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Evan Rosa: From the Yale Center For Faith and Culture, this is for the life of the world. A podcastabout seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Jesse Peterson: Qohelethassumes living has a kind of cost just to, you know, maintain our own survivalat the bare minimum. But to have a job feed yourself, maintain relationshipslike it, there's a cost you, you're putting in all this effort and all of thatassumes, doesn't it, that something that justifies the cost on the other sideof the ledger.
And so often what is assumed to justify it is a sense ofmeaning that you're working. Toward something, you're working on somethingbecause that thing is gonna have impact and everyone's gonna love it andwhatever 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 humanbeings.
Evan Rosa: What doesall this living add up to? Is life really just a ledger, all the effort, allthe costs, just a kind of balance sheet of income and expenses, even if younormally don't think of it that way. Most of us are hoping that all of thisadds up to something
Jesse Peterson: andyeah, he seems to be just using a red marker and just putting a giant X throughthat. Idea that there is this fulfillment on the other end of all of youreffort. And so then it just raises the question like, well, okay, if not, whatkeeps me going? What, what motivates me to live? If it's not the case that allof my actions that are done in a kind of means to end manner, I'm aiming atsome 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 whatyou thought it was going to be. It's not gonna be as satisfying as you thoughtit was going to be. Or, you know, you're gonna have it for five minutes andthen someone else will take it away.
Like, there's just all these possibilities of why life doesn'tturn out in the way we might expect.
Evan Rosa: That isthe question at the center of our conversation today, written sometime in thethird century BC. The book of Ecclesiastes doesn't flinch from some of the mostdifficult questions that we could ask.
What do you actually gain from everything that you pour yourlife 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 rosecolored responses offering observations you might not be hoping for.
Jesse Peterson: Theabsurd is the divorce, the chasm between your expectations for what the worldwould 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 ormeaningless, things like that.
Evan Rosa: 20thcentury existentialist, Albert Kemu called it the absurd, the author ofEcclesiastes coed called it Cave Vapor Breath, a Chasing After Wind Vanity ofVanities.
Both figures were describing the same kind of rupture. Thedistance between expectation and reality between logic and illogic. Thatyawning chasm where we try to make sense of our lives. A lot of voices outthere want to simply jump over that chasm. But coed, the author ofEcclesiastes, just sits right at the bottom of it and therein lies its value.
Jesse Peterson: And Ithink it's because in these passages he's advocating a kind of mental shift andattitude shift. It's, it's this, can you view your work, your toil, not just asa means to some further end that, that you have no idea whether it will comeabout 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'sabout the process, not the product, these kind of things. But I do think that'swhat he is actually getting at. I think that's the heart of the message of thebook, is to turn away from a kind of future based obsession with how thingswill turn out and, uh, an approach to life where you're not stopping andsmelling the roses as it were.
Turning from that kind of means to end approach to viewingthings as an end in themselves, whatever comes of it. Doesn't matter, whateverpeople think of it later on. Doesn't matter. In this moment of working on whatI'm working on, whatever it is, I am fully alive. I'm exercises, the capacitiesI have from God as a human being.
Whatever you have to do, whatever your hands find to do, do itwith all your mind. So I, I think that's, uh, a much more robust conception ofjoy than that. It's this just kind of like empty, passive pleasure.
Evan Rosa: And thereis the fulcrum, the turning, not nihilism, not resignation. Something moredifficult, something that keeps you honest, a reorientation toward the onlything that's actually available to you, a present moment, and what your handsfind 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 notdistracted. I don't, I'm not checking my phone every five minutes.
Evan Rosa: I canimagine that jazz drumming does this.
Jesse Peterson: Yes,yes. I think I know why you brought that up. Absolutely. Being a musician whoattempts 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 musicpossible? But it's not for something down the road. It's just to completely ownthe present moment and to bring it to life.
Evan Rosa: My guesttoday has spent years inside Ecclesiastes. Jesse Peterson is a philosopher andbiblical scholar at George Fox University, whose new book on Ecclesiastesbrings the tools of contemporary value theory to one of the most provocativetexts 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, aboutjoy, 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 hearunder this episode is his own playing and not by accident.
'cause if you had to choose a single genre of music that goesalong with Ecclesiastes, I would argue it would have to be jazz. Jazz. Is thisart form built on impermanence? Phrasing that's improvised that reach, butdon't resolve on dissonance that doesn't apologize for itself. A conversationbetween musicians who trusting themselves don't exactly know where a song mightgo, or are at least guiding the listener into unknown territory.
Jazz is a kind of chasing after something, maybe a chasingafter the wind, maybe leaving life unresolved. As soon as you think you'vecaught it, it vanishes. That is ve, that is vapor. That's the wind that JAblows in.
