On the Human Condition (Luc Dardenne) / The Kid with a Bike

“On the Human Condition” is not merely a text that explains The Kid with a Bike; it is the very foundation of its existence, the psychological seed, and its philosophical essence. Luc Dardenne did not seek merely to address social issues through the figure of Cyril. Rather, through Cyril’s gestures and silences, his rage, violent impulses, and his small yet profound shifts toward accepting love, Dardenne poses the immense question: “How does one survive in a godless world?”
The anxiety of death and the absence of God, introduced in Chapter 1, and the possibility of love and recovery of empathy in Chapter 7, flow like emotional undercurrents through every scene of The Kid with a Bike. For instance, Cyril’s desperate search for his father is not simply a child’s longing but can be seen as an existential cry toward an absolute other who might confirm his very being. Samantha’s unconditional acceptance offers Cyril his first glimpse into a world where it is safe to ask for help—a moment that plants the seed of trust in the external world. This is the core insight of Chapter 7 in On the Human Condition.
In the preface to the book, Luc Dardenne confesses, “Through Cyril, the child within me awakened once again.” This is a powerful indication that The Kid with a Bike is not just a film, but a poetic realization of Dardenne’s inner self and philosophy. Thus, The Kid with a Bike is not merely a story; it is a poetic response to an existential question. And On the Human Condition can be seen as a philosophical diary unfolding the inner reflections that lie between that question and its response.
 

 
 
Chapter 1. A Being Awakened in the Shadow of Death

Luc Dardenne begins the first chapter with Nietzsche’s declaration: “God is dead.” He directly confronts the question: How can a human being survive in a world without God? The protagonist of the film, Cyril, is the embodiment of this very question. Abandoned and exposed to violence, devoid of love, Cyril’s journey toward rediscovering the capacity to trust and love becomes Dardenne’s way of asking us: Can we live without the fear of death? And how should we embrace that fear?

Martin Heidegger once said, “Anxiety is the purest path toward the abyss of Being.” In response to these words, the author recalls the Buddha’s parinirvana. To not turn away from death but to hold it close and live fully in the present—that, we are told, is the truest mode of existence. Luc Dardenne expresses this as “the radiant present in which one encounters oneself, in time linked to the reality of dying.”

And I thought: life does not continue by avoiding death, but rather, it begins the moment we accept death with honesty. Anxiety led me back into the present. And that present shimmered like a fleeting moment—yet it was the clearest proof that I was alive. As Proust once described, it is often the smallest sensations—a sound of rain, a cup of milk coffee, the feeling of the wind—that hold us within the river of time.

In the end, life is a pilgrimage toward death. Yet along that path, we keep asking: Who am I?
That question draws us into the most vulnerable center of our being.
And from that center, we finally come face to face with the living self once again.

 

 

 

Chapter 2. The Dream of Living Like an Animal

In the face of death, human beings are powerless to assert any form of agency. Death arrives suddenly, unbidden, and it is an end that cannot be defied. No plan, no word, no will holds any weight before it. As Heidegger puts it, we are beings-toward-death. But Luc Dardenne adds another question to this: Why does the fear of death dominate us with such overwhelming emotion?

This fear is not only about the fact of dying. It emerges from something deeper—the fear of being forgotten, of being left alone in pain, of vanishing without meaning. In The Kid with a Bike, Cyril is, in many ways, already dead in the eyes of his father. He is a child abandoned while still alive, trapped in the shadow of death.

That is why he must become stronger, why he must ride his bike faster. To escape that passivity and pain, he turns to violence as a desperate means to assert his own subjectivity. Yet slowly, he begins to move beyond the fear of death—not through strength, but through the presence of someone who waits for him, remembers him, and protects him.

This is a subtle, deeply human process. More than the fact of dying, it is the presence of someone who makes us want to live that pulls us back onto the side of life. Death is the most absolute rupture for a human being. But what relieves that fear is the love of the other—the protective shield that love provides. Luc Dardenne says that anxiety, rather than isolating us in the idea of death, can actually detach us from linear time and bring us back into the vividness of the present moment.

And I believe this: death is not merely an end, but the moment when a connection to someone is severed. The knowledge that such a connection is still possible while we are alive—that alone makes life, and existence, just a little warmer.

 

Chapter 3. Death, the Most Passive State

We are all walking toward death.
Time flows in a straight line, and from the moment we are born, we begin the journey toward our end.
But Luc Dardenne tells us this: Some forms of love can alter the very direction of that time.
This is the love of the other—unconditional, absolute.

