Field Notes #1: Reflections On Existentialism

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

Chapters

• 0:00 What Is Existentialism
• 2:43 Why Kierkegaard Is The Father
• 5:10 The Secular Lineup: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus
• 9:20 Existence Precedes Essence Explained
• 12:30 Standing Before God: Kierkegaard’s Core Move
• 17:30 Subjectivity, Truth, And Faith
• 21:40 Despair And The Self: Sickness Unto Death
• 26:00 The Leap Of Faith Reclaimed

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:06

This is Field Notes for the Subversive Orthodoxy Podcast. Welcome back to the podcast and welcome to our very first Field Notes. These are meditations, reflections, or reviews of things that were things I don't want to lose or things I don't want to forget that we had discussed on the podcast or going deeper on certain aspects. So his first one is what is existentialism? And you know, what did Kierkegaard do to us basically? So I want to review like what it is because some people may not have had any context for that when we when we did the Kierkegaard episode. There is a lot of interest these days in Kierkegaard and and Dostoevsky specifically. So the word the word existentialism is became like a philosophical term. It was a a philosophy basically. So Kierkegaard was considered one of the godfathers of it or fathers of it. So you've heard the word existential crisis that's usually said like a joke, but there's actually a whole philosophy behind that phrase. And today, with this field note, I just want to dig into what is existentialism, why is Kierkegaard called the father of it, and what, if anything, is worth saving from it. So it relates to things like freedom, anxiety, meaning, authenticity, and despair. So the negative sides are like the anxiety and the despair, but it really speaks to freedom, meaning, and authenticity. And it's it's all over in our movies, it's all over in our therapy culture, it's you know, things you would see on Spotify playlists. There's there's there's rappers quoting existentialists as song titles and choruses just ripping straight off of Nietzsche and straight off of Kierkegaard. The church itself has has received a lot from Kierkegaard and from existentialism. And, you know, whether that's good or bad or somewhere in between is kind of something I wanted to explore on this as a as kind of a meditation. So, you know, it's kind of always 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 this just imaginary in my head, or am I just playing a role? So it kind of deals with stuff like that. Like, is is reality reality, basically? So existentialism is a family of thinkers, they would, they would say, who say the central question isn't what is the universe made of? So it's not about all the externals, but it's more about how do I live authentically as a human being in a world, in this world, that can feel absurd or indifferent or even meaningless. When it comes to the the non-Christian existentialists, they're gonna basically be nihilists or there's no meaning. If life is absurd, I believe Camus was a proponent of that. And and it just doesn't matter. So just make with it what you want. And you would see that that's pretty much a big proponent. I mean, that's a big pillar in our culture currently, is if people don't believe anything, they still believe there's meaning that they basically have to create. So maybe that's you know part of part of why there's so many problems, too, because people are trying to construct their own meaning and it's very tiresome or very disappointing. So key figures would be Nietzsche, Frederick Nietzsche. He unmasked herd more herd morality. So, like people thinking, you know, what is right and wrong based on what everyone else thinks. And he called for the overman or the superman basically. He also had the God is dead story where where basically we've graduated from religion, but he still, as an existentialist, he still spoke towards depth and courage. So like he had he had things he will, you know, people accuse him of being a nihilist, but which means nothing has meaning, everything is meaningless. Kind of like the Ecclesiastes in the Bible is a kind of a nihilistic mantra that all is meaningless, all is vanity. But Nietzsche still wanted depth and he still wanted courage as as values and things that he would speak about. Martin Heidegger is a guy who talks about being toward death and how the they, the crowd, flatten us. I don't know much about him myself, but he's he's a big he's a big uh one of the top three kind of existentialists. And then Jean-Paul Sartre or Sartre, he was somebody I learned about in philosophy classes. He he he made excess existence precedes essence was kind of what he was saying. And that kind of became the actual definition of of existentialism. Existence precedes essence. So just the fact that we exist is more important, what we need to focus on than you know what it all is. So just just digging into what is actually happening right here, right now. Who am I? What am I doing in this in this world that I've been born into? Humans are he he had a quote of that humans were condemned to be free and he invented meaning without God. So he was reacting to the you know the decline of the church, and he was trying to create meaning without God. So, you know, that's definitely present currently. We, you know, people that are not religious or or not spiritual, they they have they have some sort of set of values that they have either gotten from society or they've had to develop their own, that they feel these are this is my reality, you know, it's very existentialist. So you're creating your meaning without God. So it's very, very irrelevant. Existentialism is all around us and in all of our our culture and