In this conversation. Jesse Peterson and I discuss his 2025book, Collette, and the philosophy of value uncovering how to read Ecclesiastesand looking at this biblical text through the filters of meaning and value. Inthe lenses of toil and absurdity, he suggests that the book's famousmeaninglessness is not actually nihilism, but a precise and honest diagnosis ofour unmet expectations as human beings.
He maps the book surprising, turn towards joy, not as aconsolation or escape, but a radical reorientation of attention toward workrelationship, and the value of the present moment all always ends in and ofthemselves, but underneath it all runs the double shadow of death, not just aphysical ending, but the extinction of our memory, all informing Collette'sinvitation 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 forthe Life of the World.
Jesse Peterson: Thankyou, Evan. Good to be here.
Evan Rosa: I thinkit's really cool that you wrote a book about Ecclesiastes. I do too. Why didyou choose. This particular project, what does it mean to you and what's yourpersonal history with the book of Ecclesiastes?
Jesse Peterson: Yeah,when I was young, I remember reading it and just finding it fascinating becauseit is so philosophical and because it is clearly concerned with meaning inlife. Later on, I'll maybe make a more technical case for it, being concernedwith that. For, for now, I think I could just state that and I felt that, and Iwas 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 Iwas in grad school, I took a class that covered it and, and I ended up writinga very long paper that got me for the first time into the academic study of thebook and drawing on some great scholars of the book. I mm-hmm. Yeah. Justbecame very interested in some of the debates concerning it.
It also became, for me, a kind of puzzle. He uses a lot ofphrases 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 thingsthat, that were Danity
Evan Rosa: Vanities.Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: Andit's like, I knew he was getting at something, but I really didn't understandwhat 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 ofvalue regarding Ecclesiastes. And I think that this is, this is just, justadded my, to my own interest in the text because you were well treating it ina, 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 ofphilosophy and contemporary concern.
Jesse Peterson: Yeah.As far as my approach with it, I had become interested in, around the time Iwas starting my PhD dissertation, I had become interested in approaches tobiblical studies and the Hebrew Bible in particular that were bringing biblicaltexts into dialogue with philosophy. There was a book that I read around thetime that I was starting by Yaku Gari called the Hebrew Bible and Philosophy ofReligion.
And he was approaching these biblical texts from a variety ofphilosophical 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 greatopportunity, especially with Ecclesiastes.
I mean, it is often considered the most philosophical book I inthe Bible, and I think for good reason it's dealing with more abstract conceptsthan you get in a lot of other texts. Anyway, so I ran with that. And yeah, asyou mentioned, I did so by pairing it with ideas about value. And incontemporary 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 valuetheory.
It's part of it, but it's also broader than that. It's reallyjust concern with. Values in human life. What, what is good in human life, whatis bad in human life and approach from various angles. Looking at things likemeaning, looking at things like deaths and happiness and joy. And I justthought that the kind of stuff that was being talked about in this, thesecontemporary 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 usefulway to draw out some of the ideas of that text. So that was kind of the basicapproach.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Andthen your introduction, you, you know, you cite, see what is good for thechildren of man todo under heaven during the few days of their life. What isgood?
The question of value shows up there. And so it's, it'srepresenting 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 activitywithin it. Mm-hmm. And what we take to be our goals, but not just our goalsmoving forward, but an understanding of the past and what it can cumulativelymean for us.
What would you say was the role that Ecclesiastes played in itshistorical context in Ancient Near East?
Jesse Peterson: To behonest, 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 otherancient 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, whichwhat is identified with the Dead Sea Scrolls, that community, that they read itthere, there's a, there's just a couple bits.
There's one from, there's a portion from Chapter six Es, and Ithink another one that we found that have been found at Kumaran. Mm-hmm. And sowe know that it was being used. But what I'm referring to as far as how it wasread early on, I think the best clue comes from within the book itself. Andwhat I have in mind by that is what's often referred to as the epilogue at theend of chapter 12.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: Thisis the part where Kohe, and maybe we need to come back to talk about that wordkohe.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Weshould
Jesse Peterson: kohe,which is often translated the teacher or the preacher is referred to here inthe third person from most of the book, except for the very beginning. Thefirst couple verses from most of the book, you have a first person speaker thatidentifies as Coha.
I Coha did this, did that. You, you're clearly getting hisperspective throughout the book. But then when we, when we get to the end ofthe book, chapter 12, starting in verse nine, uh, this section starts. Sobesides being wise, COHA taught the people knowledge. Mm-hmm. Arranged Proverbsand so on. It describes that.
And then there's the famous ending, the end of the matter thatall has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments. This is the whole dutyof man God will bring every deed into judgment with every secret thing, whethergood or evil. That's the end of the book. So. The consensus among scholars forquite a while now is that that wasn't written by Qoheleth.
