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Gordon Marino on Existentialism and Authenticity (Episode 48)
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Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
In this conversation, Michael Tremblay speaks with Gordon Marino. Gordon is a professor of philosophy at St. Olaf's College and a specialist in existentialism.
In this conversation, they speak about existentialism and in particular the work of Kierkegaard. They discuss the idea of authenticity and human's capacity for self-deception. Towards the end of the podcast, Gordon's experience as a boxing coach and how his athletic journey relates to existentialism.
This podcast will of value to anyone who wants to learn more about approaches to philosophy as a way of life that differ from Stoicism.
(01:41) What Is Existentialism?
(04:37) Authenticity
(08:26) Emotions in Existentialism
(12:18) How Should We Live?
(14:07) Wait - Who Is Kierkegaard?
(25:48) The Role of Faith
(30:16) Obedience
(30:54) Sport and Coaching
***
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Transcript
Introduction and Tough Love in Boxing
00:00:00
Speaker
One of the things I got from my boxing coaching mentor, Gordon Hawkins, was that the loving thing to do a lot of times is to tell people shit they don't want to hear, Matt, you know?
Introduction to Stoa Conversations Podcast
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome to Stoa Conversations. In this podcast, Caleb Ontiveros and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week we'll share two conversations, one between the two of us and the other will be an in-depth conversation with an expert.
Existentialism with Gordon Marino
00:00:26
Speaker
In this conversation, I speak with Gordon Marino. Gordon is a professor of philosophy at St. Olaf's College and a specialist in existentialism. Existentialism is a different way of approaching philosophy as a way of life. In this conversation, we speak about existentialism and in particular the work of Kierkegaard. We discuss the idea of authenticity and human's capacity for self-deception.
Boxing and Existential Themes
00:00:49
Speaker
We also talk about the separation between what we know we should do and our own actions and how to bridge that gap.
00:00:56
Speaker
Towards the end of the podcast, we discuss sport, in particular Gordon's experience as a boxing coach and how his athletic journey relates to existentialism. This podcast should be of value to anyone who wants to learn more about approaches to philosophy as a way of life that differ from stoicism. Here is Gordon Marino.
00:01:15
Speaker
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Stoa. I'm joined today by Gordon Marino, Professor of Philosophy at
Core Themes of Existentialism
00:01:20
Speaker
St. Olaf's College and Specialist in Existentialism. Hi, Gordon. Thanks for coming on. Nice to be here. Thanks for having me. I think it's pretty exciting to get to talk to a specialist in existentialism. And I think there's a lot of value to add to people who are interested in, so this isn't interested in philosophy as a way of life. So we'll just start off with a really simple question. What is existentialism?
00:01:40
Speaker
Existentialism is really unified by a bunch of different themes, so everyone has a different roster of who's on the Existentialism. If you look at anthologies, including my own, they're very different kinds of rosters. So I always think of it in terms of a bunch of themes
Kierkegaard's Philosophical Insights
00:01:56
Speaker
that unite them. For example, limits of rationality, individual choice,
00:02:03
Speaker
freedom, addressing emotions like, I'm a specialist in care card, addressing, and he directly addresses emotions like, and moods like anxiety and depression, and that sort of thing. What's about first person perspective, which I think is really, you get it, you certainly get a care card that it's thinking about life from first person perspective. So in one of his books, he
00:02:25
Speaker
And one of the pseudonyms that he wrote in the shooting name is one of the pseudonyms that obviously written books on his classics is the concluding unscientific postscript. And in that book he lists all the facts about death, right? Of the objective facts are about a page and a half.
00:02:42
Speaker
You know, if you take certain sulfur or whatever it is, if the sulfur gas shall die, the hero dies in fifth act, on and on and on. And then he goes, but none of this tells me what death means to me, what my own death means. Right? So he draws this distinction between kind of an objective knowledge and
00:03:01
Speaker
having this personal, what things personally mean to him. And I think that's true of a lot of some other existential thinkers. And that's how the question of the meaning of life comes up. The question of what's the meaning?
Connecting Abstract Ideas to Real Life
00:03:16
Speaker
Facts as opposed to meaning. Those are some of the main themes of existentialism.
00:03:21
Speaker
Yeah, great. Could you speak a little bit more about the first-person perspective and I guess maybe some other examples and how that differs from, I guess, facts and what the difference is there? Yeah, so here in this context, Kierkegaard asks, again, he says, I know all these facts about death, right? No matter mortal, I'm a man. They're from when I die, blah, blah, blah, right? Objective facts. But that doesn't tell me what death means to me.
00:03:46
Speaker
Right? So he raised this question about the meaning of what certain ideas mean, what they mean to you.
Existentialism and Personal Crises
00:03:52
Speaker
So one of his, a point of great emphasis in Kierkegaard is as many the greatest is emphasis on inwardness, on appropriation. He says that
00:04:00
Speaker
He feels that people have appropriated things in a very limited way and they don't have this passion or relationship to their ideas. So, I mean, look at our own age, right? You think you're a fighter for social justice if you have a like on Facebook or something or either on Twitter, right? So he's very much concerned with our internal relationship or passion or relationship to our beliefs.
