November 25, 2025 • 26 mins
We trace existentialism from Kierkegaard’s pivot to the single individual before God to the secular push for meaning without God, then test what still helps in a noisy, anxious culture. We offer a grounded practice of stillness and a challenge to choose rather than drift.
• what existentialism means and why it endures
• Kierkegaard’s shift from systems to the single individual before God
• Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus in brief
• existence precedes essence and its cultural echoes
• subjectivity as owned truth, not private whim
• despair as the self refusing to be itself before God
• the leap of faith as passionate trust when guarantees end
• gifts to keep: honesty about anxiety, critique of the herd, real decisions
• risks without God: radical autonomy and thin hope
• a practical stillness exercise to cultivate the inner life
Please check out the subversive orthodoxy Instagram
You can find my other creative work on beingtravismullen.substack.com
You can always email us. Ideas for field notes would be great coming from you guys if you could email us at subversiveorthodoxy@gmail.com
Contact: subversiveorthodoxy@gmail.com
Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy
Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation
Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.
Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.
Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_01 (00:06):
This is Field Notes for the Subversive Orthodoxy
Podcast.
Welcome back to the podcast andwelcome to our very first Field
(00:26):
Notes.
These are meditations,reflections, or reviews of
things that were things I don'twant to lose or things I don't
want to forget that we haddiscussed on the podcast or
going deeper on certain aspects.
So his first one is what isexistentialism?
And you know, what didKierkegaard do to us basically?
So I want to review like what itis because some people may not
(00:49):
have had any context for thatwhen we when we did the
Kierkegaard episode.
There is a lot of interest thesedays in Kierkegaard and and
Dostoevsky specifically.
So the word the wordexistentialism is became like a
philosophical term.
It was a a philosophy basically.
So Kierkegaard was consideredone of the godfathers of it or
(01:13):
fathers of it.
So you've heard the wordexistential crisis that's
usually said like a joke, butthere's actually a whole
philosophy behind that phrase.
And today, with this field note,I just want to dig into what is
existentialism, why isKierkegaard called the father of
it, and what, if anything, isworth saving from it.
(01:35):
So it relates to things likefreedom, anxiety, meaning,
authenticity, and despair.
So the negative sides are likethe anxiety and the despair, but
it really speaks to freedom,meaning, and authenticity.
And it's it's all over in ourmovies, it's all over in our
therapy culture, it's you know,things you would see on Spotify
(01:59):
playlists.
There's there's there's rappersquoting existentialists as song
titles and choruses just rippingstraight off of Nietzsche and
straight off of Kierkegaard.
The church itself has hasreceived a lot from Kierkegaard
and from existentialism.
And, you know, whether that'sgood or bad or somewhere in
(02:22):
between is kind of something Iwanted to explore on this as a
as kind of a meditation.
So, you know, it's kind ofalways asking the question Am I
really living my life?
Is this is this real?
Is this true?
Am I living my life before God?
Am I am I in relation or is thisjust imaginary in my head, or am
(02:43):
I just playing a role?
So it kind of deals with stufflike that.
Like, is is reality reality,basically?
So existentialism is a family ofthinkers, they would, they would
say, who say the centralquestion isn't what is the
universe made of?
So it's not about all theexternals, but it's more about
how do I live authentically as ahuman being in a world, in this
(03:07):
world, that can feel absurd orindifferent or even meaningless.
When it comes to the thenon-Christian existentialists,
they're gonna basically benihilists or there's no meaning.
If life is absurd, I believeCamus was a proponent of that.
And and it just doesn't matter.
(03:27):
So just make with it what youwant.
And you would see that that'spretty much a big proponent.
I mean, that's a big pillar inour culture currently, is if
people don't believe anything,they still believe there's
meaning that they basically haveto create.
So maybe that's you know part ofpart of why there's so many
problems, too, because peopleare trying to construct their
(03:49):
own meaning and it's verytiresome or very disappointing.
So key figures would beNietzsche, Frederick Nietzsche.
He unmasked herd more herdmorality.
So, like people thinking, youknow, what is right and wrong
based on what everyone elsethinks.
And he called for the overman orthe superman basically.
(04:09):
He also had the God is deadstory where where basically
we've graduated from religion,but he still, as an
existentialist, he still spoketowards depth and courage.
So like he had he had things hewill, you know, people accuse
him of being a nihilist, butwhich means nothing has meaning,
everything is meaningless.
(04:31):
Kind of like the Ecclesiastes inthe Bible is a kind of a
nihilistic mantra that all ismeaningless, all is vanity.
But Nietzsche still wanted depthand he still wanted courage as
as values and things that hewould speak about.
Martin Heidegger is a guy whotalks about being toward death
(04:52):
and how the they, the crowd,flatten us.
I don't know much about himmyself, but he's he's a big he's
a big uh one of the top threekind of existentialists.
And then Jean-Paul Sartre orSartre, he was somebody I
learned about in philosophyclasses.
He he he made excess existenceprecedes essence was kind of
(05:17):
what he was saying.
And that kind of became theactual definition of of
existentialism.
Existence precedes essence.
So just the fact that we existis more important, what we need
to focus on than you know whatit all is.
So just just digging into whatis actually happening right
here, right now.
Who am I?
(05:37):
What am I doing in this in thisworld that I've been born into?
