Matty: Hello and welcome. My name is Maddie, and this is the next episode of Vocation. Once again, I'm very pleased to announce and join by the great Michael Tessarian. And we're going to be discussing the topic of your most recent book, Michael, ⁓ which is available in your sub stack, ⁓ which is regarding existentialism. Existentialism was one of those highfalutin words that I think most people would maybe struggle to define. So could you maybe start us off by give us a little bit a little bit of an introduction into what existentialism actually means and then we'll dive further into from there if that's cool. Hello, if you've been enjoying this content once again, would really appreciate it if you would consider subscribing and liking the video as well too. It will really help me keep this journey going. Thank you again for your time. I'm back to the show.
Mtsar: Thank you, Matty. I appreciate that very much. ⁓ yes, that's right. The book took about thirty five years to write and it came out last April, May. And so I've been taking a very long needed rest and helping it to consolidate. But yes, you're right, ⁓ this is a kind of philosophy that gained a lot of traction in the early twentieth century, especially among artists, poets, filmmakers, and playwrights. In fact, some of the existentialists like Gabriel Marcel, Albert Camus, ⁓ and ⁓ Frederick Nietzsche ⁓ excuse me, not Frederick Nietzsche, was thinking here of Paul Sartre. were novelists, were playwrights, and we have other poets as well. But amongst the art world, ⁓ say your surrealists, you couldn't think of surrealism without existentialism. But it permeated into abstract art and modern art in general. And even into film early filmmaking. And that continued that trend has continued right up to American Beauty, ⁓ to Blade Runner, and V for Fendetta. and and ⁓ movies that are even being made you know in in recent times, things like Equilibrium and ⁓ movies of that nature. And you know something? Even maybe the Matrix. ⁓ if it if if films like that are not totally based on existential themes, then you'll find certain quasi-existential themes running through them. But really when you go back in the actual technical sort of textbook history of it, they claim that the mat the French mathematician Blaise Pascal would be one of the earliest proto existentialist thinkers, because of some remarks that he made. But then you get to ⁓ the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, where you actually find the term for the first time being used in a certain context of existence, you know? And also with Kierkegaard, you get the big themes that will become ⁓ very ⁓ well known. This would be themes of ⁓ finitude, you know, the brevity of life, and put and crowd consciousness, this idea of ⁓ the collective, and also the big, big, big theme of dread or anxiety that haunts the human consciousness. That, those three and other things are found in Kierkegaard. And he was the first one to really muse on it. And he's already eighteenth century. And so that's where ⁓ it really all starts. And then you could say that ⁓ it moves up to through a whole bevy of others. you get Gabriel Marcel, the French philosopher, who then used the word more extensively, and so some experts think that he is the actual one who coined the term. So it's either Kierkegaard, Kirk. you know, uses it or Marcel made it more popular, that's the way it looks. And he had some very interesting things to say, so I feature him quite heavily in the book. But then he got the German Heidegger, who ⁓ was ⁓ I would say a deeper thinker than most of them, and ⁓ or let's just say that his works sh sort of shook modern philosophy to the core. and couldn't be as dismissed like previous philosophers like Kierkegaard could be dismissed as a kind of a crank or an eccentric. ⁓ because Heid Heidegger was a an academic of a very, very eminent level, he couldn't be dismissed. Kierkegaard was just a a a ⁓ the son of a rich man. Who sat around in the park smoking his cigar and ⁓ writing books and thinking. So of course, he had no academic training. He although he was a ⁓ one of the greatest geniuses that ever lived. But Heidegger, they found it harder to dismiss. His first book was considered a an earth shaking wonder, you know, in nineteen twenty-seven. And so this is the brief history of it. And he just reprised a lot of these ⁓ Kierkegaard themes, but was also fascinated with Nietzsche. And Nietzsche is not an existentialist, not in any true sense. If you're being generous, you could say he's another one of these proto-existentialists. But a lot of people just go, no, no, ⁓ he's not really an existentialist. It's just that some of his ideas being kind of atheistic and ⁓ about the individual were picked up. By later existentialists. So, you know, it's okay to feature him in the rogues gallery, so to speak. But the one of the other contradictory parts there is that ⁓ when you really do your homework, you find out something quite amazing. And that is that it's a myth that existentialism is mostly atheistic, bleak, and pessimistic. That's how the public thinks of it, right? This philosophy. Because you know, of the popularization of Jean Paul Sartre and others like that, and that that that Nietzsche connection. But as a matter of fact, eighty percent of existential philosophers down through time were Christian. And this includes Gabriel Marcel and Soren Kierkegaard and a whole host of others, before Heidegger and after Heidegger. So what do you do with that? And one of these figures was none other than the gr one of the greatest novelists who ever lived, Fi Fyodor Dostoevsky. And for those who really know their philosophy, they found out that Nietzsche's philosophies are mostly sort of rescripted Dostoevsky without the Christian element. Dostoevsky ⁓ prefigured most of the ideas of Nietzsche.
Matty: Fascinating. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Mtsar: Yes, it is. And one can get into that and talk about how Nietzsche sort of even misread Dostoevsky. It may have not been Nietzsche's fault. ⁓ the book that he read on Dostoevsky was a a ⁓ badly edited one. And so it didn't really represent Dosto one of Dostoevsky's books properly. So they do sometimes say that that could have been a problem. But in any case Nietzsche certainly did use the ideas of Dostoevsky, but did not actually ⁓ represent him correctly either. So this is a an anomaly, but a deep research shows you that no, no, it's Dostoevsky's work that is really the precursor. And of course, we anyone who's got ⁓ a real you know does a real study of anything in philosophy knows that no one, not even Heidegger, is ⁓ coming up with original ideas. ideas are based always on predecessors. Always.
Matty: The root of the word you'd mentioned there was existence, and that's sort of what stood out to me. Because when I started going, well, how do I about existentialism? ⁓ it's about it's thinking about existence, existence itself, and from sort of this first-person perspective is the importance of it. Can you explain a little bit ⁓ the difference of
Mtsar: Yeah, that's right.
Matty: Of you know, thinking about existence, how is existentialism different from the rest of philosophy? What did these new thinkers bring to the table there that sort of elevated it into its own subject, so to speak?
Mtsar: ⁓ yes, well that's right. ⁓ you've already made made the point that it was from this individualistic point of view. Other philosophies always spoke it very much in general, and had interesting themes, no doubt. But it just seemed that this idea of the individual self and the individual experience had been sort of left out until you get to Kierkegaard. Who palpably wanted to examine, you know, ⁓ phenomenologically this whole concept of the self. Now, it it also there's a couple of different answers to that because ⁓ one of them is something to do with what Immanuel Kant had discovered. ⁓ again, in the 18th century, he was a German idealist, but also a skeptic, you know, with a capital S. And he had ⁓ Discovered that ⁓ It's difficult. Well, he wrote a book, you see, called The Critique of Pure Reason. And what that really means, the title can be rephrased, as the limits of reason, the limits of thinking. And it was radical for its time, incredibly radical, and gave rise to what we know as German idealism. German idealism came up as a kind of a rebuttal to Kant, Kant's idea, and and some of its consequences. And so in the end will existentialism. So one one reason for phenomenology, one reason for existentialism is this idea that there is this ⁓ these limits of reason because the existentialist accepted it. The idealists did not. The idealists ⁓ strained against it and tried to say, okay, even if there are these ⁓ obstacles to reason, it's not gonna matter that much. We can handle that. You know, they were uncomfortable with it. But existentialism took it absolutely deadly serious. But even slightly before Kant's time, during an earlier period in the 1700s, ⁓ you get a the one of the first materialist philosophers ⁓ called John Locke, a British philosopher, an English philosopher, ⁓ they call them empiricists. And they are ⁓ the group that you know would include people like Thomas Hobbes. And Francis Bacon, ⁓ sort of ⁓ materialists, maybe not atheists completely by that time, because you couldn't be an atheist in those days, right, without being burned at the stake. But certainly these were materialists. Now there's another threat. There's the Kantian thing I just mentioned, and then there's this. And their big question, they were also rivals of the of early idealists, and they had John Locke had proposed That the human mind is what is known as tabula rasa, meaning blank slate, and that everything you find in consciousness is put there by the world. Obviously, you know, through the senses. Everything. There's nothing in consciousness that isn't in the world. So sensual experience, worldly experience is is completely the origin, the root of all consciousness. And this was so attractive. ⁓ because he just turned around and said, try prove me wrong. Find something in your mind, no matter how fantastical it might be, its origins are in the world. And so this launched British empiricism, which became a very powerful ⁓ rival philosophy to idealism. But the idealists said, We're not being fooled here. We've got Emmanuel Kant, and we're going to stick to that, and we're going to stick to idealism. And the whole premise of idealism, what it actually even means, is that no, no, you're wrong. We are we're not negating that the world has this enormous ⁓ important ⁓ role in producing content, but there's already structures within the mind that you're born with called innate, innate structures, innate ideas. And every soul, every child comes into the world with these. And it's through these structures or forms or categories of mind that the Data that comes in through the senses is organized. And these two rival schools have been going on since till the present day. Yeah? It's a these are really, really 101 basics that are known to everybody who studies philosophy, what I've just described. But what the Heidegger sort of thesis is, and I'm generalizing here, but it will help to explain how existentialism came about. Is that they looked at this from a slightly different perspective. Their concern was not the RG Bargy between the two schools and which one was right. Their observation was how come it is that the mind itself can't answer the question once and for all? I mean, the questions that the empiricist proposed are questions about the mind. Right, we said, is the mind blank or is the mind come in with these innate ideas? So this the whole thing is based in what is the nature of the mind. So then why is it? They asked, very simple question, but it was dynamite. Why has the mind itself Not able to deliver the answer categorically, once and for all, and end it. Is idealism right or the empiricist is right? Everybody turns around to the elephant in the room, goes, Okay, mind, what is the answer? And the mind cannot answer, doesn't know, can only speculate. And by the way, even if the mind said, ⁓ say one person's mind said, I think it's I think I'm with John Locke, it's innate ideas. ⁓ I'm with John Locke, it's ⁓ tabula rasa. So what? How did that help you? And then if you're another person that says, No, I'm with these idealists, I'm absolutely sure that my mind comes in with these categories of the understanding. How did that change anything? It doesn't make a dent dent of difference. So this astonished the world when you thought about it. And when the and as I just said, Kant's book that came a little bit later, not too long later, was 1780s, 1790s, was called The Critique of Reason, right? The Limits of Reason. Well here they were already. This was already underway but from the time of John Locke just before. And so by the time the twentieth century comes in, this is almost like considered one of the great impasses of philosophy. Now remember Heidegger's writing in 1927, and there was existentialists before him. Kierkegaard in the 18th century, ⁓ Rosenzweig in ⁓ in 1910, Martin Buber. It's all happening in the early 20th century. And so the upshot of what I'm talking about was this: that the existentialists were happy to accept the limitations of the reason and say the mind is not able to answer this, so why are we pawn- why are we Dicking about with these forms of philosophy, idealism and empiricism. There's got to be a radical change. And by the way, the two that I just mentioned, this thing about Kant, you know, his concept of limitation of the reason, and then this John Locke thing, which is also an impasse, that's only two. There's other ones. There's actually many more of these impasses that when you actually find, you know, you go to the inquiring mind, the mind is stumped.
Matty: Mm.
Mtsar: So all of this was the problem of the opening of the 20th century. It's a long way around to answer your question. Existentialism said, we've got to then, you know, park this. And we can't make thinking the center of philosophy. Seems a strange thing to say, right? But this is what they were looking at. They were toying with this idea. What will replace it then? One asks. Well, the phenomenologists and the existentialists said, experience. We're going to replace the center of philosophy from reason.
Matty: Yeah. Mm.
Mtsar: The rationalist school is completely dead. ⁓ well, I'm wrong. It's not completely dead, but it's certainly not going to be the dominant philosophy anymore. We've got to make it living experience. What does it mean to be in the world as an individual, as a self, in a much more visceral, embedded and entangled ⁓ way? And this is then, I think, you know, what ⁓ launched it. And ⁓ this was ⁓ picked up by Edmund Husserl, ⁓ the great phenomenologist, the creator phenomenology really, and ⁓ Heidegger was his secretary as a young man, right? ⁓ and by the way, Husserl was a very great mathematician. And hi he had picked Heidegger in Freiburg University to be his ⁓ understudy and his secretary. And if there's anybody before them that mattered, it was a man called Franz Brentano.
Matty: Right, right.
Mtsar: Right, that was the biggest inspiration for Husserl and a big inspiration for Heidegger. So there's a little bit of a backstory there for phenomenology. But then finally Heidegger broke away from Husserl, you know, and started his own sort of ⁓ path. And that's how we get how that's how we get to him in writing in nineteen twenty seven with his great work Being in Time. That's the that's the best sort of ⁓ introduction that I can give.
Matty: Yeah, no, that that's perfect. And ⁓ that really got to the the nub of the question there is with the when I was reading sort of the old say Greek ⁓ philosophers, it's it's a lot about thinking, about thinking and about logic, and it's about breaking down logic, and it never quite gets out of that then. ⁓ and so as you're speaking here again about John Locke, he's one of these fundamental thinkers of of of liberalism, ⁓ and this idea of the tabula rasa is is one of these sort of pernicious ideas I think that permeates our culture so much. So when you see the issue of mass migration and the effects of it in 2026 now, one of the main sort of tenants of it, of modern liberalism, is that all people are just interchangeable, you know, economic units. You know, you can take anyone from Tim Buck to and set them in the middle of London or middle of Paris, whatever. And all the the only difference between them is they just need a different education because we're all blank slates and it's just your environment. ⁓ but as you're getting on to there there's a limit to this with it, and it's that there really is innate ideas. And this touches on the work of things like ⁓ people like Carl Jung. ⁓ and the collective unconscious and whatnot, which is something we'll maybe dive into in a little bit also. So we had the we had the history of philosophy with this thinking about thinking, ⁓ and then we come up to the limit or the limit of reason, as you were saying, about Kant. Now we move on to experience being primary, this phenomenological experience. What are some of the other main sort of phenomenological experiences that these existentialists are speaking about then? What is it about this first person experience that's ⁓ That stands out to them, what is it that they focus on?
Mtsar: Well, there's several. ⁓ started off by Kierkegaard probably, and one well, time would be one of them, you know. ⁓ existence, of course, that you just find yourself thrown into the world without electing it, those kinds of topics. But I think ⁓ sorry, ⁓ two two more vitally important. ⁓ 'cause I opened my book's introduction with one of them, and that's the question of freedom. But then ⁓ the book quickly then starts to explore Probably one of the biggest existential themes, which is anxiety. So you get this ⁓ th business of being thrown into the world, right? But see, that actually connects the anxiety because it's being thrown into the world, that is one of the primary sources of the anxiety. So really thrown us is a kind of a subset of anxiety, actually. So yeah, freedom, anxiety, ⁓ death, right? The the problem of death. And of course that's a cliche. The moment you say mostly to about existentialism to almost anyone who's a little bit, you know, red, they they'll immediately tell you, ⁓ yeah, it's about that bloody it's all that bleak stuff about death and pessimism, you know, so that became a kind of a cliche. And ⁓ and some most of the time they don't really know ⁓ what they're talking about. ⁓ other than that it would be collectivism, which we already mentioned was a big one for Kierkegaard. So there's four four big ones that are already massive. And they're massive because no one else had really spoken of them in any kind of detail. ⁓ some things had been said, right? I mean, it's not that death hadn't been spoken about, but it had been spoken about in this more romantic way, this poetic way, this fatalistic way, ⁓ you know, by ⁓ Victorian philosophers and what have you, but never really in a in a sort of a robust existentialistic way. It really hadn't. ⁓ unless you're gonna go to like I said, the Dostoevskys. And then there is a bleakness, there is a sort of a pessimism angle there that you also get in in philosophers like Nietzsche. But then in subcategories, you're gonna get this ⁓ story of time in existentialism, and let's never forget the concept of the will, the will to power that they took from Nietzsche and ⁓ updated. You know, you get your V Viktor Frankel's and your Gabriel Marcel's. And other philosophers like that who are going to sort of a Transmography Nietzsche's concepts into something a little bit more human, a little bit more robust, and also a little bit more positive. Not the Darwinian, Nietzschean, Freudian model, which says that man is just essentially a beast, or man is just a sexual being, you know, libido is everything and will de power is everything that came out of Schopenhauer as well. They're gonna look at that and go, I don't think that's satisfactory. I don't think that's satisfactory. So there's existentialists out there who are gonna he you know take on those ⁓ philosophical ideas as well and try to shred those. That's another, you know, s sort of these are also themes that you'll find running through the existentialists. Yeah.