It doesn't sound like it was written by Qoheleth. It soundslike it's someone else talking about him. Then the question becomes, what wasthe angle of that later person? Is it someone within the Qoheletht School ofthought? If there was such a thing? Mm-hmm. Is it someone who is a bitconcerned about the book? Uh, you know, maybe some of the more.
Heterodox claims that one might see in the book. Is it someonethat was concerned with orthodoxy and therefore gives this kind of solid Torahending fear God and keep his commandments? That's all Koal was really gettingat. 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 latereditor who wanted to make sure that the book ended on a note that made it fitin with other biblical texts and the Torah.
Evan Rosa: Mm-hmm.Yeah. A little bit of anxiety perhaps over all of the meaninglessness thatprecedes it. Yeah. And the overall sense that, that, that, that even as itapproaches 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 thetitle of the book, is that I want to make a distinction between meaning andvalue. Where me meaning is a certain kind of value. It's a certain kind of goodthat 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 aadvocacy of nihilism, uh, or something like that. And so I do read the bookthinking that Khali is denying a certain kind of value, which we are using theEnglish word meaning to represent. He obviously didn't have access to thatword. 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 tryingto 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 ofthe general concept.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: Hehas a certain conception of meaning, I think, and that that thing that heestablishes, he says, yeah, that doesn't exist in human life. We have to getused to the idea that that particular thing is not gonna happen for us in humanlife. I can come back to what I think he thinks that thing is, but I'm statingit broadly.
But then, uh, and this is why my book is divided into twohalves, the negative values that we see in the book of Ecclesiastes and thepositive 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 thatit's from a certain perspective that's different than this other thing that wethink of as meaning.
Evan Rosa: What elsedo 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 putit at a 10th century writing date, the date of composition.
Evan Rosa: Adescendant of King David, right?
Jesse Peterson: Yeah.And you know, there's you, you read the book and hey, I mean, the very firstverse 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 reasonfor 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 hasoverwhelmingly come to the conclusion that it's not possible that this waswritten by King Solomon because it's not possible.
It was written in the 10th century, BCE. The reason for that isto 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 wroteit, then there is no history of the Hebrew language. And what he meant by thatis he meant there is clearly a history of the Hebrew language, meaning thelanguage develops over time, and scholars talk about early biblical Hebrew, andin this case late biblical Hebrew.
They can clearly see differences in the way the languagedeveloped and. To pretty much all scholars. This just fits perfectly into latebiblical 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 agreewith for a lot of reasons that have to do with vocabulary, just grammaticalstuff.
We don't have to go into the weeds of those details, uh, butthat's the consensus. So then one might ask, well, what, what about this stuffthat looks like it's from Solomon? Well, I and many others think that the authoris putting on what you might call a Solomonic persona. He, he's stating thingsthat would make the reader think about King Solomon.
Evan Rosa: Mm-hmm.
Jesse Peterson: Suchas kingship, wealth and, and indeed wisdom that he was pursuing. Well, all ofthose things.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: Justlike old King Solomon did. And so I think he, he, he's wanting us to thinkabout that, but at the end of the day, it doesn't make sense to read this asactually being written by, uh, Solomon.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Let's talk a little bit about how to conceptualize meaning. Howcan a contemporary reader bring a philosophy of value and an understanding ofmeaning? 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. Hedoes it through a variety of ways, but I've identified these couple of wordsthat get us into it.
One is the Hebrew word, Amal, which is usually translated toil.
Evan Rosa: Yeah,
Jesse Peterson: ofcourse toil. We think of war, but also we would have a connotation of it's workthat really isn't fun. Yeah. It's work that you don't want to be doing. It'sdifficult. Maybe takes a long time. And so on. So that word shows up severaltimes.
And then another word that it's often paired with is the Hebrewword tro. And this is a word that it's often translated as gain or profit. Itmore literally means what is leftover. And so you might think of a businesstransaction, you're adding up your gains, your losses, what's left over. Afterall of that should be your, your profit.
That's your uron. I'll, I'll read a couple of verses wherethese come together. Mm-hmm. One is right near the beginning of the book inchapter one, verse three, what gain, there's uron is there for a person in allhis 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 theworker in that which he toils.
So he seems to have. In mind the idea that, you know, your lifetakes a lot of effort. I mean, I think, uh, Thomas Nagle once wrote somethinglike, living a Human life is a full-time occupation and you put all this timeand effort into just living your life. And the question is, well, what does itadd up to afterwards?
Um, I also think of, I dunno if you saw the movie Boyhood, thatRichard Linklater film?
Evan Rosa: Uh, yeah,I haven't seen it. No.
Jesse Peterson: Thecharacter that's played by Patricia Ake, she's like the mom of the boy.
Evan Rosa: Mm-hmm.