Humans are he he had a quote ofthat humans were condemned to be
free and he invented meaningwithout God.
So he was reacting to the youknow the decline of the church,
and he was trying to createmeaning without God.
So, you know, that's definitelypresent currently.
(06:00):
We, you know, people that arenot religious or or not
spiritual, they they have theyhave some sort of set of values
that they have either gottenfrom society or they've had to
develop their own, that theyfeel these are this is my
reality, you know, it's veryexistentialist.
So you're creating your meaningwithout God.
So it's very, very irrelevant.
Existentialism is all around usand in all of our our culture
(06:23):
and philosophy, religious andnon-religious.
That's what's pretty interestingabout it.
Camus was also the philosopherof the absurd, you know, just
the quote, life is absurd, waswas kind of, you know, when they
try to distill these guys downto a down to a phrase, that was
kind of the one about him.
Kierkegaard's twist was thatwhile all these guys wrestle
(06:46):
with freedom and dread andmeaning, Kierkegaard gets called
the father of existentialismbecause he was the first to say
that the real issue isn'tabstract truth, but it's
existing, the existingindividual standing before God.
And so, like the professor hadsaid on the episode about
Kierkegaard, a lot of a lot ofhis stuff had been bastardized.
(07:08):
Like people quote him, peoplelike him as an existentialist,
but a lot of what he says wastaken out of context and and
lost its its richness andnuance, you know, like existing
individual is is is the real thereal reality, but is what
somebody might take from that.
(07:29):
But Kierkegaard said the exexisting individual standing
before God.
So he would have it in thecontext of God and in his in his
philosophy.
So he was the father ofexistentialism and you know,
definitely the father ofChristian existentialism, and
everyone who knows anythingabout him would know that that
that's kind of his title.
The reason he's the father of itis because he shifts philosophy
(07:53):
from systems to the singleindividual who has to choose and
live.
So before that, you know, as youas you see in Kierkegaard's the
episode on Kierkegaard, or ifyou've read any Kierkegaard,
it's a lot about being anindividual, like actually
looking at the church or lookingat society as these huge systems
of of behavior and belief.
(08:14):
And he's saying, No, you gottaactually choose and live.
You gotta do, you gotta choosewhat you're doing.
You can't just do what everyoneelse is doing.
Like he just didn't believe thatwas true.
He thought it was actually justfake, like a hall of mirrors.
And in this culture now, we haveTV constantly.
We have mess, we have you know10,000 messages a day.
(08:37):
He and so we are constantlyemulating, imitating, envying,
all of these things arehappening at us at an enormously
fast rate compared to thosedays.
So if if if Kierkegaard wasseeing that back then, imagine
what he'd be saying about itnow, because we now have all of
that on steroids times 10.
(09:01):
He said that Christianity is nota set of ideas, but a lived and
risky commitment.
So that's a huge difference fromthe way a lot of a lot of
religious people have beenbrought up in in Christian
churches that you know this isthis is what you need to
believe.
And he's he was saying thatthat's not that's not all there
(09:21):
is to it.
It's actually more about alived, risky commitment of
faith.
And uh one of his quotes says,The thing is to understand
myself, to find a truth which istrue for me, to find the idea
for which I can live and die.
So what's true for you, what'strue for me, what's true for you
(09:42):
is true for you, what's true forme is true for me.
You know, kind of was coinedright there by Kierkegaard.
And when you unpack it, he's notsaying my private truth against
reality, but he's saying truthpersonally appropriated, like
trusted, obeyed, costly, likeactually believing something,
like truly believing it and notjust absorbing from the culture
(10:03):
around you.
So that's an interesting,interesting quote about him.
And then on subjectivity andfaith, in his concluding on
scientific postscripts writing,he has this quote subjectivity
is truth, and if subjectivity isin existing, then Christianity
is a perfect fit.
(10:24):
But here's the thing withKierkegaard is some of the
things he says are pretty toughto understand, and he's better
read with a teacher or incommunity with other people
where you can talk about it.
Because subjective his quotehere, subjectivity is truth, and
if subjectivity is in existing,then Christianity is a perfect
(10:45):
fit.
That's a tough one, and that'sin his book that has a crazy
title that ends in concludingunscientific postscript.
So for moral and religiousmatters, what matters is how we
stand in relation to the truth,our inwardness, faith, and
obedience.
That's kind of what he wasgetting at there.
(11:06):
But that quote particularly, hehas some of these quotes that
the professor and I talked abouton the podcast episode about
Kierkegaard that they sound likeDr.
Seuss almost.
Like Kierkegaard is a very hewrites these very obscure
things, and they have they havemeaning, but it's you have to
almost unravel what he's tryingto say in the in those quotes.
So then he also has the despairin the self and his the sickness
(11:29):
unto death.
We did discuss this quote too.
The self is a relation whichrelates itself to its own self.
So, in other words, it's like weare the tension of, you know,
all the things time, eternity,infinite, all the things that,
you know, make make up a humanwith a spiritual dimension, and
(11:52):
that relation in how we relateto ourselves and how we relate
to God and the the world aroundus.
It's like you can you can gothrough your whole life without
having a real relation toyourself.