Matty: And maybe we'll just dive into each one of these as a little subtopic and sort of ⁓ maybe try to parse out what the existentialist wrote about ⁓ these. So ⁓ the first one you mentioned there was time, and I guess it's to do with our relationship with time, our experience of time from the first person. What were the main existentialist insights into man's relationship with time that comes to mind?
Mtsar: Yeah, well one of the things that upset ⁓ Hegel ⁓ sorry Heidegger was more of these large ⁓ inflated ideas about the nature of time and the movement of time in in more this ⁓ historical movement, this historical complex you know ⁓ context. Because that'd have been all the rage. You know, Germany was absolutely ⁓ obsessed had been obsessed with the Hegelian idea of the Geist or the spirit or the mind, whatever you wanna way you want to look at it, like consciousness itself, moving epochally down from you know millennia past and unfolding in various ⁓ strange stages until it's gonna reach this absolute end of history moment. And so it g it gave the feeling of this large Titanic movement into which all human beings are swept up, you know, like a great tidal wave would sweep up a fish. And the individual fish is just like an invent you know, like a a a bacteria or a cell is really rather unimportant in what Hegel had called the slaughter bench of history. The important thing is history and that it's it's it's Titanic movement. And along comes Heidegger and just Bursts that bubble. It's one of the things that made him famous. And he shrinks this big balloon animal that the idealists had created down, down, down, down, down, down, and brings it down to earth and says, No, no, time that's not what time is at all. Time is this temporality of the human being in his finitude, you know, and the brevity of his life. And this is then what ⁓ a a large aspect of his work ⁓ focuses on. And this is where you get the whole concept of you know the brevity of life, ⁓ the concepts of authenticity. And he did it with other philosophers as well. He was able to sort of ground it. And then another thing that he did that hadn't also quite been stressed before is the importance of the future. You know, in the in the past, present, future, these tenses. He wanted to illustrate how the future is in existentialism the most important tense. And it even affects how we live in the now. So the how we how a person occupies the now moment is entirely contingent upon how you project your mind forward to the point of death and then return. And This ⁓ amounts to a kind of, you know, whether you're going to be authentic or not. If you put your mind forward to the moment when death happens, death arises as your possibility, and you flee from that, then you return to the present as a kind of an inauthentic being. Probably one who will try to flee from all other deep philosophical questions and flee even into these other philosophies or into these religions or into science. And therefore, you're not going to really be facing your temporality at all, unlike the person, you know, who comes back in a more authentic manner and does. But not only did he pop the bubble of this large ⁓ Hegelian movement of time and the movement of the Geist through the ages, he popped the whole idea of even the calendars and the twelve-hour clock. And the the seven day week. And said that's not time either. He called it vulgar time or ontic time. And that's the type of time that the inauthentic man lives in in order to escape or flee the temp the temporality that is really the underlying ontological s time. Because because when you have to face your death, when you have to face the finitude and more the question of mortality. It also creates this primal dread, this primal anxiety, this primal angst. And it's permeates your being to such an extent that in order to escape it, we invent calendars and invent schedules and festivals and clock time, which is all structured. Tick, tick, tick, tick, it's it's predictable. The the seven-day week goes round and round. My goodness is not wonderful. It's a lovely little playpen for the kids. It's a little structure to make us existentially ⁓ secure. It's got nothing in it that is of any substance or significance except for the fact that it is the marker, it is the ⁓ proof positive that we are in a state of fall, a state of fli f ⁓ flight from the real temporality. flee from that, and we're fleeing from the anxiety. But the authentic man doesn't. He builds his theories of authenticity on this because the man who you know realizes the brevity of his existence, goes forward to realize ⁓ possibility that ends all his other possibilities, and returns to the present now with greater lucidity ⁓ After squarely looking this whole matter in the face, you see, and realizing that life just dissolves into nothingness and he'll never be again, the being that he is right now, like looking in the mirror, is one day not going to exist. And will not exist forever. Everything you've known, everything you've loved, and everything you you cherish, it'll all just disappear in the mists of time. So that being doesn't flee from this and returns to the present. And now has a different relationship with the present. So this had never ever ever been stated before in such vivid way. And the person who inhabits the present moment that way is is the authentic being. You know, and he doesn't flee from death. But why is he authentic? It's because now he's going to exercise true valuation and valorization in his life. What is really of value gets my attention and the trivialities just fall away. Yeah. He no longer is an occupational being or a recreational being, ext you know, exclusively. He moves into more of a vo a vocational aspect. This is the the key leap for for Heidegger that's very, very important in his philosophy. So that I hope that answers that question about time.
Matty: Yeah, that's fantastic. And ⁓ even before we get into the other little subsections there, I think this term of authenticity is something that we should maybe hover over for another minute or two. ⁓ there's a little quote from ⁓ I have from ⁓ the second chapter, I think it is, of your book. I'll maybe just read it out and we'll maybe dive into a little bit more about authenticity. ⁓ actually this is the second article ⁓ that's on your ⁓ sub stack, and so I'll just read it out here. ⁓ the answer is that authenticity is not a matter commented on by others. It's not a matter of public opinion. It's not necessarily on display. It's actually one's own business, which makes existentialism very personalistic. And you'd said ⁓ you have a quote from Javi Carrell Hardiger's ethics of authenticity deals first and foremost with oneself rather than with Dasein's responsibility to others. And then you go on to say, ⁓ yes, and the most important point and problem if one knew what it meant to live authentically, would they gratefully choose it? Or instead run headlong into the other direction? Authenticity and uniqueness may be utterly repugnant to those happily embedded as non-cells within the status quo. What's the reason for this? ⁓ yeah, maybe even you want to speak about authenticity just a little bit more. This seems to be one of the main concepts that Heidegger had come up with. This is this evolution of philosophy over time. ⁓ What is an inauthentic man? How does Heidegger like succinctly describe what authenticity is as well? Is it linked somewhat to ⁓ Carl Jung's idea of individuation and about differentiation, is it? Or have you other thoughts about it? Yeah.
Mtsar: No, that's exactly it. ⁓ the idea of the authentic man is almost identical to what the psychologist Jung called i individuation. so There's a to me, there's a very strong parallel between those two things. With ⁓ and also because in both Jung and Heidegger, it's choice that is going to matter here. It's going to be free will. The two types of peop person I said, one who goes forward ⁓ and just can't accept what's going on and returns just as your everyday banal person and sticks with the banality, he does that through choice. And the man who returns to the now in more of a vivid, lucid way, he is also choosing that. He's catapulted out of the everydayness, you know, and and grasps his possibilities, knowing that this is just the way it is. There's free will, but there are that free will also has its inbuilt limitation. You can't do all the things you want to do. You know, you can be the brain surgeon and you can maybe de be the you know the the somebody who who studies fencing or chess. So there we've got two possibilities. But how you can't do twenty or fifty. And as Heidegger says, the moment that you pick up one possibility, you're immediately closing the door to twenty others. Right? Because they were phenomenologists, right? This is a hard fact. They're just observing the life and that's what it is. How many people do you know saying, well I could have been such and such, you know, but I got tied up, I got married, so I couldn't be the rock star.
Matty: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Mtsar: Okay, so this is a fact. Right, you pick up certain possibilities and that means that immediately the others are ⁓ excluded.
Matty: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mtsar: So this this becomes a paradox. But back to the point, it's choice. So look at these determinists. Existentialism celebrates free will. But it what it does is it also takes the concept of freedom, this was all Kierkegaard had done originally, and it exalts it to an even greater importance. And you know that people like Erich Frahm wrote a book called Escape from Freedom. So titles like that are all based in existentialism. You know, the Rollo May, Irving Yallum, all of these thinkers on the on the matter, they're they're commenting on Heidegger and Kierkegaard in terms of this idea of freedom. They make it central. Yeah. But then what's extraordinary is, and this impacts your question, you would think that instead of being happy that you're born free, you have this radical freedom. The strange thing is, and even Jean Paul Sartre, you know, spoke extensively about this, we are in deep anxiety about this freedom. Because we know that now we've got to grasp our possibilities and that it really, really matters what we do. And we can't just be willy-nilly. We can't just be liber liber libertine about it. So with the with the existential freedom has come a great deal of personal responsibility, one that man doesn't really want. He finds them, you know, this is the existential conflict. So this is the other angle to the question of authenticity. The authentic man not only ⁓ tries to ⁓ deal with this, right, and grasp the possibilities anyway. But he comes to understand that his anxiety is the perfect catalyst. The anxiety goads him toward the authentic life.
Matty: Yeah.
Mtsar: Yeah, it's a good thing. The false man goes, Hey, big pharma, give me a pill to get rid of this. I don't give a fuck that there's a difference between legitimate suffering and neurotic misery. I just want to feel better. And in comes this basically satanic edifice that goes, Take this pill. You'll get rid of all your neurotic misery. But you didn't read the footnote which says, and with it will go out the legitimate suffering that you need to be a true.
Matty: Yeah, yeah. Alright.
Mtsar: Authentic human being. That's where we find ourselves in the world today. So existentialism now takes on a greater meaning than any other philosophy because it already had predicted this. Yeah. Not only what is authenticity, but the the devilry, right? The great problem of inauthenticity. It predicted it. That's why it was that's why it caught on with so many artists and filmmakers. You couldn't have the movie American Beauty, you know, and V for Fendetta. And and a hundred other great, great, great, great movies. You couldn't have The Razor's Edge, the the original movie, or The Moon and Sixpence, these classics from, you know, f forty, fifty years ago. And many others I could mention. Absolute stunning films and stunning books. You couldn't have Hermann Hesse. Some of the greatest writers were deeply influenced by this, because it's it's not just ⁓ saying, here's the Here is the ⁓ imagery of authenticity. No, it's also gonna define the inauthenticity. It's not gonna say, here we have the picture of the outsider for you, you know, so that that's defined, but we're gonna show you what the everyday mediocrity is as well. You know, like A Bart Schmidt and Truman Show and stuff like ⁓ that.
Matty: Yeah, yeah. ⁓ I I know the ones you're talking about, yeah, classics there. And so we speak about existentialism, we're speaking about not just thinking about man's existence but feeling it and then understanding it through this way. This is this primary sea of consciousness, maybe they brought more into the picture that older philosophers may not have done. And so when we you were speaking about time initially, it's about projecting the mind forward towards death, this ⁓ existential concept of it and then coming back. ⁓ but what we notice then phenomenologically is how it brings up that anxiety. It is this anxiety that the free will lies in of how you choose to react to it. So the authentic man understands that the anxiety is ⁓ is the light in the ocean to go towards, you know, it is that lighthouse that is your path to authenticity, is your path to really living. Whereas sort of the modern life or the inauthentic man ⁓ is pulled towards Denying that anxiety. And one of the other ways of doing it is not just through pills, but by continuingly associating with thought and then just going back into thinking about thinking and about thinking. And sure, you can think about death and the concept of it, but as long as you're not feeling the real anxiety and the impact of it, you're not getting to this next stage. As this is the essence of what you were speaking about then of what ⁓ existentialism really is. It's about just the path to authenticity and the relationship with anxiety and freedom. Is there any other major concepts you'd mentioned before? Collectivism had come up in this as well, also. How does collectivism play a part in this too?
Mtsar: ⁓ that comes up in Heidegger specifically, like it did in Kierkegaard, but the term that Heidegger gave for it is fallenness. You see, in throneness, there's really no choice. We wake up and find ourselves in a world and we didn't elect. There's another feature called facticity that the existentialist used. That we don't choose either. That's just the way the world is configured that we find ourselves in. There's a mother and there's a father. There's families, there's a house I live in, there's a community, right? There's these roads. We drive on the right or we drive on the left. There's a bloody thing called school. It's set up this way. I have no fucking say in it. There's the will of other people. Right? All this facticity is something that I can't do anything about. My height. You know, my class, my caste, all of these things that are sort of just embedded and they're pre-configured. But by the time you get to ⁓ and of course mortality, death, you can't do much about that. But When it comes to fallenness, yeah, this one there's a lot of personal choice. Fallenness is where the volition of man matters. So what you just said there is an excellent summary, right? The fallenness is to say, Well, where do I flee when I want to flee from all this anxiety? There's a ready made place. It's called society, is the mittweld, as it's called in German, right? ⁓ with world. And there is where I find, just like Gustave Le Bon had also written this ⁓ remarkable work, The Crowd, ⁓ which has a I I always put that along with Ayn Rand. I can I can fit that into an existentialism framework, no problem, right? You can do it with Ayn Rand because she talked about values, and you can do it with Gustave Le Bon because he was a he defined what it meant to be ⁓ you know, a slave of the of the ⁓ collective. So the collective life turns out to be the ready made default surrogate. Whoom! If you want to even bring in auto rank, which one day you and I will actually definitely do something on that. But there is this womb like life, which is the perfect place to immerse your sense of identity. And it's been that way actually since prehistoric times. And so that is the default everydayness of the gray one, right? The dasman, not Dasein, who's the being who gives being. proper thought, but the man who goes, I well, I I don't think about that at all. I have other preoccupations like saving the world and solving cancer and raising a family, right, and all all the domestic nonsense. ⁓ just like I said, we flee into the clock of the twelve hours. Well, we flee into domestic and social roles so that we can be less ⁓ less human, so we can be organizational men, so we can be institutionalized, so we can be technical or religious or even metaphysical. There's a lot that goes into that life. It's it's really and and that's why Heidegger's book is quite thick, because he's going to give his own remarkable analysis of all of this cop art. of all of these inauthentic modes, right? He's gonna really try to look at it phenomenologically and ⁓ show you the structure of it, which he does and and how he did it, you know, was the thing that ⁓ shook the world really.
Matty: Mm. I I really I I'm already fascinated by this topic. I I would still like to use this first episode maybe as just keeping a Mac review of what existential is. And so ⁓ let's maybe even just dive into a couple of more of these little sort of ⁓ colloquialisms or or or words he's coined in his work, because then we'll be able to build upon them down the line. One of those that has come out then is Dasign, ⁓ which I'm taking to mean ⁓ the authentic man. Can you speak a bit more about what Heidegger described as a Dasein, and then maybe what what the opposite of Dasein is, what an inauthentic man is. Was there another word for that?
Mtsar: ⁓ yes. the the opposite would be Dasban, the one. Yeah. Das Ban. Just the one. The everyday non entity, the grey, one guy who's indistinguishable from another. His beliefs. Right? You're a gambler, I'm a gambler. ⁓ you know how to work the car, so do I, right? ⁓ you vote for that that one demagogue, so do I. Right? I support the team. Yeah, the every man. Exactly. You know, you drink Pepsi, I drink Coke, it's okay. Right? We go go along to get along.
Matty: Das man the one the one. The Yeah. The everyman. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Mtsar: That kind of being. Now, Dasein as a word is familiar to all Germans. There's nothing mysterious about the actual word itself. But Heidegger, because all it just means is being there, which really means being here in English, being here, being present as an entity in the world. And he used it because of a bigger ⁓ theme, a bigger ⁓ existential theme, which was that you are defined by Heidegger as a being in the world. Right? Being in the world, and those it's a hyphenite hyphenated term. Because he wanted to get away from this metaphysical tradition and this Cartesian, Kantian tradition that put a hard divide between your mind, your consciousness, your selfhood, and the world. Like they're two distinct different things mind inside, the subject, and the objective world outside. Heidegger never was okay with that. ⁓ you know, and he wasn't even okay with it when it was expressed by his own mentor. Edmund Husserl. It's actually one of the reasons that Heidegger broke away from Husserl, you know, later on. There were other reasons, but this was a big one. Because Husserl, he thought, was still caught within this Cartesian tradition. You see, of this sort of ⁓ this kind of removed observer, and then the stuff that's being observed. Heidegger said, no, no, no, we've got this has all got to be thrown out, and he did. But ⁓ Dasein ⁓ then is is this. But to be more specific, as he says in the very first ⁓ paragraphs of Being and Time, the difference that defines Dasein is that Dasein is the only being that can ask the question of being. No animal does it. Right? And actually, well, no, not all human beings even do it, but at least the human being is capable. So he slanted his book in a way that had been completely original. He didn't ask big metaphysical questions about being. He he kind of turned towards that later on in his career. But when he was a young man, this is the approach he took. He said being is too amorphous a concept to really get our minds around. It's slippery, it's amorphous. But one thing we can understand is the being who asks the question of being. That is within, you know, our purview. Maybe we can get a foothold in that. And so what this did was it redefined the human being. No one had ever thought this before. When you summon up the question of being, it automatically raises the question of who's asking the question. And so this was then a great rate ⁓ revolution because it kind of put a f ⁓ if not a complete full stop on the metaphysical tradition, it certainly put a bloody colon on it. Right? Because the metaphysical tradition was all about these big overarching questions about God, reality, supernatural realms, and the substance of things and you know, all of this stuff that didn't really include a living experience of a self. Heidegger just completely chops that and you know. Tunnel visions on the individual's experience, not collective. So Dasein is the being who ⁓ the that the question of being matters. Yeah. The only one who's capable of inquiring. So he said, let's turn from the question of being, which is amorphous and slippery, and start to analyze. It's called design analysis, right? Who is this being? What do we know about the being who asks the question of being? And this the whole philosophical world found absolutely unbelievable. This w ⁓ you know, I probably have I've butchered it, but this was absolutely earth-shattering at the time when it came out. It really stumped everybody from all these other traditions. And some hated it and thought it was just gobbledygoog and obscuration, you know, and others realized its poignancy. That this was not calling for a different kind of ⁓ perception. ⁓ I mean radically. And as I said, philosophers d didn't take to it as much as the great as the artists did. The ports. They We've been doing this all along, but nobody's ever wrote our manifesto. Being in time is really like our manifesto. This is what we've been doing. This is what we're trying to get at. You know.
