Steve Jobs and Philosophy

Close Your Eyes, Hold Your Breath, Jump In

PAUL PARDI

For the launch of the Macintosh, one of the most important product releases for Steve Jobs and Apple, the Mac team wanted to include a calculator application and a young engineer named Chris Espinosa was tasked with the work.

Jobs rejected Espinosa’s first version as inferior but, in his own way, encouraged Espinoza to keep working. In subsequent design meetings Jobs would ask for a tweak here or to add pixels there but Espinosa could not seem to land a design that would please Jobs. Finally in one design review, Espinosa came in with a different kind of app. He created what he called “The Steve Jobs Roll Your Own Calculator Construction Set.”

It was a tool that allowed Jobs to modify the look of the parts of the calculator to his liking. After a few minutes of playing around with the tool, Jobs got the look exactly the way he wanted it and the design Jobs came up with not only shipped with the first Macintosh but remained in subsequent versions of the operating system for fifteen years (Steve Jobs, p. 132).

While this anecdote supports the contention that Jobs was a control freak, it points to another characteristic that has philosophical relevance: Jobs relied heavily on intuition. He had to touch, see, and experience things in his world until he found what he couldn’t describe with words. Steve Jobs tended to live his life in the moment. His world was one of discovery and he would come to know purity, truth, and even perfection, by encountering them. His life was guided by these principles—the principles of an artist—not by a master plan neatly written out in project specification and carefully supported by consensus and data. Jobs’s life most closely aligned with the philosophical worldview called existentialism.

Existentialism

Existentialism in all its varieties is difficult to capture in simple terms partly because existentialists tend to eschew labels and, almost by definition, refuse to be defined. Existentialism describes a way of being in the world. Though it can be described philosophically, it’s not a creed or a collection of propositions. It’s the act of living and not a product of abstract thought. The label can be applied, if at all, to the story of a life lived rather than to specific words spoken or ideas held.

Existentialist philosophers tend not to write purely analytic work characterized by precise terms and logical arguments. They write narratives about man’s struggle with existence and meaning and the journey or path that may provide that meaning. This focus tends to make existentialist writings either highly relatable or highly abstract. Many readers of Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard, the father of modern existentialism, see that book as an attempt to explain why Kierkegaard broke off his engagement to his love Regine—something that tortured him his entire life. The existentialist novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his The Brothers Karmazov—often considered the greatest novel ever written—attempts to work out problems of ethics, religion, and epistemology in a fast-paced narrative told through the eyes of three brothers. Providing us with an analysis of these issues was not his concern.

Jobs stated that his goal in creating Apple and its products was “to make a ding in the universe” (Apple Revolution, p. 43). He would be dissatisfied with anything less. His obsession with perfection—he once called a cooking knife in a French shop “ruined” because the manufacturer failed to remove a spot of glue in the handle (Steve Jobs, p. 344)—and “getting it right” was fueled by this goal. He would labor days and sometimes weeks over minor tweaks to a case for one of his machines. He tearfully stopped a rehearsal for the launch of the first iMac when he learned that the CD drive in the device was of the tray kind rather than the more elegant slot model (p. 351).

The authentic life is an expressive life of just the type that Steve Jobs attempted to live. He was called “mercurial” by those closest to him, something he acknowledged and even poked fun at (p. 234). If he felt angry, he might lash out at a beloved friend. If he were hurt or frustrated or elated and joyful, he would cry in front of peers, partners, and even customers. Authenticity means being as real as you know how and expressing that in word and deed, for better or worse.

Existentialists tend to live life “in the moment.” They focus on attempting to turn possibility into actuality. They have a vision of what they want their life to mean and what it could be and they attempt to exercise their will to bring that vision into reality. As most of us know, this is much easier said than done. Actualizing everything we want to become is foiled by illness, financial loss, the will of others, and even our own weakness of will. This failure to fully realize our lives (become our truest self) results in what Kierkegaard captured in the term despair. Despair for existentialists isn’t the same as the emotional state of depression (though they do, at times, go together). It’s the experience of living a less than fully actualized life—of discovering a gap between the actual and the potentially real.

Many of us do not have an active knowledge of this gap but we have a sense of it. We have a longing to be more than we are, to be a better person, to leave a mark, to make a dent in the universe. We strive for it but can never seem to achieve it. This angst causes us to create facades and tell lies to ourselves and others so we hide our failure to actualize our possibilities. The greater and deeper the lies, the less authentic our lives may become. Psychologist Ernest Becker, in his great work The Denial of Death, was leveraging the philosophy of Kierkegaard when he described this mental defense as “character armor.”

Bad Faith

The French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre attempted to unpack this idea in a way similar to Kierkegaard. The inauthentic person is the one who lies to himself and thus creates a fiction about who he is and gets others to believe the fiction is reality. A person who constructs this persona acts in what Sartre called “bad faith.” The person who acts in bad faith is not intentionally lying to others (that is, willingly telling them falsehoods). Rather, the person is actually lying to themselves and they know this. These lies create an internal conflict that makes being authentic impossible.