00:04:21
Speaker
So, yeah, you can ask yourself sometimes, like, okay, I'm for all, all for justice, and you might say to yourself, well, really, what if I sacrificed in this cause? I really, or is it just beautiful, certainly, nonsense chatter. So your book, The Extentialist Survival Guide, How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age, does this relate to this idea of authenticity, this connection between your identity or what, you know, you say you believe in justice, but you're not really sacrificing anything?
00:04:49
Speaker
You know, in that book I try to begin every chapter with a personal story because I think that you can't relate your abstractions.
00:04:57
Speaker
to life, to examples, and then there's something missing. And that's also something I find in both, certainly in Care Card is,
Kierkegaard on Faith and Spirituality
00:05:03
Speaker
whenever he gives an abstract idea, there's idea, and always he'll come up with a fairy tale or something to illuminate it. And at least in my background and philosophy, there's so little emphasis on style, and it's all on kind of a jargon-laden and heavy.
00:05:19
Speaker
incomprehensible at times, as you might know. And so I think it's really important to be able to relate your abstractions to something concrete. And that was one of the things I tried to do in my book. My son who's not ever said some of these examples are too concrete, Dad, cut them out. We'll go into that part.
Kierkegaard's Communication and Ethics
00:05:42
Speaker
I don't think you want to say that.
00:05:45
Speaker
Well, that's one thing I wanted to ask you about was, you know, in the book you do relate it to these concrete examples and you talk about existentialism affecting your own life. You talk about it, you know, pulling you back from the rope and cross beam. And I was wondering if you have some examples or you wanted to pick one from your own experience about existentialism has impacted your life. Well, certainly Kicker did immensely as a, right in the book, I was a basket case after I break up in early marriage and literally
00:06:15
Speaker
After about two years, people thought I was a goner, and I picked up one of Picker's books in a coffee shop when I was waiting for a therapy appointment.
00:06:26
Speaker
couple of things he helped with immediately were, as I started to study him, was the fact that suffering is not a stench, you know, like if you have anxiety or depression, it's not a stench, it's something you can do with dignity and actively, right? It's something to go through actively. So he gave some dignity to that whole experience of a mental breakdown that was a bit hospitalized and quite a bit of trouble. And it also helped me become aware of the fact that
00:06:52
Speaker
If you aspire to be a good loving human being, it's easy to do that when you're getting accepted to med school or whatever, you just had your novel published and everything's all the way to grade. Well, try doing it when a hammer comes down in life, which it does, and it will. That's when you really see
00:07:17
Speaker
He talks about it as a crisis to where you really see
Self-Deception and Personal Growth
00:07:21
Speaker
with the underlying structures like so. He really helped me understand that it was important to be able to reach through the likes of anxiety and depression. Now, for him, they also have... We live in a... Not to carry on too long, but we live in a very medicalizing society, obviously. I mean, one book that I
00:07:39
Speaker
but as good as the disappearance of sadness, where all sadness is classified as depression. Beyond just encouraging us to be able to deal with these emotions, Kiergaard also claims they have a certain cognitive significance. Unlike other philosophers, he's saying that there's a cognitive content. These feelings are very important. It's an anxiety for Kiergaard and all the epigones that ripped them off, that we really understand that we're free.
00:08:08
Speaker
Right? And so what he says is he recognizes how dangerous things are, he can be handled wrong with, but he also says it's a blessing because it's how we appropriate our own freedom. Is that clear? Sat? Got that idea?
00:08:23
Speaker
So one thing you hit on is this cognitive content to negative emotions. And this was a thing you mentioned in the book as well, which is that you can use negative emotions as conveyors of self understanding was the quote, which I thought was really, really nice. And that's the thing that I
Stoicism, Emotions, and Boxing
00:08:35
Speaker
talk about in stoicism as well a lot, which is this idea that
00:08:52
Speaker
I think I see a connection there.
00:08:58
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with you. There is this agreement on that, on the importance of dealing with emotions and being aware of what you feel. A lot of philosophers talk about self-knowledge, and heck, as though you can have self-knowledge without knowing what you feel. As I understand, the Stoics, they might have some, tell you something about where your heart is, but they're still regarded as the enemy to some extent. Whereas for Kierkegaard, they're revelatory in a different way. They're positive things. They're a blessing.
00:09:25
Speaker
A Kiergaard, you know, he says to learn to be action the right way is the greatest lesson in life. So I think there's more emphasis on Kiergaard on the positive and intrinsic nature of it, right? Yeah, I'm super curious about that. So what about a negative emotion would be revelatory or positive?
00:09:43
Speaker
Okay, so anxiety, again, you experience choice and freedom. You experience that you're a spirit, you know, that you can do either A, B, or C, right? So there's that out there. That's positive, right? He says, animals and angels don't have anxiety. I think he was wrong about animals, but I don't know about angels.