Matty: Yeah. Mm-hmm. And so when you're speaking about the being who questions being, is this where psychology then comes into it? What was Heidegger's opinion on psychology, which was still probably blossoming around that time, early nineteen twenties, thirties, yeah.
Mtsar: Yes. So he doesn't have much to say about it. And there's interesting reasons why that is, right? And ⁓ it might be because he, like Jean-Paul Sartre, who did talk about it, just believed that the last thing we need in this world is another fucking priesthood. Except that these guys were white coats, whereas the black robes, right, were their black robes. Now we got a thing called psychologist who goes around wearing a white robe. But the function, right, these shrinks, head shrinkers. ⁓ it's doubtful whether we need them and whether they're doing anything that's productive. I think Heidegger had a big question mark about that. ⁓ but but but but on the other side, he was really, really good friends with the people who ⁓ formed you know existential psychology. So those who Go after Heidegger saying, ⁓ he absolutely loathes psychology, don't really have many legs to stand on. It's not completely true. And also he was he visited the great Viktor Frankel in Vienna. Now why would you do that? Right? Victor Frankel is the man who created the philosophy that was going to countermand not only Freud, but Nietzsche and Adler, you know, the will the power merchants. Frankel would come up with an alternative ⁓ theory that is largely based on Heidegger's work about authenticity. And so Heidegger actually makes the trip to go visit the guy. So this is not some hater hater of psychology. He just had his suspicions, but a a greater form of psychology arose, you know, and they ⁓ picked up on an idea that the existentialists had talked about, which was that man was a trinity. Okay, there's the Eigenwelt, which is the inner world of his self, interlocking with the mitwelt, which is the withworld of other people, that would be society and culture. And the Umweld, which is nature, the natural world. But these are three interlocking realities or spheres of operation. And a whole person, an authentic person, must unite these three. Yeah. And so now when you come to therapy, it's very, very different than the Freudian or even the Jungian. You see? There's a different orientation. And this again had an enormous impact. They're still gonna work with this Dasein concept, you know, and they're still gonna look at your immersion in the collective and they're certainly gonna look at your hang ups and anxieties. Of course that'll be huge, right? ⁓ for psychotherapy. But they also have this idea of the of the existential trinity. And on un uninslaved, you know, we've done numerous programs about that.
Matty: Yeah, yeah, they're brilliant. People have gotta sign up and make sure you check those out. ⁓ we'll maybe even leave a link down below to some of those episodes for people to dive into. And so just to make sure I've got this sort of framework right, then we're speaking about existentialism. This is thinking and feeling about existence. One of the main issues that people have to deal with is this relationship to death. So as people start to contemplate it and to really feel it, this creates an anxiety within man. And it's this anxiety that we don't like and which we want to run away from. We have the authentic man who moves towards it. We have the unauthentic man who moves away from it. ⁓ and our freedom sort of lies in which sort of way a man moves towards. One of the ways of for an inauthentic man to become authentic then is understanding this existential trinity and learning how to balance each of these three different spheres of of the self, ⁓ of ⁓ the community and then then of the world around of nature as well too. What were the other main ways that ⁓ Heidegger described maybe how an authentic man can move towards authenticity? 'Cause I'm sure they're they're they're not a hard demarcation and we're both a mixture of both, then we there's probably times in our life where we move towards one or the other or I maybe what's just your your thoughts on that then, really? Yeah.
Mtsar: Well, see, Heidegger was different than Kierkegaard because he wasn't as critical or judgmental at all. He was extremely genteel and urbane, and had also no actual moral philosophy that one can put their finger on, right? And if it's there, it's there more implicitly. He's just not judgmental. When he talks about inauthenticity, he's not judging anyone. Because his from his point of view,
Matty: That's interesting.
Mtsar: Is that it is a default position.
Matty: Yes, that makes sense.
Mtsar: He thinks he thinks that anxiety is bound to cause inauthenticity from the off. It's the first natural knee-jerk reaction. So he doesn't blame people ever. Whereas, you know, some other existentialists, you you get a a little bit more of that, you know, critical eyebrow and that bit of a frown. You don't find that in Heidegger at all. He understands. He's very, very, very, very genteel and urbane in in his manner and his his regards. The human race. It's very hum human about it all. And so his is a gentle coaxing. You know, making the point. That's all. Just make the point. Just show people ⁓ what is what's happening. But if they want to remain within this inauthentic everydayness, go ahead. There's not an ounce of yes, there's no criticism in any of his books. You just can't find it.
Matty: It's your choice.
Mtsar: And this can irritate people because of course the reputation of of the Camus and the John Paul Sartres and the you the Kierkegaards and others is like, yeah, there's a more you know, con condemning the world for its treatment of the outsider and you know and that's all the pop stuff. That's that's fashionable when you're ⁓ making a movie or writing a a novel or something, you know, and it's man against the world. But you don't get any of that in Heidegger at all. He he does it he ⁓ he's writing in a very, very ⁓ neutral sort of st style. Yeah, there's no condemnation. He he takes it for granted that all of this is the default condition that you find yourself in. You're really not to blame. And he just presents this as a a theory without any goad or any guilt, you know.
Matty: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's really fascinating with it. what what sort of perception did Heidegger get at the time when he initially came out with these sort of ideas? Was this welcomed initially into the sort of the establishment or was it here, push back for decades and ⁓ fight your way out?
Mtsar: No, he was made immediately. He became a professor, yeah, he was given his professorship and the ripples of ⁓ his reputation went round. Now he wasn't liked by everybody by any means. And that had to do more with the style of writing. See, back at the time we talked about with John Locke and that crowd, they were writing books this thin. Right? Heidegger was one of the ones that come up with a big thick volume full of the most terse German terms and even these neologisms, making up words and hyphenating other words. And so people just weren't spare. They just went, This is gobbledygook. And and they were really angry and said, How does this man even get his degree? You know, he he's a it's all of obfuscation. He's a con artist, you know. But of course, other people Could read more deeply and were profoundly fascinated. You can't even imagine. And at the school, at Marburg originally and in Freiburg later, corridors were literally jam-packed. You know who? Who by? Not just students of Heidegger, but other teachers. Teachers from the college, his own college, and all the students from other colleges and other classes, other Subjects would crowd in the car door and pin drop silence just to hear his manner of speaking. His his command of the German language and the millifluence and the brilliance of what he was talking about. It was stunning. People were absolutely gobsmacked as he talked about the most mundane things, the tree in the courtyard that nobody notices, the handle on the door that they turn without you noticing it, the glasses on your face, the paper that you write on, the why you're holding the pen and you don't even realize it exists, the tissue you pull from the box that means nothing to you. The table that you and your wife sit sit at and make the greatest decisions of your life in your kitchen is completely unseen. All these things that are invisible by proximity. He brought the world up into people's faces like you know, like Van Gogh had done in his paintings or whatever, like a great artist does, but in a way that through language. And then he would speak about language. And that really, really, really captivated people. He would point out things like ⁓ the German word for thinking, Denkan, Denken, is etymologically equivalent to the word for gratitude, Duncan. Or they say, you know, Dunke. You hear German saying Danke, Dunke. Duncan is thank you or gratitude. Dunken is thinking. So he would he would wax lyrical on the fact that every thought that a man thinks should be an act of gratitude.
Matty: Mm-hmm.
Mtsar: People were floored, they'd never heard anything like this. They were gobsmacked. And the German manner in which he spoke it was absolutely poetic. And then he'd cite the great poets. That's how one of the ways I got into him, you know, from my personal biography, was through German poetry, but we don't have to talk about that. But his his manner of communicating was so captivating.
Matty: Yeah. Yeah. That's unreal, yeah.
Mtsar: You know, ⁓ bringing things that were ⁓ they all knew, they had all read, we all know, but we we don't know. We have not seen it in in such an incredible light. And some people c you know said he was very Taoist. You know, this this is ⁓ books have been written actually, some very excellent books showing that there might have been ⁓ he might have had an interest in in ⁓ Japanese ⁓ philosophy and in ancient Chinese Taoism. Connections have been made by certain scholars, you know. And there's a lot of substance to that, I think. But it doesn't take anything away from his own original thought, because where he goes, the Taoists didn't necessarily go. Yeah.
Matty: Hmm. ⁓ did he mention anything about Hegel's dialectic and his thoughts on that? Is there anything that comes to mind you?
Mtsar: Yeah, these are the kind of things he had no time for. Because remember, he was puncturing a hole in all of these large constructs. You know? But again, as I said, he was very genteel. So when he deconstructed it, he did it in a way like almost a craftsman. There was none of the sledgehammer nonsense. Yes, it was always very sophisticated and sometimes so sophisticated that it's very hard to follow. You don't know is he saying something positive about a teaching or something negative? Is he deconstructing something or is it is it not? W were his critiques, it's quite subtle. That's what ⁓ it takes a long time to really understand him. He wrote critiques of Kant, he wrote critiques of Hegel, but at the same time, you know, you don't know if he's ⁓ See there's a in German thought there's a lot of parallels. Between these thinkers. Yeah. And it all comes out of a kind of an earlier tradition as well. Yeah. Some of the terms that he later used in his sort of later work actually come straight out of Jakob Boma and Meister Eckhart from the bloody fourteenth century. And a and a guy called Angelius Silesius, German mystics. Hundreds of years ago, their work is turning up in Heidegger's later work. He is obviously indebted to two Jewish existential thinkers who preceded him Martin Buber, who be very well known, and Franz Rosenzweig. Who's more unknown? Yeah? He's indebted to Henri Berg's son, the French mathematician and philosopher. And as I said, Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl. ⁓ do you know there's a poet in, I think it is ⁓ England, Jared Manley Hopkins. I forget if he was American or British, I think he was British. And he was a Catholic priest. And he's one of the precursors of of Heidegger. And I'm just giving you a sketch. We have others. So thought doesn't just you know come out of the blue. Even a Heidegger has got his un his ⁓ antecedents, you know, the like you said, the the gi the shoulders of giants that you stand on. So just because he took a philosopher and was able to deconstruct that man's philosophy, he's always putting something in its place. He's not just deconstructing, he you know, which the critical theorists do. Heidegger is putting something of incredible value there where he takes away something. This is the difference. This is the act of a first rate mind, not a third rate mind who knows how to just tear down and leave nothing in its place. Heidegger is very conscientious about things like that. If he critiques something here, he's going to put something scintillating in its place. And that's what makes him different.
Matty: Did he write at all about ⁓ the relationship between Dasman, an authentic man, and religion? How did he think how did he see religion playing into this as well?
Mtsar: Yeah, very good question. And even though he and his wife physically threw down Catholicism, you know, in the twenties, they both his wife was from an aristocratic family and she was a ⁓ I'm not actually sure if she was Catholic or Protestant. I can't tell you which religion she was, but Heidegger was a Catholic. But in any case, both of them both of them gave up on religion in their personal lives, right? So that's usually as far as people go. But I don't think that's enough. So I don't think that Heidegger was religious, but that doesn't make him an atheist. And that's a very strange thing to say. Cause it normally, if somebody's not religious, then they have to be an atheist, right? But I don't think that that that's where Heidegger was. Heidegger saw religion as one way of being showing up. One way. There can be other ways. So he's not against religion. He's just gonna say That when you take the epochs of history In a way that even Hegel did. This might be a small area of agreement between the two thinkers. Being has a way of manifesting in different epochs. And you know something? Part two of being in time, which actually never did get written, wasn't meant to be about exactly what I'm talking about. About the epoch epochal manifestations of being. When he starts turning his mind more from Dasein, right, as the personification of being. And he started looking at being in the broader thing, in the broader context. He actually did start to do that. And he talked about this epochal movement. And in this epochal movement, religion turns out to be one way that the human consciousness gets to understand what being is. And to back this up, he said that the ancient Greeks and their multiplicity of gods, no pantheons. That was another way at the time that being showed up to be understood. And then he moves forward to our age and says, Do you know that thing that you all call technology? That's another way of the way being is showing up. So that doesn't mean a man who's sitting there waving the fists ⁓ and has got some ⁓ bugbear about religion. He's speaking at it from a completely different point of view. So again, an original one. The idea of a god in the sky and all that comes with it, you know, angels and ⁓ supernatural realms, is a way that the human mind, you know, the way that being itself manifested. And this is what's gonna happen epochally. And by the way, there's and the strange thing almost ⁓ you know, fulfill your previous question, is that it has echoes of fucking Hegel in it. So this is what this is like
Matty: I was just about to ask, ⁓ yeah. Well what what what is being? Is is this just another word for geist of spirit? Is that what he saw it as? Or is it a totally different concept? Yeah, yeah. ⁓ that's good.
Mtsar: No. No. No. No. Now this of course then is what I had to try and deal with in my book, right? Because these are the some of the areas now amazingly, to find the answer to that, you have to really go back to Plato, somebody that Heidegger's also meant to have critiqued and not particularly liked. He has a penchant more for Heraclitus and Parmenides, you know, these pre Socratic philosophers. And he's got a little bit more worrying. And let me give you one anecdote as to why that is. Before we just hold on to that question what you asked. What was it, by the way, about religion? No. It was what what did you just ask?
Matty: ⁓ that last one was what is being? ⁓ and then it is it's it's spirit, is it guys, but ⁓ I'll I'll keep it here at the side. Yeah, I'll let you go into the plate a bit there. Yeah, yeah.
Mtsar: Right. Keep that to the side for just a second, because I want to pre-cuse that by saying that ⁓ the reason why, the mega reason why Heidegger was against his one of the big platforms on which he stood that got him attention is why you're antiplatonist, why you are against the metaphysical tradition, why you make these large encompassing statements about overthrowing metaphysics. And the reasons are actually quite simple. It's because you see. In order to reconcile the ⁓ conflict between Parmenides and Heraclitus, who came before him, Plato came up with ⁓ the well known philosophy that talks about ⁓ higher realms where there is these forms, right? Perfect forms, and then a lower world, which are kind of where we're at, which is kind of shadowy and mostly illusionary. But still sort of articulated to the higher world. It's just that it's Maya. It's what the you know the Eastern people call the Maya. So Plato came for this split world. Now the Gnostics would pick up on this later on as well. And if you really if anyone wants to really understand Heidegger, they've got to think in as much anti Gnostic terms as you can possibly get. Know your Gnosticism through and through, and then think of the complete counterposition, and you got Martin Heidegger standing there. But getting back to this platonic thing, the divide between the higher world of perfect forms, you know, mathematical, geometric, whatever, the truth, and then this kind of lower shadowy world that kind of, yeah, it reflects the the the perfect world, but it's it's it's basically imperfect. This is the heart of you know what the metaphysical tradition. But of what what Heidegger's point was is that the moment that you do this, it gives the right. To the human being to then think of the lower world as something inferior. It's inbuilt. Plato didn't probably even mean it this way, but this is the end result. This is what it actually means to the human being and his will to power. Then I can control. It doesn't matter what I do to this largely illusionary world, which includes my own body, which includes the natural world, animals, and just everything, all objects. So I can move them around. Look, look at the freedom it gives my polymorphous will. Now that this metaphysical philosophy has been installed, the perfect world is up there, unchangeable with God. And my world down here, I can turn into a plaything and let my will run wild.
Matty: I see.
Mtsar: And I can be the conqueror. I can be the imperial force that organizes and if necessary destroys. Right? So this was the tradition that Heidegger says w took philosophy down a wrong road right from the beginning. He calls it, you know, the road of error. Centuries and centuries of error, not philosophy at all, not the real thing. The real thing was back before, you know, Plato, but that got sabotaged.
Matty: I see.
