Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Stages on Life’s Way

Episode Date: June 13, 2014

A few years ago your host took a pilgrimage to Copenhagen to walk the streets the great Dane Søren Kierkegaard once walked. He wanted to understand  the meaning of Kierkegaard’s religious stage so he decided to ask the experts at the Kierkegaard research center. Also Photographer Dina Litovksy tells us about the history and some of the secrets of the modern bachelorette party. And Michael Holmes tells us about life’s final stage – death. *********Click on the image for the whole story about this week’s installment**********

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Stages on Life's Way. Mat ikke din ånd ved halve ønsker og halve tanker. Spørg dig, og hold ved at spørge, indtil du finder svaret. Til man kan have erkendt en ting mange gange, anerkend den. Man kan have villet en ting mange gange, forsøgt den. Og dog først den dybe indre bevægelse. Først hjertets ubeskrivelige rørelse.

Først den forviser dig om, at hvad du har erkendt tilhører dig. At ingen magt kan tage det fra dig. Til kun den sandhed, der opbygger, er sandhed for dig. Som en ung mand blev jeg seduceret by Soren Kierkegaard. I was 20 years old. I was studying philosophy in a small college town in Montana, and I was unsure of who I was and what I was supposed to do with my life. And then I read Either Or, and everything changed.

Do not interrupt the flight of your soul. Do not distress what is best in you. Do not enfeeble your spirit with half wishes and half thoughts. Ask yourself and keep on asking until you find the answer. For one may have known something many times, acknowledged it. One may have willed something many times, attempted it, and yet only the deep inner emotion only the hearts indescribable emotion only that will convince you that what you have acknowledged belongs to you I completely connected with this Dane from another century either or filled me with such confidence for the first time in my life I felt that I was on the right track.

I moved on to the other books, Fear and Trembling, Works on Love, The Concept of Anxiety, Repetition. I read all the edifying discourses, his strange sermons. I even contemplated a life of study dedicated to Kierkegaard, until I realized I'd have to learn Danish. Stens ige den sjælfsflut. Bedro iggede, bælde, edde. Mett iggeden an. Ved hælve, unnske, e hælve tanke. Spar daj. My favorite Kierkegaard book of all time

is Stages on Life's Way. It's kind of the sequel to Either Or, but with a bonus section. Whereas the first book gives us Kierkegaard's theory of the aesthetic and the ethical ways of living life, Stages on Life's Way adds a third, the religious stage. Now, I've read this book many, many, many times, but I've never been able to make sense of what he's talking about when it comes to the religious stage.

I always assumed it would come to me later in life with experience. But I'm 37 years old now, and I'm starting to get worried. Like, what if it just never happens? So this summer I got the opportunity to visit Copenhagen and I figured I could sneak into the Kierkegaard Research Center posing as a journalist doing a story on Kierkegaard and get some help from the experts. The religious stage is complicated for many reasons. It has two levels, A and B. A, religiousness. A is the Socratic religiosity.

And the B section is dealing with Christianity. Joachim Garf is one of the scholars at the Research Center. He wrote this big book on Kierkegaard that for some reason caused a controversy in Denmark when it came out a few years ago. You were not allowed to read him aesthetically, and you're not allowed to read him biographically. And I did both. Not in order to provoke, but to me there is this very dramatic tension between the writer and the private person. The connections between Kierkegaard's private life and his writings are so

obvious, it just makes no sense how a Kierkegaard scholar could be controversial for pointing them out. It must be some Danish thing that I just don't get. I mean, the most famous part of either or, where Johannes seduces and breaks off an engagement with a girl named Cordelia? Everyone knows that Kierkegaard wrote this just after he broke off his own real-life engagement with Regina Olsen. And in Stages on Life's Way, there's another diary written by a man who also breaks off an engagement. And Garf told me Kierkegaard has this guy quote the actual letter that he wrote to break with Regina Olsen, word for word. In his book, Garf makes many connections between Kierkegaard's life and his various pseudonymous characters. But he also wants us to understand that they're not just his pen names.