Faith, Authenticity, and Societal Norms
00:10:03
Speaker
Or depression, the sense of connection with other people. It can certainly make you more empathic, but it also
00:10:10
Speaker
is a way of appropriating your vulnerability in life, which is not something Stokes like. They don't talk about which is a God term today. I hate to carry on about it too much. They hear too much about the big window of virtuous being and making yourself vulnerable, but depression can tell you something about that, right? So those are some positive lessons that can come out of that.
00:10:35
Speaker
So there's some facts about human existence which carry pain, but also a certain degree of beauty. And if you close yourself off to feeling anxiety at choices or potential, you're closing yourself off to like experiencing your own freedom, something like this. Something like that, I hate to be blasphemous, but for Kiergaard, this is very much connected with faith for him, you know?
00:11:01
Speaker
And that was another thing he certainly helped with. And I thought, believe in Jesus or whatever. It was like Santa Claus stuff until I encountered him and he helped. Because he acknowledged how faith is this collision with reason. The understanding, radical collision, that's choice. He helped me. It's almost like he identified the elephant in the room. So for him, anxiety and depression
00:11:28
Speaker
would have spiritual decisions. For example, I mean, if we probably need to secularize this today to delcurate it down and sweeten it up, but if you're offended by the idea of God, Kierkegaard would say, well, look, the thing that you should be anxious about most in life is what kind of human being you are.
00:11:47
Speaker
You know, not everything else in life is subject to chance. And with my students, I always try to get them to think about, you know, what kind of person do you want to be? What's your goal as a person? Because, of course, naturally, at that age, they're all thinking about, what am I going to do with my career? Well, you can think about that, but also, so if a care guard, it's the fear of the right thing. Fear of being a jerk, that's how I put it a lot, more than losing a little bit of your happiness quotient.
00:12:15
Speaker
Do the existentialists have
Philosophy and Boxing: Teaching and Coaching
00:12:17
Speaker
an answer to that question of how do you want to live? Or is it more a push for you to think critically about it for yourself? Again, it depends on who you're thinking of here, right? As I mentioned in the book, there's kind of two models of what it is to be the self. One, you're born with a certain self that you try to realize for a caregiver.
00:12:41
Speaker
being a faithful, loving person, good person, right? And no matter how much you achieve, if you become the big shot, you're a billionaire by 30 because you invented some app. That's not it, man. He thinks, even, one of the cool things is his claim is that he's a great success kid, that, you know, thank God for all that stuff. He says some of those things lead to a certain forgetfulness about what a real task in life is, and that's to be,
00:13:11
Speaker
good human beings, right? Now, the other ones, like you take nature and Sartre, and you might know more about this time, but it seems to me they're kind of, and they're showing in line, I think they have the self as this painting you make. Your actions, surlocations, ensemble of actions, so it's more of a creation. So how do you choose between those views of the self? One that you're born with?
00:13:35
Speaker
one of the self of self-creation? Well, what do you think Kieger would say? Either or. Leave the faith time. Because you're not going to wait for philosophy to settle the army. You know what I mean? Like, time doesn't stop. You talked about Kierkegaard and the role of faith, which
00:13:53
Speaker
When I think of existentialism, I think of, you know, this, this sense of like meaning post-God, right? Like this, this view of, of constructing yourself, you know, if there is no inherent meaning from a God. So I want to dig into that faith question with Kierkegaard, but maybe if we can back up a bit and if you provide some, who was Kierkegaard, some kind of biographical information. We could have started with that. Yeah, we should have.
00:14:17
Speaker
make more sense. Yeah, so Kiergaard was born in 1813, lived until 1855, and he was born in Copenhagen, wrote in Danish,
Building Trust and Authenticity in Coaching
00:14:30
Speaker
and he had most other people of his intellect were written in German or something. He was born to a very wealthy family. His father was a shepherd in Newtland, but he came into Copenhagen at 12.
00:14:46
Speaker
amassed a fortune at a time when the Danish economy was falling apart, so very weird stuff like that. Rarely, if ever, does he identify himself with philosophy, even though he's been appropriated by philosophy departments. He was very critical of academic philosophy, and more about him, as Lewis Mackey put it, a kind of poet, even more of a theological sort.
00:15:10
Speaker
What were kind of his major works? And I suppose this idea of faith, where does that kind of come to a head in his work? The issue of faith is throughout all his works. As I mentioned earlier, in his classics like Farron Trembling, The Sickest Son of Death, The Philosophical Fragments were
Starting with Existentialism
00:15:29
Speaker
all written in pseudonyms, okay? At the same time that he published a book under a pseudonym,
00:15:34
Speaker
which I take to be, and each synonym, I think there's a Kierkegaard industry. There's huge debates about the meaning of synonyms, right? I think each synonym embodies a different light perspective, right? So, but at the same time, if you publish a book under synonym, you would also publish another, what do you call it, edifying literature under his own name. Usually they were a day apart. Like Kant in some way, he thought that our knowledge of
00:16:00
Speaker
ethics of right and wrong were universally distributed, right? You don't need an ethics expert to tell you what to do. My sense is that he thought that if the elite had an edge there too, had an advantage there would be an unfair world. So he thought that because a knowledge of ethics and to some extent certain aspects of Christianity were universally distributed
00:16:27
Speaker
There was no longer an object to be communicated, right? What needed to be communicated was to help bring the person, right? So there's no object of knowledge. You and I both know
00:16:40
Speaker
have this knowledge of right and wrong, I don't need to tell you about it. You don't need more information, right? So he said that transforms the whole project of communication so that what you're doing is trying to bring a person to a more authentic, although it is the word, relationship with their beliefs. So in that context, he comes up with what I think is one of his most interesting contributions of this doctrine of indirect communication. He says, look, you go back and
00:17:10
Speaker
There's two things I can blather on and tell. Boxing a kick, or so. Oh, I'm sorry. We'll get to boxing at the end. Oh, well. Well, I'm sorry to carry on here, but, um. No, it's great. He said, look, philosophers don't think about having thought about the issue of communication since Plato in the seventh letter, right? About whether or not to write.