Jesse Peterson: Andyou know, he gets, you know, of course the movie goes through, I think it'slike nine years that they show this actual boy growing up though it's afictional story.
Anyway, near the end, she says something like. I just, I justthought there'd be something more than this after. She's not even that old whenshe says that, but she's raised, raised up this boy and so on. I thoughtthere'd be something more. I thought it would add up to something. And so heclearly seems to be getting at something like that.
And that's how a lot of people have thought about meaning in ageneral way. I, I get into more kind of specific conceptions in the book, butthat's at least a starting point is it's like, what is everything? Like what'sthe thing that remains at the end of your life? What does it all add up to? Allof the effort we put into living?
And it may be not that he is utilitarian, but at least thisidea of like he's thinking in quantifying terms because I and others interpretQoheleth 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. Andother times later in the book he's referring, he talks about how one wouldrelate to a king.
So it doesn't seem that he was literally a king. I think thatjust comes up early on as this persona, as I mentioned. But what I think he wasprobably a businessman because there are many terms in the book that are fromthe commercial world. There's a word for, as I mentioned, yaron, there is theword for wages.
There's just various others that make me think he really dealtin the realm of business and commerce and economic kind of thought.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: Andso I think that he is this philoso, this philosopher who is talking aboutmeaning in life, but I think he, he's putting it into almost commercial oreconomic type of language.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. No,I, I, I really appreciate that, that particular perspective, because there's akind of. Broader awareness that he's bringing into. And I think it'sfascinating to think about those spaces where, in particular, philosophy ofvalue does connect with consumer culture or other, like broadly economic
Jesse Peterson:mm-hmm.
Evan Rosa: Phenomenawhere it's, it's one of these unique places where we can see abstract andparticular kind of coming together and Yeah. And, and really see, see theapplication of ideas into some practical lived experience.
Jesse Peterson: Andjust as a side note, one of the philosophers who's thought to have reallybrought the idea of value back into our thinking as a central philosophicalconcept is actually Nietzsche, you know, in the late 19th century.
And I read an article that I found fascinating. I hope I don'tget 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 sothrough value as an economic notion.
I have a section of the book where I walk through a fewdifferent ways that meaning has been understood in contemporary meaning oflife, uh, philosophy.
Evan Rosa: Mm-hmm.
Jesse Peterson: Oneof them is the idea of subjectivism, or that's at least my summarizing term forit. Just that meaning consists in like personal psychological satisfaction anduh, and I refer to a few passages in the book where maybe one could plausiblyread 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 thinkthat's the best fit for his idea about meaning. And then another possibility iswhat's called consequentialism about meaning. And this is more the idea thatmeaning unlike the first few, it's not just you have psychological satisfactionand that's what meaning in life is.
Mm-hmm. It's more that you are kind of objectively contributingto something good. Um, you might not even feel that you are. I mentioned likeMother Therea when she was having her doubts that we
Evan Rosa: Oh, right.
Jesse Peterson: Wentfrom her diary, like she doesn't really think she's doing anything good. Ofcourse, anyone else would look at it like, oh, she's doing so much good for theworld.
So that's more this objective or consequentialist understandingof meaning. It's also, I wanna mention here, connected to, this is what I callthe cog in the machine view of meaning. Ah. What I mean by that is sometimesthis comes up even in readings of Ecclesiastes, the idea that, well, Kalletdidn't know what the meaning was, but he believed that God was creating a, agiant meaning for everyone, including him or, and, and everything else.
In other words, all you, you're just, you're a cog in themachine, you're playing some unknown role in God's great plan. And that's whereone would find, uh, meaning in life. And so there too, I give some argumentsagainst. Seeing it that way, and I'll just move to the view that I end up, uh,supporting.
Evan Rosa: Yeah,please.
Jesse Peterson: Whichis the idea of inters subjectivism. What that really refers to is that meaningis 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 honorafter.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: Yeah.So I think that's what he, that's his conception of meaning because he doesspeak in various times about he, he's kind of mourning the fact that, oh, noone will be remembered and so on.
Mm-hmm. He places meaning in that kind of category, but he isdenying 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 hisideas in the book, but that conception is what he denies as an actual thing forhuman 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 allsorts of people, not just Khali, but it's how I read the book. Mm-hmm. I thinkthat 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 histime.
I think we see things in the book of Proverbs that he would'vebeen familiar with. He at times, in the book of Ecclesiastes, you get theselittle lines and, and I think even potentially quotations from Proverbs or atleast allusions to the proverbial thought from that book. And a lot scholarshave this idea of the act consequence nexus, meaning that the Book of Proverbsputs forth.
