Serial Thinker Interview | Alexandre Gilbert #292.1

Lev Fraenckel aka Serial Thinker is a french philosopher. He published La philo en mode Serial Thinker, in 2023 and Ma vie a -t-elle un sens ?, in 2025. He counts 55k followers on Youtube and 322k on Tik Tok.

Part I

You made a video about Dahmer, and your name, Serial Thinker, plays on the concept of a serial killer—it’s a sort of gimmick or joke. So my question is: Why did you make that video about Dahmer, and do you consider yourself a serial killer? It’s a straightforward, open question.

Serial Thinker: In fact, I chose the name Serial Thinker because I think there’s often a misunderstanding when teaching philosophy, especially in the first high school philosophy class. All philosophy teachers explain that the etymology of philosophy is the love of wisdom. But I think—actually, I’d say it’s the hate of wisdom. I think I got that from Deleuze. It’s a bit provocative, of course, because the word “wisdom” in French doesn’t translate the Greek Sophia very well. It’s true that “wisdom” isn’t a completely dumb translation for Sophia, because Sophia isn’t just intelligence. In “wisdom,” there’s this idea of both intelligence and ethical intelligence—meaning a philosopher isn’t just someone who’s smart, thinks fast, or has great computing power or intellectual credibility. It’s not just about calculation, theoretical knowledge, or scientific knowledge. It’s also about self-knowledge and existential knowledge, and thus an ethical knowledge of how to live well, how to achieve happiness.

So, it’s true that we don’t really know how to translate Sophia. And I think the French translation as “wisdom” is an unfortunate one because it immediately leads to a misunderstanding. In French, when you hear “wisdom,” you think of a well-behaved child. But I think philosophers are anything but well-behaved children. On the contrary, the first philosopher, or at least the one credited as the father of philosophy, was anything but a well-behaved child, since he was sentenced to death by Athenian democracy.

So, right from the start, a philosopher is more of a troublemaker, someone who thinks against the norms of their time. Socrates, for example, was a huge challenge to the polytheism of his era, which wasn’t just a theological norm but also a political one, since Athena protected the city. If you question Athena’s protection of the city, you’re an enemy of the city. So, there you go.

That’s why I chose the phrase Serial Thinker—to try to break this preconception of the philosopher as wise. So, am I a serial killer? Yes, I think a philosopher should be a serial killer of all established norms, whether they’re ethical, epistemological, or otherwise. They must constantly question what no one else questions, and that’s what’s interesting.

And, of course, it’s ironic—you’re not a serial killer; you don’t kill anyone, drink blood, or commit atrocities. Yet you made a video about Dahmer, an extreme case, to explore the theme of freedom. Could you repeat what you said in that video, but perhaps elaborate a bit, since the original was understandably concise?

Serial Thinker: Yes, one of the questions Dahmer’s biography raises is whether he was truly free, whether he had the freedom to act as he did, whether free will even makes sense in the human experience. You can ask this about any individual, but it becomes so much more tragic with a serial killer, because they’re the person who repulses us the most, who represents absolute evil. If absolute evil isn’t the result of a free choice but of psychological, social, or genetic determinism, or whatever else, then it raises questions about how we judge or view them.

In the series, we see that his mother took a lot of pills during pregnancy—meds she shouldn’t have taken—so you could assume that messed with his mind a bit. Then, he had a pretty disastrous childhood, left to his own devices with an alcoholic father who, as a hobby, taught him to dissect dead animals in a pretty weird way. I’m not saying dissecting animals automatically leads to this, and it can be done in a totally unhealthy way, but maybe it was done in an unhealthy way here.

Essentially, the way you present Dahmer—and perhaps this reflects your own view—is a Spinozist perspective on evil, where evil exists externally to the subject. Would you say this idea encapsulates your Serial Thinker philosophy?

Serial Thinker: Yes, I think we’re deeply determined, metaphysically, by causes, but that doesn’t make the concept of freedom irrelevant. Even for Spinoza, who’s deeply committed to determinism, he doesn’t give up on the idea of freedom. That’s really important and always tricky to explain. People struggle to understand the difference between metaphysical free will and the concept of freedom.

Let me give a clearer example, one I often use with students. Imagine a Taliban raised in an extremely fanatical ideology where women are inferior to men, and Americans are the devil who must be exterminated. Now imagine this Taliban meets a philosopher and ends up in prison. In prison, he meets a philosophy teacher—because sometimes there are philosophy teachers in prison. I did that for a year.

At a philosophy café organized by this teacher, he realizes he was raised in something completely wrong and learns to question the beliefs he grew up with. He frees himself from something. Was that less determined? It was determined by that encounter with the philosopher. If he hadn’t had that cause—that meeting, that mental openness to question things, or been in prison—he wouldn’t have met the philosopher and wouldn’t have freed himself.

But that’s the metaphysical question.

Serial Thinker: Yes, we’re all metaphysically determined, but that doesn’t really impact our lives. In our lives, what matters is freedom—a relative freedom, the freedom to question the dogmas we grew up with, to expand our horizons of thought. That’s possible regardless of our determinism. You never escape determinism—it doesn’t make sense. Something happening without a cause doesn’t make sense scientifically.

Everything has a cause. If freedom is something that happens out of nowhere, without a cause, it’s nonsense. Unless you believe in chance, but that’s not… There are two possibilities: either we’re determined by causes and not free metaphysically, or it’s chance, and we’re still not free. So, there’s no way to epistemologically justify free will.

But you can explain the concept of freedom, and it makes sense, even in a somewhat Sartrean sense. Humans are infinitely freer than animals, but not in the absolute sense Sartre claims. Sartre’s wrong to posit absolute freedom, and Spinoza’s right here. But Sartre’s right that humans have a much broader range of possibilities. They can invent a job, a life—they’re not tied to a function like a worker ant or a soldier ant.

We’re metaphysically determined—that’s obvious to me. But that doesn’t mean the concept of freedom is meaningless. Freedom makes sense regardless of our determinism. Take the Taliban who meets a philosopher and, through that experience, frees himself from his prejudices. That encounter was determined, but it still enabled freedom.

Part 2 here