Libsyn Directory

Bernardo Kastrup and The Search for Meaning

Release Date: 04/27/2024

Crash Landing on Meaning: Life, Class, and Rediscovery through Korea

Korea Deconstructed

Lebanese scholar Rania Hafez joins Korea Deconstructed for a wide-ranging conversation on class, culture, and the search for meaning. Rania reflects on how media pushes culture wars over class solidarity, the importance of leadership in academia, and how she discovered Korean dramas during the Covid pandemic. Her love for Crash Landing on You and Hometown Cha Cha Cha helped her find beauty and purpose again, calling Korea her "Narnia." A deeply personal and philosophical episode about rediscovery, passion, and why Korea speaks to so many hearts around the world. She also reflects on her...

Kim Il Sung: The Accidental Tyrant Who Changed Korea Forever

Korea Deconstructed

My guest is Fyodor Tertitskiy, a prolific scholar, polyglot, and one of the few who reads the footnotes of history in multiple languages. His new book, Accidental Tyrant, a biography of Kim Il Sung, challenges the official state mythology and unearths the improbable rise of a guerrilla fighter turned dynastic dictator. This is how Kim Il Sung outwitted imperialists, communists, comrades, and colonels alike, turning chance into legacy, failure into foundation. But the question remains: what does this all mean for those of us living in a world still shaped by the ghosts of his decisions? ...

Koreans React to the 2025 Presidential Election: What Do Koreans Really Want?

Korea Deconstructed

In this episode of Korea Deconstructed, I’m joined by four university students: young people who voted, watched, and waited as South Korea held its most recent presidential election and elected Lee Jae-myung. We discuss what the election felt like to them. What it felt like to cast a vote. What they saw among their friends. And what was never said. We’ll explore the hopes and contradictions of a generation caught between economic uncertainty, cultural shifts, and a political system that doesn’t always seem built for them. Korea Deconstructed #105 Big thank you to these wonderful...

Is Korea Falling Apart? 4 Young Koreans React to “Korea is Over”

Korea Deconstructed

A recent viral YouTube video claimed that Korea would soon be extinct. The country transformed negatively by one of the world's lowest birthrates. Change, it suggested, was too late. Four young adults come together to discuss the future of Korea, assessing its birthrate issues, education, culture of perfection, and the deep spiritual crisis that seems to have gripped the nation. Is Korea really over? Not necessarily... We hear from 4 young people all living here: a young Korean man interested in Jungian psychology, a woman balancing study and modeling, an ethnic Korean from Uzbekistan...

Dividing Korea: Dr. Kornel Chang

Korea Deconstructed

Kornel Chang on U.S. Power, Korean Resistance, and the Birth of Division What if Korea’s true revolution was never allowed to happen? In this episode, I talk with historian Kornel Chang, author of A Fractured Liberation, to explore a moment in Korean history that most people never learn about. A moment when ordinary Koreans believed they were on the brink of something new. In 1945 Japanese colonial rule had ended and, across the peninsula, people were filled with hope. Workers seized factories, farmers reclaimed land, and women demanded rights. It was Korea’s “Asian Spring”...an...

Building a Life Abroad: Kim Ninja’s Guide to Korea

Korea Deconstructed

From visas to values: a positive, practical conversation about living in Korea Kim Ninja joins Korea Deconstructed to talk about building an authentic life in Korea. Born in Germany to Vietnamese parents, Kim made the jump to Korea and now helps thousands of expats and digital nomads adapt culturally, practically, and legally. Through cartoons, articles, and community building, he offers a refreshing, optimistic take on life abroad — steering away from sensationalism. In this conversation, Kim shares practical advice on visas, adapting to Korean norms, and how to find real beauty in your...