And part of that is the idea ofbeing able to be comfortable in
your own skin or being able tosit under a tree and think and
(12:12):
meditate or pray for 20, 30minutes, that's very hard in our
culture now.
It's like the relationships wehave with ourselves are so
distracted almost that we don'teven have the ability to do that
anymore unless you cultivate it.
So cultivating stillness andcultivating a conversation
(12:32):
within yourself in in silence orin peace is very, very
important.
That's something I do get fromKierkegaard that I really I
really value.
And another quote from thesickness unto death is despair
is the sickness unto death whenthe self refuses to be itself
(12:53):
before the power thatestablished it.
I think this correlates to hishis other quote that you know,
existence is how you existbefore God or the individual
existing before God.
So despair is when the selfrefuses to be itself, it refuses
to exist before the power thatestablished it, which must mean
(13:16):
God, like the creator.
So despair comes from not beingyourself in relation to God.
And I had a professor once tellme that he was he was talking
about King David from the Bible,and that David did a lot of bad
things and he was not a greatperson.
But one thing that he got fromDavid was humility, and the way
(13:38):
he described humility was havinga right relationship or having a
right understanding of who youare before God.
And that sounds veryKierkegaardian here, where it's
like the massive context is isthe universe, and if the
universe has a creator, thenyour your actual defining self
(13:59):
is who you are before thatcreator.
And so his next concept, theleap of faith concept is you
know a coined phrase now wherepeople just say, Oh, I gotta
take a leap of faith and takethis new job, or whatever.
But Kierkegaard made did amajor, a major built a major
(14:19):
concept about the leap of faithin fear and trembling and
defined it as someone taking aradical, passionate step into
trust in God.
And that was actually his hiscontext of what he meant by the
leap of faith.
It wasn't it wasn't cognitivechecking out your brain to
believe something, it was givingGod a chance to prove himself
(14:44):
through radical faith, jumpingin to the water and allowing
allowing yourself to trust.
And that's really what he meant.
It wasn't it wasn't as muchabout cognitive or intellectual
debate of checking out yourbrain so that you can believe in
Jesus or something, but it washe said, faith is a marvel, yet
(15:07):
no human being is excluded fromit.
Faith is a passion.
And on that note, I think a lotof people think, you know, faith
is religious, but I think faithis involved in a lot of things.
So in in whatever you'retrusting in as an ultimate thing
in your life, that's faith,that's faith.
You you're trusting something tobe true or something to be real
(15:30):
or something to happen.
Politics can be a thing that weput our faith in, which is
obviously very disappointingmost of the time.
But the leap itself is notirrational nonsense, it's a
passionate trust in God whenobjective guarantees run out.
So that if you want to if youwant to dig in more on what he
means by leap of faith, fear andtrembling is the book.
(15:56):
So how did existentialism howhow did existentialism shape
modern culture?
You'll see it in these theseways.
You have we have a hyper focusnow on being authentic or being
your true self.
You know, we had we had mantraslike what's true for you is true
for you, and uh currently it'slike you do you.
Anxiety and therapy culture andthe language of angst and crisis
(16:20):
is normal now.
And these are all things thatKierkegaard faced that you know
his his herd culture didn'treally want to acknowledge
anxiety and and crisis andthings like that.
It was just, you know, in theold days, people put on a smile
and pretend like everything'sfine.
It was like a culture ofsuppression.
And he, even as a Christian, wasgoing against that and saying,
(16:42):
No, we have problems, we haveanxiety, we have we have angst,
we have life and death crisiscrises in our in our heads.
And so, um, and then in art andfilm, characters who have a
meaningless world sometimes mustcreate their own meaning.
So you might see that in a lotof films and stories and in
books too.
(17:03):
Some of the things as aChristian, you know, what do I
want to hold on to or what do Iwhat do I what do I resonate
with?
Definitely the honesty aboutanxiety and despair.
I love that because you know, II really hate fake.
Like I don't like fakeness.
So it can make you a more heavyperson or a more real person.
(17:24):
I have this problem.
Like I'm I'm ready to cut to thedepths with anybody anytime.
For example, last night aroundthe fire at um a hang with like
10 guys, I could have I couldhave just bounced around in the
small talk that was happening,but I end up talking to one of
the guys about his estrangementwith his you know ex and
(17:44):
daughter and broken familysituation.
And and we talked about that forlike half an hour.
So yeah, it's heavy, but it'snot fake.
So that's kind of, you know, andI know a lot of our culture,
especially men, they just don'twant to go there.
They just want to keep it likeabout football or about politics
or about whatever they can just,you know, kind of rant about.
And that's just part of, youknow, being a being a man in our
(18:06):
culture is how it's defined.
It takes a lot of security anddepth, and even maybe just
certain personalities just don'tlike to go talk about anxiety
and despair.
But it's necessary too, becauseyou know, meanwhile, you have
you have people taking theirlives.
So I've had two two friends whowere Christians in the last year
(18:26):
take their lives with wife andchildren.
So, you know, being honest aboutanxiety and despair is very
important and very necessary tobeing a man or being a person in
this in our it at all, being ahuman.
Number two, that things that Ithink are gifts from him or from
existentialism is critique ofthe herd and the public.
(18:46):
So Kierkegaard's the public, hecalled it quote unquote the
public, or Nietzsche's herd.
