of Ecclesiastes is of Solomonic origin, if King Somn wrote it, then there is no history of the Hebrew language. And what he meant by that is he meant there is clearly a history of the Hebrew language, meaning the language develops over time, and scholars talk about early biblical Hebrew, and in this case late biblical Hebrew.
They can clearly see differences in the way the language developed and. To pretty much all scholars. This just fits perfectly into late biblical Hebrew. That's why the consensus for the dating is the third century, BCE, eh, some might say fourth. But third is the most common I, which I agree with for a lot of reasons that have to do with vocabulary, just grammatical stuff.
We don't have to go into the weeds of those details, uh, but that's the consensus. So then one might ask, well, what, what about this stuff that looks like it's from Solomon? Well, I and many others think that the author is putting on what you might call a Solomonic persona. He, he's stating things that would make the reader think about King Solomon.
Evan Rosa: Mm-hmm.
Jesse Peterson: Such as kingship, wealth and, and indeed wisdom that he was pursuing. Well, all of those things.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: Just like old King Solomon did. And so I think he, he, he's wanting us to think about that, but at the end of the day, it doesn't make sense to read this as actually being written by, uh, Solomon.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Let's talk a little bit about how to conceptualize meaning. How can a contemporary reader bring a philosophy of value and an understanding of meaning? To this text and appreciate what Colette's trying to say.
Jesse Peterson: Yeah, I think he gets into that topic, especially through the use of two words. He does it through a variety of ways, but I've identified these couple of words that get us into it.
One is the Hebrew word, Amal, which is usually translated toil.
Evan Rosa: Yeah,
Jesse Peterson: of course toil. We think of war, but also we would have a connotation of it's work that really isn't fun. Yeah. It's work that you don't want to be doing. It's difficult. Maybe takes a long time. And so on. So that word shows up several times.
And then another word that it's often paired with is the Hebrew word tro. And this is a word that it's often translated as gain or profit. It more literally means what is leftover. And so you might think of a business transaction, you're adding up your gains, your losses, what's left over. After all of that should be your, your profit.
That's your uron. I'll, I'll read a couple of verses where these come together. Mm-hmm. One is right near the beginning of the book in chapter one, verse three, what gain, there's uron is there for a person in all his toil, which he toils under the sun. Yeah. So those two terms are paired, very similar is three nine, where he says what gain is there for, for the worker in that which he toils.
So he seems to have. In mind the idea that, you know, your life takes a lot of effort. I mean, I think, uh, Thomas Nagle once wrote something like, living a Human life is a full-time occupation and you put all this time and effort into just living your life. And the question is, well, what does it add up to afterwards?
Um, I also think of, I dunno if you saw the movie Boyhood, that Richard Linklater film?
Evan Rosa: Uh, yeah, I haven't seen it. No.
Jesse Peterson: The character that's played by Patricia Ake, she's like the mom of the boy.
Evan Rosa: Mm-hmm.
Jesse Peterson: And you know, he gets, you know, of course the movie goes through, I think it's like nine years that they show this actual boy growing up though it's a fictional story.
Anyway, near the end, she says something like. I just, I just thought there'd be something more than this after. She's not even that old when she says that, but she's raised, raised up this boy and so on. I thought there'd be something more. I thought it would add up to something. And so he clearly seems to be getting at something like that.
And that's how a lot of people have thought about meaning in a general way. I, I get into more kind of specific conceptions in the book, but that's at least a starting point is it's like, what is everything? Like what's the thing that remains at the end of your life? What does it all add up to? All of the effort we put into living?
And it may be not that he is utilitarian, but at least this idea of like he's thinking in quantifying terms because I and others interpret Qoheleth as a businessman. Yeah, I don't think that he was literally a king, and he sheds that persona really, after chapter two, it doesn't come back. And other times later in the book he's referring, he talks about how one would relate to a king.