The assumption that, you know, you do good stuff, you workhard, and there's gonna be a good result at the end. You're gonna have a goodlife and a good family and and whatever else, or you're bad person, or you'relazy, or whatever else it is, and you're gonna have a bad result. That there'salways this close connection between what you do and the result karma, we mightsay in modern day terms.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: And Ithink that what is one of the things at the heart of the book of Ecclesiastes isjust to say, uh, maybe not, maybe there isn't that direct line between what youdo and what the result will be. But I think mm-hmm. The reason he's, the reasonhe would bother to say that is because at some earlier time he did have thatassumption.
He was raised with that assumption. And that's where, becauseit seems like you're asking like, well, why would, if one has a view ofmeaninglessness, of the denial of meaning. Why even say that? What's the pointof even bringing that up?
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Why takethe via Negativa in that way?
Jesse Peterson: Yeah.I think the point of bringing it up is if you have been raised differently, ifpeople are claiming that, oh no, you, you know, you do all this good stuff inyour 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. Andso he seems to find it a worthwhile thing to state because of that.
Evan Rosa: Andcertainly there's the positive value side of things, but insofar as there'sthis claim of, it's, it's hard to find where the meaning is or it, it, it lookslike it's just fine constantly escaping and eluding our grass.
Is that evidence that, that he's sort of being disabused oflike an immature optimism?
Jesse Peterson: Yeah.Uh, yeah. That's another way of getting at how I read it, that. He, he probablydid have an optimism at an earlier point in time. He was disabuse of it, and soyou could say it's, it's kind of like, oh, it matches on to some degree withWalter Brueggemann's, notions of orientation is our starting point to theworld, and you kind of have this idea of a positive connection between youractions and the results, or you know, that the world is a just place or thingslike this, that the world is meaningful, that there's order and instead ofchaos, and then you go through something or a variety of things that leads youto a place of disorientation.
You're no longer seeing the world match your expectations ofthe world, which is also, by the way, what you know, Camus seems to have inmind by the idea of the absurd. The absurd is yeah, the divorce, the chasmbetween your expectations for what the world would be and the reality of thecold hard truth of the way the world really is.
There's that, that mismatch, that chasm, that dissonance, thatabsurd.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: Thenfor Bruma, of course, he has that third category of a reorientation after thedisorientation or a new orientation. And I think that for Kallet, the stuff Ibriefly mentioned earlier, the joy passages, I think that's the equivalent inkallet of the new orientation, the reorientation after the disorientation ofseeing life, as you've been mentioning, meaningless, the, the Hebrew wordbehind that is havo can be translated as indeed absurd or futile or things likethat.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, thecreation 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: lookinginto 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, Iwould put it like this, the process of maturing, the process of becoming adultis disusing oneself of certain spontaneous expectations or certain expectationsand letting go of, of, of deceptions and mm-hmm.
And, and trying to reorient oneself while retaining some, somekind of, some kind of approach that, that decides, yeah, life is, in factlivable life is in fact worth living. It requires some kind of reorientation tomaintain that perspective. Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: It'sreal. And I think this is one of the reasons the book is just still sorelevant.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.Yeah.
What would you say is the threat of absurdity, the distancebetween expectations and reality? But what makes the concept of absurdity ormeaninglessness so threatening and scary?
Jesse Peterson: Ithink it's what you've just been referring to. It's, it's the problem ofmotivation for living.
Evan Rosa: Yes.
Jesse Peterson: Andagain, connecting it back to something I said earlier with Kha is that I thinkKha assumes living has a kind of cost just to, you know, maintain our ownsurvival at the bare minimum.
But to have a job feed yourself, maintain relationships likeit, there's a cost you, you're putting in all this effort and all of thatassumes, doesn't it, that there is something that justifies the cost on theother side of the ledger, right. So often what is assumed to justify it is asense of meaning that you're working toward something, you're working onsomething because that thing is gonna have impact and everyone's gonna love itand 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, heseems to be just using a red marker and just putting a giant X through thatidea 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 megoing?
What? What motivates me to live? If it's not the case that allof my actions that are done in a kind of means to end manner, I'm aiming atsome goal. If I can't at all depend on that goal, and, and again, I would saythat KOA would say something like, well, either it's not gonna come ever. Or ifit 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 tobe. Or you know you're gonna have it for five minutes and then someone elsewill take it away. Like there's just all these possibilities of why. Lifedoesn't turn out in the way we might expect.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: Sothen 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 Idon'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 camouand questions of meaning so closely tying to so closely the Yeah. The decisionto 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 alegitimate answer to the problem.
Evan Rosa: It's clearto 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 meaningand 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 inEcclesiastes. What have you discovered about the harm of death that might cometo us?
Jesse Peterson: Yeah.Yeah. One of the chapters in the book is, is about that, is what the harm ofdeath as he understands it.