Heidegger's the they, so theyhad words for this, expose mass
cultural conformity.
So, you know, that it's veryanti-the-individual.
So you have you have so manypeople that just feel out of
place or they don't feel likethey fit in in in general mass
(19:10):
mass cultural conformity in thenorms of culture.
So this is a this is a greatcritique, and it's obviously
something Jesus and John theBaptist they didn't fit in
either, and they were they werecritiquing the herd too.
Like Jesus said the road iswide, you know, that goes away
from me, basically, and the roadis narrow that follows me.
(19:32):
And so the there's a bigcritique on the they and the the
herd, and you know, you kind ofhave to accept this gift and be
like, who am I without the herd?
Who am I without the massculture?
Am I am I conforming everythingto the people I see on TV or the
people I want to be, I want tohave status with at my school or
(19:56):
at my at my work or in my in myneighborhood or in my social
construct.
And then insistence on personaldecisions.
So you just don't drift intofaith.
You have to make decisions andchoose something.
And so this is something that,you know, I think, I think
people are generally drifting alot, you know, until those
(20:17):
moments where something, somekind of crisis happens, they
have to make a decision.
So Kierkegaard's saying, like,you don't actually have to wait
for a crisis.
You can actually make choices,make you can choose, you know,
your personal decisions of howyou're gonna believe, how you're
gonna live, how you're gonnalive in this world.
A couple of things that I thinkare kind of negative from
(20:37):
existentialism.
Mostly when God is removed fromthe equation, you get you get
radical autonomy, which is likehyper-individualism with no
context of God or cultcommunity.
Because when you add God, itassumes community, assumes
responsibility to others.
But when you take God out of theequation, there's no no one
telling you that you need tocare about others.
(20:58):
It's just radical autonomy.
So that's where you would getlike hyper-individualism and
inventing your own meaningcompletely.
Like whatever you, you know, youmight see this in the far right
or the far left, where they justlatch on to what gives them
meaning because that's all theygot, you know, just whatever is
serving the thing that I'veattached myself to, that becomes
(21:20):
the meaning.
And then despair withoutultimate hope.
So Sartre and Camus expressedthat, and they had they had no
answer.
It was just that's that's whatit is.
That's life.
You don't have there is no hope,and there is just despair.
So life is meaningless andhopeless, and there's no point.
So just do what you want.
Do you know, make make somethingout of it if you want, or don't.
(21:44):
That's kind of what some ofthese philosophers leave you
with.
So my my takeaways fromexistentialism in general are
like my personal responsibilitybefore God, like taking my
actual relationship with Godseriously and not pretending
it's something if it's not.
Like, do I have an actualrelationship with God?
(22:06):
Or do I just say I do?
Or do I just believe I do?
Do I actually communicate and doI actually spend time in
stillness or or silence and everlit-do I ever listen?
Do I ever calm down and bestill?
Also taking seriously the depthof despair and sin, just those
realities that tear us away fromall the good.
(22:28):
And then the need for a lived,costly discipleship, not just
views, like having an actualrelational discipleship, like
knowing God, knowing others,sharing with them in the
journey, walking on the roadtogether, and not just having,
you know, ideas or beliefs orhaving some kind of social media
(22:49):
presence that says God first,but like do I actually live it
out in any kind of a a way thatcosts me anything?
And then it's reallyexistentialism comes down to
like, you know, the God factoror the non-god factor.
So like you if you have the Godequation like Kierkegaard did,
(23:09):
there's meaning in the in theuniverse, there's there's
purpose, and there's someone whodefined all of that.
When you remove that spiritualequation of any kind of
authority or creator, you dohave the need to create meaning
from nothing, because there isno there's no actual defined
meaning in a in a materialisticworld.
(23:31):
You can observe what you thinkhas meaning and you can create
that as a construct, but it'snot like it would have any
inherent meaning by by itself,like spoken by any kind of
intelligent being.
Now, the I do see I do see howsomebody with no no no belief in
God or creator could see thatthe world has goodness, they
(23:53):
could see all this evidence ofgoodness and hierarchy and order
and things like that, and theycould derive meaning from that.
And that's probably where a lotof people have landed.
But yeah, so the my conclusionon just the existentialism is to
like a way for you to interactwith it would be to just see if
(24:15):
you can spend 20 or 30 minutesin a in a silent place sitting
in a park under a tree withoutyour phone, leave your phone in
the car and actually have aconversation or be still, you
know, in inside yourself andjust have a a concept of like
understanding your own your ownin inner life.
And that's something insubversive orthodoxy, you see a
(24:37):
common thread of like thesepeople are fighting for the
inner life.
They don't believe it's all justexternal, they believe we have a
world within ourselves that wehave to cultivate and take care
of.
And that goes for faith, youknow, with faith or without
faith.
It's you we all have an innerlife that we need to cultivate.
And in order to have peace, inorder to have hope, there's
(25:01):
things we have to come to termswith in our lives constantly.
And so I just encourage everyoneto spend some time, you know,
existing, surely existingwithout distractions, and think
about what is what is true andreal and good and beautiful
inside yourself.
And also acknowledge, is there aplace in me of quiet despair?
(25:24):
And you could bring thathonestly before a creator, or
you could bring it to yourselfif you if you don't believe, and
you could just work work on itquietly within yourself and
think of ways you can come toterms with that, or what you
need to do to deal with it.