philosophy, religious and non-religious. That's what's pretty interesting about it. Camus was also the philosopher of the absurd, you know, just the quote, life is absurd, was was kind of, you know, when they try to distill these guys down to a down to a phrase, that was kind of the one about him. Kierkegaard's twist was that while all these guys wrestle with freedom and dread and meaning, Kierkegaard gets called the father of existentialism because he was the first to say that the real issue isn't abstract truth, but it's existing, the existing individual standing before God. And so, like the professor had said on the episode about Kierkegaard, a lot of a lot of his stuff had been bastardized. Like people quote him, people like him as an existentialist, but a lot of what he says was taken out of context and and lost its its richness and nuance, you know, like existing individual is is is the real the real reality, but is what somebody might take from that. But Kierkegaard said the ex existing individual standing before God. So he would have it in the context of God and in his in his philosophy. So he was the father of existentialism and you know, definitely the father of Christian existentialism, and everyone who knows anything about him would know that that that's kind of his title. The reason he's the father of it is because he shifts philosophy from systems to the single individual who has to choose and live. So before that, you know, as you as you see in Kierkegaard's the episode on Kierkegaard, or if you've read any Kierkegaard, it's a lot about being an individual, like actually looking at the church or looking at society as these huge systems of of behavior and belief. And he's saying, No, you gotta actually choose and live. You gotta do, you gotta choose what you're doing. You can't just do what everyone else is doing. Like he just didn't believe that was true. He thought it was actually just fake, like a hall of mirrors. And in this culture now, we have TV constantly. We have mess, we have you know 10,000 messages a day. He and so we are constantly emulating, imitating, envying, all of these things are happening at us at an enormously fast rate compared to those days. So if if if Kierkegaard was seeing that back then, imagine what he'd be saying about it now, because we now have all of that on steroids times 10. He said that Christianity is not a set of ideas, but a lived and risky commitment. So that's a huge difference from the way a lot of a lot of religious people have been brought up in in Christian churches that you know this is this is what you need to believe. And he's he was saying that that's not that's not all there is to it. It's actually more about a lived, risky commitment of faith. And uh one of his quotes says, The thing is to understand myself, to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. So what's true for you, what's true for me, what's true for you is true for you, what's true for me is true for me. You know, kind of was coined right there by Kierkegaard. And when you unpack it, he's not saying my private truth against reality, but he's saying truth personally appropriated, like trusted, obeyed, costly, like actually believing something, like truly believing it and not just absorbing from the culture around you. So that's an interesting, interesting quote about him. And then on subjectivity and faith, in his concluding on scientific postscripts writing, he has this quote subjectivity is truth, and if subjectivity is in existing, then Christianity is a perfect fit. But here's the thing with Kierkegaard is some of the things he says are pretty tough to understand, and he's better read with a teacher or in community with other people where you can talk about it. Because subjective his quote here, subjectivity is truth, and if subjectivity is in existing, then Christianity is a perfect fit. That's a tough one, and that's in his book that has a crazy title that ends in concluding unscientific postscript. So for moral and religious matters, what matters is how we stand in relation to the truth, our inwardness, faith, and obedience. That's kind of what he was getting at there. But that quote particularly, he has some of these quotes that the professor and I talked about on the podcast episode about Kierkegaard that they sound like Dr. Seuss almost. Like Kierkegaard is a very he writes these very obscure things, and they have they have meaning, but it's you have to almost unravel what he's trying to say in the in those quotes. So then he also has the despair in the self and his the sickness unto death. We did discuss this quote too. The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self. So, in other words, it's like we are the tension of, you know, all the things time, eternity, infinite, all the things that, you know, make make up a human with a spiritual dimension, and that relation in how we relate to ourselves and how we relate to God and the the world around us. It's like you can you can go through your whole life without having a real relation to yourself. And part of that is the idea of being able to be comfortable in your own skin or being able to sit under a tree and think and meditate or pray for 20, 30 minutes, that's very hard in our culture now. It's like the relationships we have with ourselves are so distracted almost that we don't even have the ability to do that anymore unless you cultivate it. So cultivating stillness and cultivating a conversation within yourself in in silence or in peace is very, very important. That's something I do get from Kierkegaard that I really I really value. And another quote from the sickness unto death is despair is the sickness unto death when the self refuses to be itself before the power that established it. I think this correlates