00:17:31
Speaker
You know what I mean? All I do is I hand you these huge treatises and you go, and even today, there's not emphasis on style. Sometimes I read some of these guys, I was like, what are you like? Some grandiose narcissist, they just don't care whether or not people understand it, irritates me, and Kierkegaard started to give some serious thought to how to communicate.
00:17:54
Speaker
Okay, so I love this. This is really interesting. So the idea is that ethical intuition is quite strong. We all generally have a good picture of what it is to be a good person and to be a bad person. So the question is not teach us something. The question is how do we motivate ourselves?
00:18:12
Speaker
So it's this question of motivation, this reconciling belief in behavior, one way, an answer to that or a solution to that problem, that separation between belief and behavior is indirect communication, which is this stories, parables, or kind of other forms of ways of motivating people.
00:18:29
Speaker
irony, great use of irony. The idea is you want to know who you're talking to, right? So you'd go up to some, I don't know, some evangelical atheist and start giving them arguments for the existence of God, right? So the idea is to take the coordinates of who he's speaking to, be aware of their subjectivity. But yeah, the text is some of a motivation, but as I get into in the book, I think Kierkegaard's greatest insight about ethics
00:18:56
Speaker
was our capacity for self-deception. I bring up some examples of my book. We talk ourselves out of inconvenient truths. So, for example, if you're a guy during the Vietnam War that was 68, the guy who knew Thompson was a helicopter pilot, discovered the MyLai Master going on,
00:19:16
Speaker
in his crew, they've got the other guys, and he's a Holy. So he lands the helicopter and tries to talk to the man in charge, and they'd already killed like three civilians. And Rusty Cali was in charge and Cali wouldn't stop it. And so Thompson took the machine guns and the helicopter, important about the American troops say, keep this up, I'll kill you.
00:19:41
Speaker
Now, that took a lot of courage, I mean, becoming obviously like, you know, he was called the traitor, but that wasn't the hard part. The hard part really was, he goes to report this event, right, up the chain of command.
00:19:56
Speaker
they start sending them on suicide missions. I think the first two commanders didn't do anything, right? So all this time he's being called a traitor and trying to kill him, basically. And he could say, oh, look, I've done my duty. That's enough.
00:20:15
Speaker
So there's all these ways he could have talked himself into saying, it's not my problem anymore. But no, he went right through that road to the attention of this massacre, to the attention of the American people, and he changed the view of the Vietnam War, and he suffered terribly for it. So Kierkegaard thinks what we try to do, we procrastinate. So I have a tough decision to make, and I know the decision is going to lead to some pain.
00:20:41
Speaker
Before I jump into the decision, I go, eh, maybe I better sleep on this and make sure I'm doing the right thing. And we sleep on it all right and sleep ourselves out of the issue. So I think one of his greatest contributions is his analysis of self-deception, which is in the second part of sectors on the deck. You'll see in one of the best descriptions.
00:21:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's brilliant. So there's a bunch of different ways we had this disconnect, just trying to frame it for myself, this disconnect between belief and behavior. And one of these ways is through self-deception. Another is through, you know, procrastination. And what was, what would, does Kierkegaard have a set of recommendations about how we overcome self-deception or what does he have to say on that? Oh, well, one of the things that we should emphasize here is that self-deception takes the form of you actually finally convince yourself that doing the easiest thing is the right thing.
00:21:32
Speaker
So it's not even a matter, he says, hypocrites are rarer today. So it's not like I'm being a hypocrite. You actually, yeah, so this volitional self ignorance, right? You create, you actually create, you can't convince yourself that you're doing the right thing. One of the secular virtues that he emphasized a lot is the effort to be honest, but he doesn't have any, oh, here's the seven steps.
00:21:59
Speaker
We like these four noodles today, right? The six steps to forgive noodles and 17 steps to out of self-disception. So this capacity for self-honesty to tolerate is important, I think, for him. So fair enough that there's no kind of six-step method, but
00:22:16
Speaker
I guess in your own experience for people that are struggling is the idea that the solution will be individual and you just need to confront these and like put in the hard work or what's kind of the, um, maybe this is my own succumbing to this problem of wanting to six steps, but I feel like we're like, okay, we've identified this problem, but like, what do, what do we do now? I don't know if you have any personal thoughts. Okay. So this is a trip, maybe a trivial story, but.