So it doesn't seem that he was literally a king. I think that just comes up early on as this persona, as I mentioned. But what I think he was probably a businessman because there are many terms in the book that are from the commercial world. There's a word for, as I mentioned, yaron, there is the word for wages.
There's just various others that make me think he really dealt in the realm of business and commerce and economic kind of thought.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: And so I think that he is this philoso, this philosopher who is talking about meaning in life, but I think he, he's putting it into almost commercial or economic type of language.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. No, I, I, I really appreciate that, that particular perspective, because there's a kind of. Broader awareness that he's bringing into. And I think it's fascinating to think about those spaces where, in particular, philosophy of value does connect with consumer culture or other, like broadly economic
Jesse Peterson: mm-hmm.
Evan Rosa: Phenomena where it's, it's one of these unique places where we can see abstract and particular kind of coming together and Yeah. And, and really see, see the application of ideas into some practical lived experience.
Jesse Peterson: And just as a side note, one of the philosophers who's thought to have really brought the idea of value back into our thinking as a central philosophical concept is actually Nietzsche, you know, in the late 19th century.
And I read an article that I found fascinating. I hope I don't get the title wrong, I believe it was called The Cost of Nietzsche and Values. And it just made this really clear connection between niche's, ideas of values, and the economic language that was developing at the time in the 19th century, and how he was kind of drawing on that.
So just a more modern parallel of this, the same thing, thinking about value philosophically. Mm-hmm. But being influenced to do so through value as an economic notion.
I have a section of the book where I walk through a few different ways that meaning has been understood in contemporary meaning of life, uh, philosophy.
Evan Rosa: Mm-hmm.
Jesse Peterson: One of them is the idea of subjectivism, or that's at least my summarizing term for it. Just that meaning consists in like personal psychological satisfaction and uh, and I refer to a few passages in the book where maybe one could plausibly read koel that way he does use this language of satisfaction quite a bit.
Mm-hmm. But I'll make various arguments why I don't think that's the best fit for his idea about meaning. And then another possibility is what's called consequentialism about meaning. And this is more the idea that meaning unlike the first few, it's not just you have psychological satisfaction and that's what meaning in life is.
Mm-hmm. It's more that you are kind of objectively contributing to something good. Um, you might not even feel that you are. I mentioned like Mother Therea when she was having her doubts that we
Evan Rosa: Oh, right.
Jesse Peterson: Went from her diary, like she doesn't really think she's doing anything good. Of course, anyone else would look at it like, oh, she's doing so much good for the world.
So that's more this objective or consequentialist understanding of meaning. It's also, I wanna mention here, connected to, this is what I call the cog in the machine view of meaning. Ah. What I mean by that is sometimes this comes up even in readings of Ecclesiastes, the idea that, well, Kallet didn't know what the meaning was, but he believed that God was creating a, a giant meaning for everyone, including him or, and, and everything else.
In other words, all you, you're just, you're a cog in the machine, you're playing some unknown role in God's great plan. And that's where one would find, uh, meaning in life. And so there too, I give some arguments against. Seeing it that way, and I'll just move to the view that I end up, uh, supporting.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, please.
Jesse Peterson: Which is the idea of inters subjectivism. What that really refers to is that meaning is found in your connection to other people, and especially even posthumously, like after death. The idea of having a good regard of having some kind of honor after.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: Yeah. So I think that's what he, that's his conception of meaning because he does speak in various times about he, he's kind of mourning the fact that, oh, no one will be remembered and so on.
Mm-hmm. He places meaning in that kind of category, but he is denying its existence. So I have a kind of nuanced, nuanced take on, it's like, I believe she has a conception of meaning that he is, that is underlying his ideas in the book, but that conception is what he denies as an actual thing for human beings, it's not reachable.
I think what it all relates to, I believe, is expectations. Uh. I think in Khalid's case, and I think what I'm about to say applies to all sorts of people, not just Khali, but it's how I read the book. Mm-hmm. I think that he was raised with some sort of expectation about how the world would go. I read him as a, a sage, a guy that was steeped in the wisdom thought of his time.