Mtsar: So this is the larger commentary. That's why he was against the metaphysical tradition, because it lets the will to power, Nietzsche's will to power, run wild. It actually gives it the mandate, it gives it the raison d'etre of why man can be the will to power, the power drive, the Faustian power drive. Because nothing in the world is anything but an imperfect form, giving you the perfect right to put your stamp on it, to own it, to turn it into a resource, a standing resource. To order it about. Yeah. But back to your question. Funny enough, in Plato's Timaeus might be the secret of the of your original question. Because they Plato talks about a thing called the Korah, K-H-O-R-A. And Heidegger talks about being.
Matty: Mm.
Mtsar: Now personally, I don't see any difference between the two. You know, you gotta do a little bit of ⁓ you know, distillation, but not much. So anti Platonic as Heidegger was, he recognizes Plato as a great philosopher who had already put his finger on what being is. But to explain it to our audience, you've got to look at it phenomenologically and not abstractly. Everything that exists in our planet and all around us has a background. Right? If I have a cup here, then the background of that cup is the table that's sitting on. Right? The background of the table is the carpet. And and and the background of the carpet is the room. And the background of the room is the house. And then the garden. And the garden then is of the county, right? Or the state that I'm living in, you know? And then that's of the country, which is of the nation, which is of the planet. And then the planet goes to the cosmos or th the solar system, which then goes to the the galaxy and the cosmos, right? So everything has a background. But what Plato is asking is what is the background of all backgrounds? Where does this thing lead? So the metaphysical tradition did have this question that Heidegger later picks up again. What is the background of all backgrounds? So our imagination really is, you know, limited. It can't go there. Remember we already talked about the limits of reason? Well, here's another one. I told you there was other ones, and here's one. I I can think about the corners of the universe and that's all because I can't go there physically. I don't know what right and now they're talking even about an expanding universe. Expanding into what? That has no answer. And even if there was a what, then doesn't that have to have a background? And the philosophers don't it background, they call it the ground of being. What is the grund, right? In German, grund. What is the ground of all being? Well, look, people like Meister Eckhart said there isn't any ground. It's called the unground. That just threw people for a loop. Yeah. The unground, yeah. God is ungrounded. They try to fit it into the religious context and made a total mess of it. The best they could do is it's just it's ungrounded.
Matty: The undrind, yeah, yeah, the script, yeah. Hmm.
Mtsar: So there's actually a philosophical concept called the ungrun. Of course, later philosophers just had to throw it out because this is another one of those things that we talk about Locke and Kant before in the beginning. Well, this is another one. This doesn't lead us anywhere. The mind can't conceive of it, the mind can't tell you what is the ultimate background, the Korah. But one thing you can say about the Korah everything that you do know and see, the beings, the entities and objects around you.
Matty: Yeah. Fascinating.
Mtsar: Couldn't exist without it. So it is the unknowable thing that gives you the knowable. It is the being that allows other beings to show up, but you don't know what it is. In fact, the very showing up of the beings Occludes the thing that gives them birth. They're in the way of your perception. You cannot see the horizon of all horizons. You cannot even conceive of it, right? But it is the is the mother of all. Korah actually kind of, you know, they they referred to it, I don't know if the word means it, but it certainly had the connotation of womb. Yeah. But the main thing that ⁓ perplexed these philosophers is that we cannot conceive of it. So if you can't conceive of something, then isn't it equivalent to nothingness? I mean it is. So the concept of zero is the Korah. It's something that you have made a symbol for, and even that is somewhat inappropriate because as soon as you make a symbol of it, it's a something. But this thing is not a something. This gives rise to some things, to things, but is not a something in itself. Well, that's it. The reason is already fuck, you don't need Kant, you don't need Locke. And you need you don't need any other ⁓ you know, of manifestation of this of the limits of reason. Fuck this one will do. And it's found in fl in Plato. So Heidegger is picking this up in his own way, and I believe that and or at least I argue in the book and people can, you know, argue me wrong, I believe that the the being he's talking about is the Korah. So it's a platonic concept. And he's just resurrecting it. No doubt, you know, other Heideggerans will go, No, you're wrong, but I don't see how I'm wrong at all.
Matty: Mm. And yeah, no well. I'll see if there's any other little things. Yeah, there's some other concepts maybe we'll we'll go into a little bit more to get more details, and then probably in the next episode we'll dive into like maybe ⁓ a larger structure of putting them all together. ⁓ some of the other ones we haven't spoken about is maybe this will to power. What did he say about the will to power, Heidegger? What was his commentary on Nietzsche?
Mtsar: Well, this is probably for me one of the most important things. And I deal with that in chapter nineteen. Briefly, Mike, but because you could you could write a whole other book on it, right? But the idea is this, and you asked earlier about ⁓ the role of psychology. And this is where the philosophy and the psychology get the closest, what ⁓ what I'll say now, right? And people will see that this is an area where they almost fuse together. They're very, very parallel. But it has to do with Nietzsche again. And this time I counterpose it to Viktor Frankel's teachings of the will to meaning in the following way. ⁓ after remember what I wrote in the chapter 19. Now, like we said, the new science of Darwin helped Freud, Schopenhauer, and the materialists. Settle on the idea that man is basically bestial in his origins. And Nietzsche, right? Yeah. So Schopenhauer, Freud and Nietzsche share this in common. And it was from Darwin that they're looking. They're taking their ⁓ guide from him, their direction. Man is either a bestial being, a victim of the bestial will to power, or you can slightly nudge that aside and make way for the sexual theory of Freud. But basically it all wraps up. To be the same. Victor Frankel comes along and is you know troubled by that and of course comes up with his own theories, and I've read them both. And so although Frankel himself does not say this in so many words, the way I look at it is this. And that is that actually the basis of man is not the will to power, as Nietzsche thought, it's the will to meaning that Frankel, you know, proposes. And I agree with that. But the thing that I, you know, I bland Heidegger here now, bring in Heidegger and the psychologists, to say that the trouble is why we're not actively working from this will to meaning is because it raises anxiety. The anxiety you and I have just talked about. So this is a kind of a you know an existential theory that fits perfectly when you join the pieces up. You we don't act from the will to meaning, even though it is the basic drive and the basic instinct, because it awakens this anxiety. No less one than says, fight the crowd, fight the world. Don't go along like everybody else. Right. So what this means is that the will to power all is not the basic drive, but it is the default one. that we go to instead of like we compensate. Now this is known as sublimation when one thing transforms into another. And this is why w the whole human race automatically chooses to default to the will to power rather than the will to meaning. And why they're addicted to it, can't get off of it. Now, Frankel is the closest one to realize that this is the case. And he had his own conclusions to make, you know, because he was a psychologist who said we've got to shift this. Because obviously, from what we're saying, there's going to be an inner conflict. Right? Just from this alone. Because people who default to the will to power ⁓ have this other voice within them, the will to meaning, that's going to be in conflict. Right? So just by doing this, just by defaulting to the false will or the secondary will, you're putting yourself in inner conflict. And somebody like Frankel is going to say, isn't that the cause of everything you see in the world or the pathology? Which then calls for a therapy that's going to have to try and deal with this? And that's exactly what his life project was. All very valid. And he the he met Heidegger, he knew Heidegger. In fact, a lot of his work is probably based very much on what these existentialists were doing. I'm sure of it. He admits it that it it was the case. He is considered to this day, if you look him up in an encyclopedia, an existential psychologist, Viktor Frankel. Because there can be no doubt about it. But that's not where the story ends for me. Yes, we've got the anxiety, but the thing that Nietzsche picked up on and what the world has understood is that when the will to power dominates, It does it it ⁓ it allows us by going towards the will to power instead of the will to meaning, the anxiety we just spoke about that arises when you at even attempt, you see, to be guided by the will to meaning is slightly lowered. It's not obliterated by any means, but it's lowered. That's why we do it. Otherwise there wouldn't be any will to power and everything would be fine. But to lower the existential anxiety, ⁓ that you know, that the will to meaning arises in a soul. We default to the will to power. And then we find out that the will to power is very useful. Look at it what it does, it crushes our enemies for us. It pushes us through the world. It's ⁓ it gets our ambitions met. It gets our desires met. Hey, this is kind of cool, I like it. Right? We're like, you know, t infants. W with our plastic swords running around, breaking up toys and smashing things. This is great fun. So we also get this kind of ⁓ results from the will to power, and this is what convinces us to continue using it. But what Nietzsche never saw, and what under undermines his entire philosophy is this. Because the deeper part of ourselves, right, that the will to meaning ⁓ speaks from, the conscience, knows that we're doing something wrong. It floods us with a kind of existential guilt. So wait a minute. We thought we were ⁓ escaping the anxiety, and we were, but now we get this big massive dollop of guilt. For doing so. So tell me how that's a win. It would be a win if the anxiety lowered and that was the end of the story. But because we have a deeper sense of soul, something is wrong with us, bloody well guilt tops up what we lost with the anxiety. So th so Nietzsche is a buffoon. Because Nietzsche tries to present this as the the basis of man, as as the as the ⁓ p primal you know condition and drive of man, and he's telling you to go for it with gusto. He decorates it all with this idea of the superman and everything, to make it all shiny and you know attractive. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. If you break it down like the way I'm doing, I'm sorry. That decoration, no, that doesn't work. The person is no better off. And Frankel is the one then that's right. You should have gone with the will to meaning all along, because the actual will to power that allegedly lowered the anxiety, yes, but it did. It did so, yes. But it then arose another vice, which is all the guilt. So in the end of the day, you're no better off. So the will to power is a joke. The will to power cannot be seen by any philosopher of sense to be the right way for a man. Right there, it's it's killed off. Absolutely wrong path.
Matty: Mm. And so Mm-hmm. And so then you would you would maybe change ⁓ Nietzsche's very famous tightrope of man as ⁓ as a being from, you know, animal to the superman. ⁓ you would maybe swap that with the Das Man and becoming Dasine, you know, from the inauthentic man, this tightrope towards ⁓ the authentic man. And part of what that rope is made of is is the will to meaning. That that that's essentially it is. Yeah. And so
Mtsar: You know? Very good point. Now we just on Enslaved, I just did a show called The Origins of War, where we expanded on what we're talking about now to show you just how this has affected the human race. I really recommend people go to that. But we'll keep it short here and just say that this contract negates Nietzsche. And if you can think out there how many people teach Nietzsche, how many people are sworn to Nietzsche's philosophy, you know, and how many podcasts are dedicated exclusively to Nietzsche and all of this.
Matty: Right.
Mtsar: You know, we've done several podcasts that show that it it's it's weaker than you think. And here is another I I I take this as an absolute proof that it is weaker. But see, if you talk about have you heard if you tell people have they heard of Freud, Darwin, Schopenhauer, and ⁓ Nietzsche, they all go yes. But if you say, Have you heard of Victor Frankel? They What who who are you talking about? Yeah, this is the danger, this is the problem. You've got to know the ⁓ counter points and know how to apply them properly. So yeah, chapter nineteen, I explain this. They show you how that's a just a a road to nowhere. You can cut cut all the criticisms out and just shrink it down to this. That ⁓ the person who histrionically was thinking in Darwinian terms about man just being this, you know, sophisticated ape. Yeah. This doesn't hold up at all. It doesn't hold up. So it it's pretty much ⁓ a philosophy that has has to be deconstructed actually. And again, put something in its place, what what you can. If you've read your Viktor Frankl's and your Heidegger's you can. You can actually do that. So I stand firm on that point.
Matty: It sort of reframes anxiety in a very interesting way. ⁓ people think of anxiety as maybe a negative emotion. ⁓ funnily enough, it sounds like it's maybe a precursor where if you mix it with courage ⁓ and with free choice, it ⁓ transmutes itself into meaning and this is what the source of meaning is, is anxiety. ⁓ is maybe an interesting way of looking at it. But maybe maybe not the ⁓ yeah. Any any thoughts on that, Michael? Maybe first.
Mtsar: Yes. Yes. You see, if if Frankel is right and the will to meaning is the basic ⁓ drive, but we then refuse for some reason to live in authentically, why should you be at peace? Why should things be all a balance and harmony? Wouldn't you expect to be off kilter? Wouldn't you expect to be flooded with negative emotions? I would expect that. If you're doing something unjust. Same thing later on in Heidegger. If you're being a member of the crowd and you're fleeing from mortality and finitude, fleeing from your authentic possibilities and diving into the fucking anonymous crowd, why should you be at peace there? Wouldn't that be something abnormal? You should never have a minute of rest. That would be more consistent with the moral universe that the person who makes those decisions and makes those choices should never be at peace. Well they're not. And I would I I I look at that as favorable. You shouldn't be right if you bought a lie, why should you be at peace? Well, if you've killed the self, you're gonna tell me that now I'm living in harmony like these fucking new agers and what have you? No. If you've done something so disastrous like self-murder, don't tell me that then you're gonna live your life in peace. There should be something off. There should be ⁓ something imbalanced, deeply so. Those imbalances to me are not something that wants to be, you know, mollified and bleached. Or drugged out of existence, those things are precious. Those, as we said earlier, are the catalyst to real authentic change. And this is what caught on. People realize this. But unfortunately our world has gone back backwards, right? They've gone back to the medication. They've gone back to the artificial happiness.
Matty: And maybe even to close it up then for this initial episode in the existentialism, is there any other fundamental concepts you think we haven't mentioned so far you'd like to maybe give an overview upon, or is there anything that comes to mind there? I think some of the things we've Do I mean to go over what we've touched on or is ⁓ is there anything that comes to mind immediately? Yeah.
Mtsar: No, no. No, I think we've done pretty good. I mean, this is a labyrinthine subject. And we can do other things on it from other angles. I I always love doing that. You know, but as I said, this is fresh in my mind because ⁓ the book came out out last year, so I've been taking this extended rest, letting it consolidate. Very happy the way it came out. ⁓ the the anecdotes that you read are from the introduction. But if people go to my notes page on the Substack folder, there's a couple of articles not connected to the book that are there too. You know, before the book starts, ⁓ that are very, very good. Maybe we can even discuss some of those. They they pertain to the same content, ⁓ but from a slightly different angle. Because you are dealing with the psychology, but you're also dealing with the art. You're also dealing with ⁓ Subject of technology, which we haven't touched on, you know, and the sciences, scientism would factor in here. ⁓ poetry and art, you know, there's there's lots of things that one can explore. But I just particularly love the philosophical tie-ins. I think this is how ⁓ it started to intrigue me. ⁓ I got into it through poetry originally, but I also got into it in terms of ⁓ Gnosticism. Remember earlier we mentioned the Pl Plato thing about the divide between the higher and lower levels? In the eighties I'd been into Gnosticism, and so when I got into Heidegger, I started to see what he was saying impacted the Gnostic idea that I started to have serious doubts about anyway. So there's a tie in there. Then also I'm a personalist. I wrote a book on personalism, the philosophy of personalism. It's called Disciples of the Mysterium. And in that book I argue that existentialism actually terminates in personalism. You know. Yeah, ⁓ that's the the end result, personalism. Because at the end of the day, you see, if you think about it, we've talked about authenticity. But who is to actually say if another person is authentic or not? Do you see how ridiculous that is?
Matty: Yeah, of course.
Mtsar: There's only one person who knows if you're living authentically or not, and that's yourself. The person who's gonna comment to you on it means nothing because how do you know they're living authentically? This is the one area where somebody's Opinion, right? Somebody's ⁓ conclusion and prescription is absolutely meaningless. Their only concern here is whether they're living authentically. No one on the planet can decide for you or even tell you that you are in fact living authentically. It's a totally moot point. So with authenticity and the question of comes this extraordinary nuance. And Heidegger knew all about this. That's why I told you he was very genteel. There's only one person, and that's Dasein. Who can tell whether Dasein is living authentically or not? But that can be summarized as personalism. So based on that and other amusings, I link the two things, existentialism and personalism, very, very closely, just like Gabriel Marcel did. He was a personalist. You know, and this is something that also, this is another one of the threads that got me in. It was poetry, it was Gnosticism, and it was personalism that made me, you know. Like you said, th you're fascinated by the subject, so was I. And it was for these three reasons. They were dovetailing into existentialism. 'Cause I found, you know, what I was looking for there.
Matty: Yeah, yeah, brilliant.
Mtsar: Yeah. On all cases. And we and we can definitely explore some of this later on as well.
Matty: Yeah, absolutely. I I think I'll wrap it up there for this episode as an introduction. Is there any other final little things you want to touch on, Michael, or is this sound like a good endpoint for you?
Mtsar: No, I think we've done really great. We got to lots of the points, yeah. That we should get especially with the background. We threw in a lot of names there that were again these giants that ⁓ you know, came in the earlier periods. I always like to have, you know, an interview where we get to that. So we did that. And then we also talked about the key precepts. So Yeah, I think we did a great job. Thanks to you. Brilliant questions.
