I ain’t got an original thought in my head, if it aint got the lingering scent of divinity to it, i aint interested in it.

This film feels inspired by My Dinner with Andre. Like that movie, it consists of two people talking for 1 hour and 30 minutes in a single room, discussing life and meaning.

Maybe I’m just being paranoid because I recently read the paper The Ground of Being, but at times it feels like the movie is subtly moving toward the idea of Jesus as Grund (ground/foundation).

It also touches on an interesting philosophical problem: If you’re an atheist and truly believe that everything is just matter, explainable by rational laws—that the universe is not mysterious—what could possibly convince you otherwise? Suppose Jesus appeared to you directly and performed wonders that defy everything you know to be true. Would you then believe in the divine? Or would you assume you’re experiencing psychosis? How would you ever tell the difference?

Another interesting idea discussed is that of the “man of the underground”: the enlightened, rational man who understands the world is cold, distant, and meaningless. He sees everything as ultimately without purpose—a worldview steeped in misery and nihilism. But he doesn’t turn away from it. In fact, he embraces it. He feels, in some twisted way, superior to those who haven’t realized this “truth.” “Yes, I may be miserable, but at least I know the truth. I am right.” There’s a kind of pride in that outlook—an arrogance he might never admit. But is that really the right path? It feels more like a cliché of how not to live—a recipe for maximizing misery, for pushing away everything that could create a sense of connection to the world.

The movie also makes an important point: If you feel that your life is not worth living, and you’ve already tried therapy, medication, and other conventional help, maybe it’s worth considering a drastic lifestyle change—a new job, a spiritual path, even mysticism. How can you think of ending your life before trying those things? Suicide should be a last resort—not something considered just because the “easy” things didn’t help.

The film also touches on a Heideggerian problem: the tendency to view the world purely through an object–subject lens. The universe becomes nothing but a set of objects to study and manipulate, which leads to nihilism and strips the world of meaning. By denying one’s own Dasein, one’s lived, subjective experience, we also deny the possibility of meaning itself.

One final thing I want to mention: the symbolic use of color is noteworthy. The Black man, who represents religion, theology, and Kierkegaard’s leap of faith (although this only fits to a degree), is dressed in white. The white man, who represents nihilism and pessimism inspired by Schopenhauer, is dressed in black. Striking visual choice.

Huge respect to the film for how it ends. 7/10.

Edit: One more thing came to mind—the religious man mentions that the only thing he truly misses about his former lifestyle is music. I believe there’s a deeper reason for this. Listening to music one loves is often a gateway to transcendent experiences—moments that might otherwise only be accessed through religion. In this sense, this represents a kind of journey: from more earthly forms of transcendence to the divine transcendence sought through asceticism, prayer, and deep religious study.

Let me try to make the point about this modern trap that is easy to fall into—and that society more generally has fallen into.

I mean, you can imagine being born into the world we live in, inheriting a kind of Enlightenment optimism, a Christian idealism—believing that the mind is inside a body, that there is one truth that reveals itself, and that getting to this objective truth should be our highest priority in life.

And you can imagine looking around you for people to inspire you in this pursuit. Who do you see? You see scientists, philosophers—what seem to be the highest-level people committed to finding the truth. And what do they say to do? We’ve got to study the objects out there and how they relate to each other. We’ve got to find the best way to know what these things are and how to manipulate them to our advantage. Because not only does this bring us closer to the truth—our ultimate goal—but it also produces technology that can do miraculous things and make people’s lives better, more efficient, more optimized. That’s what we’re told to focus on.

And you can imagine hearing all that and thinking: Yeah, I’m on board with that. The correct way for me to view my existence, if I want to live in reality, is the scientific way of looking at things. I’m going to work hard to remove my cultural biases, I’m going to make sure language doesn’t get in the way of that truth, I’m going to remove how history shades my way of thinking—and if only I can do all that fully, then one day I’ll be able to get out of Plato’s cave. I’ll be able to see the truth, not just the shadows on the wall.

But if Heidegger is right, then as spectators from the outside, we can see how this person is simplifying things—how they’re really just stuck in the allegory of the cave. They think they’re arriving at the truth, but we can predict the outcome of this single way of framing things: they’ll struggle with nihilism, because they’re trying to create meaning out of theoretical abstractions. They’ll live in confusion about subjectivity and consciousness, or free will and determinism, because they’re always committing a category error when trying to describe their being. They’ll see culture, language, and history as barriers to truth, rather than the very things that make their experience of being even possible.

This doesn’t mean we should abandon the concept of framing things as objective and subjective. What Heidegger is saying is that relying solely on this one framing is problematic and incomplete. Certain elements of being are described better—or worse—in different framings. And when you overuse one of these framings, you inevitably run into very predictable problems when that framing reaches its limitations.

So, if you live your entire life in the framing of subject and object, of course you’re left with a cold, disinterested universe filled with objects that you are always detached from.

And even if, based on that, you construct some theoretical framework, that system will always be rooted in the idea of being a subject in a world of objects—centered around manipulating those objects in ways that are useful or beneficial to you.

That’s why Nietzsche is, for Heidegger, the last great metaphysician—because his framework of the will to power is still based on the subject-object framing.

As long as our systems are based on this framing, they are ultimately corrupted by a technological viewpoint. We are always looking at people and things as if they are objects-at-hand—as if they are things to be understood, controlled, manipulated, and optimized for a particular outcome.

Dasein and the work in Being and Time is not the sole viewpoint Heidegger thinks we should use to look at the relation of being—it’s a reframing of what being is, meant to free people from seeing things only through a subject-object lens.

And nature is more complicated than having just a single framing.

~ Philosophize This! Epsiode: 214