00:22:40
Speaker
I got the very sad news that my brother has what looks to be a very bad cancer. My older brother, who was like a father to me, just an incredible guy. A priest I know was so, the only priest I ever met was killed in a bike accident. There was a funeral last night. And part of me is going, well, you know, you're going through this really hard time. Give yourself a break. You don't need to go to this, you know, that kind of chatter like that.
00:23:10
Speaker
I mean, it was, that was a very bad place. And then her partner said, man, come on, wake up, baby. You can make it to an hour. You can make it to an hour service. You know, as a boxing trainer, he was really helpful with the Mexican immigrant community. And I have a lot of my boxers are Mexicans and he's just unbelievable guy. So there I was, I was ready to talk myself out of it, cut myself a break. In this case, I said, come on, you know,
00:23:40
Speaker
So it's not six steps, but there was a self-reflection and you can do this, it's not going to kill you. Something like that. So that self-reflection and recognizing, am I taking just the easy way out or am I underestimating my ability to? It's funny, but one of the key words, he thought one of the biggest problems with human existence is our kind of universal impulse to compare ourselves to other people.
00:24:10
Speaker
academics, who's publishing this books and that kind of thing. And he thought we carried it into the graveyard to make sure it gets the big monument. And I think I mentioned in the book, I've had students get into grad school and they want to know how many people got rejected. And I like to tell them nobody got rejected. Because the more rejected, the more valuable I am.
00:24:33
Speaker
Well, but sometimes like it helps me to, you know, when I'm in a situation like last night to look around the world and Yemen and places like that. And yeah, I think I could handle it. It makes me stop whining. You know what I mean? So in that sense, I think he's wrong that sometimes a comparison like that can be useful. Like, come on, you're not exactly in the civil war in Syria or some famine or something.
00:25:02
Speaker
I guess a comparison that provides perspective versus a comparison that just strokes your ego or makes you feel better than other people. We're anxious, right? Yeah, we're anxious is a good point, too. I've seen books like this. Someone's going to say, oh, you should read this book. No, I wish I did. That's the book I wanted to write. I don't want to. You know, the jealousy, them to, yeah, the pandemic in our society. So I think your curve was wrong. That comparison is going to be useful.
00:25:27
Speaker
Practice Stoicism with Stoa. Stoa combines the ancient philosophy of stoicism with meditation in a practical meditation app. It includes hundreds of hours of exercises, lessons, and conversations to help you live a happier life. Find it available for a free download in the Play Store and App Store. I want to get to the boxing. We'll leave enough time for that because I'm also very interested in martial arts and martial arts as a form of self-improvement or at least applying philosophy.
00:25:56
Speaker
just one thing back to the Kierkegaard. So I guess I just want to go back to faith. So where does faith fit into this picture? Obviously Kierkegaard's complicated. There's going to be many facets to his thought. We focused on this kind of discrepancy between belief and action, self-deception, convincing yourself that the easy thing is the right thing. And so where does faith fit into this picture or is it a different part of the philosophy? I think it's all important. I think for him, again, he thinks, you know, we've been
00:26:27
Speaker
given the gospel and totally believe and have this choice, you're not going to get there on a rational, empirical basis, right? That we have to make a, what's called a leap of faith, a phrase that isn't exactly used. And I think for him, so it's all his works, like, I mean, everything is always there. And to the point where, I mean, I think,
00:26:47
Speaker
Sometimes people want to cancel him because he didn't write about political issues that were going on. But I think for him it's just more than a proposition of belief, it's this attempt to trust in God like you would a person. So I see faith for him as trust. So a bunch of bad crap happens. I feel like, oh man, can you just think about power and all this stuff, right?
00:27:14
Speaker
The people disappointed some time, and the idea is to just try to maintain this trust as opposed to the, I believe, Dr. Lindsay, he recognizes the feelings that go with faith come and go, right?
00:27:26
Speaker
that the janitor is going to feel, but he thinks it's a light mostly for his work, the voter's whole life to think about it, what it means to have faith. So he thought by clarifying what it means to have... Okay, so in terms of his background, when you were born in Denmark in that time, you were born into the Lutheran church.
00:27:46
Speaker
He objected and he said, no, faith is something much, much harder. So he wanted to make faith possible again by showing what a strenuous, what a weird, primitive thing it is. Make it possible again by showing how impossibly hard it is. Is that going to make you happy? No. He thought there were more important things in life than happiness and self-help. So faith would say, well, how's faith going to make me happier?
00:28:12
Speaker
might make him more at peace at some level, but he doesn't make any—he thought happiness less, things were much more governed by it. And this is where, of course, he's disagreeably stoked here. He doesn't emphasize grace because there's just you that in order to be faithful or a good person, neither grace nor God, right? That's a little ancient here. He doesn't emphasize that because he thought the Danes had
00:28:33
Speaker
overused idea of grace too much. So yeah, it doesn't figure into the picture of how am I going to get the most fulfillment or how am I going to be happiest in and of itself is more important than anything.