I think we see things in the book of Proverbs that he would've been familiar with. He at times, in the book of Ecclesiastes, you get these little lines and, and I think even potentially quotations from Proverbs or at least allusions to the proverbial thought from that book. And a lot scholars have this idea of the act consequence nexus, meaning that the Book of Proverbs puts forth.
The assumption that, you know, you do good stuff, you work hard, and there's gonna be a good result at the end. You're gonna have a good life and a good family and and whatever else, or you're bad person, or you're lazy, or whatever else it is, and you're gonna have a bad result. That there's always this close connection between what you do and the result karma, we might say in modern day terms.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: And I think that what is one of the things at the heart of the book of Ecclesiastes is just to say, uh, maybe not, maybe there isn't that direct line between what you do and what the result will be. But I think mm-hmm. The reason he's, the reason he would bother to say that is because at some earlier time he did have that assumption.
He was raised with that assumption. And that's where, because it seems like you're asking like, well, why would, if one has a view of meaninglessness, of the denial of meaning. Why even say that? What's the point of even bringing that up?
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Why take the via Negativa in that way?
Jesse Peterson: Yeah. I think the point of bringing it up is if you have been raised differently, if people are claiming that, oh no, you, you know, you do all this good stuff in your life and you're gonna see the good results.
And he's just trying to look around, as you mentioned earlier, and be honest with the way the world really is, at least in his perception. And so he seems to find it a worthwhile thing to state because of that.
Evan Rosa: And certainly there's the positive value side of things, but insofar as there's this claim of, it's, it's hard to find where the meaning is or it, it, it looks like it's just fine constantly escaping and eluding our grass.
Is that evidence that, that he's sort of being disabused of like an immature optimism?
Jesse Peterson: Yeah. Uh, yeah. That's another way of getting at how I read it, that. He, he probably did have an optimism at an earlier point in time. He was disabuse of it, and so you could say it's, it's kind of like, oh, it matches on to some degree with Walter Brueggemann's, notions of orientation is our starting point to the world, and you kind of have this idea of a positive connection between your actions and the results, or you know, that the world is a just place or things like this, that the world is meaningful, that there's order and instead of chaos, and then you go through something or a variety of things that leads you to a place of disorientation.
You're no longer seeing the world match your expectations of the world, which is also, by the way, what you know, Camus seems to have in mind by the idea of the absurd. The absurd is yeah, the divorce, the chasm between your expectations for what the world would be and the reality of the cold hard truth of the way the world really is.
There's that, that mismatch, that chasm, that dissonance, that absurd.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: Then for Bruma, of course, he has that third category of a reorientation after the disorientation or a new orientation. And I think that for Kallet, the stuff I briefly mentioned earlier, the joy passages, I think that's the equivalent in kallet of the new orientation, the reorientation after the disorientation of seeing life, as you've been mentioning, meaningless, the, the Hebrew word behind that is havo can be translated as indeed absurd or futile or things like that.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, the creation fall redemption model there is is pretty interesting.
Jesse Peterson: Yeah. Yeah. I think it fits with the book in its own co way
Evan Rosa: looking into the reorientation, looking into the looking redemptively at the process, because I think to branch it a little bit into normal adult life. I would, I would put it like this, the process of maturing, the process of becoming adult is disusing oneself of certain spontaneous expectations or certain expectations and letting go of, of, of deceptions and mm-hmm.
And, and trying to reorient oneself while retaining some, some kind of, some kind of approach that, that decides, yeah, life is, in fact livable life is in fact worth living. It requires some kind of reorientation to maintain that perspective. Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: It's real. And I think this is one of the reasons the book is just still so relevant.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Yeah.
What would you say is the threat of absurdity, the distance between expectations and reality? But what makes the concept of absurdity or meaninglessness so threatening and scary?