Matty: Yeah, no, that's super then. So I will we'll wrap it up for there then this week. All so ⁓ thank you very much again, Michael. I really appreciate your insight into this. anybody has any questions, please leave it down below. ⁓ you can find Michael's book on ⁓ existentialism in the sub stack. And of course, go over to Unslave to check out the other shows you've done. Again, the links will be down below. Thank you everybody for stopping by. Please like and subscribe. And we'll see you all next time. Thank you. Cheers, Michael.
Mtsar: Thank you, Matty. I appreciate that very much. ⁓ yes, that's right. The book took about thirty five years to write and it came out last April, May. And so I've been taking a very long needed rest and helping it to consolidate. But yes, you're right, ⁓ this is a kind of philosophy that gained a lot of traction in the early twentieth century, especially among artists, poets, filmmakers, and playwrights. In fact, some of the existentialists like Gabriel Marcel, Albert Camus, ⁓ and ⁓ Frederick Nietzsche ⁓ excuse me, not Frederick Nietzsche, was thinking here of Paul Sartre. were novelists, were playwrights, and we have other poets as well. But amongst the art world, ⁓ say your surrealists, you couldn't think of surrealism without existentialism. But it permeated into abstract art and modern art in general. And even into film early filmmaking. And that continued that trend has continued right up to American Beauty, ⁓ to Blade Runner, and V for Fendetta. and and ⁓ movies that are even being made you know in in recent times, things like Equilibrium and ⁓ movies of that nature. And you know something? Even maybe the Matrix. ⁓ if it if if films like that are not totally based on existential themes, then you'll find certain quasi-existential themes running through them. But really when you go back in the actual technical sort of textbook history of it, they claim that the mat the French mathematician Blaise Pascal would be one of the earliest proto existentialist thinkers, because of some remarks that he made. But then you get to ⁓ the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, where you actually find the term for the first time being used in a certain context of existence, you know? And also with Kierkegaard, you get the big themes that will become ⁓ very ⁓ well known. This would be themes of ⁓ finitude, you know, the brevity of life, and put and crowd consciousness, this idea of ⁓ the collective, and also the big, big, big theme of dread or anxiety that haunts the human consciousness. That, those three and other things are found in Kierkegaard. And he was the first one to really muse on it. And he's already eighteenth century. And so that's where ⁓ it really all starts. And then you could say that ⁓ it moves up to through a whole bevy of others. you get Gabriel Marcel, the French philosopher, who then used the word more extensively, and so some experts think that he is the actual one who coined the term. So it's either Kierkegaard, Kirk. you know, uses it or Marcel made it more popular, that's the way it looks. And he had some very interesting things to say, so I feature him quite heavily in the book. But then he got the German Heidegger, who ⁓ was ⁓ I would say a deeper thinker than most of them, and ⁓ or let's just say that his works sh sort of shook modern philosophy to the core. and couldn't be as dismissed like previous philosophers like Kierkegaard could be dismissed as a kind of a crank or an eccentric. ⁓ because Heid Heidegger was a an academic of a very, very eminent level, he couldn't be dismissed. Kierkegaard was just a a a ⁓ the son of a rich man. Who sat around in the park smoking his cigar and ⁓ writing books and thinking. So of course, he had no academic training. He although he was a ⁓ one of the greatest geniuses that ever lived. But Heidegger, they found it harder to dismiss. His first book was considered a an earth shaking wonder, you know, in nineteen twenty-seven. And so this is the brief history of it. And he just reprised a lot of these ⁓ Kierkegaard themes, but was also fascinated with Nietzsche. And Nietzsche is not an existentialist, not in any true sense. If you're being generous, you could say he's another one of these proto-existentialists. But a lot of people just go, no, no, ⁓ he's not really an existentialist. It's just that some of his ideas being kind of atheistic and ⁓ about the individual were picked up. By later existentialists. So, you know, it's okay to feature him in the rogues gallery, so to speak. But the one of the other contradictory parts there is that ⁓ when you really do your homework, you find out something quite amazing. And that is that it's a myth that existentialism is mostly atheistic, bleak, and pessimistic. That's how the public thinks of it, right? This philosophy. Because you know, of the popularization of Jean Paul Sartre and others like that, and that that that Nietzsche connection. But as a matter of fact, eighty percent of existential philosophers down through time were Christian. And this includes Gabriel Marcel and Soren Kierkegaard and a whole host of others, before Heidegger and after Heidegger. So what do you do with that? And one of these figures was none other than the gr one of the greatest novelists who ever lived, Fi Fyodor Dostoevsky. And for those who really know their philosophy, they found out that Nietzsche's philosophies are mostly sort of rescripted Dostoevsky without the Christian element. Dostoevsky ⁓ prefigured most of the ideas of Nietzsche.
Matty: Fascinating. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Mtsar: Yes, it is. And one can get into that and talk about how Nietzsche sort of even misread Dostoevsky. It may have not been Nietzsche's fault. ⁓ the book that he read on Dostoevsky was a a ⁓ badly edited one. And so it didn't really represent Dosto one of Dostoevsky's books properly. So they do sometimes say that that could have been a problem. But in any case Nietzsche certainly did use the ideas of Dostoevsky, but did not actually ⁓ represent him correctly either. So this is a an anomaly, but a deep research shows you that no, no, it's Dostoevsky's work that is really the precursor. And of course, we anyone who's got ⁓ a real you know does a real study of anything in philosophy knows that no one, not even Heidegger, is ⁓ coming up with original ideas. ideas are based always on predecessors. Always.
Matty: The root of the word you'd mentioned there was existence, and that's sort of what stood out to me. Because when I started going, well, how do I about existentialism? ⁓ it's about it's thinking about existence, existence itself, and from sort of this first-person perspective is the importance of it. Can you explain a little bit ⁓ the difference of
Mtsar: Yeah, that's right.
Matty: Of you know, thinking about existence, how is existentialism different from the rest of philosophy? What did these new thinkers bring to the table there that sort of elevated it into its own subject, so to speak?
Mtsar: ⁓ yes, well that's right. ⁓ you've already made made the point that it was from this individualistic point of view. Other philosophies always spoke it very much in general, and had interesting themes, no doubt. But it just seemed that this idea of the individual self and the individual experience had been sort of left out until you get to Kierkegaard. Who palpably wanted to examine, you know, ⁓ phenomenologically this whole concept of the self. Now, it it also there's a couple of different answers to that because ⁓ one of them is something to do with what Immanuel Kant had discovered. ⁓ again, in the 18th century, he was a German idealist, but also a skeptic, you know, with a capital S. And he had ⁓ Discovered that ⁓ It's difficult. Well, he wrote a book, you see, called The Critique of Pure Reason. And what that really means, the title can be rephrased, as the limits of reason, the limits of thinking. And it was radical for its time, incredibly radical, and gave rise to what we know as German idealism. German idealism came up as a kind of a rebuttal to Kant, Kant's idea, and and some of its consequences. And so in the end will existentialism. So one one reason for phenomenology, one reason for existentialism is this idea that there is this ⁓ these limits of reason because the existentialist accepted it. The idealists did not. The idealists ⁓ strained against it and tried to say, okay, even if there are these ⁓ obstacles to reason, it's not gonna matter that much. We can handle that. You know, they were uncomfortable with it. But existentialism took it absolutely deadly serious. But even slightly before Kant's time, during an earlier period in the 1700s, ⁓ you get a the one of the first materialist philosophers ⁓ called John Locke, a British philosopher, an English philosopher, ⁓ they call them empiricists. And they are ⁓ the group that you know would include people like Thomas Hobbes. And Francis Bacon, ⁓ sort of ⁓ materialists, maybe not atheists completely by that time, because you couldn't be an atheist in those days, right, without being burned at the stake. But certainly these were materialists. Now there's another threat. There's the Kantian thing I just mentioned, and then there's this. And their big question, they were also rivals of the of early idealists, and they had John Locke had proposed That the human mind is what is known as tabula rasa, meaning blank slate, and that everything you find in consciousness is put there by the world. Obviously, you know, through the senses. Everything. There's nothing in consciousness that isn't in the world. So sensual experience, worldly experience is is completely the origin, the root of all consciousness. And this was so attractive. ⁓ because he just turned around and said, try prove me wrong. Find something in your mind, no matter how fantastical it might be, its origins are in the world. And so this launched British empiricism, which became a very powerful ⁓ rival philosophy to idealism. But the idealists said, We're not being fooled here. We've got Emmanuel Kant, and we're going to stick to that, and we're going to stick to idealism. And the whole premise of idealism, what it actually even means, is that no, no, you're wrong. We are we're not negating that the world has this enormous ⁓ important ⁓ role in producing content, but there's already structures within the mind that you're born with called innate, innate structures, innate ideas. And every soul, every child comes into the world with these. And it's through these structures or forms or categories of mind that the Data that comes in through the senses is organized. And these two rival schools have been going on since till the present day. Yeah? It's a these are really, really 101 basics that are known to everybody who studies philosophy, what I've just described. But what the Heidegger sort of thesis is, and I'm generalizing here, but it will help to explain how existentialism came about. Is that they looked at this from a slightly different perspective. Their concern was not the RG Bargy between the two schools and which one was right. Their observation was how come it is that the mind itself can't answer the question once and for all? I mean, the questions that the empiricist proposed are questions about the mind. Right, we said, is the mind blank or is the mind come in with these innate ideas? So this the whole thing is based in what is the nature of the mind. So then why is it? They asked, very simple question, but it was dynamite. Why has the mind itself Not able to deliver the answer categorically, once and for all, and end it. Is idealism right or the empiricist is right? Everybody turns around to the elephant in the room, goes, Okay, mind, what is the answer? And the mind cannot answer, doesn't know, can only speculate. And by the way, even if the mind said, ⁓ say one person's mind said, I think it's I think I'm with John Locke, it's innate ideas. ⁓ I'm with John Locke, it's ⁓ tabula rasa. So what? How did that help you? And then if you're another person that says, No, I'm with these idealists, I'm absolutely sure that my mind comes in with these categories of the understanding. How did that change anything? It doesn't make a dent dent of difference. So this astonished the world when you thought about it. And when the and as I just said, Kant's book that came a little bit later, not too long later, was 1780s, 1790s, was called The Critique of Reason, right? The Limits of Reason. Well here they were already. This was already underway but from the time of John Locke just before. And so by the time the twentieth century comes in, this is almost like considered one of the great impasses of philosophy. Now remember Heidegger's writing in 1927, and there was existentialists before him. Kierkegaard in the 18th century, ⁓ Rosenzweig in ⁓ in 1910, Martin Buber. It's all happening in the early 20th century. And so the upshot of what I'm talking about was this: that the existentialists were happy to accept the limitations of the reason and say the mind is not able to answer this, so why are we pawn- why are we Dicking about with these forms of philosophy, idealism and empiricism. There's got to be a radical change. And by the way, the two that I just mentioned, this thing about Kant, you know, his concept of limitation of the reason, and then this John Locke thing, which is also an impasse, that's only two. There's other ones. There's actually many more of these impasses that when you actually find, you know, you go to the inquiring mind, the mind is stumped.
Matty: Mm.
Mtsar: So all of this was the problem of the opening of the 20th century. It's a long way around to answer your question. Existentialism said, we've got to then, you know, park this. And we can't make thinking the center of philosophy. Seems a strange thing to say, right? But this is what they were looking at. They were toying with this idea. What will replace it then? One asks. Well, the phenomenologists and the existentialists said, experience. We're going to replace the center of philosophy from reason.
Matty: Yeah. Mm.
Mtsar: The rationalist school is completely dead. ⁓ well, I'm wrong. It's not completely dead, but it's certainly not going to be the dominant philosophy anymore. We've got to make it living experience. What does it mean to be in the world as an individual, as a self, in a much more visceral, embedded and entangled ⁓ way? And this is then, I think, you know, what ⁓ launched it. And ⁓ this was ⁓ picked up by Edmund Husserl, ⁓ the great phenomenologist, the creator phenomenology really, and ⁓ Heidegger was his secretary as a young man, right? ⁓ and by the way, Husserl was a very great mathematician. And hi he had picked Heidegger in Freiburg University to be his ⁓ understudy and his secretary. And if there's anybody before them that mattered, it was a man called Franz Brentano.
Matty: Right, right.
Mtsar: Right, that was the biggest inspiration for Husserl and a big inspiration for Heidegger. So there's a little bit of a backstory there for phenomenology. But then finally Heidegger broke away from Husserl, you know, and started his own sort of ⁓ path. And that's how we get how that's how we get to him in writing in nineteen twenty seven with his great work Being in Time. That's the that's the best sort of ⁓ introduction that I can give.
Matty: Yeah, no, that that's perfect. And ⁓ that really got to the the nub of the question there is with the when I was reading sort of the old say Greek ⁓ philosophers, it's it's a lot about thinking, about thinking and about logic, and it's about breaking down logic, and it never quite gets out of that then. ⁓ and so as you're speaking here again about John Locke, he's one of these fundamental thinkers of of of liberalism, ⁓ and this idea of the tabula rasa is is one of these sort of pernicious ideas I think that permeates our culture so much. So when you see the issue of mass migration and the effects of it in 2026 now, one of the main sort of tenants of it, of modern liberalism, is that all people are just interchangeable, you know, economic units. You know, you can take anyone from Tim Buck to and set them in the middle of London or middle of Paris, whatever. And all the the only difference between them is they just need a different education because we're all blank slates and it's just your environment. ⁓ but as you're getting on to there there's a limit to this with it, and it's that there really is innate ideas. And this touches on the work of things like ⁓ people like Carl Jung. ⁓ and the collective unconscious and whatnot, which is something we'll maybe dive into in a little bit also. So we had the we had the history of philosophy with this thinking about thinking, ⁓ and then we come up to the limit or the limit of reason, as you were saying, about Kant. Now we move on to experience being primary, this phenomenological experience. What are some of the other main sort of phenomenological experiences that these existentialists are speaking about then? What is it about this first person experience that's ⁓ That stands out to them, what is it that they focus on?
Mtsar: Well, there's several. ⁓ started off by Kierkegaard probably, and one well, time would be one of them, you know. ⁓ existence, of course, that you just find yourself thrown into the world without electing it, those kinds of topics. But I think ⁓ sorry, ⁓ two two more vitally important. ⁓ 'cause I opened my book's introduction with one of them, and that's the question of freedom. But then ⁓ the book quickly then starts to explore Probably one of the biggest existential themes, which is anxiety. So you get this ⁓ th business of being thrown into the world, right? But see, that actually connects the anxiety because it's being thrown into the world, that is one of the primary sources of the anxiety. So really thrown us is a kind of a subset of anxiety, actually. So yeah, freedom, anxiety, ⁓ death, right? The the problem of death. And of course that's a cliche. The moment you say mostly to about existentialism to almost anyone who's a little bit, you know, red, they they'll immediately tell you, ⁓ yeah, it's about that bloody it's all that bleak stuff about death and pessimism, you know, so that became a kind of a cliche. And ⁓ and some most of the time they don't really know ⁓ what they're talking about. ⁓ other than that it would be collectivism, which we already mentioned was a big one for Kierkegaard. So there's four four big ones that are already massive. And they're massive because no one else had really spoken of them in any kind of detail. ⁓ some things had been said, right? I mean, it's not that death hadn't been spoken about, but it had been spoken about in this more romantic way, this poetic way, this fatalistic way, ⁓ you know, by ⁓ Victorian philosophers and what have you, but never really in a in a sort of a robust existentialistic way. It really hadn't. ⁓ unless you're gonna go to like I said, the Dostoevskys. And then there is a bleakness, there is a sort of a pessimism angle there that you also get in in philosophers like Nietzsche. But then in subcategories, you're gonna get this ⁓ story of time in existentialism, and let's never forget the concept of the will, the will to power that they took from Nietzsche and ⁓ updated. You know, you get your V Viktor Frankel's and your Gabriel Marcel's. And other philosophers like that who are going to sort of a Transmography Nietzsche's concepts into something a little bit more human, a little bit more robust, and also a little bit more positive. Not the Darwinian, Nietzschean, Freudian model, which says that man is just essentially a beast, or man is just a sexual being, you know, libido is everything and will de power is everything that came out of Schopenhauer as well. They're gonna look at that and go, I don't think that's satisfactory. I don't think that's satisfactory. So there's existentialists out there who are gonna he you know take on those ⁓ philosophical ideas as well and try to shred those. That's another, you know, s sort of these are also themes that you'll find running through the existentialists. Yeah.
Matty: And maybe we'll just dive into each one of these as a little subtopic and sort of ⁓ maybe try to parse out what the existentialist wrote about ⁓ these. So ⁓ the first one you mentioned there was time, and I guess it's to do with our relationship with time, our experience of time from the first person. What were the main existentialist insights into man's relationship with time that comes to mind?