Kierkegaard wants us to learn about his ideas from his characters. Kierkegaard has a theory, in a way, about these stages. But he doesn't speak about it as a theory of stages. But he has these pseudonymous figures that represent different perspectives on life. That's one of the aphorisms written by a character known simply as A. He's one of Kierkegaard's most famous aesthetic characters, and my personal favorite. He is the modern romantic type. He is a very ironic type. He is a very distant person that suffers from spleen,

and he doesn't have a steady job, and he is more or less in a permanent drift. Hang yourself, and you will regret it. Do not hang yourself, and you will also regret it. Whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, and you'll regret it. Do not hang yourself, and you'll also regret it. Whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way. This, gentlemen, is the quintessence of all the wisdom of life. Kierkegaard's aesthetic characters are the ones that seduced me. I didn't just understand them, I identified with them.

This is how, after graduating college, I ended up on the East Coast, living in this unheated basement apartment, writing and drawing these ridiculous little mini-comics about love and philosophy. I even had my own Kierkegaardian name, Zero Benjamin, because, you know, zero means both everything and nothing, or something like that. But I actually tried to convince the people I sent my comics to that this was my real name, like cartoonist Tim Crider. I assumed that Zero was your real name from the get-go. I mean, it is a name, isn't it?

Wasn't Zero Mostel actually named Zero Mostel? My friend Tim's a real hoarder, and he still has all the comics and letters I sent to him from this time. My testament to the aesthetic stage of life. Dear Tim, how the hell are you? I finally got the whole story on the twin makeout session. Dig. I was kissing and feeling them both, but Megan quit, and I locked myself with Jade in one of the bedrooms. Well, Megan busts in, and I turn to her, direct quote according to Megan, but I do not recall. Hey, what are you doing? I'm about to go down on your sister. Woo-hoo! I am such a fucking moron.

So, Tim, why do women exist? There are a lot of exclamation points after that. I am having financial problems still, but I'm working on it. I believe this letter is coming to a close because the handwriting is deteriorating rapidly. I am so drunk I can't get my shoes off. I guess that's it. That's all, folks. Tomorrow I'm going to work at this tea shop for this lady. Too bad I don't even know how to make tea, so I guess I should go to bed. Heart, ZB. You better stop by and visit before I saw my head off. The end. This went on for a few years, but eventually I gave up on the

pseudonyms and the comics, and eventually I moved out of the unheated basement apartment, and eventually I end up living with a girl. And then one night, I'm laying on the new couch, this couch that had to be hoisted into the apartment by crane, and she's setting up the drawing rack in front of the bookshelf. And I can see my Kierkegaard books with their colored spines peeking out at me between her bras and panties. And all of a sudden, it's like, bang, I realize I am living in the ethical stage. And when I, as a married man, rest my head on her shoulder, I'm not a critic who admires or sees the lack of some earthly beauty, nor am I an infatuated youth who celebrates her bosom,

but nevertheless I am as deeply moved as the first time. For I know what I knew, and what I'm repeatedly convinced of, that there within my wife's breast beats a heart quietly and humbly, but steadily and smoothly. And I know it beats for me and my welfare, and for what is mutually ours. Judge William, he's the ethical person. He's a married man, he has two kids, and he's working in the court. He is addressing himself to this esteed in order to be his educator in a way. I really tried to open my heart to Judge William, but the writings are dull and pedantic.

They're actually called Reflections on Marriage. And so one night after the girl and I have this nasty row over whether or not the closet in the kitchen should be painted or wallpapered, it hits me that if Kierkegaard really believed this marriage crap, then he would have gotten married himself. And I realized I can't find the answers I'm looking for in Judge William because the answers aren't there. Kierkegaard is well aware that you should try to get hold of your reader and try to lead your reader to certain ideas and certain positions and certain conflicts.

Of course, I didn't tell my girlfriend that I left her because I was on a quest to live out Kierkegaard's religious stage, but it's true. Once again, I was seduced by Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard is a very seductive author. His style, his rhetoric, his ideas, his way of addressing himself to the reader is seductive author. His style, his rhetoric, his ideas, his way of addressing himself to the reader is seductive. And his idea is that one should be taken through the aesthetic stage and up to the ethical stage and from that further on to the religious. Now, as I said, I've read Stages on Life's Way many, many, many times,

but I've never been able to make sense of the religious section of the book. The section is mostly made up of diary entries from another young man. This one is found at the bottom of a lake. But unlike the seducer's diary from either or, it's really not fun to read. The diary is like a blog written by someone who can't afford a psychiatrist. It's like DIY therapy, totally and completely impenetrable. It's a very, very sad diary in a way. It's very, very dramatic, and it's a very alarming diary because we have this writer who again and again returns to some very painful reflections and in a way it's far too much and