to his his other quote that you know, existence is how you exist before God or the individual existing before God. So despair is when the self refuses to be itself, it refuses to exist before the power that established it, which must mean God, like the creator. So despair comes from not being yourself in relation to God. And I had a professor once tell me 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 great person. But one thing that he got from David was humility, and the way he described humility was having a right relationship or having a right understanding of who you are before God. And that sounds very Kierkegaardian here, where it's like the massive context is is the universe, and if the universe has a creator, then your your actual defining self is who you are before that creator. And so his next concept, the leap of faith concept is you know a coined phrase now where people just say, Oh, I gotta take a leap of faith and take this new job, or whatever. But Kierkegaard made did a major, a major built a major concept about the leap of faith in fear and trembling and defined it as someone taking a radical, passionate step into trust in God. And that was actually his his context of what he meant by the leap of faith. It wasn't it wasn't cognitive checking out your brain to believe something, it was giving God a chance to prove himself through radical faith, jumping in to the water and allowing allowing yourself to trust. And that's really what he meant. It wasn't it wasn't as much about cognitive or intellectual debate of checking out your brain so that you can believe in Jesus or something, but it was he said, faith is a marvel, yet no human being is excluded from it. Faith is a passion. And on that note, I think a lot of people think, you know, faith is religious, but I think faith is involved in a lot of things. So in in whatever you're trusting in as an ultimate thing in your life, that's faith, that's faith. You you're trusting something to be true or something to be real or something to happen. Politics can be a thing that we put our faith in, which is obviously very disappointing most of the time. But the leap itself is not irrational nonsense, it's a passionate trust in God when objective guarantees run out. So that if you want to if you want to dig in more on what he means by leap of faith, fear and trembling is the book. So how did existentialism how how did existentialism shape modern culture? You'll see it in these these ways. You have we have a hyper focus now on being authentic or being your true self. You know, we had we had mantras like what's true for you is true for you, and uh currently it's like you do you. Anxiety and therapy culture and the language of angst and crisis is normal now. And these are all things that Kierkegaard faced that you know his his herd culture didn't really want to acknowledge anxiety and and crisis and things like that. It was just, you know, in the old days, people put on a smile and pretend like everything's fine. It was like a culture of suppression. And he, even as a Christian, was going against that and saying, No, we have problems, we have anxiety, we have we have angst, we have life and death crisis crises in our in our heads. And so, um, and then in art and film, characters who have a meaningless world sometimes must create their own meaning. So you might see that in a lot of films and stories and in books too. Some of the things as a Christian, you know, what do I want to hold on to or what do I what do I what do I resonate with? Definitely the honesty about anxiety and despair. I love that because you know, I I really hate fake. Like I don't like fakeness. So it can make you a more heavy person or a more real person. I have this problem. Like I'm I'm ready to cut to the depths with anybody anytime. For example, last night around the fire at um a hang with like 10 guys, I could have I could have just bounced around in the small talk that was happening, but I end up talking to one of the guys about his estrangement with his you know ex and daughter and broken family situation. And and we talked about that for like half an hour. So yeah, it's heavy, but it's not fake. So that's kind of, you know, and I know a lot of our culture, especially men, they just don't want to go there. They just want to keep it like about football or about politics or about whatever they can just, you know, kind of rant about. And that's just part of, you know, being a being a man in our culture is how it's defined. It takes a lot of security and depth, and even maybe just certain personalities just don't like to go talk about anxiety and despair. But it's necessary too, because you know, meanwhile, you have you have people taking their lives. So I've had two two friends who were Christians in the last year take their lives with wife and children. So, you know, being honest about anxiety and despair is very important and very necessary to being a man or being a person in this in our it at all, being a human. Number two, that things that I think are gifts from him or from existentialism is critique of the herd and the public. So Kierkegaard's the public, he called it quote unquote the public, or Nietzsche's herd. Heidegger's the they, so they had words for this, expose mass cultural conformity. So, you know, that it's very anti-the-individual. So you have you have so many people that just feel out of place or they don't feel like they fit in in in general mass mass cultural conformity in the norms of culture. So this is a this is a great critique, and it's obviously something Jesus and John the Baptist they didn't fit in either, and they were they were critiquing the herd too. Like Jesus said the road is wide, you know, that goes away from me, basically, and the road is narrow