Mtsar: Yeah, well one of the things that upset ⁓ Hegel ⁓ sorry Heidegger was more of these large ⁓ inflated ideas about the nature of time and the movement of time in in more this ⁓ historical movement, this historical complex you know ⁓ context. Because that'd have been all the rage. You know, Germany was absolutely ⁓ obsessed had been obsessed with the Hegelian idea of the Geist or the spirit or the mind, whatever you wanna way you want to look at it, like consciousness itself, moving epochally down from you know millennia past and unfolding in various ⁓ strange stages until it's gonna reach this absolute end of history moment. And so it g it gave the feeling of this large Titanic movement into which all human beings are swept up, you know, like a great tidal wave would sweep up a fish. And the individual fish is just like an invent you know, like a a a bacteria or a cell is really rather unimportant in what Hegel had called the slaughter bench of history. The important thing is history and that it's it's it's Titanic movement. And along comes Heidegger and just Bursts that bubble. It's one of the things that made him famous. And he shrinks this big balloon animal that the idealists had created down, down, down, down, down, down, and brings it down to earth and says, No, no, time that's not what time is at all. Time is this temporality of the human being in his finitude, you know, and the brevity of his life. And this is then what ⁓ a a large aspect of his work ⁓ focuses on. And this is where you get the whole concept of you know the brevity of life, ⁓ the concepts of authenticity. And he did it with other philosophers as well. He was able to sort of ground it. And then another thing that he did that hadn't also quite been stressed before is the importance of the future. You know, in the in the past, present, future, these tenses. He wanted to illustrate how the future is in existentialism the most important tense. And it even affects how we live in the now. So the how we how a person occupies the now moment is entirely contingent upon how you project your mind forward to the point of death and then return. And This ⁓ amounts to a kind of, you know, whether you're going to be authentic or not. If you put your mind forward to the moment when death happens, death arises as your possibility, and you flee from that, then you return to the present as a kind of an inauthentic being. Probably one who will try to flee from all other deep philosophical questions and flee even into these other philosophies or into these religions or into science. And therefore, you're not going to really be facing your temporality at all, unlike the person, you know, who comes back in a more authentic manner and does. But not only did he pop the bubble of this large ⁓ Hegelian movement of time and the movement of the Geist through the ages, he popped the whole idea of even the calendars and the twelve-hour clock. And the the seven day week. And said that's not time either. He called it vulgar time or ontic time. And that's the type of time that the inauthentic man lives in in order to escape or flee the temp the temporality that is really the underlying ontological s time. Because because when you have to face your death, when you have to face the finitude and more the question of mortality. It also creates this primal dread, this primal anxiety, this primal angst. And it's permeates your being to such an extent that in order to escape it, we invent calendars and invent schedules and festivals and clock time, which is all structured. Tick, tick, tick, tick, it's it's predictable. The the seven-day week goes round and round. My goodness is not wonderful. It's a lovely little playpen for the kids. It's a little structure to make us existentially ⁓ secure. It's got nothing in it that is of any substance or significance except for the fact that it is the marker, it is the ⁓ proof positive that we are in a state of fall, a state of fli f ⁓ flight from the real temporality. flee from that, and we're fleeing from the anxiety. But the authentic man doesn't. He builds his theories of authenticity on this because the man who you know realizes the brevity of his existence, goes forward to realize ⁓ possibility that ends all his other possibilities, and returns to the present now with greater lucidity ⁓ After squarely looking this whole matter in the face, you see, and realizing that life just dissolves into nothingness and he'll never be again, the being that he is right now, like looking in the mirror, is one day not going to exist. And will not exist forever. Everything you've known, everything you've loved, and everything you you cherish, it'll all just disappear in the mists of time. So that being doesn't flee from this and returns to the present. And now has a different relationship with the present. So this had never ever ever been stated before in such vivid way. And the person who inhabits the present moment that way is is the authentic being. You know, and he doesn't flee from death. But why is he authentic? It's because now he's going to exercise true valuation and valorization in his life. What is really of value gets my attention and the trivialities just fall away. Yeah. He no longer is an occupational being or a recreational being, ext you know, exclusively. He moves into more of a vo a vocational aspect. This is the the key leap for for Heidegger that's very, very important in his philosophy. So that I hope that answers that question about time.
Matty: Yeah, that's fantastic. And ⁓ even before we get into the other little subsections there, I think this term of authenticity is something that we should maybe hover over for another minute or two. ⁓ there's a little quote from ⁓ I have from ⁓ the second chapter, I think it is, of your book. I'll maybe just read it out and we'll maybe dive into a little bit more about authenticity. ⁓ actually this is the second article ⁓ that's on your ⁓ sub stack, and so I'll just read it out here. ⁓ the answer is that authenticity is not a matter commented on by others. It's not a matter of public opinion. It's not necessarily on display. It's actually one's own business, which makes existentialism very personalistic. And you'd said ⁓ you have a quote from Javi Carrell Hardiger's ethics of authenticity deals first and foremost with oneself rather than with Dasein's responsibility to others. And then you go on to say, ⁓ yes, and the most important point and problem if one knew what it meant to live authentically, would they gratefully choose it? Or instead run headlong into the other direction? Authenticity and uniqueness may be utterly repugnant to those happily embedded as non-cells within the status quo. What's the reason for this? ⁓ yeah, maybe even you want to speak about authenticity just a little bit more. This seems to be one of the main concepts that Heidegger had come up with. This is this evolution of philosophy over time. ⁓ What is an inauthentic man? How does Heidegger like succinctly describe what authenticity is as well? Is it linked somewhat to ⁓ Carl Jung's idea of individuation and about differentiation, is it? Or have you other thoughts about it? Yeah.
Mtsar: No, that's exactly it. ⁓ the idea of the authentic man is almost identical to what the psychologist Jung called i individuation. so There's a to me, there's a very strong parallel between those two things. With ⁓ and also because in both Jung and Heidegger, it's choice that is going to matter here. It's going to be free will. The two types of peop person I said, one who goes forward ⁓ and just can't accept what's going on and returns just as your everyday banal person and sticks with the banality, he does that through choice. And the man who returns to the now in more of a vivid, lucid way, he is also choosing that. He's catapulted out of the everydayness, you know, and and grasps his possibilities, knowing that this is just the way it is. There's free will, but there are that free will also has its inbuilt limitation. You can't do all the things you want to do. You know, you can be the brain surgeon and you can maybe de be the you know the the somebody who who studies fencing or chess. So there we've got two possibilities. But how you can't do twenty or fifty. And as Heidegger says, the moment that you pick up one possibility, you're immediately closing the door to twenty others. Right? Because they were phenomenologists, right? This is a hard fact. They're just observing the life and that's what it is. How many people do you know saying, well I could have been such and such, you know, but I got tied up, I got married, so I couldn't be the rock star.
Matty: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Mtsar: Okay, so this is a fact. Right, you pick up certain possibilities and that means that immediately the others are ⁓ excluded.
Matty: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mtsar: So this this becomes a paradox. But back to the point, it's choice. So look at these determinists. Existentialism celebrates free will. But it what it does is it also takes the concept of freedom, this was all Kierkegaard had done originally, and it exalts it to an even greater importance. And you know that people like Erich Frahm wrote a book called Escape from Freedom. So titles like that are all based in existentialism. You know, the Rollo May, Irving Yallum, all of these thinkers on the on the matter, they're they're commenting on Heidegger and Kierkegaard in terms of this idea of freedom. They make it central. Yeah. But then what's extraordinary is, and this impacts your question, you would think that instead of being happy that you're born free, you have this radical freedom. The strange thing is, and even Jean Paul Sartre, you know, spoke extensively about this, we are in deep anxiety about this freedom. Because we know that now we've got to grasp our possibilities and that it really, really matters what we do. And we can't just be willy-nilly. We can't just be liber liber libertine about it. So with the with the existential freedom has come a great deal of personal responsibility, one that man doesn't really want. He finds them, you know, this is the existential conflict. So this is the other angle to the question of authenticity. The authentic man not only ⁓ tries to ⁓ deal with this, right, and grasp the possibilities anyway. But he comes to understand that his anxiety is the perfect catalyst. The anxiety goads him toward the authentic life.
Matty: Yeah.
Mtsar: Yeah, it's a good thing. The false man goes, Hey, big pharma, give me a pill to get rid of this. I don't give a fuck that there's a difference between legitimate suffering and neurotic misery. I just want to feel better. And in comes this basically satanic edifice that goes, Take this pill. You'll get rid of all your neurotic misery. But you didn't read the footnote which says, and with it will go out the legitimate suffering that you need to be a true.
Matty: Yeah, yeah. Alright.
Mtsar: Authentic human being. That's where we find ourselves in the world today. So existentialism now takes on a greater meaning than any other philosophy because it already had predicted this. Yeah. Not only what is authenticity, but the the devilry, right? The great problem of inauthenticity. It predicted it. That's why it was that's why it caught on with so many artists and filmmakers. You couldn't have the movie American Beauty, you know, and V for Fendetta. And and a hundred other great, great, great, great movies. You couldn't have The Razor's Edge, the the original movie, or The Moon and Sixpence, these classics from, you know, f forty, fifty years ago. And many others I could mention. Absolute stunning films and stunning books. You couldn't have Hermann Hesse. Some of the greatest writers were deeply influenced by this, because it's it's not just ⁓ saying, here's the Here is the ⁓ imagery of authenticity. No, it's also gonna define the inauthenticity. It's not gonna say, here we have the picture of the outsider for you, you know, so that that's defined, but we're gonna show you what the everyday mediocrity is as well. You know, like A Bart Schmidt and Truman Show and stuff like ⁓ that.
Matty: Yeah, yeah. ⁓ I I know the ones you're talking about, yeah, classics there. And so we speak about existentialism, we're speaking about not just thinking about man's existence but feeling it and then understanding it through this way. This is this primary sea of consciousness, maybe they brought more into the picture that older philosophers may not have done. And so when we you were speaking about time initially, it's about projecting the mind forward towards death, this ⁓ existential concept of it and then coming back. ⁓ but what we notice then phenomenologically is how it brings up that anxiety. It is this anxiety that the free will lies in of how you choose to react to it. So the authentic man understands that the anxiety is ⁓ is the light in the ocean to go towards, you know, it is that lighthouse that is your path to authenticity, is your path to really living. Whereas sort of the modern life or the inauthentic man ⁓ is pulled towards Denying that anxiety. And one of the other ways of doing it is not just through pills, but by continuingly associating with thought and then just going back into thinking about thinking and about thinking. And sure, you can think about death and the concept of it, but as long as you're not feeling the real anxiety and the impact of it, you're not getting to this next stage. As this is the essence of what you were speaking about then of what ⁓ existentialism really is. It's about just the path to authenticity and the relationship with anxiety and freedom. Is there any other major concepts you'd mentioned before? Collectivism had come up in this as well, also. How does collectivism play a part in this too?
Mtsar: ⁓ that comes up in Heidegger specifically, like it did in Kierkegaard, but the term that Heidegger gave for it is fallenness. You see, in throneness, there's really no choice. We wake up and find ourselves in a world and we didn't elect. There's another feature called facticity that the existentialist used. That we don't choose either. That's just the way the world is configured that we find ourselves in. There's a mother and there's a father. There's families, there's a house I live in, there's a community, right? There's these roads. We drive on the right or we drive on the left. There's a bloody thing called school. It's set up this way. I have no fucking say in it. There's the will of other people. Right? All this facticity is something that I can't do anything about. My height. You know, my class, my caste, all of these things that are sort of just embedded and they're pre-configured. But by the time you get to ⁓ and of course mortality, death, you can't do much about that. But When it comes to fallenness, yeah, this one there's a lot of personal choice. Fallenness is where the volition of man matters. So what you just said there is an excellent summary, right? The fallenness is to say, Well, where do I flee when I want to flee from all this anxiety? There's a ready made place. It's called society, is the mittweld, as it's called in German, right? ⁓ with world. And there is where I find, just like Gustave Le Bon had also written this ⁓ remarkable work, The Crowd, ⁓ which has a I I always put that along with Ayn Rand. I can I can fit that into an existentialism framework, no problem, right? You can do it with Ayn Rand because she talked about values, and you can do it with Gustave Le Bon because he was a he defined what it meant to be ⁓ you know, a slave of the of the ⁓ collective. So the collective life turns out to be the ready made default surrogate. Whoom! If you want to even bring in auto rank, which one day you and I will actually definitely do something on that. But there is this womb like life, which is the perfect place to immerse your sense of identity. And it's been that way actually since prehistoric times. And so that is the default everydayness of the gray one, right? The dasman, not Dasein, who's the being who gives being. proper thought, but the man who goes, I well, I I don't think about that at all. I have other preoccupations like saving the world and solving cancer and raising a family, right, and all all the domestic nonsense. ⁓ just like I said, we flee into the clock of the twelve hours. Well, we flee into domestic and social roles so that we can be less ⁓ less human, so we can be organizational men, so we can be institutionalized, so we can be technical or religious or even metaphysical. There's a lot that goes into that life. It's it's really and and that's why Heidegger's book is quite thick, because he's going to give his own remarkable analysis of all of this cop art. of all of these inauthentic modes, right? He's gonna really try to look at it phenomenologically and ⁓ show you the structure of it, which he does and and how he did it, you know, was the thing that ⁓ shook the world really.
Matty: Mm. I I really I I'm already fascinated by this topic. I I would still like to use this first episode maybe as just keeping a Mac review of what existential is. And so ⁓ let's maybe even just dive into a couple of more of these little sort of ⁓ colloquialisms or or or words he's coined in his work, because then we'll be able to build upon them down the line. One of those that has come out then is Dasign, ⁓ which I'm taking to mean ⁓ the authentic man. Can you speak a bit more about what Heidegger described as a Dasein, and then maybe what what the opposite of Dasein is, what an inauthentic man is. Was there another word for that?
Mtsar: ⁓ yes. the the opposite would be Dasban, the one. Yeah. Das Ban. Just the one. The everyday non entity, the grey, one guy who's indistinguishable from another. His beliefs. Right? You're a gambler, I'm a gambler. ⁓ you know how to work the car, so do I, right? ⁓ you vote for that that one demagogue, so do I. Right? I support the team. Yeah, the every man. Exactly. You know, you drink Pepsi, I drink Coke, it's okay. Right? We go go along to get along.
Matty: Das man the one the one. The Yeah. The everyman. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Mtsar: That kind of being. Now, Dasein as a word is familiar to all Germans. There's nothing mysterious about the actual word itself. But Heidegger, because all it just means is being there, which really means being here in English, being here, being present as an entity in the world. And he used it because of a bigger ⁓ theme, a bigger ⁓ existential theme, which was that you are defined by Heidegger as a being in the world. Right? Being in the world, and those it's a hyphenite hyphenated term. Because he wanted to get away from this metaphysical tradition and this Cartesian, Kantian tradition that put a hard divide between your mind, your consciousness, your selfhood, and the world. Like they're two distinct different things mind inside, the subject, and the objective world outside. Heidegger never was okay with that. ⁓ you know, and he wasn't even okay with it when it was expressed by his own mentor. Edmund Husserl. It's actually one of the reasons that Heidegger broke away from Husserl, you know, later on. There were other reasons, but this was a big one. Because Husserl, he thought, was still caught within this Cartesian tradition. You see, of this sort of ⁓ this kind of removed observer, and then the stuff that's being observed. Heidegger said, no, no, no, we've got this has all got to be thrown out, and he did. But ⁓ Dasein ⁓ then is is this. But to be more specific, as he says in the very first ⁓ paragraphs of Being and Time, the difference that defines Dasein is that Dasein is the only being that can ask the question of being. No animal does it. Right? And actually, well, no, not all human beings even do it, but at least the human being is capable. So he slanted his book in a way that had been completely original. He didn't ask big metaphysical questions about being. He he kind of turned towards that later on in his career. But when he was a young man, this is the approach he took. He said being is too amorphous a concept to really get our minds around. It's slippery, it's amorphous. But one thing we can understand is the being who asks the question of being. That is within, you know, our purview. Maybe we can get a foothold in that. And so what this did was it redefined the human being. No one had ever thought this before. When you summon up the question of being, it automatically raises the question of who's asking the question. And so this was then a great rate ⁓ revolution because it kind of put a f ⁓ if not a complete full stop on the metaphysical tradition, it certainly put a bloody colon on it. Right? Because the metaphysical tradition was all about these big overarching questions about God, reality, supernatural realms, and the substance of things and you know, all of this stuff that didn't really include a living experience of a self. Heidegger just completely chops that and you know. Tunnel visions on the individual's experience, not collective. So Dasein is the being who ⁓ the that the question of being matters. Yeah. The only one who's capable of inquiring. So he said, let's turn from the question of being, which is amorphous and slippery, and start to analyze. It's called design analysis, right? Who is this being? What do we know about the being who asks the question of being? And this the whole philosophical world found absolutely unbelievable. This w ⁓ you know, I probably have I've butchered it, but this was absolutely earth-shattering at the time when it came out. It really stumped everybody from all these other traditions. And some hated it and thought it was just gobbledygoog and obscuration, you know, and others realized its poignancy. That this was not calling for a different kind of ⁓ perception. ⁓ I mean radically. And as I said, philosophers d didn't take to it as much as the great as the artists did. The ports. They We've been doing this all along, but nobody's ever wrote our manifesto. Being in time is really like our manifesto. This is what we've been doing. This is what we're trying to get at. You know.