But, anyways, I hope this washelpful meditation on on going a
(25:45):
little bit more deeper andbroader on existentialism and
also how I related to it.
Hope please check out thesubversive orthodoxy Instagram.
You can find my other creativework on being
travismullen.substack.com.
And you can always email us.
Ideas for uh field notes wouldbe great coming from you guys if
(26:05):
you could email us at uhsubversiveorthodoxy at
gmail.com.
This is Field Notes for the Subversive Orthodoxy
Podcast.
Welcome back to the podcast andwelcome to our very first Field
(00:26):
Notes.
These are meditations,reflections, or reviews of
things that were things I don'twant to lose or things I don't
want to forget that we haddiscussed on the podcast or
going deeper on certain aspects.
So his first one is what isexistentialism?
And you know, what didKierkegaard do to us basically?
So I want to review like what itis because some people may not
(00:49):
have had any context for thatwhen we when we did the
Kierkegaard episode.
There is a lot of interest thesedays in Kierkegaard and and
Dostoevsky specifically.
So the word the wordexistentialism is became like a
philosophical term.
It was a a philosophy basically.
So Kierkegaard was consideredone of the godfathers of it or
(01:13):
fathers of it.
So you've heard the wordexistential crisis that's
usually said like a joke, butthere's actually a whole
philosophy behind that phrase.
And today, with this field note,I just want to dig into what is
existentialism, why isKierkegaard called the father of
it, and what, if anything, isworth saving from it.
(01:35):
So it relates to things likefreedom, anxiety, meaning,
authenticity, and despair.
So the negative sides are likethe anxiety and the despair, but
it really speaks to freedom,meaning, and authenticity.
And it's it's all over in ourmovies, it's all over in our
therapy culture, it's you know,things you would see on Spotify
(01:59):
playlists.
There's there's there's rappersquoting existentialists as song
titles and choruses just rippingstraight off of Nietzsche and
straight off of Kierkegaard.
The church itself has hasreceived a lot from Kierkegaard
and from existentialism.
And, you know, whether that'sgood or bad or somewhere in
(02:22):
between is kind of something Iwanted to explore on this as a
as kind of a meditation.
So, you know, it's kind ofalways asking the question Am I
really living my life?
Is this is this real?
Is this true?
Am I living my life before God?
Am I am I in relation or is thisjust imaginary in my head, or am
(02:43):
I just playing a role?
So it kind of deals with stufflike that.
Like, is is reality reality,basically?
So existentialism is a family ofthinkers, they would, they would
say, who say the centralquestion isn't what is the
universe made of?
So it's not about all theexternals, but it's more about
how do I live authentically as ahuman being in a world, in this
(03:07):
world, that can feel absurd orindifferent or even meaningless.
When it comes to the thenon-Christian existentialists,
they're gonna basically benihilists or there's no meaning.
If life is absurd, I believeCamus was a proponent of that.
And and it just doesn't matter.
(03:27):
So just make with it what youwant.
And you would see that that'spretty much a big proponent.
I mean, that's a big pillar inour culture currently, is if
people don't believe anything,they still believe there's
meaning that they basically haveto create.
So maybe that's you know part ofpart of why there's so many
problems, too, because peopleare trying to construct their
(03:49):
own meaning and it's verytiresome or very disappointing.
So key figures would beNietzsche, Frederick Nietzsche.
He unmasked herd more herdmorality.
So, like people thinking, youknow, what is right and wrong
based on what everyone elsethinks.
And he called for the overman orthe superman basically.
(04:09):
He also had the God is deadstory where where basically
we've graduated from religion,but he still, as an
existentialist, he still spoketowards depth and courage.
So like he had he had things hewill, you know, people accuse
him of being a nihilist, butwhich means nothing has meaning,
everything is meaningless.
(04:31):
Kind of like the Ecclesiastes inthe Bible is a kind of a
nihilistic mantra that all ismeaningless, all is vanity.
But Nietzsche still wanted depthand he still wanted courage as
as values and things that hewould speak about.
Martin Heidegger is a guy whotalks about being toward death
(04:52):
and how the they, the crowd,flatten us.
I don't know much about himmyself, but he's he's a big he's
a big uh one of the top threekind of existentialists.
And then Jean-Paul Sartre orSartre, he was somebody I
learned about in philosophyclasses.
He he he made excess existenceprecedes essence was kind of
(05:17):
what he was saying.
And that kind of became theactual definition of of
existentialism.
Existence precedes essence.
So just the fact that we existis more important, what we need
to focus on than you know whatit all is.
So just just digging into whatis actually happening right
here, right now.
Who am I?
(05:37):
What am I doing in this in thisworld that I've been born into?
Humans are he he had a quote ofthat humans were condemned to be
free and he invented meaningwithout God.
So he was reacting to the youknow the decline of the church,
and he was trying to createmeaning without God.
So, you know, that's definitelypresent currently.
(06:00):
We, you know, people that arenot religious or or not
spiritual, they they have theyhave some sort of set of values
that they have either gottenfrom society or they've had to
develop their own, that theyfeel these are this is my
reality, you know, it's veryexistentialist.
So you're creating your meaningwithout God.