00:28:48
Speaker
I mean, that was great. What I was thinking also was this idea again of authenticity. So you were saying like, he wants to make faith possible by showing how hard actual faith is. So I assume perhaps in the context, a bunch of people had diluted themselves or had a kind of self-deception about faith, but weren't looking, you know, weren't confronting the actual difficulty of the act or something like this. Is that right at all?
00:29:12
Speaker
One book that many people read is fair and trembling, and he's showing that what Abraham did was resecure part of your murder. Or he's ready to kill Isaac, right? And that person who's called the Father of Faith goes beyond the ethical and does something that is based on the power of the observed. That's the first example of him using this notion of the observed, emphasizes that a lot.
00:29:36
Speaker
one of the things that goes on today is everyone loves Kirk Gert's psychology, but like it like to detach it from any of this talk of faith. Like one thing that's really funny then is, you know, for him, the concept of authority was very important and obedience. I mean, he has a few lines about that. Man, nobody could ever live in this world and don't tell me what to do world, right? I mean, it's this obsession with autonomy. Well, everyone likes Kirk Gert's talk about autonomy and
00:30:04
Speaker
But now you don't dare mention the importance of obedience. When I was a kid, it was a virtue. Now it's like, are you kidding me? Things have changed. Yeah. Yeah. And how, I guess, how do you feel about that? Do you feel that there is a virtue to obedience? Like you think this has gone too far or what's the... Yeah. I think the obsession with autonomy has gone much too far. Yeah. And this obsession with a personal choice, all that stuff is a little bit whacked out. Yeah. There is a place to do what you've been told to do.
00:30:32
Speaker
I mean, you see this in training with jujitsu. It hasn't been watered down, so the whole spiritual element is gone, right? Martial art. We turn everything into a technique, right? It used to be like you'd just master it in zen, whatever, or yoga. Master tells you, I actually do X. I do think there's a place for it.
00:30:51
Speaker
that was the exact job I was going to make about this virtue of obedience comes up in a coaching context or an student context. So yeah, I'm interested based on my own history and competitive sport and your history with boxing to dig in a bit into that. And I think it also connects really nice with these ideas of authenticity, with these ideas of self-deception, because all those things come up and I guess we can dig into that. So maybe if you could provide your background as a boxer, you were a football player before that, but I don't know how you view that in your
00:31:20
Speaker
athletic journey. Yeah. I was going back and forth between boxing and football but where I lived on the New Jersey Shore there were no boxing gyms so I'd have to hitch like into Philadelphia which was like at like 15 and things to get some training and my grandfather been a boxer but I came from an Italian family and my father who was always connected boxing with crime and the mob and all that stuff and he was not a big boxing fan so I kind of was something I kind of
00:31:48
Speaker
took up on my own and became obsessed with. I had dreams to make it to Annabelle, which were probably unrealistic, and I went to his one school, and when that dream collapsed, my whole sense of identity went with it. It was terrible, getting the drugs, drinking, and that kind of stuff. This is where, I mean, one of the connections there with stoicism would be this idea of why do I
00:32:15
Speaker
I felt like it wasn't even being if I wanted to make it in football at the top, you know? Couldn't love myself unless I saw these kinds of identity attachments we get secured court discussions and sex on death. Well, it should give me pause to go, why do I need this so badly? Like I'm working with a coach and a kid right now who's been on the kickboxing MMA as an amateur at the world level.
00:32:42
Speaker
can't think of anything but fighting. And that has a lot to do with the fact that the only time he got any attention from his father was for fighting, but his whole identity is so wrapped up in it. And that happened with me, so I transferred to Columbia, actually part of the football, got hurt there.
00:33:02
Speaker
I went back to the boxing gyms and signed a pro contract with somebody, with a person who had too many fighters and was just a terrible, no training and so I had to quit. One of the things I learned from that and that horrible experience was I was sparring with all these top contenders in New York at the time, even though I didn't have that much experience, was the importance of being at a coach. As you probably know from gyms, you go to the wrong gym, it can be a terrible experience.
00:33:31
Speaker
His idea was, you know, you survive with these guys and these top contenders and everything else is going to be as usual. It doesn't work that way. So that's how I kind of got into boxing and training people for 30 years, I guess almost.
00:33:49
Speaker
One of the questions I have here is how important is the people's identity, how sometimes the fantasy of being able to defend ourselves, how important that is to many people. It really helps a lot of people. It makes them feel much more at home in themselves. At this stage, it's kind of puzzling me to why it's so important. It's kind of primitive.