Matty: Yeah. Mm-hmm. And so when you're speaking about the being who questions being, is this where psychology then comes into it? What was Heidegger's opinion on psychology, which was still probably blossoming around that time, early nineteen twenties, thirties, yeah.
Mtsar: Yes. So he doesn't have much to say about it. And there's interesting reasons why that is, right? And ⁓ it might be because he, like Jean-Paul Sartre, who did talk about it, just believed that the last thing we need in this world is another fucking priesthood. Except that these guys were white coats, whereas the black robes, right, were their black robes. Now we got a thing called psychologist who goes around wearing a white robe. But the function, right, these shrinks, head shrinkers. ⁓ it's doubtful whether we need them and whether they're doing anything that's productive. I think Heidegger had a big question mark about that. ⁓ but but but but on the other side, he was really, really good friends with the people who ⁓ formed you know existential psychology. So those who Go after Heidegger saying, ⁓ he absolutely loathes psychology, don't really have many legs to stand on. It's not completely true. And also he was he visited the great Viktor Frankel in Vienna. Now why would you do that? Right? Victor Frankel is the man who created the philosophy that was going to countermand not only Freud, but Nietzsche and Adler, you know, the will the power merchants. Frankel would come up with an alternative ⁓ theory that is largely based on Heidegger's work about authenticity. And so Heidegger actually makes the trip to go visit the guy. So this is not some hater hater of psychology. He just had his suspicions, but a a greater form of psychology arose, you know, and they ⁓ picked up on an idea that the existentialists had talked about, which was that man was a trinity. Okay, there's the Eigenwelt, which is the inner world of his self, interlocking with the mitwelt, which is the withworld of other people, that would be society and culture. And the Umweld, which is nature, the natural world. But these are three interlocking realities or spheres of operation. And a whole person, an authentic person, must unite these three. Yeah. And so now when you come to therapy, it's very, very different than the Freudian or even the Jungian. You see? There's a different orientation. And this again had an enormous impact. They're still gonna work with this Dasein concept, you know, and they're still gonna look at your immersion in the collective and they're certainly gonna look at your hang ups and anxieties. Of course that'll be huge, right? ⁓ for psychotherapy. But they also have this idea of the of the existential trinity. And on un uninslaved, you know, we've done numerous programs about that.
Matty: Yeah, yeah, they're brilliant. People have gotta sign up and make sure you check those out. ⁓ we'll maybe even leave a link down below to some of those episodes for people to dive into. And so just to make sure I've got this sort of framework right, then we're speaking about existentialism. This is thinking and feeling about existence. One of the main issues that people have to deal with is this relationship to death. So as people start to contemplate it and to really feel it, this creates an anxiety within man. And it's this anxiety that we don't like and which we want to run away from. We have the authentic man who moves towards it. We have the unauthentic man who moves away from it. ⁓ and our freedom sort of lies in which sort of way a man moves towards. One of the ways of for an inauthentic man to become authentic then is understanding this existential trinity and learning how to balance each of these three different spheres of of the self, ⁓ of ⁓ the community and then then of the world around of nature as well too. What were the other main ways that ⁓ Heidegger described maybe how an authentic man can move towards authenticity? 'Cause I'm sure they're they're they're not a hard demarcation and we're both a mixture of both, then we there's probably times in our life where we move towards one or the other or I maybe what's just your your thoughts on that then, really? Yeah.
Mtsar: Well, see, Heidegger was different than Kierkegaard because he wasn't as critical or judgmental at all. He was extremely genteel and urbane, and had also no actual moral philosophy that one can put their finger on, right? And if it's there, it's there more implicitly. He's just not judgmental. When he talks about inauthenticity, he's not judging anyone. Because his from his point of view,
Matty: That's interesting.
Mtsar: Is that it is a default position.
Matty: Yes, that makes sense.
Mtsar: He thinks he thinks that anxiety is bound to cause inauthenticity from the off. It's the first natural knee-jerk reaction. So he doesn't blame people ever. Whereas, you know, some other existentialists, you you get a a little bit more of that, you know, critical eyebrow and that bit of a frown. You don't find that in Heidegger at all. He understands. He's very, very, very, very genteel and urbane in in his manner and his his regards. The human race. It's very hum human about it all. And so his is a gentle coaxing. You know, making the point. That's all. Just make the point. Just show people ⁓ what is what's happening. But if they want to remain within this inauthentic everydayness, go ahead. There's not an ounce of yes, there's no criticism in any of his books. You just can't find it.
Matty: It's your choice.
Mtsar: And this can irritate people because of course the reputation of of the Camus and the John Paul Sartres and the you the Kierkegaards and others is like, yeah, there's a more you know, con condemning the world for its treatment of the outsider and you know and that's all the pop stuff. That's that's fashionable when you're ⁓ making a movie or writing a a novel or something, you know, and it's man against the world. But you don't get any of that in Heidegger at all. He he does it he ⁓ he's writing in a very, very ⁓ neutral sort of st style. Yeah, there's no condemnation. He he takes it for granted that all of this is the default condition that you find yourself in. You're really not to blame. And he just presents this as a a theory without any goad or any guilt, you know.
Matty: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's really fascinating with it. what what sort of perception did Heidegger get at the time when he initially came out with these sort of ideas? Was this welcomed initially into the sort of the establishment or was it here, push back for decades and ⁓ fight your way out?
Mtsar: No, he was made immediately. He became a professor, yeah, he was given his professorship and the ripples of ⁓ his reputation went round. Now he wasn't liked by everybody by any means. And that had to do more with the style of writing. See, back at the time we talked about with John Locke and that crowd, they were writing books this thin. Right? Heidegger was one of the ones that come up with a big thick volume full of the most terse German terms and even these neologisms, making up words and hyphenating other words. And so people just weren't spare. They just went, This is gobbledygook. And and they were really angry and said, How does this man even get his degree? You know, he he's a it's all of obfuscation. He's a con artist, you know. But of course, other people Could read more deeply and were profoundly fascinated. You can't even imagine. And at the school, at Marburg originally and in Freiburg later, corridors were literally jam-packed. You know who? Who by? Not just students of Heidegger, but other teachers. Teachers from the college, his own college, and all the students from other colleges and other classes, other Subjects would crowd in the car door and pin drop silence just to hear his manner of speaking. His his command of the German language and the millifluence and the brilliance of what he was talking about. It was stunning. People were absolutely gobsmacked as he talked about the most mundane things, the tree in the courtyard that nobody notices, the handle on the door that they turn without you noticing it, the glasses on your face, the paper that you write on, the why you're holding the pen and you don't even realize it exists, the tissue you pull from the box that means nothing to you. The table that you and your wife sit sit at and make the greatest decisions of your life in your kitchen is completely unseen. All these things that are invisible by proximity. He brought the world up into people's faces like you know, like Van Gogh had done in his paintings or whatever, like a great artist does, but in a way that through language. And then he would speak about language. And that really, really, really captivated people. He would point out things like ⁓ the German word for thinking, Denkan, Denken, is etymologically equivalent to the word for gratitude, Duncan. Or they say, you know, Dunke. You hear German saying Danke, Dunke. Duncan is thank you or gratitude. Dunken is thinking. So he would he would wax lyrical on the fact that every thought that a man thinks should be an act of gratitude.
Matty: Mm-hmm.
Mtsar: People were floored, they'd never heard anything like this. They were gobsmacked. And the German manner in which he spoke it was absolutely poetic. And then he'd cite the great poets. That's how one of the ways I got into him, you know, from my personal biography, was through German poetry, but we don't have to talk about that. But his his manner of communicating was so captivating.
Matty: Yeah. Yeah. That's unreal, yeah.
Mtsar: You know, ⁓ bringing things that were ⁓ they all knew, they had all read, we all know, but we we don't know. We have not seen it in in such an incredible light. And some people c you know said he was very Taoist. You know, this this is ⁓ books have been written actually, some very excellent books showing that there might have been ⁓ he might have had an interest in in ⁓ Japanese ⁓ philosophy and in ancient Chinese Taoism. Connections have been made by certain scholars, you know. And there's a lot of substance to that, I think. But it doesn't take anything away from his own original thought, because where he goes, the Taoists didn't necessarily go. Yeah.
Matty: Hmm. ⁓ did he mention anything about Hegel's dialectic and his thoughts on that? Is there anything that comes to mind you?
Mtsar: Yeah, these are the kind of things he had no time for. Because remember, he was puncturing a hole in all of these large constructs. You know? But again, as I said, he was very genteel. So when he deconstructed it, he did it in a way like almost a craftsman. There was none of the sledgehammer nonsense. Yes, it was always very sophisticated and sometimes so sophisticated that it's very hard to follow. You don't know is he saying something positive about a teaching or something negative? Is he deconstructing something or is it is it not? W were his critiques, it's quite subtle. That's what ⁓ it takes a long time to really understand him. He wrote critiques of Kant, he wrote critiques of Hegel, but at the same time, you know, you don't know if he's ⁓ See there's a in German thought there's a lot of parallels. Between these thinkers. Yeah. And it all comes out of a kind of an earlier tradition as well. Yeah. Some of the terms that he later used in his sort of later work actually come straight out of Jakob Boma and Meister Eckhart from the bloody fourteenth century. And a and a guy called Angelius Silesius, German mystics. Hundreds of years ago, their work is turning up in Heidegger's later work. He is obviously indebted to two Jewish existential thinkers who preceded him Martin Buber, who be very well known, and Franz Rosenzweig. Who's more unknown? Yeah? He's indebted to Henri Berg's son, the French mathematician and philosopher. And as I said, Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl. ⁓ do you know there's a poet in, I think it is ⁓ England, Jared Manley Hopkins. I forget if he was American or British, I think he was British. And he was a Catholic priest. And he's one of the precursors of of Heidegger. And I'm just giving you a sketch. We have others. So thought doesn't just you know come out of the blue. Even a Heidegger has got his un his ⁓ antecedents, you know, the like you said, the the gi the shoulders of giants that you stand on. So just because he took a philosopher and was able to deconstruct that man's philosophy, he's always putting something in its place. He's not just deconstructing, he you know, which the critical theorists do. Heidegger is putting something of incredible value there where he takes away something. This is the difference. This is the act of a first rate mind, not a third rate mind who knows how to just tear down and leave nothing in its place. Heidegger is very conscientious about things like that. If he critiques something here, he's going to put something scintillating in its place. And that's what makes him different.
Matty: Did he write at all about ⁓ the relationship between Dasman, an authentic man, and religion? How did he think how did he see religion playing into this as well?
Mtsar: Yeah, very good question. And even though he and his wife physically threw down Catholicism, you know, in the twenties, they both his wife was from an aristocratic family and she was a ⁓ I'm not actually sure if she was Catholic or Protestant. I can't tell you which religion she was, but Heidegger was a Catholic. But in any case, both of them both of them gave up on religion in their personal lives, right? So that's usually as far as people go. But I don't think that's enough. So I don't think that Heidegger was religious, but that doesn't make him an atheist. And that's a very strange thing to say. Cause it normally, if somebody's not religious, then they have to be an atheist, right? But I don't think that that that's where Heidegger was. Heidegger saw religion as one way of being showing up. One way. There can be other ways. So he's not against religion. He's just gonna say That when you take the epochs of history In a way that even Hegel did. This might be a small area of agreement between the two thinkers. Being has a way of manifesting in different epochs. And you know something? Part two of being in time, which actually never did get written, wasn't meant to be about exactly what I'm talking about. About the epoch epochal manifestations of being. When he starts turning his mind more from Dasein, right, as the personification of being. And he started looking at being in the broader thing, in the broader context. He actually did start to do that. And he talked about this epochal movement. And in this epochal movement, religion turns out to be one way that the human consciousness gets to understand what being is. And to back this up, he said that the ancient Greeks and their multiplicity of gods, no pantheons. That was another way at the time that being showed up to be understood. And then he moves forward to our age and says, Do you know that thing that you all call technology? That's another way of the way being is showing up. So that doesn't mean a man who's sitting there waving the fists ⁓ and has got some ⁓ bugbear about religion. He's speaking at it from a completely different point of view. So again, an original one. The idea of a god in the sky and all that comes with it, you know, angels and ⁓ supernatural realms, is a way that the human mind, you know, the way that being itself manifested. And this is what's gonna happen epochally. And by the way, there's and the strange thing almost ⁓ you know, fulfill your previous question, is that it has echoes of fucking Hegel in it. So this is what this is like
Matty: I was just about to ask, ⁓ yeah. Well what what what is being? Is is this just another word for geist of spirit? Is that what he saw it as? Or is it a totally different concept? Yeah, yeah. ⁓ that's good.
Mtsar: No. No. No. No. Now this of course then is what I had to try and deal with in my book, right? Because these are the some of the areas now amazingly, to find the answer to that, you have to really go back to Plato, somebody that Heidegger's also meant to have critiqued and not particularly liked. He has a penchant more for Heraclitus and Parmenides, you know, these pre Socratic philosophers. And he's got a little bit more worrying. And let me give you one anecdote as to why that is. Before we just hold on to that question what you asked. What was it, by the way, about religion? No. It was what what did you just ask?
Matty: ⁓ that last one was what is being? ⁓ and then it is it's it's spirit, is it guys, but ⁓ I'll I'll keep it here at the side. Yeah, I'll let you go into the plate a bit there. Yeah, yeah.
Mtsar: Right. Keep that to the side for just a second, because I want to pre-cuse that by saying that ⁓ the reason why, the mega reason why Heidegger was against his one of the big platforms on which he stood that got him attention is why you're antiplatonist, why you are against the metaphysical tradition, why you make these large encompassing statements about overthrowing metaphysics. And the reasons are actually quite simple. It's because you see. In order to reconcile the ⁓ conflict between Parmenides and Heraclitus, who came before him, Plato came up with ⁓ the well known philosophy that talks about ⁓ higher realms where there is these forms, right? Perfect forms, and then a lower world, which are kind of where we're at, which is kind of shadowy and mostly illusionary. But still sort of articulated to the higher world. It's just that it's Maya. It's what the you know the Eastern people call the Maya. So Plato came for this split world. Now the Gnostics would pick up on this later on as well. And if you really if anyone wants to really understand Heidegger, they've got to think in as much anti Gnostic terms as you can possibly get. Know your Gnosticism through and through, and then think of the complete counterposition, and you got Martin Heidegger standing there. But getting back to this platonic thing, the divide between the higher world of perfect forms, you know, mathematical, geometric, whatever, the truth, and then this kind of lower shadowy world that kind of, yeah, it reflects the the the perfect world, but it's it's it's basically imperfect. This is the heart of you know what the metaphysical tradition. But of what what Heidegger's point was is that the moment that you do this, it gives the right. To the human being to then think of the lower world as something inferior. It's inbuilt. Plato didn't probably even mean it this way, but this is the end result. This is what it actually means to the human being and his will to power. Then I can control. It doesn't matter what I do to this largely illusionary world, which includes my own body, which includes the natural world, animals, and just everything, all objects. So I can move them around. Look, look at the freedom it gives my polymorphous will. Now that this metaphysical philosophy has been installed, the perfect world is up there, unchangeable with God. And my world down here, I can turn into a plaything and let my will run wild.
Matty: I see.
Mtsar: And I can be the conqueror. I can be the imperial force that organizes and if necessary destroys. Right? So this was the tradition that Heidegger says w took philosophy down a wrong road right from the beginning. He calls it, you know, the road of error. Centuries and centuries of error, not philosophy at all, not the real thing. The real thing was back before, you know, Plato, but that got sabotaged.
Matty: I see.
Mtsar: So this is the larger commentary. That's why he was against the metaphysical tradition, because it lets the will to power, Nietzsche's will to power, run wild. It actually gives it the mandate, it gives it the raison d'etre of why man can be the will to power, the power drive, the Faustian power drive. Because nothing in the world is anything but an imperfect form, giving you the perfect right to put your stamp on it, to own it, to turn it into a resource, a standing resource. To order it about. Yeah. But back to your question. Funny enough, in Plato's Timaeus might be the secret of the of your original question. Because they Plato talks about a thing called the Korah, K-H-O-R-A. And Heidegger talks about being.