and maybe that's that's a part of the the idea in the in the diary that Kirchgaard reflects so enormously that the reader should say, well, enough is enough. I should try to live my own life. I should try to get rid of that way of self-reflection and self-relation, which is a very painful discourse. So that might be a way of reading it, that the book simply wants to push the reader away. And that's the closest I got to Joachim Garf giving me the secret to the religious stage. But to be fair, it was incredibly foolish of me to think that I could get a quick and easy

answer from him. I've read enough Kierkegaard to know better than that. In fact, one of the only things I am sure about in my quest is that it's supposed to get harder and harder. If there were one person whom I could turn to, I would go to him and say, Bitte, bitte, put a little meaning for me into my confusion. To me, the most appalling meaning is not as appalling as meaninglessness. To tell you the truth, though,

I don't know if the indirect answer is working for me anymore. I've kind of had it with all the clues and the hints. I need something a little more tactile, something I can put on my refrigerator or make my Facebook status. And this is why finding the religious stage is so important to me. I figure just as he helped me earlier in life, Kierkegaard will come through for me now. This is why I kept pressing Garth for the answer. I'm sure I seemed ridiculous. But as he walked me out of the Kierkegaard Research Center,

he did give me one last thing. Being desperate or being in despair in Kierkegaard opens you to the village's life. I spent a week in Copenhagen. I walked many of Kierkegaard's favorite streets and I visited the museum where they have some of his things on display. The most amazing thing I saw was the engagement ring that Kierkegaard gave to Regina Olsen. When she gave it back to him, he reset the stones in the form of a cross, and he wore this until his death. This image of Kierkegaard putting on his ring every morning before starting his work

is what I see now when I think of the religious stage, and for some reason this image fills me with incredible comfort and hope. Most girls before they get married, like 75% or more, have a bachelorette party. But Russians don't really have bachelorette parties. So I was very curious about this. A couple of years ago, New York photographer Dina Litovsky decided to satisfy her curiosity about bachelorette parties. She started shooting them for free. The bachelorette and her friends would get photos of their night or weekend,

and Dina would get direct access to the secret rituals. At first glance, her photos aren't that different from most images of New York nightlife. There are shadowy edges and flashes of skin. But if you look closely, you can see all the tension, drama, and emotion that's bound up in the modern bachelorette party. This is in Atlantic City. I went with the girls for two days to Atlantic City for the bachelorette party, and the bride is the one actually lying down that's being humped.

I don't know any other word to describe it. The girls got from a limo from a two hour drive and they just started right away trying to get into this mode of a bachelorette party. It's all play, it's all performance. So before they could have a change and before they went out to the club, they start kind of ready acting out and almost like preparing for the night out. Girls can go wild with impunity for this one night, and they're not going to be judged in any bad way, as they would be, for example, in the context of spring break. They're doing this within safe confines of a marriage process,

so they can go wild, more wild than they can ever go in their regular life, because they're insulated by this rite of passage. So I find that girls start drinking right away when they go to a bachelorette party, and then they start kind of acting out. This is probably the only thing that ever shocked me, a midget.

You know, a stripper comes in, he dances for 10 minutes, he gyrates against the rite, he leaves. It really does not go beyond this. When I saw the midget, I was like, okay, I haven't seen this before. He came in, he took off his shirt, he danced, and then the girls started dancing, then he accompanied them to a club. There are party midgets up there, and I looked it up,

and there are party midgets who do bachelorette parties. Not all of the women that Dina met were into the strippers, midget or non-midget. So there's definitely been some bored girls and some girls who were very uncomfortable with what was happening. Just illustrate this picture, for example. This is a stripper in Atlantic City. So here the bride, she's a good Jewish girl, she did not want a stripper. And the girls got her a stripper, and everything was fine until he took everything off.