Jesse Peterson: I think it's what you've just been referring to. It's, it's the problem of motivation for living.
Evan Rosa: Yes.
Jesse Peterson: And again, connecting it back to something I said earlier with Kha is that I think Kha assumes living has a kind of cost just to, you know, maintain our own survival at the bare minimum.
But to have a job feed yourself, maintain relationships like it, there's a cost you, you're putting in all this effort and all of that assumes, doesn't it, that there is something that justifies the cost on the other side of the ledger, right. So often what is assumed to justify it is a sense of meaning that you're working toward something, you're working on something because that thing is gonna have impact and everyone's gonna love it and whatever it is, everyone's gonna love you for doing something great.
Like we, you know, in all sorts of different arenas, right? Everyone's job is, we tend to think that way as as human beings. And yeah, he seems to be just using a red marker and just putting a giant X through that idea that. There is this fulfillment on the other end of all of your effort. And so then it just raises the question like, okay, if not, what keeps me going?
What? What motivates me to live? If it's not the case that all of my actions that are done in a kind of means to end manner, I'm aiming at some goal. If I can't at all depend on that goal, and, and again, I would say that KOA would say something like, well, either it's not gonna come ever. Or if it does, it's not gonna be what you thought it was going to be.
It's not gonna be as satisfying as you thought it was going to be. Or you know you're gonna have it for five minutes and then someone else will take it away. Like there's just all these possibilities of why. Life doesn't turn out in the way we might expect.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: So then what does motivate us? What keeps us going as far as suicide?
I don't think that he ever addresses that in the book, and I don't think he ever advocates it. I don't see any,
Evan Rosa: oh, certainly not. I'm, I'm only raising it in from, from the perspective of camou and questions of meaning so closely tying to so closely the Yeah. The decision to live one's life.
Jesse Peterson: Yeah. Yeah. I think he has an answer to that, that we'll get to in a bit.
It might not be satisfying for everyone, but I think he has a legitimate answer to the problem.
Evan Rosa: It's clear to me that, that the question of death and the question of one's ceasing to be, is another motivating factor for the urgency of asking the question about meaning and can add to anxiety and, and obviously terror.
For some, some people, the question of, of one's. Stopping. I, I just wanted to ask you about the overall approach to death that we find in Ecclesiastes. What have you discovered about the harm of death that might come to us?
Jesse Peterson: Yeah. Yeah. One of the chapters in the book is, is about that, is what the harm of death as he understands it.
And I used it as a jumping off point, a comparison with Epicurus, the ancient philosopher, because he famously said that death is not a harm for human beings,
Evan Rosa: nothing to us. Yeah,
Jesse Peterson: right. Nothing is, nothing. You're not alive and there's no sensory experience in his view once you're dead. So just what's the problem?
Of course, most of us don't agree with that. We feel like there's something wrong with that. And so philosophers, and especially recently. Have been trying to find ways to argue against Epicurus, and that's this realm called philosophy of death. And the common view is that, well, death is bad because it deprives us of the good things that we would still have in life had we not right.
Died. And I think that that, you see that in Coha. There is a couple passages, uh, I won't get into now, where he implicitly is saying that, yeah, death does deprive one of good things. And so it is a bummer to die. The deeper thing is what you've just been alluding to in the way you raised the question, which is the connection between death and meaning.
Hmm. If meaning is found in this kind of inters subjectivism as I refer to it, this honor from the part of others towards oneself, including after death.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: And if Qoheleth says, well, it's not, it's not only the case that you're going to die, it's also the case that your memory is going to die. Well then that's a really big problem because we might think, uh, again, this is, you know, setting aside maybe Christian theological views about the afterlife and so on, which I don't think hel had held to.
So setting those things aside, think he believes that death is the end, then you have death. But some might say. Well, there is a kind of metaphorical immortality living on in the memory of others.
Evan Rosa: Oh yeah.