It is the love that revives a child in the midst of pain and fear, especially for those who have no one left to trust.
It is, ultimately, the love of a mother.
This love gives the newborn child the first sign that the world is worth living in.
And in that moment, the child silently cries out: I do not want to die. I want to live.

For Cyril in The Kid with a Bike, this protective love also arrived.
It came in the form of the other—Samantha.
Even amid his violence and rage, her unwavering acceptance of the child’s existence becomes a love that makes him want to live again.
Love is not merely a feeling; it is the power to transform time itself.

It gradually turns the fear of death into glimpses of happiness.
It shifts seemingly meaningless time into time for someone, into time with someone.
Such love whispers: It brings me joy that you exist in this world.
And that whisper becomes the deepest assurance a living being needs to continue living.

Desire without love isolates us.
Desire repeats itself, and that repetition severs relationships and becomes a vehicle of hatred and destruction.
But the absolute love of the other leads us back into relation.
It restores our longing to live.

In the end, it is the only truly human miracle:
the transformation of time once flowing toward death
into time flowing toward life.

 

 

Chapter 4. Can Love Change the Course of Time?

“Power is the most potent illusion that allows human beings to forget the anxiety of existence.”
— Luc Dardenne
Some say, “The world does not make room for the weak.”
At first glance, it sounds like a sober truth.
But Luc Dardenne challenges this notion:
Where does such power come from? And for what purpose does it exist?
He argues that a person full of power is someone who cannot accept the infinite love of the other.
One who cannot face the fear of death, who fails to tame it, and instead clings to the illusion of controlling time and existence.
Such a person becomes disconnected and isolated from the flow of life.
Dardenne, citing Boethius, offers the metaphor of “a man who seeks to possess all of time at once.”
But the one who tries to claim all of time cannot truly live in the present.
He tries to erase the past and control the future, yet in doing so, he becomes a servant of time itself.
Even the attempt to divide and conquer time—claiming it bit by bit—still leaves one trapped under its rule.
Time cannot be seized.
And the more we try to capture it, the farther we drift from the present.
Cyril in The Kid with a Bike initially denies his own pain.
He refuses to acknowledge the death, the loss, the grief.
He tries to protect himself with violence.
But all it brings is deeper isolation.
Only when he is offered the infinite, unconditional love of the other can he begin to reveal his vulnerability—and in doing so, rediscover life.
True transformation does not come through strength.
It begins when we admit our fear and allow ourselves to receive love.
Luc Dardenne writes: “The human being who fears death finds, in the love of the other, the courage to live again.”
We cannot overcome the anxiety of existence by mastering time or power.
It is only when we accept that anxiety—and allow ourselves to dwell with another who stays—that we finally become present, and truly alive.

 

Chapter 5. Fear in the Name of Power

 
“Power is the most potent illusion that allows human beings to forget the anxiety of existence.”
— Luc Dardenne
Some say, “The world does not make room for the weak.”
At first glance, it sounds like a sober truth.
But Luc Dardenne challenges this notion:
Where does such power come from? And for what purpose does it exist?
He argues that a person full of power is someone who cannot accept the infinite love of the other.
One who cannot face the fear of death, who fails to tame it, and instead clings to the illusion of controlling time and existence.
Such a person becomes disconnected and isolated from the flow of life.
Dardenne, citing Boethius, offers the metaphor of “a man who seeks to possess all of time at once.”
But the one who tries to claim all of time cannot truly live in the present.
He tries to erase the past and control the future, yet in doing so, he becomes a servant of time itself.
Even the attempt to divide and conquer time—claiming it bit by bit—still leaves one trapped under its rule.
Time cannot be seized.
And the more we try to capture it, the farther we drift from the present.
Cyril in The Kid with a Bike initially denies his own pain.
He refuses to acknowledge the death, the loss, the grief.
He tries to protect himself with violence.
But all it brings is deeper isolation.
Only when he is offered the infinite, unconditional love of the other can he begin to reveal his vulnerability—and in doing so, rediscover life.
True transformation does not come through strength.
It begins when we admit our fear and allow ourselves to receive love.
Luc Dardenne writes: “The human being who fears death finds, in the love of the other, the courage to live again.”
We cannot overcome the anxiety of existence by mastering time or power.
It is only when we accept that anxiety—and allow ourselves to dwell with another who stays—that we finally become present, and truly alive.