So it's very, very irrelevant.
Existentialism is all around usand in all of our our culture
(06:23):
and philosophy, religious andnon-religious.
That's what's pretty interestingabout it.
Camus was also the philosopherof the absurd, you know, just
the quote, life is absurd, waswas kind of, you know, when they
try to distill these guys downto a down to a phrase, that was
kind of the one about him.
Kierkegaard's twist was thatwhile all these guys wrestle
(06:46):
with freedom and dread andmeaning, Kierkegaard gets called
the father of existentialismbecause he was the first to say
that the real issue isn'tabstract truth, but it's
existing, the existingindividual standing before God.
And so, like the professor hadsaid on the episode about
Kierkegaard, a lot of a lot ofhis stuff had been bastardized.
(07:08):
Like people quote him, peoplelike him as an existentialist,
but a lot of what he says wastaken out of context and and
lost its its richness andnuance, you know, like existing
individual is is is the real thereal reality, but is what
somebody might take from that.
(07:29):
But Kierkegaard said the exexisting individual standing
before God.
So he would have it in thecontext of God and in his in his
philosophy.
So he was the father ofexistentialism and you know,
definitely the father ofChristian existentialism, and
everyone who knows anythingabout him would know that that
that's kind of his title.
The reason he's the father of itis because he shifts philosophy
(07:53):
from systems to the singleindividual who has to choose and
live.
So before that, you know, as youas you see in Kierkegaard's the
episode on Kierkegaard, or ifyou've read any Kierkegaard,
it's a lot about being anindividual, like actually
looking at the church or lookingat society as these huge systems
of of behavior and belief.
(08:14):
And he's saying, No, you gottaactually choose and live.
You gotta do, you gotta choosewhat you're doing.
You can't just do what everyoneelse is doing.
Like he just didn't believe thatwas true.
He thought it was actually justfake, like a hall of mirrors.
And in this culture now, we haveTV constantly.
We have mess, we have you know10,000 messages a day.
(08:37):
He and so we are constantlyemulating, imitating, envying,
all of these things arehappening at us at an enormously
fast rate compared to thosedays.
So if if if Kierkegaard wasseeing that back then, imagine
what he'd be saying about itnow, because we now have all of
that on steroids times 10.
(09:01):
He said that Christianity is nota set of ideas, but a lived and
risky commitment.
So that's a huge difference fromthe way a lot of a lot of
religious people have beenbrought up in in Christian
churches that you know this isthis is what you need to
believe.
And he's he was saying thatthat's not that's not all there
(09:21):
is to it.
It's actually more about alived, risky commitment of
faith.
And uh one of his quotes says,The thing is to understand
myself, to find a truth which istrue for me, to find the idea
for which I can live and die.
So what's true for you, what'strue for me, what's true for you
(09:42):
is true for you, what's true forme is true for me.
You know, kind of was coinedright there by Kierkegaard.
And when you unpack it, he's notsaying my private truth against
reality, but he's saying truthpersonally appropriated, like
trusted, obeyed, costly, likeactually believing something,
like truly believing it and notjust absorbing from the culture
(10:03):
around you.
So that's an interesting,interesting quote about him.
And then on subjectivity andfaith, in his concluding on
scientific postscripts writing,he has this quote subjectivity
is truth, and if subjectivity isin existing, then Christianity
is a perfect fit.
(10:24):
But here's the thing withKierkegaard is some of the
things he says are pretty toughto understand, and he's better
read with a teacher or incommunity with other people
where you can talk about it.
Because subjective his quotehere, subjectivity is truth, and
if subjectivity is in existing,then Christianity is a perfect
(10:45):
fit.
That's a tough one, and that'sin his book that has a crazy
title that ends in concludingunscientific postscript.
So for moral and religiousmatters, what matters is how we
stand in relation to the truth,our inwardness, faith, and
obedience.
That's kind of what he wasgetting at there.
(11:06):
But that quote particularly, hehas some of these quotes that
the professor and I talked abouton the podcast episode about
Kierkegaard that they sound likeDr.
Seuss almost.
Like Kierkegaard is a very hewrites these very obscure
things, and they have they havemeaning, but it's you have to
almost unravel what he's tryingto say in the in those quotes.
So then he also has the despairin the self and his the sickness
(11:29):
unto death.
We did discuss this quote too.
The self is a relation whichrelates itself to its own self.
So, in other words, it's like weare the tension of, you know,
all the things time, eternity,infinite, all the things that,
you know, make make up a humanwith a spiritual dimension, and
(11:52):
that relation in how we relateto ourselves and how we relate
to God and the the world aroundus.
It's like you can you can gothrough your whole life without
having a real relation toyourself.
And part of that is the idea ofbeing able to be comfortable in
your own skin or being able tosit under a tree and think and
(12:12):
meditate or pray for 20, 30minutes, that's very hard in our
culture now.
It's like the relationships wehave with ourselves are so
distracted almost that we don'teven have the ability to do that
anymore unless you cultivate it.
So cultivating stillness andcultivating a conversation
(12:32):
within yourself in in silence orin peace is very, very
important.
That's something I do get fromKierkegaard that I really I
really value.
And another quote from thesickness unto death is despair
is the sickness unto death whenthe self refuses to be itself
(12:53):
before the power thatestablished it.