00:34:13
Speaker
Yeah, that was an interesting direction for you to take it because I was expecting the discussions of the positive aspects, but you very rightly bring up what sometimes gets dismissed in these discussions of the negative aspects of, you know, your ego, your time to your self-conception and how you can kind of have that break if things don't work out for you. Yeah. And I think especially fighting as a sport,
00:34:36
Speaker
If you're not philosophical, it can be tied up a lot into conceptions of masculinity and, as you said, defending yourself and being a man. I never want to get too philosophical about it for some reason, but I mean, two things there that I've argued is that if it's true that we need to be able to deal with anxiety and rage,
00:34:56
Speaker
which a lot of the people, at least in boxing, not the white collar stuff, at least in boxing, the kids that come from environments where there's a lot of anger, a lot of time, and we need workshops and deal with that. And there aren't many places in this society today where you can get practice at being anxious. And anxiety, and as you know, even if you just want to think of it from a practical point of view, it makes you alert. Like when I've had boxers that, there's some exceptions, Ali and Joe Lewis, for example,
00:35:26
Speaker
sleep before big fight. But for the most part, my, I mean, huge fight, Fraser Ali, Lewis Schmeling, you'd have to wake him up from the fight, you know. But for the most part, the boxers I've dealt with before, screwing around or, you know, before about the new word anxious, I said, oh, shit, man, here we go. You know, because they're in denial. So one of the, one of the things I got from him and friends with Mike Tyson and from his trainer, custom motto is a
00:35:54
Speaker
not getting anxious about being anxious, not panicking about being feeling panicked. That's a big lesson, right? Because, like, for example, I got to New Zealand yesterday about my brother man, and I was ready to hit the bar or something, man, you know, it takes a while to process the blows of life, and not to freak out about feeling freaked out. So that, that's a positive aspect of it.
00:36:16
Speaker
But I'm sure you'd agree you gotta have the right coach, the right environment. I certainly don't think sport or especially martial art is like necessarily beneficial. I think it has to be done for a certain purpose. And I think, as you pointed out, it has to be done in the right environment.
00:36:29
Speaker
But this is the thing I talk a lot of with stoicism as well, is this like not having that second order anxiety or that second, or you're angry with yourself for being angry because now you're practicing stoicism and you're like, I'm not going to be angry anymore. I'm like, oh, I'm so frustrated. Getting over that, that is harder in a stoic conception, I think, to explain than it is in an existentialist one where the existentialist, if I'm understanding you correctly, just gets to say, hey, this is just a part of being a person.
00:36:55
Speaker
in the stoic view, you actually are failing. And what you have to do is you have to forgive yourself for making a mistake. But I guess in the existentialist picture, that's just, you just have to be comfortable confronting the world as it is where some things are going to make, are going to be all anxiety producing and some things are going to be a really sad and hard.
00:37:13
Speaker
You can count on anxiety with boxing, right? They know they're gonna get a workout there when it comes to that, being able to deal with it. That's why a million times I've quit this sport, because I've had so many people like, you train them every day for five months. And then I think I want to trust, I got to take another, I got on a job coach, I can't. And then three months later, I want to be a fighter again. So what a lot of them want to do is they want to play fight. They don't really want to fight. They want the red badge of courage, Matt.
00:37:42
Speaker
And you don't get your red badge of courage until you get in the ring. And I mean, a lot of, like I was talking to some people at one white color place, they go, oh, he's far. In the meantime, people think they're, you know, so part of it is, you know, so. And we have this idea of red badge of courage, and I think that's a big part of what a lot of us want.
00:38:04
Speaker
Yeah. Or this kind of what I hear in that story is this self-deception of like, you think you want it, but if you really wanted it, you wouldn't have trouble coming into the gym and out of the gym again. You just do it. So there's this kind of like this battle. Cause you've coached boxing and you just mentioned that, but I did it quite extensively. What kind of differences do you find in that environment versus teaching in a university, for example? Like do you find these similar projects or do you approach them quite differently or?
00:38:32
Speaker
I think the coaching and teaching really will work together for me because helping students recognize their anxiety sometimes, being able to figure them out individually, so being able to address them individually. One of the things that I experienced in sports was that I was in some of the greatest gyms in the world when I was in New York and there were these trainers there that I was hopefully mentored by Angelo Dundee later in life.
00:38:59
Speaker
They had all this knowledge. The trainers I worked with, they didn't teach anything. If you're not learning something new, it gets stale. Unboxing, for example, you get all this bad muscle memory. That can't be changed sometimes. I've had to retire fighters who are winners, but couldn't develop a defense. Reaching out and giving instructions. When I was in the gyms as a kid, I was like too cool to ask. I had Freddie Brown there in the corner, got real ourselves around that thing. Guys that were like,
00:39:29
Speaker
the sweetest of sweet scientists, and Mr. Cool wouldn't ask him, hey coach, so one of the things that was cool about my life as a boxing writer for The Wall Street Journal and HBO and everything was, I'd always end my interviews with, hey Manny, give me one tip for my fighters.
00:39:47
Speaker
all the great fighters have, some of that is just like, you know what I mean? Like, oh yeah, there's no problem, right? And so the importance of teaching people something new. Yes, it's kind of like asking all these great philosophers for like one particular insight, but this is a bit more practical and actionable. This is kind of cool. Yeah, I think a lot of these questions, I mean, you talked about this kind of coaching style of not actually coaching, which I think is interesting
00:40:17
Speaker
I always thought that was interesting. I mean, I look at coaching sport and jujitsu similar to like working through stoicism with philosophy. And there's this, there's this approach sometimes where you're just going to make people do, you know, you're just going to throw them in the ring and they're going to figure it out or they don't. And you're going to, like I said, like if they can survive against the best guys in the gym, that's good. But part of my approach as a coach, as you mentioned, is in this more personalized, you know, understanding the person where they are and adjusting for that.