 

Chapter 6. Melancholy, Evil, and Closed Imagination

 

"The dwelling place of evil is melancholy.
It creates an imagined state of being that seems preferable to the life of one who has been separated,
and offers it as a protective shield."
— Luc Dardenne

At times, when reality becomes too painful to endure, we construct another world within our minds.
For some, this becomes a space of creative imagination.
For others, it becomes a refuge of melancholy.
Luc Dardenne warns us: when such imagination remains cut off from the other—when it is enclosed within a sealed inner world—it holds within it the seed of evil.

Evil always negates the outside.
It turns away from the suffering of the other, rejects connection, and locks the self within itself.
That world may appear safe on the surface, but it is sustained only by eliminating the presence of the other.
In such a state, one must cease to perceive the other as human in order to preserve the self.
And when the suffering of another no longer reaches us, empathy disappears, and the other collapses into a being with whom no relationship is possible.

This, Dardenne suggests, is the foundation of evil that emerges from melancholy:
disconnection, indifference, powerlessness, and isolation.
As these feelings repeat and intensify, the self eventually shuts down even to itself.
But there is something that breaks open this sealed world:
a relationship grounded in infinite love.

Infinite love listens to the pain of the other, not by promising to erase it,
but by choosing to remain beside it.
Such love is more than an emotion—it is a way of being that keeps the self open.
Unlike melancholy, which closes and constricts, love always points toward a world of open possibility.

Without that love, Cyril in The Kid with a Bike would have remained the boy who rides away in escape.
But he had Samantha.
Her love made it possible for him to gradually emerge from his closed world of imagination,
to trust again in the existence of the outside.

Evil always desires a closed world.
Love always seeks openness.
We live between these two, choosing daily.
And that choice always returns to one question:
Does another's pain still reach me as my own?

 

Chapter 7. The One Who Can Ask for Help

 
“Waiting for help from outside is, like the struggle to survive, a phenomenon of the mind.
To the child groaning in pain, the mother says:
‘I’m coming. I’ll bring you warm milk. I won’t leave you in pain.’”
I couldn’t hold back my tears at this passage.
The moment I read it, for the first time, I appeared as “the Other” to my past self.
Back then, I didn’t know how to ask for help.
Because I had never received it, I couldn’t even believe it was possible.
“The one who asks for help is already someone who has once been helped.”
That single sentence pierced through years of my silence.
I came to realize that trust in the world, faith in the existence of others,
often begins with the memory of a warm touch hidden somewhere deep inside us.
And that touch is not remembered through language,
but through a felt sense of being.
I wondered why offering a hand to someone in pain can feel so profoundly fulfilling.
It’s not because I help them,
but because their joy becomes mine.
In that moment, the boundary between you and me disappears.
When your pain is eased, I can breathe again too.
As in the poem by Korean poet Kim Chun-soo:
"When I called his name, he came to me and became a flower."
The hand extended in help breathes life into the nameless Other,
and that newly animated presence becomes a mirror that reflects my own being.
In the moment when we look at each other and speak,
we are no longer isolated beings.
We are living beings—those who carry memories of having been loved—
and it is through those memories
that we begin to trust the world again.

 

Chapter 8. The Reason I Learned to Love Myself

 
“A human being cannot live without continually believing
in something within them that cannot be destroyed.”
— Luc Dardenne
Within us, there exists something that does not easily break—
something invisible, yet never absent.
We may call it faith, or soul, or even dignity.
But Luc Dardenne traces the origin of that faith to one thing:
the memory of having been unconditionally loved.
A person who has learned to love themselves
is often someone who has once been loved by another.
That memory becomes the foundation of self-love,
and the very first step toward trusting others.
Kafka once wrote in his diary:
"Can one conceive of anything more hopeless than something
that cannot be comforted,
not even by the smallest speck of solace?"
This question struck Dardenne deeply.
He contemplated it for years, and in response,
he imagined a moment when absolute love arrives for the human being who cannot be consoled.
Sometimes, that love appears in the form of a personal god—
not a god seen by the eye,
but one who loves without condition.
Faith in such a presence becomes the root of all trust—
in oneself, and in the other.
Self-love is not an emotion that excludes others.
Rather, it begins the moment we can affirm ourselves
through the infinite love of another.
And this form of self-love frees us from the fear of death,
the obsession with power,
the craving for eternity—
because being accepted by love makes any need for domination unnecessary.
Cyril, in The Kid with a Bike,
does not possess this self-love at first.
He has never truly been received by another.
But through Samantha’s love,
he begins—quietly, tentatively—to believe that he might be okay.
That belief becomes the most intimate force
that allows him to love life again.
🌱 Reader's Note
Reading this chapter, one line stayed with me:
"I am happy because someone else is happy because of me."
This joy is not simply my own—it is the moment another’s joy echoes inside me.
To grow older, I had to be loved by someone first.
And that memory still lives within me.