Jesse Peterson: Maybe through physical objects, you know, a book one writes or a, a statue or a building with your name on it, or there's just purely mental, there's just the memory of you in later generations.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: And Koal seems to go out of his way to deny that for everyone, which is ironic because here we are, 2000 plus years later, talking about him or remembering him. But for whatever reason he thought that, no, that's just not going to happen. And so that creates a big problem for death. It's not just that you'll physically die, but the meaning that you've accrued for your life if there was such a thing that dies with you.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. It withers, right? Like
Jesse Peterson: Yeah, exactly. Mm-hmm. And another one of the points he makes about death, he uses this Hebrew phrase, muha, which is translated literally as the same fate. He's trying to show that he makes some comparisons between categories of beings. At first between people, there's wise people and there's foolish people.
But then elsewhere he compares it to there's human beings and there's animals, or there's righteous people, there's unrighteous people. And at all times he uses the phrase to just say, these two categories have the same fate. Despite perhaps the expectation that they wouldn't have, that the wises would go on to some great afterlife and the fools would not, or that humans would have some great afterlife and animals would not, uh, you know, that might, that thought might not fly today in 2025, but at least that was the assumption then.
Sure. And he's just with all that and he's saying, no, same fate for all these categories. They're all gonna end up six feet underground. Exactly the same.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. So
Jesse Peterson: it really is a very kinda modern perspective on that, that you, maybe you would say modern humanistic or modern secular or something. But
Evan Rosa: yeah, I think going to chapter nine from here makes sense.
I mean he, uh, yeah. Um, nine, five for the living, no, that they will die, but the dead, no, nothing, and they have no more reward for the memory of them is forgotten.
Jesse Peterson: Right?
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Even the way he
Jesse Peterson: put that, they have no more reward because the memory, the, the reward would've been the memory, but they don't continue to get that reward even beyond death because, uh, the memory is lost.
Evan Rosa: I really do wanna stay focused on value, but there is a fascinating question of the metaphysics of the person. What people are. Yeah. And that seems to be implied in Collette writing here. And, and I'm, and it looks like it's, you know, leaning more toward a kind of materialism.
Jesse Peterson: I could speak to that for a second if you want.
Evan Rosa: Please do. Yeah. I'm curious what your thought is on about
Jesse Peterson: that. I think he just has, what at this point in time would've been a traditional Hebrew conception of, and I have a paper that relates to this, a paper called Did Qoheleth Believes in an Afterlife.
Evan Rosa: Ah, but
Jesse Peterson: in that, I get it, just anthropology, his view of the human person, I think is a traditional Hebrew one in the sense that Genesis two spoke of the creation of the human being, as in part it's coming from the dust of the ground.
But then the other ingredient number two is that the life breath from God comes down, vies that dust, and together that creates the, the, the neish, the, the living person. I don't think Koal had a view much different than that. You see that throughout most of the Hebrew Bible, and that just means as many passages indicate that when a person dies, the dust returns to the dust.
And koal even cites that passage from Genesis in chapter three.
Evan Rosa: Mm-hmm.
Jesse Peterson: Uh, when he says, go to one place, all are from the dust and to dust all return. That's chapter three, verse 20. And there's a similar, uh, idea in chapter 12. So I think that's the conception. Human beings are. Yeah. It's a material dust.
They're vivified temporarily by the life breath from God, but then when they die, that life breath does a U-turn and goes back up to God. The dust kind of dissipates, and that's the end of, of that individual.
Evan Rosa: So then the, the turn here, which is a fascinating turn, is toward, so enjoy, go eat your bread.
Verse seven in chapter nine. Eat your bread with joy. Drink your wine with a merry heart. For God has already approved what you do. Let your garments be always white. Let not oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun.
Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might for. There is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom and shale to which you are going.
Jesse Peterson: Mm-hmm.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. So this is turning toward enjoyment and pleasure in the in, in light of this common end that we would all share that there is no reward for the dead.