And I used it as a jumping off point, a comparison withEpicurus, the ancient philosopher, because he famously said that death is not aharm for human beings,
Evan Rosa: nothing tous. Yeah,
Jesse Peterson:right. Nothing is, nothing. You're not alive and there's no sensory experiencein his view once you're dead. So just what's the problem?
Of course, most of us don't agree with that. We feel likethere's something wrong with that. And so philosophers, and especiallyrecently. Have been trying to find ways to argue against Epicurus, and that'sthis realm called philosophy of death. And the common view is that, well, deathis bad because it deprives us of the good things that we would still have inlife had we not right.
Died. And I think that that, you see that in Coha. There is acouple 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. Thedeeper thing is what you've just been alluding to in the way you raised thequestion, which is the connection between death and meaning.
Hmm. If meaning is found in this kind of inters subjectivism asI refer to it, this honor from the part of others towards oneself, including afterdeath.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: Andif Qoheleth says, well, it's not, it's not only the case that you're going todie, it's also the case that your memory is going to die. Well then that's areally 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 isthe end, then you have death. But some might say. Well, there is a kind ofmetaphorical immortality living on in the memory of others.
Evan Rosa: Oh yeah.
Jesse Peterson: Maybethrough physical objects, you know, a book one writes or a, a statue or abuilding with your name on it, or there's just purely mental, there's just thememory of you in later generations.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: AndKoal seems to go out of his way to deny that for everyone, which is ironicbecause here we are, 2000 plus years later, talking about him or rememberinghim. But for whatever reason he thought that, no, that's just not going tohappen. And so that creates a big problem for death. It's not just that you'llphysically die, but the meaning that you've accrued for your life if there wassuch a thing that dies with you.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Itwithers, right? Like
Jesse Peterson: Yeah,exactly. Mm-hmm. And another one of the points he makes about death, he usesthis Hebrew phrase, muha, which is translated literally as the same fate. He'strying to show that he makes some comparisons between categories of beings. Atfirst between people, there's wise people and there's foolish people.
But then elsewhere he compares it to there's human beings andthere's animals, or there's righteous people, there's unrighteous people. And atall times he uses the phrase to just say, these two categories have the samefate. Despite perhaps the expectation that they wouldn't have, that the wiseswould go on to some great afterlife and the fools would not, or that humanswould have some great afterlife and animals would not, uh, you know, thatmight, that thought might not fly today in 2025, but at least that was theassumption then.
Sure. And he's just with all that and he's saying, no, samefate for all these categories. They're all gonna end up six feet underground.Exactly the same.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. So
Jesse Peterson: itreally is a very kinda modern perspective on that, that you, maybe you wouldsay modern humanistic or modern secular or something. But
Evan Rosa: yeah, Ithink going to chapter nine from here makes sense.
I mean he, uh, yeah. Um, nine, five for the living, no, thatthey will die, but the dead, no, nothing, and they have no more reward for thememory of them is forgotten.
Jesse Peterson:Right?
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Eventhe way he
Jesse Peterson: putthat, they have no more reward because the memory, the, the reward would'vebeen the memory, but they don't continue to get that reward even beyond deathbecause, uh, the memory is lost.
Evan Rosa: I reallydo wanna stay focused on value, but there is a fascinating question of themetaphysics of the person. What people are. Yeah. And that seems to be impliedin Collette writing here. And, and I'm, and it looks like it's, you know,leaning more toward a kind of materialism.
Jesse Peterson: Icould 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 traditionalHebrew conception of, and I have a paper that relates to this, a paper calledDid Qoheleth Believes in an Afterlife.
Evan Rosa: Ah, but
Jesse Peterson: inthat, I get it, just anthropology, his view of the human person, I think is atraditional Hebrew one in the sense that Genesis two spoke of the creation ofthe human being, as in part it's coming from the dust of the ground.
But then the other ingredient number two is that the lifebreath 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 differentthan that. You see that throughout most of the Hebrew Bible, and that justmeans as many passages indicate that when a person dies, the dust returns tothe 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, butthen when they die, that life breath does a U-turn and goes back up to God. Thedust kind of dissipates, and that's the end of, of that individual.
Evan Rosa: So thenthe, the turn here, which is a fascinating turn, is toward, so enjoy, go eatyour bread.
Verse seven in chapter nine. Eat your bread with joy. Drinkyour wine with a merry heart. For God has already approved what you do. Letyour garments be always white. Let not oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy lifewith the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has givenyou under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil atwhich 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 aregoing.
Jesse Peterson:Mm-hmm.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Sothis is turning toward enjoyment and pleasure in the in, in light of thiscommon 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 canbe forgotten. Dust returns to dust, therefore, and you fill in that blank andI'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 thatit's, it can be hard for human beings to, to swallow that kind of logic becauseof the desire, meaning the logic though, is straightforward.