 

Chapter 9. The Joy of Living Together: The Conditions of Democracy

“The desire to belong is an expression of our yearning for eternity.”
— Luc Dardenne

We all want to belong somewhere.
This sense of belonging is not merely a place within a social structure—
it is a vital assurance that our existence will not simply vanish.
Elias Canetti once wrote,
“There is nothing more frightening than contact with the unknown.”
This helps explain why people disappear into crowds,
why they avoid facing themselves as singular beings.

In the crowd, the other disappears.
People cover themselves with shared movements, shared emotions, shared cries.
It is a defense mechanism born from the fear of death—
an anonymous shield that blocks true connection.
But Dardenne reminds us that genuine belonging does not arise from conformity,
but from recognition.

When another sees me, calls out to me,
and says, “It’s okay for you to be here,”
only then do I begin to feel the joy of living together.
He cites Pascal:
“All of man’s happiness lies in respect.”
Such respect is not founded in laws or institutions,
but in the foundational human relation—
in empathy,
in the mutual acceptance of fragile beings.

Democracy, Dardenne suggests, is not built on fear of power,
but on the shared recognition of our fear of death.
It becomes possible when we can acknowledge one another
and dare to speak,
not from strength,
but from vulnerability.

When Cyril leaned on Samantha in The Kid with a Bike,
it was not through any system or rationale.
It was through a quiet, unwavering act of recognition—
a gesture that said, without words, “You are okay.”
Democracy is not merely a structure upheld by numbers or rules,
but a world where “someone sees me,
and I can reach out to them in return.”
That world becomes real only
when we are willing to embrace the part of ourselves
that is involved in the suffering of others.

🌱 Reader’s Note
For a long time, I don’t think I could ever say aloud:
“See me. Speak to me. Love me.”
Then one day, I realized I was saying those very words to animals instead of people.
Pascal’s words—“A mind not respected cannot endure”—
came vividly alive in this chapter.
If a world where someone simply tells me, “You’re okay,”
is what democracy means,
then maybe I am still someone quietly waiting for those words.

 

 

Chapter 10. The Returning Past and the Lost Home

“Trauma is what structures human time.”
— Luc Dardenne
Trauma is not merely a past event.
It unsettles the present and freezes the possibilities of the future.
Trauma is, in this sense, a hollow pain positioned at the very center of time.
We often ask ourselves, “Why am I being pulled back into the past at this very moment?”
That pull is not a matter of memory,
but the result of something unresolved—
a wound still open in time.
Dardenne writes that we reject the world not because it is hostile,
but because it has lost its enchantment.
And the source of that enchantment lies in a lost home.
Not a physical place,
but a moment in childhood where we lived without fear,
where we were unconditionally loved,
and where, through the gaze of another,
we felt assured: You are allowed to exist.
This, he says, is the home we all carry within us.
Ernst Bloch once wrote:
"The home that no one has ever truly had
will one day come into being."
That longing for home—active and full of desire—
draws us back toward joy,
and enables us to love the world again.
Thus, the past that returns to us
is not only a replay of wounds,
but the echo of our longing to love once more.
Cyril in The Kid with a Bike is also searching for that lost home.
For him, home meant someone who would hold him again,
someone who would remember him from beginning to end.
When that love appears,
the fractured time of trauma begins to mend.
It is no longer time racing toward death,
but time turning once again toward life.

 

Chapter 11. The Child Brings My Death

“The child born into the world declares that they have taken—already claimed—the place of the adult.”
— Luc Dardenne

We call the birth of a child a joy.
But within that joy lies an unspoken trace of anxiety and loss.
Why is that?
Dardenne sees the arrival of a child as a quiet announcement of the adult’s eventual death.
The beginning of a new life is, at the same time, a confrontation with the end of a previous one.

The child’s birth is an irreversible rupture in reality:
from nothingness to fullness,
from stillness to movement,
from silence to a fierce and trembling division.
Even before learning to speak, the child throws the question “Who am I?” toward the adult—
a question that inevitably returns as “And who are you?”
The adult stands perplexed, expected to teach, yet unsure of who they truly are,
facing the blank page of their own existence.