So he thought he was doing his job, but the girls, this was way too much for them. They shrieked, they were screaming, and they were uncomfortable, and they said that this was not a good experience for them afterwards. So here you can see the game went a bit too far. They thought they can toughen it out and they're going to get this stripper first time they saw one,

and he went too far, even though I think he was scared more than them when they started screaming. But you can see in some circumstances it goes way beyond the comfort zone. It was the feminist movement's desire to subvert the traditional marriage process in the 1960s and 70s that gave birth to the modern bachelorette party. But today, Dina says, the party has itself been subverted by commercialism. Here's a bride. She's the one tied up with the heels up. And she's given presents. A lot of presents. You know, bridal shower, the presents are recipes and, you know, juicers. At a bachelorette party, the presents are recipes and, you know, juicers.

At the bachelorette party, the presents are sex toys and underwear and lingerie. So here she's given a Japanese silk robe. The origin of the bachelorette party was in the late 60s feminist culture because before women had the bridal shower, which is very much a part of the wedding process. But the bridal shower is very much about reinforcing traditional gender roles. It's about a woman being a housewife, a mother, and she's giving pots and pans and recipes. And the men had the bachelor party,

which was also part of the wedding process. And then so basically the feminist movement said that women also have sexual freedom to lose. And as less and less women started being virgins on their wedding, this became much more important for them to also celebrate this ending of sexual freedom. So it got started initially, like, in the early 70s, but it wasn't popular until the 80s. Like, the first mention of bachelorette party was in the 80s.

And then again, it was not very popular as this ritual that everybody's doing. And then about, I think, in the the 90s women's magazines picked it up but they made it more consumerist i mean the whole wedding process became very consumerist so obviously they started also selling the chachkis and the penis straws and i think the original message of it the intention definitely got convoluted so most people do not see this now as a feminist ritual. You know, you have to really think about it to understand that women are partying as men. So there is some feminist strength to it. But for most girls, it's just something that

they do, something their friends do, something that they do, something that they read in women's magazines. You know, there are top ten things you have to do for a bachelorette party. You know, get a stripper, get a limo, get the penis straws, they're compulsory. There is something going on in Dina's photos, though, beyond the excessive drinking and the penis balloons and penis straws. Her strongest images show us women acknowledging endings and beginnings. One of my favorites depicts a bachelorette cautiously wading into a hotel swimming pool, veil askew. Perhaps she's drunk. Perhaps it's a bad idea for her to be in the water.

But she is definitely, and most certainly, on her way. Thank you. Every day, almost, on the news, you'll hear some science report or medical report saying that thus and such, you know, overeating or being overweight or smoking too much or whatever increases the mortality rate. Well, the mortality rate's 100%. It never changes one single bit. You know, nothing pushes the mortality rate up and down. It stays at 100%. The only question is, when? Michael Holmes is the author of Crossing the Creek, a book that details his experiences as a hospice nurse.

It's part manifesto, part philosophical treaties about life's final stage, death. What typically happens in the dying process is the social mask begins to dissolve. Our social mask is how we want people to perceive us, who we want them to perceive us to be. And it's not always, in fact, it's very seldom who we really are. And so very often it can be kind of surprising, you know, who you find hiding behind the mask.

That's one of the reasons why I really like spending time with dying people. As a cross-section of the general public, they're probably one of the most honest, real group of people you will ever meet. It's actually not unusual at all for hospice nurses to be old intensive care nurses. It's kind of a way for them to redeem themselves for everything they did in intensive care. You know, as an intensive care nurse, an awful lot of the things that you do, you know, before you even start aren't going to work. And that the only reason that you're doing them at all is because neither the patients and the families or the doctors want to be honest with one another about what's happening. I mean, I've saved lives in my time working in intensive care, lots of lives, but very few of them could I ever look back on and honestly say

I thought in retrospect that it was a good idea. If you ask people, what's the purpose of life? Well, very often the purpose of life in most people's minds consists of really nothing more than to just live another day. And when you think about that, that is really more sophisticated than the theology of a cancer cell. You know, a cancer cell really has no point in life other than to just grow and live another day. Whereas heart cells and lung cells and bone cells all have a purpose, you know, whereas a cancer cell really does not. So,

you know, we really should start instead of thinking that, you know, being in a body in the physical realm is good and dying and not being in a body in the physical realm is bad and a failure. You know, that's really wrong thinking. What we should be thinking is, what did I come here for? What did I come here to do? What did I come here to learn? Why am I here? And if I don't know what I came here for, how would I know when I was finished?