that follows me. And so the there's a big critique on the they and the the herd, and you know, you kind of have to accept this gift and be like, who am I without the herd? Who am I without the mass culture? Am I am I conforming everything to the people I see on TV or the people I want to be, I want to have status with at my school or at my at my work or in my in my neighborhood or in my social construct. And then insistence on personal decisions. So you just don't drift into faith. You have to make decisions and choose something. And so this is something that, you know, I think, I think people are generally drifting a lot, you know, until those moments where something, some kind 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 how you're gonna believe, how you're gonna live, how you're gonna live in this world. A couple of things that I think are kind of negative from existentialism. Mostly when God is removed from the equation, you get you get radical autonomy, which is like hyper-individualism with no context of God or cult community. Because when you add God, it assumes community, assumes responsibility to others. But when you take God out of the equation, there's no no one telling you that you need to care about others. It's just radical autonomy. So that's where you would get like hyper-individualism and inventing your own meaning completely. Like whatever you, you know, you might see this in the far right or the far left, where they just latch on to what gives them meaning because that's all they got, you know, just whatever is serving the thing that I've attached myself to, that becomes the meaning. And then despair without ultimate hope. So Sartre and Camus expressed that, and they had they had no answer. It was just that's that's what it is. That's life. You don't have there is no hope, and there is just despair. So life is meaningless and hopeless, and there's no point. So just do what you want. Do you know, make make something out of it if you want, or don't. That's kind of what some of these philosophers leave you with. So my my takeaways from existentialism in general are like my personal responsibility before God, like taking my actual relationship with God seriously and not pretending it's something if it's not. Like, do I have an actual relationship with God? Or do I just say I do? Or do I just believe I do? Do I actually communicate and do I actually spend time in stillness or or silence and ever lit-do I ever listen? Do I ever calm down and be still? Also taking seriously the depth of despair and sin, just those realities that tear us away from all the good. And then the need for a lived, costly discipleship, not just views, like having an actual relational discipleship, like knowing God, knowing others, sharing with them in the journey, walking on the road together, and not just having, you know, ideas or beliefs or having some kind of social media presence that says God first, but like do I actually live it out in any kind of a a way that costs me anything? And then it's really existentialism comes down to like, you know, the God factor or the non-god factor. So like you if you have the God equation like Kierkegaard did, there's meaning in the in the universe, there's there's purpose, and there's someone who defined all of that. When you remove that spiritual equation of any kind of authority or creator, you do have the need to create meaning from nothing, because there is no there's no actual defined meaning in a in a materialistic world. You can observe what you think has meaning and you can create that as a construct, but it's not 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 how somebody with no no no belief in God or creator could see that the world has goodness, they could see all this evidence of goodness and hierarchy and order and things like that, and they could derive meaning from that. And that's probably where a lot of people have landed. But yeah, so the my conclusion on just the existentialism is to like a way for you to interact with it would be to just see if you can spend 20 or 30 minutes in a in a silent place sitting in a park under a tree without your phone, leave your phone in the car and actually have a conversation or be still, you know, in inside yourself and just have a a concept of like understanding your own your own in inner life. And that's something in subversive orthodoxy, you see a common thread of like these people are fighting for the inner life. They don't believe it's all just external, they believe we have a world within ourselves that we have to cultivate and take care of. And that goes for faith, you know, with faith or without faith. It's you we all have an inner life that we need to cultivate. And in order to have peace, in order to have hope, there's things we have to come to terms with in our lives constantly. And so I just encourage everyone to spend some time, you know, existing, surely existing without distractions, and think about what is what is true and real and good and beautiful inside yourself. And also acknowledge, is there a place in me of quiet despair? And you could bring that honestly before a creator, or you could bring it to yourself if you if you don't believe, and you could just work work on it quietly within yourself and think of ways you can come to terms with that, or what you need to do to deal with it. But, anyways, I hope this was helpful meditation on on going a little bit more deeper and broader on existentialism and also how I related to it. Hope please check out the subversive orthodoxy Instagram. You can find my other creative work on being travismullen.substack.com. And you can always email us. Ideas for uh field notes would be great coming from you guys if you could email us at uh subversiveorthodoxy at gmail.com.