How To Live, Given What We Know

The Deeper Thinking Podcast is digitally narrated. 

For those drawn to what resists easy speech—fear, grief, madness, and the strange dignity of love in a mortal world.

#Existentialism #HannahArendt #SimoneWeil #Levinas #Nietzsche #Kierkegaard #MichelFoucault

Beneath the surface of ordinary life move currents we rarely name—fear, silence, madness, love, death, revenge. This episode follows those undercurrents as they surface in philosophy, tracing the fragile edges of meaning where language falters and our most intimate decisions unfold.

Drawing on thinkers like Søren Kierkegaard, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Simone Weil, Michel Foucault, and Friedrich Nietzsche, we explore how existential threats—real or perceived—shape the contours of the self, and how moments of hesitation and vulnerability expose deeper ethical truths.

This is not a theoretical exercise. It is a meditation on life at the edge: the silence before speech, the madness beneath order, the courage of love, and the grief that follows all that matters. These tensions are not modern. They are human. And they press upon our lives in ways we often feel before we can name.

Reflections

• Fear is not only paralysis. It is an index of what matters.


• Silence speaks where language cannot bear the weight.


• Madness can conceal a plea for recognition.


• Love reveals us—fragile, exposed, yet willing.


• Death is not merely an end, but a teacher of urgency.


• Revenge exposes the thin line between justice and desire.


• Truth is never fully possessed, only approached with care.

Why Listen?

• Explore fear, silence, and madness as existential rather than clinical experiences


• Learn how thinkers like Kierkegaard and Levinas reframed suffering as ethical and ontological


• Discover why Foucault insisted madness was a social construction, not simply pathology


• Reflect on Weil’s vision of attention as moral listening


• Reconsider revenge and forgiveness through the lens of Arendt’s ethics of action

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Further Reading

• Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard


• The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt


• Totality and Infinity by Emmanuel Levinas


• The Birth of the Clinic by Michel Foucault


• Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil


• The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche

Silence, fear, madness, love—these are not side themes. They are the grammar of being human.

#Philosophy #Existentialism #TheDeeperThinkingPodcast #Levinas #Kierkegaard #Arendt #Nietzsche #Silence #Fear #Love #Truth #Death #Revenge #MoralPhilosophy #PublicPhilosophy #Ethics #Meaning #Care #Madness