The dead, don't know anything.
Jesse Peterson: Mm-hmm.
Evan Rosa: Memory can be forgotten. Dust returns to dust, therefore, and you fill in that blank and I'm, I wanna ask you about the logic of that.
Jesse Peterson: Mm-hmm. Well, I think there's a fairly straightforward logic. It's just that it's, it can be hard for human beings to, to swallow that kind of logic because of the desire, meaning the logic though, is straightforward.
If, if one were to say and believe, well, this, this is the end, death is the end. Even in that double sense, I was referring to the, the death and then the death after death as someone put it, meaning the death of the memory and so on.
Evan Rosa: Mm-hmm.
Jesse Peterson: Well then what do you, what is there then? What is, what is there that's valuable?
It's, right now, it's the value of the present moment. You see this most clearly in that, the final verse that you read from chapter nine, verse 10, whatever your hand finds to do. Do it with your might for, there is no chance to do these things, to do work or to sink or have knowledge or wisdom in sheeo the place of the dead that he believed everyone would, would go to.
Evan Rosa: Yeah,
Jesse Peterson: it is. It is a straightforward logic. It's a difficult logic for us to swallow, I think.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: But maybe I could say more about the conception of joy, if that's okay.
Evan Rosa: Please do, please do. Let's, let's move toward his positive values.
Jesse Peterson: Yeah. And so this is one of the seven passages that are identified as the enjoyment passages.
Mm-hmm. Sometimes called the carpe diem refrain. And, uh, there's one at the end of chapter two. There's a couple of these in chapter three, one in chapter five, one in chapter eight, one here that we're just reading in chapter nine. And, and one in chapter 11, there's debate among interpreters on how to take these passages in light of everything else we've already talked about, right?
Mm-hmm. In light of the seemingly negative pessimistic tone that you get in a lot of the book, that just raises the question with these passages, like, well, does he, what does he really mean by that? And some, and especially those interpreters who do. Lean in the more negative reading of the rest of the book.
Evan Rosa: Mm-hmm.
Jesse Peterson: Um, they wanna read this in a very negative light as well. What I mean by that is even the Hebrew word that's used, uh, in these passages for joy is the word and, and it can be translated pleasure. Potentially, but some scholars read it as well. All he means by that is a kind of empty pleasure, just a mere sensory pleasure.
Is it
Evan Rosa: consolation or something like that.
Jesse Peterson: Yeah, exactly. I, I think in my book I refer to it as the anesthetic view or the sort of narcotic view.
Evan Rosa: Ah, right, right, right.
Jesse Peterson: Of enjoyment that it's, yes. As we've already mentioned, life is very painful. Is there anything that can just numb the pain a little bit?
Well, there is this possibility of empty pleasure.
Evan Rosa: Okay. Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: And you know, we all know how that, how that can work out. Sure. There might, we may know people that live that way, so that's one possible reading, but I don't go that direction. I think that he actually does mean something more robust by his use of joy and, and so I'll give one of the arguments for that.
Maybe it's even the main one that I lean on. It's if you, if you look at these various passages, what is it that he is saying to enjoy? Well, he is saying to enjoy food and drink. I'll just maybe briefly read from a couple of them.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, sure.
Jesse Peterson: So in, um, let's see, in 3 22, he said, so I saw that there's nothing better than that.
A man should rejoice in his work for that is his lot. In chapter five, there's one where he says, behold what I've seen to be good in fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one? Toils under the sun.
Evan Rosa: Mm-hmm.
Jesse Peterson: We could read more than, but basically what I'm getting at is you heard that he does mention food and drink, so one might think, oh, it's just the pleasure of eating and drinking.
Yeah. But notice that both of the ones that I just read, he's, he gives as an object of enjoyment work. Toil, and that is not something that is obviously pleasing. As I mentioned earlier, toil as in these other passages that we talked about before, TOIL is usually something difficult we don't like to toil.