Korean Cinema & The Bodies Within

Korea Deconstructed

I sat down with scholar, Nilesh Kumar to explore how Korean cinema has reflected shifting notions of gender, identity, and social structure across decades. From the angry men of the Korean New Wave to the defiant heroines of modern streaming hits, this conversation examines how bodies on screen become battlegrounds for power, memory, and desire. We begin by talking about how technology defines Park Chan-wook’s groundbreaking movie Oldboy, as well as its absence of allegory, signaling the start of post-modern Korean cinema. Then, we explore three main themes in Korean cinema across time:...

Voices of Change: Korean Students, Art, and Democracy

Korea Deconstructed

보도지침 (Media Guidelines) is a satirical work that critiques the media landscape and the influence of government or corporate power on Korean journalism in the 1980s. It explores themes such as censorship, the manipulation of public opinion, and the ethical dilemmas faced by journalists. The play is known for its sharp wit and critical perspective, often using humor and irony to highlight the challenges and compromises that media professionals may face. More and more young Koreans are bringing this play to the stage—not as a history lesson, but as a statement about their own...

The Korean Diaspora and Korean History Told Through Photos

Korea Deconstructed

A few years ago, Blair's grandmother gave him a present. Approximately 300 photographs his grandfather had taken in Korea nearly 70 years ago. These beautifully preserved color photos not only revealed a country and its people emerging from war and beginning to rebuild, it also showed Blair members of his family. It showed him where he was from, and, therefore, where he was going. He has digitized these photos and made them into an archive. This has since grown to feature a wide range of photos and videos expertly organized to allow visitors to discover Korea as it once was and, perhaps, also...

Shamanism, Post-Colonialism, and the Korean Left

Korea Deconstructed

David A. Tizzard has a PhD in Korean Studies and lectures at Seoul Women's University and Hanyang University. He writes a weekly column in the Korea Times, is a social-cultural commentator, and a musician who has lived in Korea for nearly two decades. He can be reached at . Jack Greenberg works as an independent consultant, researcher, and freelance writer. His current focus is on heritage and conservation issues, historical memory debates, truth-seeking and reconciliation, and civilian massacres of the Korean War. Connect with Jack Substack: Twitter: BlueSky: Insta: ...

More Episodes

Bernardo Kastrup is the executive director of Essentia Foundation. His work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy and another Ph.D. in computer engineering. As a scientist, Bernardo has worked for CERN and Philips Research Laboratories. Bernardo's 11th book, coming in 2024, is 'Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st-century's only plausible metaphysics.'

This is me listening to Bernardo and asking him questions so as to better understand the world as mind. To do this, we explored what it means to be human. Bernardo explained the work of Nietzsche, Frankl, Schopenhauer, and Jung to me as well as how a bourgeoise has sought to wrest control of our culture away from the church and ultimately leave us stranded, meaningless, and seeking solutions elsewhere.

Bernardo taught me that we should not seek answers or solutions. These will never appear to us and we simply don't have the capability to understand what is going on. Instead, like the apple blossom in his garden, we should just be. We should listen to the noumena, the will inside us. We can describe it as duty, as calling, as fate, or as many other things. But ultimately, we are a violin and we should allow ourselves to be played by nature rather than seeking to force ourselves on the world. We should seek service instead of personal happiness. These ideas will stay with me for a while.

At the end, I asked him to recommend a movie, a book, and a song. The movie he suggested was The Double Life of Véronique (1991) by Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski. The song was Song to the Siren by Cocteau Twins vocalist Elizabeth Fraser. The book was Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation.

Bernardo's Website: https://www.bernardokastrup.com/

The Essentia Foundation: https://www.youtube.com/@UCHKZdDf09_8vVHm102fu0sg

Bernardo's upcoming book: https://www.amazon.com/Analytic-Idealism-Nutshell-straightforward-metaphysics/dp/1803416696

Discussion Outline:

0:00 The importance of service

7:40 The bourgeoisie capture of culture

12:33 Immanent meaning

25:35 Spiritual but not religious

31:00 Carl Jung and our two stages of life

41:58 Introspection as the royal path to knowledge

48:15 Schopenhauer and the will inside us

54:52 Synchronicity 1:05:03 Religion and science