Matty: Mm.
Mtsar: Now personally, I don't see any difference between the two. You know, you gotta do a little bit of ⁓ you know, distillation, but not much. So anti Platonic as Heidegger was, he recognizes Plato as a great philosopher who had already put his finger on what being is. But to explain it to our audience, you've got to look at it phenomenologically and not abstractly. Everything that exists in our planet and all around us has a background. Right? If I have a cup here, then the background of that cup is the table that's sitting on. Right? The background of the table is the carpet. And and and the background of the carpet is the room. And the background of the room is the house. And then the garden. And the garden then is of the county, right? Or the state that I'm living in, you know? And then that's of the country, which is of the nation, which is of the planet. And then the planet goes to the cosmos or th the solar system, which then goes to the the galaxy and the cosmos, right? So everything has a background. But what Plato is asking is what is the background of all backgrounds? Where does this thing lead? So the metaphysical tradition did have this question that Heidegger later picks up again. What is the background of all backgrounds? So our imagination really is, you know, limited. It can't go there. Remember we already talked about the limits of reason? Well, here's another one. I told you there was other ones, and here's one. I I can think about the corners of the universe and that's all because I can't go there physically. I don't know what right and now they're talking even about an expanding universe. Expanding into what? That has no answer. And even if there was a what, then doesn't that have to have a background? And the philosophers don't it background, they call it the ground of being. What is the grund, right? In German, grund. What is the ground of all being? Well, look, people like Meister Eckhart said there isn't any ground. It's called the unground. That just threw people for a loop. Yeah. The unground, yeah. God is ungrounded. They try to fit it into the religious context and made a total mess of it. The best they could do is it's just it's ungrounded.
Matty: The undrind, yeah, yeah, the script, yeah. Hmm.
Mtsar: So there's actually a philosophical concept called the ungrun. Of course, later philosophers just had to throw it out because this is another one of those things that we talk about Locke and Kant before in the beginning. Well, this is another one. This doesn't lead us anywhere. The mind can't conceive of it, the mind can't tell you what is the ultimate background, the Korah. But one thing you can say about the Korah everything that you do know and see, the beings, the entities and objects around you.
Matty: Yeah. Fascinating.
Mtsar: Couldn't exist without it. So it is the unknowable thing that gives you the knowable. It is the being that allows other beings to show up, but you don't know what it is. In fact, the very showing up of the beings Occludes the thing that gives them birth. They're in the way of your perception. You cannot see the horizon of all horizons. You cannot even conceive of it, right? But it is the is the mother of all. Korah actually kind of, you know, they they referred to it, I don't know if the word means it, but it certainly had the connotation of womb. Yeah. But the main thing that ⁓ perplexed these philosophers is that we cannot conceive of it. So if you can't conceive of something, then isn't it equivalent to nothingness? I mean it is. So the concept of zero is the Korah. It's something that you have made a symbol for, and even that is somewhat inappropriate because as soon as you make a symbol of it, it's a something. But this thing is not a something. This gives rise to some things, to things, but is not a something in itself. Well, that's it. The reason is already fuck, you don't need Kant, you don't need Locke. And you need you don't need any other ⁓ you know, of manifestation of this of the limits of reason. Fuck this one will do. And it's found in fl in Plato. So Heidegger is picking this up in his own way, and I believe that and or at least I argue in the book and people can, you know, argue me wrong, I believe that the the being he's talking about is the Korah. So it's a platonic concept. And he's just resurrecting it. No doubt, you know, other Heideggerans will go, No, you're wrong, but I don't see how I'm wrong at all.
Matty: Mm. And yeah, no well. I'll see if there's any other little things. Yeah, there's some other concepts maybe we'll we'll go into a little bit more to get more details, and then probably in the next episode we'll dive into like maybe ⁓ a larger structure of putting them all together. ⁓ some of the other ones we haven't spoken about is maybe this will to power. What did he say about the will to power, Heidegger? What was his commentary on Nietzsche?
Mtsar: Well, this is probably for me one of the most important things. And I deal with that in chapter nineteen. Briefly, Mike, but because you could you could write a whole other book on it, right? But the idea is this, and you asked earlier about ⁓ the role of psychology. And this is where the philosophy and the psychology get the closest, what ⁓ what I'll say now, right? And people will see that this is an area where they almost fuse together. They're very, very parallel. But it has to do with Nietzsche again. And this time I counterpose it to Viktor Frankel's teachings of the will to meaning in the following way. ⁓ after remember what I wrote in the chapter 19. Now, like we said, the new science of Darwin helped Freud, Schopenhauer, and the materialists. Settle on the idea that man is basically bestial in his origins. And Nietzsche, right? Yeah. So Schopenhauer, Freud and Nietzsche share this in common. And it was from Darwin that they're looking. They're taking their ⁓ guide from him, their direction. Man is either a bestial being, a victim of the bestial will to power, or you can slightly nudge that aside and make way for the sexual theory of Freud. But basically it all wraps up. To be the same. Victor Frankel comes along and is you know troubled by that and of course comes up with his own theories, and I've read them both. And so although Frankel himself does not say this in so many words, the way I look at it is this. And that is that actually the basis of man is not the will to power, as Nietzsche thought, it's the will to meaning that Frankel, you know, proposes. And I agree with that. But the thing that I, you know, I bland Heidegger here now, bring in Heidegger and the psychologists, to say that the trouble is why we're not actively working from this will to meaning is because it raises anxiety. The anxiety you and I have just talked about. So this is a kind of a you know an existential theory that fits perfectly when you join the pieces up. You we don't act from the will to meaning, even though it is the basic drive and the basic instinct, because it awakens this anxiety. No less one than says, fight the crowd, fight the world. Don't go along like everybody else. Right. So what this means is that the will to power all is not the basic drive, but it is the default one. that we go to instead of like we compensate. Now this is known as sublimation when one thing transforms into another. And this is why w the whole human race automatically chooses to default to the will to power rather than the will to meaning. And why they're addicted to it, can't get off of it. Now, Frankel is the closest one to realize that this is the case. And he had his own conclusions to make, you know, because he was a psychologist who said we've got to shift this. Because obviously, from what we're saying, there's going to be an inner conflict. Right? Just from this alone. Because people who default to the will to power ⁓ have this other voice within them, the will to meaning, that's going to be in conflict. Right? So just by doing this, just by defaulting to the false will or the secondary will, you're putting yourself in inner conflict. And somebody like Frankel is going to say, isn't that the cause of everything you see in the world or the pathology? Which then calls for a therapy that's going to have to try and deal with this? And that's exactly what his life project was. All very valid. And he the he met Heidegger, he knew Heidegger. In fact, a lot of his work is probably based very much on what these existentialists were doing. I'm sure of it. He admits it that it it was the case. He is considered to this day, if you look him up in an encyclopedia, an existential psychologist, Viktor Frankel. Because there can be no doubt about it. But that's not where the story ends for me. Yes, we've got the anxiety, but the thing that Nietzsche picked up on and what the world has understood is that when the will to power dominates, It does it it ⁓ it allows us by going towards the will to power instead of the will to meaning, the anxiety we just spoke about that arises when you at even attempt, you see, to be guided by the will to meaning is slightly lowered. It's not obliterated by any means, but it's lowered. That's why we do it. Otherwise there wouldn't be any will to power and everything would be fine. But to lower the existential anxiety, ⁓ that you know, that the will to meaning arises in a soul. We default to the will to power. And then we find out that the will to power is very useful. Look at it what it does, it crushes our enemies for us. It pushes us through the world. It's ⁓ it gets our ambitions met. It gets our desires met. Hey, this is kind of cool, I like it. Right? We're like, you know, t infants. W with our plastic swords running around, breaking up toys and smashing things. This is great fun. So we also get this kind of ⁓ results from the will to power, and this is what convinces us to continue using it. But what Nietzsche never saw, and what under undermines his entire philosophy is this. Because the deeper part of ourselves, right, that the will to meaning ⁓ speaks from, the conscience, knows that we're doing something wrong. It floods us with a kind of existential guilt. So wait a minute. We thought we were ⁓ escaping the anxiety, and we were, but now we get this big massive dollop of guilt. For doing so. So tell me how that's a win. It would be a win if the anxiety lowered and that was the end of the story. But because we have a deeper sense of soul, something is wrong with us, bloody well guilt tops up what we lost with the anxiety. So th so Nietzsche is a buffoon. Because Nietzsche tries to present this as the the basis of man, as as the as the ⁓ p primal you know condition and drive of man, and he's telling you to go for it with gusto. He decorates it all with this idea of the superman and everything, to make it all shiny and you know attractive. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. If you break it down like the way I'm doing, I'm sorry. That decoration, no, that doesn't work. The person is no better off. And Frankel is the one then that's right. You should have gone with the will to meaning all along, because the actual will to power that allegedly lowered the anxiety, yes, but it did. It did so, yes. But it then arose another vice, which is all the guilt. So in the end of the day, you're no better off. So the will to power is a joke. The will to power cannot be seen by any philosopher of sense to be the right way for a man. Right there, it's it's killed off. Absolutely wrong path.
Matty: Mm. And so Mm-hmm. And so then you would you would maybe change ⁓ Nietzsche's very famous tightrope of man as ⁓ as a being from, you know, animal to the superman. ⁓ you would maybe swap that with the Das Man and becoming Dasine, you know, from the inauthentic man, this tightrope towards ⁓ the authentic man. And part of what that rope is made of is is the will to meaning. That that that's essentially it is. Yeah. And so
Mtsar: You know? Very good point. Now we just on Enslaved, I just did a show called The Origins of War, where we expanded on what we're talking about now to show you just how this has affected the human race. I really recommend people go to that. But we'll keep it short here and just say that this contract negates Nietzsche. And if you can think out there how many people teach Nietzsche, how many people are sworn to Nietzsche's philosophy, you know, and how many podcasts are dedicated exclusively to Nietzsche and all of this.
Matty: Right.
Mtsar: You know, we've done several podcasts that show that it it's it's weaker than you think. And here is another I I I take this as an absolute proof that it is weaker. But see, if you talk about have you heard if you tell people have they heard of Freud, Darwin, Schopenhauer, and ⁓ Nietzsche, they all go yes. But if you say, Have you heard of Victor Frankel? They What who who are you talking about? Yeah, this is the danger, this is the problem. You've got to know the ⁓ counter points and know how to apply them properly. So yeah, chapter nineteen, I explain this. They show you how that's a just a a road to nowhere. You can cut cut all the criticisms out and just shrink it down to this. That ⁓ the person who histrionically was thinking in Darwinian terms about man just being this, you know, sophisticated ape. Yeah. This doesn't hold up at all. It doesn't hold up. So it it's pretty much ⁓ a philosophy that has has to be deconstructed actually. And again, put something in its place, what what you can. If you've read your Viktor Frankl's and your Heidegger's you can. You can actually do that. So I stand firm on that point.
Matty: It sort of reframes anxiety in a very interesting way. ⁓ people think of anxiety as maybe a negative emotion. ⁓ funnily enough, it sounds like it's maybe a precursor where if you mix it with courage ⁓ and with free choice, it ⁓ transmutes itself into meaning and this is what the source of meaning is, is anxiety. ⁓ is maybe an interesting way of looking at it. But maybe maybe not the ⁓ yeah. Any any thoughts on that, Michael? Maybe first.
Mtsar: Yes. Yes. You see, if if Frankel is right and the will to meaning is the basic ⁓ drive, but we then refuse for some reason to live in authentically, why should you be at peace? Why should things be all a balance and harmony? Wouldn't you expect to be off kilter? Wouldn't you expect to be flooded with negative emotions? I would expect that. If you're doing something unjust. Same thing later on in Heidegger. If you're being a member of the crowd and you're fleeing from mortality and finitude, fleeing from your authentic possibilities and diving into the fucking anonymous crowd, why should you be at peace there? Wouldn't that be something abnormal? You should never have a minute of rest. That would be more consistent with the moral universe that the person who makes those decisions and makes those choices should never be at peace. Well they're not. And I would I I I look at that as favorable. You shouldn't be right if you bought a lie, why should you be at peace? Well, if you've killed the self, you're gonna tell me that now I'm living in harmony like these fucking new agers and what have you? No. If you've done something so disastrous like self-murder, don't tell me that then you're gonna live your life in peace. There should be something off. There should be ⁓ something imbalanced, deeply so. Those imbalances to me are not something that wants to be, you know, mollified and bleached. Or drugged out of existence, those things are precious. Those, as we said earlier, are the catalyst to real authentic change. And this is what caught on. People realize this. But unfortunately our world has gone back backwards, right? They've gone back to the medication. They've gone back to the artificial happiness.
Matty: And maybe even to close it up then for this initial episode in the existentialism, is there any other fundamental concepts you think we haven't mentioned so far you'd like to maybe give an overview upon, or is there anything that comes to mind there? I think some of the things we've Do I mean to go over what we've touched on or is ⁓ is there anything that comes to mind immediately? Yeah.
Mtsar: No, no. No, I think we've done pretty good. I mean, this is a labyrinthine subject. And we can do other things on it from other angles. I I always love doing that. You know, but as I said, this is fresh in my mind because ⁓ the book came out out last year, so I've been taking this extended rest, letting it consolidate. Very happy the way it came out. ⁓ the the anecdotes that you read are from the introduction. But if people go to my notes page on the Substack folder, there's a couple of articles not connected to the book that are there too. You know, before the book starts, ⁓ that are very, very good. Maybe we can even discuss some of those. They they pertain to the same content, ⁓ but from a slightly different angle. Because you are dealing with the psychology, but you're also dealing with the art. You're also dealing with ⁓ Subject of technology, which we haven't touched on, you know, and the sciences, scientism would factor in here. ⁓ poetry and art, you know, there's there's lots of things that one can explore. But I just particularly love the philosophical tie-ins. I think this is how ⁓ it started to intrigue me. ⁓ I got into it through poetry originally, but I also got into it in terms of ⁓ Gnosticism. Remember earlier we mentioned the Pl Plato thing about the divide between the higher and lower levels? In the eighties I'd been into Gnosticism, and so when I got into Heidegger, I started to see what he was saying impacted the Gnostic idea that I started to have serious doubts about anyway. So there's a tie in there. Then also I'm a personalist. I wrote a book on personalism, the philosophy of personalism. It's called Disciples of the Mysterium. And in that book I argue that existentialism actually terminates in personalism. You know. Yeah, ⁓ that's the the end result, personalism. Because at the end of the day, you see, if you think about it, we've talked about authenticity. But who is to actually say if another person is authentic or not? Do you see how ridiculous that is?
Matty: Yeah, of course.
Mtsar: There's only one person who knows if you're living authentically or not, and that's yourself. The person who's gonna comment to you on it means nothing because how do you know they're living authentically? This is the one area where somebody's Opinion, right? Somebody's ⁓ conclusion and prescription is absolutely meaningless. Their only concern here is whether they're living authentically. No one on the planet can decide for you or even tell you that you are in fact living authentically. It's a totally moot point. So with authenticity and the question of comes this extraordinary nuance. And Heidegger knew all about this. That's why I told you he was very genteel. There's only one person, and that's Dasein. Who can tell whether Dasein is living authentically or not? But that can be summarized as personalism. So based on that and other amusings, I link the two things, existentialism and personalism, very, very closely, just like Gabriel Marcel did. He was a personalist. You know, and this is something that also, this is another one of the threads that got me in. It was poetry, it was Gnosticism, and it was personalism that made me, you know. Like you said, th you're fascinated by the subject, so was I. And it was for these three reasons. They were dovetailing into existentialism. 'Cause I found, you know, what I was looking for there.
Matty: Yeah, yeah, brilliant.
Mtsar: Yeah. On all cases. And we and we can definitely explore some of this later on as well.
Matty: Yeah, absolutely. I I think I'll wrap it up there for this episode as an introduction. Is there any other final little things you want to touch on, Michael, or is this sound like a good endpoint for you?
Mtsar: No, I think we've done really great. We got to lots of the points, yeah. That we should get especially with the background. We threw in a lot of names there that were again these giants that ⁓ you know, came in the earlier periods. I always like to have, you know, an interview where we get to that. So we did that. And then we also talked about the key precepts. So Yeah, I think we did a great job. Thanks to you. Brilliant questions.
Matty: Yeah, no, that's super then. So I will we'll wrap it up for there then this week. All so ⁓ thank you very much again, Michael. I really appreciate your insight into this. anybody has any questions, please leave it down below. ⁓ you can find Michael's book on ⁓ existentialism in the sub stack. And of course, go over to Unslave to check out the other shows you've done. Again, the links will be down below. Thank you everybody for stopping by. Please like and subscribe. And we'll see you all next time. Thank you. Cheers, Michael.