Death is purposeful and meaningful, and it is a growth experience. It teaches us how to live. It's about life. It's not the opposite of life. It's not the end of life. It is an aspect of life. I expected that when I got into hospice that, you know, when I went out and started working with patient families in the field, questions would come up naturally, and then I could just go and look in the, you know, the proverbial hospice libraries and look in the literature and, you know, so on and so forth and find the answers to questions. What I found was, you know, like Mother Hubbard, I went to the cupboard and the cupboard was bare. There was nothing there. And so that motivated that motivated me really to start digging after I began to figure a lot of this stuff out you know what was happening

and why and what's normal and what's not normal and what you should do what you shouldn't do I just started writing some stuff out and handing it out to my patients and families that you know in thephlet. And I don't think it really even had a name at that time. But then later on, as I began to think about it, it came up with the name of Crossing the Creek. And what that has to do with is when people get close to actually leaving the physical realm or crossing over or dying or however you want to put it, they begin to perceive doing that in some fashion that is peculiar to their history. Now, I'm from a farm and grew up playing in creeks. And so, you know,

a creek is a natural boundary. And so it would be kind of natural in my mind when I get close to dying to perceive that crossing as crossing a creek. Now, for other people, like my wife was born in Philly. So, you, so she would think of it in terms peculiar to her. One old guy that I took care of had always had mules and been a lover of mules, and he was telling me how he would be riding his mules along a canyon wall, and he was trying to figure out how to get to the other side of the canyon. And another woman described as her husband, who had died, I don't know, four or five years before her, would come and pick her up in an old truck. And she would get in the truck, and they would ride until they came to this bridge.

But then she knew that if she crossed that bridge, then she would be leaving the earth, you know. So she would get out, and he would go back across. And then eventually she did go with him. You know, it's even more common, like the Jordan River, crossing the Jordan River. That's just a metaphor for the same thing. The official world of hospice cannot support my work because it presumes life transcends death. And from their point of view, making that presumption is religious. And so in an attempt to not be, quote, religious, they just don't talk about it. It's just, you know, spirituality and whether

life transcends death and so on and so forth is just the elephant in the living room that they don't speak of. Right now we're living in a physical realm and our consciousness or the little piece of it we have is attached to a particular body. And it's very difficult to imagine what it would be like to exist without a body. And so we get, you know, just kind of overwhelmed because we can't even conceive of what that would be like. Yet when you think about it, we have more experience with it than we realize. Every night when you go to bed, you dream, and that's experiencing life in a non-physical reality.

You know, when I was actually dealing with dying people all the time, I would talk to them quite a lot about their dreams because they would begin to switch from a focus on the physical world to more of a focus on a non-physical world, which would appear to them in, you know, for lack of better terms, dreams. And plus, when you're dying, you begin to go into a sleep-wake cycle that's more like an infant. You know, a baby, if you've ever had a baby or, you know, raised one, you would know that they sleep a little while and then they're awake a little while and they sleep a little while and they're awake a little while

and that just goes on around the clock. And as you get further in the dying process, you know, you revert back to that sleeping pattern, awake, sleep, awake, asleep, awake, asleep. The focus between the worlds of the physical world and the non-physical world begins to get a little obscure. One guy who was in that particular stage, I was asking him about that,

and I was asking him, how do you tell which reality you're in, you know, the physical or the non-physical? And he thought, you know, it's hard. And I said, well, which one do you think you're in now? And he said, I'm not sure. And I said, are you feeling any pain right now? And he said, yeah. And I said, well, feeling any pain right now? And he said, yeah.

And I said, well, now there's a clue. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Stages on Life's Way. This episode was produced by myself, Benjamin Walker, with help from Ethan Cheal. Special thanks to Noah Apple. Bill Bowen mixed the program, and it featured Michael Holmes, Dina Lutowski, Jochen Garf, and Tim Kreider. A version of the Kierkegaard piece was originally produced for the Danish podcast Third Ear, thanks to Pike Malinowski and Tim Hinman. toe.prx.org is where you can find the archive and sign up for the newsletter, and it is the best place to follow along

with what we're doing here. And it's, of course, also where you can subscribe to the Theory of Everything podcast, which I know you've already done. So now, all you've got left to do is tell one of your favorite people in the world that they should listen to. There's plenty to go around. Radiotopia from PRX