I think this correlates to hishis other quote that you know,
existence is how you existbefore God or the individual
existing before God.
So despair is when the selfrefuses to be itself, it refuses
to exist before the power thatestablished it, which must mean
(13:16):
God, like the creator.
So despair comes from not beingyourself in relation to God.
And I had a professor once tellme that he was he was talking
about King David from the Bible,and that David did a lot of bad
things and he was not a greatperson.
But one thing that he got fromDavid was humility, and the way
(13:38):
he described humility was havinga right relationship or having a
right understanding of who youare before God.
And that sounds veryKierkegaardian here, where it's
like the massive context is isthe universe, and if the
universe has a creator, thenyour your actual defining self
(13:59):
is who you are before thatcreator.
And so his next concept, theleap of faith concept is you
know a coined phrase now wherepeople just say, Oh, I gotta
take a leap of faith and takethis new job, or whatever.
But Kierkegaard made did amajor, a major built a major
(14:19):
concept about the leap of faithin fear and trembling and
defined it as someone taking aradical, passionate step into
trust in God.
And that was actually his hiscontext of what he meant by the
leap of faith.
It wasn't it wasn't cognitivechecking out your brain to
believe something, it was givingGod a chance to prove himself
(14:44):
through radical faith, jumpingin to the water and allowing
allowing yourself to trust.
And that's really what he meant.
It wasn't it wasn't as muchabout cognitive or intellectual
debate of checking out yourbrain so that you can believe in
Jesus or something, but it washe said, faith is a marvel, yet
(15:07):
no human being is excluded fromit.
Faith is a passion.
And on that note, I think a lotof people think, you know, faith
is religious, but I think faithis involved in a lot of things.
So in in whatever you'retrusting in as an ultimate thing
in your life, that's faith,that's faith.
You you're trusting something tobe true or something to be real
(15:30):
or something to happen.
Politics can be a thing that weput our faith in, which is
obviously very disappointingmost of the time.
But the leap itself is notirrational nonsense, it's a
passionate trust in God whenobjective guarantees run out.
So that if you want to if youwant to dig in more on what he
means by leap of faith, fear andtrembling is the book.
(15:56):
So how did existentialism howhow did existentialism shape
modern culture?
You'll see it in these theseways.
You have we have a hyper focusnow on being authentic or being
your true self.
You know, we had we had mantraslike what's true for you is true
for you, and uh currently it'slike you do you.
Anxiety and therapy culture andthe language of angst and crisis
(16:20):
is normal now.
And these are all things thatKierkegaard faced that you know
his his herd culture didn'treally want to acknowledge
anxiety and and crisis andthings like that.
It was just, you know, in theold days, people put on a smile
and pretend like everything'sfine.
It was like a culture ofsuppression.
And he, even as a Christian, wasgoing against that and saying,
(16:42):
No, we have problems, we haveanxiety, we have we have angst,
we have life and death crisiscrises in our in our heads.
And so, um, and then in art andfilm, characters who have a
meaningless world sometimes mustcreate their own meaning.
So you might see that in a lotof films and stories and in
books too.
(17:03):
Some of the things as aChristian, you know, what do I
want to hold on to or what do Iwhat do I what do I resonate
with?
Definitely the honesty aboutanxiety and despair.
I love that because you know, II really hate fake.
Like I don't like fakeness.
So it can make you a more heavyperson or a more real person.
(17:24):
I have this problem.
Like I'm I'm ready to cut to thedepths with anybody anytime.
For example, last night aroundthe fire at um a hang with like
10 guys, I could have I couldhave just bounced around in the
small talk that was happening,but I end up talking to one of
the guys about his estrangementwith his you know ex and
(17:44):
daughter and broken familysituation.
And and we talked about that forlike half an hour.
So yeah, it's heavy, but it'snot fake.
So that's kind of, you know, andI know a lot of our culture,
especially men, they just don'twant to go there.
They just want to keep it likeabout football or about politics
or about whatever they can just,you know, kind of rant about.
And that's just part of, youknow, being a being a man in our
(18:06):
culture is how it's defined.
It takes a lot of security anddepth, and even maybe just
certain personalities just don'tlike to go talk about anxiety
and despair.
But it's necessary too, becauseyou know, meanwhile, you have
you have people taking theirlives.
So I've had two two friends whowere Christians in the last year
(18:26):
take their lives with wife andchildren.
So, you know, being honest aboutanxiety and despair is very
important and very necessary tobeing a man or being a person in
this in our it at all, being ahuman.
Number two, that things that Ithink are gifts from him or from
existentialism is critique ofthe herd and the public.
(18:46):
So Kierkegaard's the public, hecalled it quote unquote the
public, or Nietzsche's herd.
Heidegger's the they, so theyhad words for this, expose mass
cultural conformity.
So, you know, that it's veryanti-the-individual.
So you have you have so manypeople that just feel out of
place or they don't feel likethey fit in in in general mass
(19:10):
mass cultural conformity in thenorms of culture.
So this is a this is a greatcritique, and it's obviously
something Jesus and John theBaptist they didn't fit in
either, and they were they werecritiquing the herd too.
Like Jesus said the road iswide, you know, that goes away
from me, basically, and the roadis narrow that follows me.