If, if one were to say and believe, well, this, this is theend, death is the end. Even in that double sense, I was referring to the, thedeath and then the death after death as someone put it, meaning the death ofthe memory and so on.
Evan Rosa: Mm-hmm.
Jesse Peterson: Wellthen 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 seethis 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 isno chance to do these things, to do work or to sink or have knowledge or wisdomin sheeo the place of the dead that he believed everyone would, would go to.
Evan Rosa: Yeah,
Jesse Peterson: itis. It is a straightforward logic. It's a difficult logic for us to swallow, Ithink.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: Butmaybe 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 enjoymentpassages.
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 chapterthree, one in chapter five, one in chapter eight, one here that we're justreading in chapter nine. And, and one in chapter 11, there's debate amonginterpreters on how to take these passages in light of everything else we'vealready talked about, right?
Mm-hmm. In light of the seemingly negative pessimistic tonethat you get in a lot of the book, that just raises the question with thesepassages, like, well, does he, what does he really mean by that? And some, andespecially those interpreters who do. Lean in the more negative reading of therest 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 iseven the Hebrew word that's used, uh, in these passages for joy is the wordand, and it can be translated pleasure. Potentially, but some scholars read itas well. All he means by that is a kind of empty pleasure, just a mere sensorypleasure.
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 sortof narcotic view.
Evan Rosa: Ah, right,right, right.
Jesse Peterson: Ofenjoyment that it's, yes. As we've already mentioned, life is very painful. Isthere anything that can just numb the pain a little bit?
Well, there is this possibility of empty pleasure.
Evan Rosa: Okay.Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: Andyou know, we all know how that, how that can work out. Sure. There might, wemay know people that live that way, so that's one possible reading, but I don'tgo that direction. I think that he actually does mean something more robust byhis 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, ifyou 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 acouple of them.
Evan Rosa: Yeah,sure.
Jesse Peterson: Soin, um, let's see, in 3 22, he said, so I saw that there's nothing better thanthat.
A man should rejoice in his work for that is his lot. Inchapter five, there's one where he says, behold what I've seen to be good infitting 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: Wecould read more than, but basically what I'm getting at is you heard that hedoes mention food and drink, so one might think, oh, it's just the pleasure ofeating 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 thatis obviously pleasing. As I mentioned earlier, toil as in these other passagesthat we talked about before, TOIL is usually something difficult we don't liketo toil.
So I think in those passages in the book where he's using theidea 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 notgonna reach the goal. So in that sense, toil seems pointless. But then we'd askwhy here then is he speaking of enjoying the toil?
And I think it's because in these passages he's advocating akind of mental shift, an attitude shift that I think is what the book isultimately getting at in terms of its cognitive message to readers. It's, it'sthis, can you view. Your work, your toil, not just as a means to some further endthat, that you have no idea whether it will come about that further end.
Can you rather turn to simply enjoy the work itself? Now wehave modern day phrases for this, you know, that it's about the process, notthe product, these kind of things. But I do think that's what he is actuallygetting at. I think that's the heart of the message of the book, is to turnaway from a kind of future based obsession with how things will turn out anduh, an approach to life where you're not stopping and smelling the roses as itwere.
Turning from that kind of means to end approach to viewingthings as an end in themselves, viewing your work as an end in self, whatevercomes of it. Doesn't matter, whatever people think of it later on, doesn'tmatter. In this moment of working on what I'm working on, whatever it is, I amfully alive. I'm exercises, the capacities I have from God as a human being.
Again, that, that passes from nine, 10, whatever you have todo, whatever your hands find to do, do it with all your mind. So I, I thinkthat's a much more robust conception of joy than that. It's this just kind oflike empty, passive pleasure.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Ithink there's, it's interesting in chapter 11, rejoice young man while you'reyoung, let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth, follow theinclination of your heart and the desire of your eyes.
It's again, that subjective, attitudinal shift, something thatis deeply internal and and importantly subjective for a person to regard theirown. Their own effort and, and, and look at it both with acceptance and theword that I sometimes use, uh, is surprise. The, it's all, it's all quitefleeting. Everyone is leveled in the sense that all of our being is, it'ssimply not up to us in an important sense.
And, and it's all a kind of gift. It's all this surprising giftthat we can then appreciate even in light of, of the, the, the futility, theabsurdity, 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'regiving, the, the, the law or portion that you are given
Evan Rosa: one's lawin life.
Jesse Peterson: Yeah.He speaks of that several times and I just kinda interpret that as well. You'renot given everything, you can't have it all and you can't even have all thatyou 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 thatlittle piece of the pie, the lot in life that you've been given.
Observe yourself into whatever that may be.
Evan Rosa: Do youthink that just being is good just being, not just coming into existence, but Imean the, the question of the bare fact of existing.