Sartre writes,

To be sure, the one who practices bad faith is hiding a displeasing truth or presenting as truth a pleasing untruth. Bad faith then has in appearance the structure of falsehood. Only what changes everything is the fact that in bad faith, it is from myself that I am hiding the truth. Thus the duality of the deceiver and the deceived does not exist here.

Jobs would have none of this. If a product design, the layout of one of his stores, or the organization of one of his product groups was faulty, he’d call it “shit” and demand that it be redone (Steve Jobs, p. 122). Authenticity for Jobs took on a form of identity. A poorly designed product, store, process, factory, or circuit board represented a flaw in Jobs himself. True authenticity meant demanding of his creations the same excellence that he demanded of himself. To do less is inauthentic.

Steve Jobs recollected that the vital spark of “the Sixties” (really the early Seventies) was:

that there was something beyond, sort of, what you see every day. It’s the same thing that causes people to want to be poets instead of bankers. And I think that’s a wonderful thing. And I think that that same spirit can be put into products, and those products can be manufactured and given to people and they can sense that spirit. (Triumph of the Nerds)

Jobs was famous for his “reality distortion field” which colleagues defined as his ability to talk about falsehoods as if they were true. Jobs would regularly deny the impossibility of product release dates, or misstate facts as if the falsehood were absolutely true. While this might appear to be acting in bad faith, it’s really very consistent with this drive for self-actualization. As far as many could tell, Jobs actually believed the reality he was creating. He was not willfully lying to himself or others. Rather, he constructed the reality he wanted to be true. His biographer, Walter Isaacson, described it as a “complex form of dissembling” where Jobs would state something he wanted as if it were true without consideration for what actually was true (Steve Jobs, p. 118). This is consistent with an existentialist theme that reality itself is malleable.

Gates the Pragmatist

Jobs’s sometime collaborator and more often nemesis Bill Gates was a software engineer at heart and built a company which focused on creating the greatest possible business impact. He understood the utility of software and how it could change the world. Gates’s master stroke was not creating a work of technically advanced art but establishing a business arrangement with IBM that would help him grow a fledgling software company into a global leader. This arrangement focused on a piece of software that was rather boring: a rudimentary operating system that would help office workers get things done on a personal computer. It wasn’t flashy, it wasn’t perfect, but it was functional, saleable, and highly utilitarian.

As a computer scientist and technologist, Gates was very much at home in the world of the rationalist—a philosophy that focuses on reason as the best way to discover truth and make decisions about how we ought to live. But Gates was also skeptical of using reason alone to make decisions. In an interview with Michael Kinsley he stated:

Rationality only goes so far. . . . There’s a lot of latitude in terms of what’s rational. If you feel like getting involved with that, if it has this positive benefit, then you’ll put more time into the specific strategy that is rational to going [sic] after that opportunity and maybe coming up with something that in the long term is very rational. (The Warren & Bill Show, emphasis added).

Jobs was even more skeptical of the utility of pure reason and he and Gates were more alike than dissimilar on this point. Rather, Gates tended to part ways with Jobs by putting more value in building utilitarian products that could be commoditized and would reach the largest possible audience. For Gates, there was no “ideal” computer system or user experience that Microsoft should work to build. Instead, Gates’s version of changing the world was to build Microsoft primarily as a business with a single, measurable, and immensely practical goal: a computer on every desktop and in every home. His post-Microsoft philanthropic work similarly focuses on utility and solving real-world problems for the most people possible (“Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene”). This focus on practicality and utility puts Gates squarely in the pragmatist camp.

Pragmatism is built on the foundation that talking about truth as an absolute that must be discovered is wrongheaded. For the pragmatist, the human intellect is fallible and truth is “epistemically opaque.” That just means that it’s not possible to have access to all the relevant facts needed to arrive with certainty at a conclusion. Even if we could, being able to understand how those facts fit together in just the right way is beyond our ken. Rather, we take what information we do have, admit it’s inadequate, and attempt to create theories and a way of life that gives us the most benefit and the least costs.

One of the early Pragmatists, William James, attempted to give a general sense of how a pragmatist should approach certain theoretical problems by describing a method:

The pragmatic method . . . is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. (Pragmatism, p. 14)

Jobs seems to have equated a focus only on practical concerns with being no better than average. His existentialism led him to sacrifice market share for control that would, in his mind, allow him to achieve a Zen-like perfect balance in his products. More importantly, he eschewed a purely pragmatic approach because it involves too many compromises. Jobs built products for himself first and he would resist compromising on any part of a product’s design if it resulted in something he would not want to use himself.

In fact Jobs channeled these ideas no more strongly than when comparing Apple’s products to Microsoft’s. When commenting on Microsoft’s music player, the Zune, he stated:

The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don’t really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out. If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much. (Isaacson, Steve Jobs, p. 406)

Jobs listened to his muses which led him on a path of freedom, sometimes destruction, and always continual re-creation. He was polarizing, which could sometimes stifle his effectiveness, but he continually worked to “connect the dots looking forward” (Stanford Commencement Address). While he wasn’t always popular and though he could alienate himself from his closest associates, he tried to live a genuine life of self-creation. In doing so, he created products and a company that can best be described in the most existentialist of terms: authentic.