(19:32):
And so the there's a bigcritique on the they and the the
herd, and you know, you kind ofhave to accept this gift and be
like, who am I without the herd?
Who am I without the massculture?
Am I am I conforming everythingto the people I see on TV or the
people I want to be, I want tohave status with at my school or
(19:56):
at my at my work or in my in myneighborhood or in my social
construct.
And then insistence on personaldecisions.
So you just don't drift intofaith.
You have to make decisions andchoose something.
And so this is something that,you know, I think, I think
people are generally drifting alot, you know, until those
(20:17):
moments where something, somekind of crisis happens, they
have to make a decision.
So Kierkegaard's saying, like,you don't actually have to wait
for a crisis.
You can actually make choices,make you can choose, you know,
your personal decisions of howyou're gonna believe, how you're
gonna live, how you're gonnalive in this world.
A couple of things that I thinkare kind of negative from
(20:37):
existentialism.
Mostly when God is removed fromthe equation, you get you get
radical autonomy, which is likehyper-individualism with no
context of God or cultcommunity.
Because when you add God, itassumes community, assumes
responsibility to others.
But when you take God out of theequation, there's no no one
telling you that you need tocare about others.
(20:58):
It's just radical autonomy.
So that's where you would getlike hyper-individualism and
inventing your own meaningcompletely.
Like whatever you, you know, youmight see this in the far right
or the far left, where they justlatch on to what gives them
meaning because that's all theygot, you know, just whatever is
serving the thing that I'veattached myself to, that becomes
(21:20):
the meaning.
And then despair withoutultimate hope.
So Sartre and Camus expressedthat, and they had they had no
answer.
It was just that's that's whatit is.
That's life.
You don't have there is no hope,and there is just despair.
So life is meaningless andhopeless, and there's no point.
So just do what you want.
Do you know, make make somethingout of it if you want, or don't.
(21:44):
That's kind of what some ofthese philosophers leave you
with.
So my my takeaways fromexistentialism in general are
like my personal responsibilitybefore God, like taking my
actual relationship with Godseriously and not pretending
it's something if it's not.
Like, do I have an actualrelationship with God?
(22:06):
Or do I just say I do?
Or do I just believe I do?
Do I actually communicate and doI actually spend time in
stillness or or silence and everlit-do I ever listen?
Do I ever calm down and bestill?
Also taking seriously the depthof despair and sin, just those
realities that tear us away fromall the good.
(22:28):
And then the need for a lived,costly discipleship, not just
views, like having an actualrelational discipleship, like
knowing God, knowing others,sharing with them in the
journey, walking on the roadtogether, and not just having,
you know, ideas or beliefs orhaving some kind of social media
(22:49):
presence that says God first,but like do I actually live it
out in any kind of a a way thatcosts me anything?
And then it's reallyexistentialism comes down to
like, you know, the God factoror the non-god factor.
So like you if you have the Godequation like Kierkegaard did,
(23:09):
there's meaning in the in theuniverse, there's there's
purpose, and there's someone whodefined all of that.
When you remove that spiritualequation of any kind of
authority or creator, you dohave the need to create meaning
from nothing, because there isno there's no actual defined
meaning in a in a materialisticworld.
(23:31):
You can observe what you thinkhas meaning and you can create
that as a construct, but it'snot like it would have any
inherent meaning by by itself,like spoken by any kind of
intelligent being.
Now, the I do see I do see howsomebody with no no no belief in
God or creator could see thatthe world has goodness, they
(23:53):
could see all this evidence ofgoodness and hierarchy and order
and things like that, and theycould derive meaning from that.
And that's probably where a lotof people have landed.
But yeah, so the my conclusionon just the existentialism is to
like a way for you to interactwith it would be to just see if
(24:15):
you can spend 20 or 30 minutesin a in a silent place sitting
in a park under a tree withoutyour phone, leave your phone in
the car and actually have aconversation or be still, you
know, in inside yourself andjust have a a concept of like
understanding your own your ownin inner life.
And that's something insubversive orthodoxy, you see a
(24:37):
common thread of like thesepeople are fighting for the
inner life.
They don't believe it's all justexternal, they believe we have a
world within ourselves that wehave to cultivate and take care
of.
And that goes for faith, youknow, with faith or without
faith.
It's you we all have an innerlife that we need to cultivate.
And in order to have peace, inorder to have hope, there's
(25:01):
things we have to come to termswith in our lives constantly.
And so I just encourage everyoneto spend some time, you know,
existing, surely existingwithout distractions, and think
about what is what is true andreal and good and beautiful
inside yourself.
And also acknowledge, is there aplace in me of quiet despair?
(25:24):
And you could bring thathonestly before a creator, or
you could bring it to yourselfif you if you don't believe, and
you could just work work on itquietly within yourself and
think of ways you can come toterms with that, or what you
need to do to deal with it.
But, anyways, I hope this washelpful meditation on on going a
(25:45):
little bit more deeper andbroader on existentialism and
also how I related to it.
Hope please check out thesubversive orthodoxy Instagram.
You can find my other creativework on being
travismullen.substack.com.
And you can always email us.
Ideas for uh field notes wouldbe great coming from you guys if
(26:05):
you could email us at uhsubversiveorthodoxy at
gmail.com.
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