Jesse Peterson: Thisis a nuanced topic in the book because he does have some negative stuff aboutexisting, and I try to, you know, sort of fit that into my overall reading ofhim.
Uh, I have in mind chapter six, one through six, where hespeaks of a man who, he says it would be better for this man basically if hedidn't exist. Or his way of putting that is that a stillborn child, a childthat is born dead, is better off than the man that he describes in thispassage.
Evan Rosa: That'swhat I'm getting at.
Jesse Peterson: Why?It's a man that completely lacks enjoyment of his life. The very thing that wejust talked about that Qoheleth is advocating. Mm-hmm. This man has it all, yethe can't enjoy it whatsoever. He lacks all joy. So Kallet has these strongwords for, for this man, and he says a stillborn child is better off. So Ithink 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 yourlife for the thing down the road, the yaron of what is left over. If that, ifhe really thinks that's just not going to happen, then that means the onlyvalue that there can be in life is the joy of the present moment that we'vebeen discussing.
So then he, and he just has said that at the end of chapterfive. Hmm. So now he begins chapter six with the case of a man who doesn't evenhave that.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: It's
Evan Rosa: like
Jesse Peterson: thatwas your last option for value in life was the joy of the moment. This guycan'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 toanswer your question, as far as Koot's view, it does imply that bare existenceas such is not valuable. Yeah. To him it has to be that you have this capacityto 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, andI think for my part, I, I think maybe disagreeing with Colette on that.
Sure. On that point,
Jesse Peterson: it'sa very hot take.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Ithink even a life that is. Experienced. I mean, I need to like tread lightly onall 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 attitudethat this particular man falls into, it still strikes me as, um, beings betterthan not being.
Jesse Peterson: Iagree. Definitely,
Evan Rosa: Jesse.There's a, a variety of resources. In fact, they're, they're just rampant outthere from positive psychology, you know, therapeutic approaches, plenty ofself-help where there's a constant effort to, I think, help a human being withtheir attitude a shift once they stumble across. Challenge, difficulty,absurdity futility and grief loss.
How would you connect this to that contemporary movement of, offocusing on subjective wellbeing and, and, and trying to understand happinessfrom a psychological perspective?
Jesse Peterson: Um,one of the approaches that I've found helpful, and I don't think I got intothis in the book, but listeners may be aware of Chi Bahai, uh, the author ofthat book Flow, uh, an idea that's I think gotten around, he did a Ted Talk onit.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Jesse Peterson: Ithink that what he's getting in that, that book fits very closely to theconception of Joy that I read in the book of Qoheletht. Ah, one of the thingshe even talks about is the idea of the autotelic experience. That's one of theprinciple ideas behind flow. It's just when you are doing something.
Again, not in any way as an end, as a means to some furtherend, but you're just enjoying the moment in itself. And he gives greatexamples, you know, mount climbing or hockey goalie or playing chess. Heinterviewed all these high performing people and just more typical kinds ofjobs as well. And he just tried to figure out from them what is it, what doesit feel like when you are view, when you, when you're doing your thing, at ahigh 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, Idon't, I'm not checking my phone every five minutes.
Evan Rosa: I canimagine that jazz drumming does this.
Jesse Peterson: Yes.Yes. I think I know why you brought that up. Absolutely. Being a musician whoattempts 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 musicpossible? But it's not for something down the road, it's just to completely ownthe present moment and to bring it to life. So that's one of the things thatI've taken away from the wonderful book of Ecclesiastes that I've now spentmany years studying.
And, and again, I'm not, I'm not trying to just gloss over thenegative stuff. I mean, the book that I've written. The majority of pages of mybook, just like the majority of words in the original, are about this negativeside of the absurd aspects of human existence. But I have wanted to also seethe other side, that he doesn't just have this negative pessimistic side, buthe does have this side commending joy in our lives.
And I think it's all worth for all of us to take that seriouslytoo.
Evan Rosa: Jesse, uh,I really enjoyed this.
Jesse Peterson:Likewise. I
Evan Rosa: enjoyedyour book. I enjoyed talking about it, and I, I'm really glad that you'reputting this out there into the world. Thanks for joining me.
Jesse Peterson:Thanks, Evan. Great to be with you
Evan Rosa: For TheLife of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture atYale Divinity School. This episode featured Jesse Peterson, productionassistance by Noah Senthil. Special thanks to Jesse for allowing us to use hismusic featured in the Jesse Peterson Quartet to buy and download his album, Manof the Earth.
Visit JessePetersonQuartet.bandcamp.com. I'm Evan Rosa and Iedit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online atfaith.Yale.Edu, where lifeworthliving.yield.edu, where you can find a varietyof educational resources to help people envision and pursue lives worthy of ourhumanity.
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