So I think in those passages in the book where he's using the idea of toil to kind of deny meaning toil is conceived as instrumental action. It's what you do as a means towards some goal, but oh, by the way, you're not gonna reach the goal. So in that sense, toil seems pointless. But then we'd ask why here then is he speaking of enjoying the toil?
And I think it's because in these passages he's advocating a kind of mental shift, an attitude shift that I think is what the book is ultimately getting at in terms of its cognitive message to readers. It's, it's this, can you view. Your work, your toil, not just as a means to some further end that, that you have no idea whether it will come about that further end.
Can you rather turn to simply enjoy the work itself? Now we have modern day phrases for this, you know, that it's about the process, not the product, these kind of things. But I do think that's what he is actually getting at. I think that's the heart of the message of the book, is to turn away from a kind of future based obsession with how things will turn out and uh, an approach to life where you're not stopping and smelling the roses as it were.
Turning from that kind of means to end approach to viewing things as an end in themselves, viewing your work as an end in self, whatever comes of it. Doesn't matter, whatever people think of it later on, doesn't matter. In this moment of working on what I'm working on, whatever it is, I am fully alive. I'm exercises, the capacities I have from God as a human being.
Again, that, that passes from nine, 10, whatever you have to do, whatever your hands find to do, do it with all your mind. So I, I think that's a much more robust conception of joy than that. It's this just kind of like empty, passive pleasure.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. I think there's, it's interesting in chapter 11, rejoice young man while you're young, let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth, follow the inclination of your heart and the desire of your eyes.
It's again, that subjective, attitudinal shift, something that is deeply internal and and importantly subjective for a person to regard their own. Their own effort and, and, and look at it both with acceptance and the word that I sometimes use, uh, is surprise. The, it's all, it's all quite fleeting. Everyone is leveled in the sense that all of our being is, it's simply not up to us in an important sense.
And, and it's all a kind of gift. It's all this surprising gift that we can then appreciate even in light of, of the, the, the futility, the absurdity, and the, the chasing after the win that it seems to represent.
Jesse Peterson: Yeah. And connected with that idea of gift is the idea of the, a lot that you're giving, the, the, the law or portion that you are given
Evan Rosa: one's law in life.
Jesse Peterson: Yeah. He speaks of that several times and I just kinda interpret that as well. You're not given everything, you can't have it all and you can't even have all that you might have desired, but you're given what you're given. You have a portion, you have a little piece of the pie and just own it, you know, and enjoy that little piece of the pie, the lot in life that you've been given.
Observe yourself into whatever that may be.
Evan Rosa: Do you think that just being is good just being, not just coming into existence, but I mean the, the question of the bare fact of existing.
Jesse Peterson: This is a nuanced topic in the book because he does have some negative stuff about existing, and I try to, you know, sort of fit that into my overall reading of him.
Uh, I have in mind chapter six, one through six, where he speaks of a man who, he says it would be better for this man basically if he didn't exist. Or his way of putting that is that a stillborn child, a child that is born dead, is better off than the man that he describes in this passage.
Evan Rosa: That's what I'm getting at.
Jesse Peterson: Why? It's a man that completely lacks enjoyment of his life. The very thing that we just talked about that Qoheleth is advocating. Mm-hmm. This man has it all, yet he can't enjoy it whatsoever. He lacks all joy. So Kallet has these strong words for, for this man, and he says a stillborn child is better off. So I think that in his view, maybe that's an exaggeration.
I, I wanna re, I wanna take it seriously that in his view, if, if he's already ruled out the idea that, that there's any value in living your life for the thing down the road, the yaron of what is left over. If that, if he really thinks that's just not going to happen, then that means the only value that there can be in life is the joy of the present moment that we've been discussing.
