Mar 9, 2024
"If only I could get the promotion, then I'll have enough money to be happy. If only I met the right person, then I'd finally be who I want to be."
Sound familiar? That logic, the belief that happiness, goodness, and identity all live somewhere just ahead of where you currently are, is one of the most quietly destructive ideas in modern life. And according to existentialist philosophy, it gets something fundamentally wrong about what it means to be a human being.
In this episode of Good Is In The Details, Gwendolyn Dolske and Rudy Salo sit down with J. Aaron Simmons — Professor of Philosophy at Furman University, former President of the Søren Kierkegaard Society USA, Vanderbilt Ph.D., mountain biker, trout fisherman, and author of Camping with Kierkegaard: Faithfulness as a Way of Life.
Dr. Simmons's central argument is both simple and radical: life is poorly understood according to a success logic of achievement, but it shines forth in its contingent singularity when we enact a faithfulness logic of ever striving toward who we hope to become. You are not a finished product waiting to be completed by the right circumstances. You are always, already, in the process of becoming. The question isn't whether you're becoming. The question is whether you're paying attention to who you're becoming — and whether that person is worthy of the finite life you've been given.
What we explore in this episode:
- What existentialism actually is, why it's far more practical, hopeful, and life-giving than its reputation for brooding café philosophy suggests
- The difference between a "success logic" of life and a "faithfulness logic," and why the former is a trap that turns people into what philosopher Aaron James calls an asshole (seriously — this is a technical philosophical term and Dr. Simmons uses it with great precision and warmth)
- Kierkegaard's three stages of existence (the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious) and what each one reveals about how we orient our lives
- What faithfulness means as an existential concept rather than a religious one: faith defined as "risk with direction" — embracing the risk of vulnerable existence and yet living on purpose in a direction worthy of your finitude
- Why the "if only" mindset — if only I had more money, more success, a better relationship — fundamentally misunderstands how identity and happiness actually work
- What Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and even Kendrick Lamar all agree on about the nature of becoming
- Why vulnerability is not a weakness to be overcome but the very condition that makes a meaningful life possible
- What it means to ask — genuinely and seriously — "what is worthy of my finitude?" and how that question reorients everything
- How camping, mountain biking, and time in nature became Dr. Simmons's philosophical laboratory — and what solitude reveals about what actually matters to us when all the noise falls away
- Why faithfulness is not about being religious — it's about being alive, on purpose, in the direction of who you hope to become
This is the episode for anyone who has ever felt the gap between who they are and who they want to be — and suspected that the gap itself might be the wrong way to think about the whole thing.
Another way of asking what is worthy of your finitude is simply: "Who are you becoming?" Dr. Simmons argues that when that becomes your question, the success-driven logic that exhausts and diminishes us loses its grip. And something much more interesting takes its place.
Guest: J. Aaron Simmons — Professor of Philosophy, Furman University. Former President, Søren Kierkegaard Society USA. Author of Camping with Kierkegaard: Faithfulness as a Way of Life (Broadleaf Books). Host of YouTube channel "Philosophy for Where We Find Ourselves." Substack: "Philosophy in the Wild." Over 200 publications in philosophy of religion, political philosophy, existentialism, and phenomenology. Vanderbilt University Ph.D.
Get Camping With Kierkegaard: https://jaaronsimmons.com
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