00:40:45
Speaker
So yeah, I agree with that. That makes a lot of sense to me. And yeah, one thing for me is like sport has all was, was always a really good way of encountering that kind of self-deception, as you said, and that kind of break between behaviors and action. Like I want to be this, but.
00:41:01
Speaker
When you, when you get a sport context or like a fighting context, we're going to like, I competed in MMA, for example, and you're going to get hit in the face and you're going to get, I have seven stitches. Well, I have nine stitches, but seven and one just from a knee. And it's like, you really got to confront, is that what you really want? And you really confront the kind of self-deception. You have an opportunity for kind of introspection in a way that's really valuable. Sometimes if you're just doing academic or theoretical work, you're not getting that same confrontation with reality.
00:41:27
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And the one thing you have with jujitsu is that we don't have unboxing. There's certain traditions there. We're a traditionalist society. And there's traditions, at least there have been in martial arts that are really good, I think, that are lacking in our general overall society. So that's one of the benefits of I think martial arts has our boxing. There's a bit of character development built into it. Like it's understood as part of the project, I guess, in martial arts.
00:41:54
Speaker
as opposed to perhaps a side effect that you can access when you're boxing if you do it intentionally. Yeah. Now, one of the things I found actually comparing football to boxing is when I coach football for years, you know, football's so corporate, you don't get to know the person. And I think it's so important to be there for people on an everyday, consistent basis. And it's not a matter of like some great insight all the time. Just being there is so important in life.
00:42:22
Speaker
And some people come from environments where nobody's been there from all time, and they never get any affirmation either. So some of the student boxers I've worked with that have gotten the most from them, it was the first place they really were. Anybody ever told them they were good. Now there's a couple of households where there's all kinds of craziness going around, pissed off, go to school, get in trouble, get yelled at. Nobody ever says a nice word. And if they stick with the box, and man,
00:42:49
Speaker
sometimes that some line of affirmation just, a lot of us have gotten our own lives. But there's millions and millions and millions of people who don't get any of them, right? And it can make you grow so much. So I think that's another beautiful part of it. And that's the point I was in. I don't have a big yellow man, I'll be screaming at people, but they got to have your trust. Once they trust you and they know you love them, man, I'm frigging nuts.
00:43:13
Speaker
You were talking about boxing coaching, but it seems to me just an incredibly strong parallel to kind of character development or friendship or, you know, some people haven't had a person there to support them. And once that trust is there, then you can yell at your friend and be like, what the hell are you doing? You know, One of the things I got from my, my boxing coaching mentor, Gordon Hawkins, who's the Marine, was that the loving thing to do a lot of times is to tell people shit they don't want to hear, Matt, you know?
00:43:39
Speaker
You know, and that's, if you really care about somebody, you'll tell them that once. And he sometimes you have to time it the way I got to your trust book. I remember one kid I traded for months and took him up and uh, it deluded to five hours. It was like a five hour drive for his first fight when they were like three, one minute rounds. He makes it to the fight. And then afterwards he goes, well, that was fun, man. I went frigging nuts, man. I said, that was fun. You didn't do your best.
00:44:06
Speaker
I wouldn't have done this at the end, but I said, I'm not coaching you all this for like a little theme park adventure. So I went berserk and I said, I wouldn't stop either too, because he should have the back of the car going home with his girlfriend and they're talking up like,
00:44:30
Speaker
I didn't drive you 10 hours for you to have fun.
00:44:43
Speaker
to bring in full circle a great connection back to this kind of pursuit of authenticity and doing that through different means. So Gordon, I really, really enjoyed talking to you. This was great. One thing that I'd like to ask, if somebody wanted to get into existentialism, obviously they can look at your book, The Existentialist Survival Guide, but if there's any, is there any other starting point you started with the Kierkegaard text? If somebody wanted to go down that road, what would you back alone?
00:45:09
Speaker
Yeah, well, there's a bunch of good intros. I mean, I have an anthology through NML, some modern library, that's got quite a spectrum of different stuff in there. But there's a lot of good intros through existentialism, and just you can pick them up and read through them. But also people can email me if they have any questions. I have sometimes people email me, we have a telephone conversation, so I'm happy to
00:45:34
Speaker
to offer some guidance along, tutoring along that line. But if they're going to look at Kitgard, I would start with the sickest son of death and not freak out about the first page. The first page is, I don't know if there's jokes around or what the hell he's trying to do, but it's like he's, it's almost like he's trying to scare you off, you know? But if you're going to read one book of Kitgard's and you have a psychological interest, that's the book. And I really appreciate all your good questions. I'm sorry to ramble on a little bit this morning, but it's a result of your good questions.
00:46:04
Speaker
Oh, Narwhal, it was great talking to you. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me, man. Thanks for listening to Story Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or whatever podcast platform you use, and share it with a friend. We are just starting this podcast, so every bit of help goes a long way.
00:46:24
Speaker
And I'd like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. Do check out his work at ancientliar.com and please get in touch with us at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback or questions. Until next time.