So then he, and he just has said that at the end of chapter five. Hmm. So now he begins chapter six with the case of a man who doesn't even have that.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: It's
Evan Rosa: like
Jesse Peterson: that was your last option for value in life was the joy of the moment. This guy can't do it, she says, all right, stillborns better off, I guess.
So that's sort of how I try to fit that in which, so then to answer your question, as far as Koot's view, it does imply that bare existence as such is not valuable. Yeah. To him it has to be that you have this capacity to find enjoyment in your lives.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. That's the, that's the very expression of it that I was, I was thinking of, and I think for my part, I, I think maybe disagreeing with Colette on that.
Sure. On that point,
Jesse Peterson: it's a very hot take.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. I think even a life that is. Experienced. I mean, I need to like tread lightly on all of this, uh, of course because of the, the agony that suffering really is. But even a life that is be ridden by suffering or, uh, or the kind of attitude that this particular man falls into, it still strikes me as, um, beings better than not being.
Jesse Peterson: I agree. Definitely,
Evan Rosa: Jesse. There's a, a variety of resources. In fact, they're, they're just rampant out there from positive psychology, you know, therapeutic approaches, plenty of self-help where there's a constant effort to, I think, help a human being with their attitude a shift once they stumble across. Challenge, difficulty, absurdity futility and grief loss.
How would you connect this to that contemporary movement of, of focusing on subjective wellbeing and, and, and trying to understand happiness from a psychological perspective?
Jesse Peterson: Um, one of the approaches that I've found helpful, and I don't think I got into this in the book, but listeners may be aware of Chi Bahai, uh, the author of that book Flow, uh, an idea that's I think gotten around, he did a Ted Talk on it.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: I think that what he's getting in that, that book fits very closely to the conception of Joy that I read in the book of Qoheletht. Ah, one of the things he even talks about is the idea of the autotelic experience. That's one of the principle ideas behind flow. It's just when you are doing something.
Again, not in any way as an end, as a means to some further end, but you're just enjoying the moment in itself. And he gives great examples, you know, mount climbing or hockey goalie or playing chess. He interviewed all these high performing people and just more typical kinds of jobs as well. And he just tried to figure out from them what is it, what does it feel like when you are view, when you, when you're doing your thing, at a high level, what's the experience like?
And they would describe it in terms of like, yeah, I'm just, I'm just completely absorbed in the present moment. I'm not distracted, I don't, I'm not checking my phone every five minutes.
Evan Rosa: I can imagine that jazz drumming does this.
Jesse Peterson: Yes. Yes. I think I know why you brought that up. Absolutely. Being a musician who attempts to to be a decent jazz drummer, the act of improvising in that moment, you're being confronted with a challenge moment by moment.
It's how do you react? How can you create the best music possible? But it's not for something down the road, it's just to completely own the present moment and to bring it to life. So that's one of the things that I've taken away from the wonderful book of Ecclesiastes that I've now spent many years studying.
And, and again, I'm not, I'm not trying to just gloss over the negative stuff. I mean, the book that I've written. The majority of pages of my book, just like the majority of words in the original, are about this negative side of the absurd aspects of human existence. But I have wanted to also see the other side, that he doesn't just have this negative pessimistic side, but he does have this side commending joy in our lives.
And I think it's all worth for all of us to take that seriously too.
Evan Rosa: Jesse, uh, I really enjoyed this.
Jesse Peterson: Likewise. I
Evan Rosa: enjoyed your book. I enjoyed talking about it, and I, I'm really glad that you're putting this out there into the world. Thanks for joining me.
Jesse Peterson: Thanks, Evan. Great to be with you
Evan Rosa: For The Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Jesse Peterson, production assistance by Noah Senthil. Special thanks to Jesse for allowing us to use his music featured in the Jesse Peterson Quartet to buy and download his album, Man of the Earth.
Visit JessePetersonQuartet.bandcamp.com. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.Yale.Edu, where lifeworthliving.yield.edu, where you can find a variety of educational resources to help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity.
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