But Dardenne tells us that this blankness is not a lack,
but a space—
a space through which breath must pass.
It is the place where, momentarily forgetting the fear of our own death,
we empty ourselves to breathe life into the child.
To teach another is to teach death.
It is to forget oneself for the sake of the other.

True education is an act of passing on love—
not through instruction,
but through the lived realization:
I, too, was once a beloved child.
And now, I have become someone who can offer that love to another.
This is the joy of nurturing—
the passing down of life itself.

Samantha in The Kid with a Bike is not Cyril’s parent.
But she gives a part of her life to him.
In doing so, she accepts Cyril’s existence—
and also accepts the finitude of her own.
To receive a child is to receive death.
It is to hold the quiet possibility that one might die for the other.
And this kind of love becomes the point from which we all begin to believe in love again.

🌱 Reader’s Note
When I first read the line, “The birth of a child is the announcement of one’s death,”
I felt breathless—shocked.
But the more I reflected, the more true it seemed.
The sense that my place was shrinking,
and someone else was now occupying it.
At first, that felt like anxiety.
But slowly, it has begun to feel like a quiet joy—
the joy of giving my life to someone else.

 

 

 

Chapter 12. Art That Crosses Through Suffering

“Art expresses human suffering.
At the same time, it speaks of a way out of that suffering.”
— Luc Dardenne

Art does not hide our wounds.
It looks suffering straight in the eye
and draws forth the human traces that dwell within it.
But art is not content merely to reproduce pain.
It becomes a silent dialogue:
a single person’s question—“How can I endure this?”—
offered to another.

For Luc Dardenne, art is a middle ground:
between self and other,
individual and universal,
despair and recovery.
In art, we confront our most fragile moments,
and yet we find comfort simply in knowing
that our fragility is seen—shared.

The Kid with a Bike is such an art.
Cyril is both socially marginalized and emotionally exposed.
His anger, mistrust, and isolation form a single, compressed gesture
of contemporary pain.
Yet Dardenne neither romanticizes nor trivializes this gesture.
He shows Cyril just as he is,
while gently gazing at the faint light of possibility within his suffering.

That possibility is called love.
It is called connection.
It is the joy of living together.

The greatest gift art can give us
is the quiet assurance: “I am not alone.”
While expressing human suffering,
art also restores the bonds between people
that make suffering bearable.
And in that moment of restoration,
we find the strength to begin again.

🌱 Reader’s Note
What struck me most as I reached the end of this book
was that Dardenne’s message beyond the camera
was not just a social statement or a moral warning.
It felt as though he was saying:
“I see your pain.
So please, do not close your eyes to the pain of others.”

Perhaps art, in the end, is the language
left behind for us
to feel the unspeakable—together.

 

From the Fear of Existence to the Possibility of Love

 

On the Human Condition is not merely a philosophical essay.
It is Luc Dardenne’s deeply personal reflection, written while contemplating Cyril and Samantha—the two central characters in The Kid with a Bike, co-directed with his brother Jean-Pierre. More than anything, it is a profound meditation on human existence through the figure of a single child.

At first, I was overwhelmed by the density of the text, filled with references to philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kafka, Spinoza, Freud, Wittgenstein, and Levinas. But by the time I finished the book, I had come to understand how The Kid with a Bike was born—not as a work of social realism alone, but as a film grounded in philosophical reflections on human anxiety, death, love, and redemption.

Chapters 1 to 3 focus on the fragility of existence, particularly the fear of death.
In a world where God is dead, the human being must now bear their own existence without external comfort. Dardenne cites Heidegger’s idea of the human being as a “being-toward-death.” Death is the most passive and terrifying force for humans, and its fear repeats endlessly along the linear trajectory of time. In the film, Cyril expresses this fear through his entire body. He has been abandoned and ignored, unable to escape the memory of pain. He keeps riding his bike—not away from death, but with a reckless indifference to it. This denial leads him only into deeper isolation.

From Chapters 4 to 7, Dardenne speaks of the arrival of the Other’s infinite love—of the possibility of an absolute relationship.
This is not simply “love” in the romantic sense, but a fundamental shift in existence.
The line, “One can only ask for help if one has once received it,” encapsulates how human beings revive themselves through relationships. For Cyril, Samantha is that figure. Through her unconditional acceptance and repeated gestures of trust, she offers him a new sense of time, a new emotional world. Dardenne writes: Time that once flowed toward death can be turned toward life through love.

Chapters 8 and 9 explore the recovery of self-love through love, and the possibility of democratic belonging.
Cyril, at first, trusts no one. But the child who could not form relationships slowly begins to believe in himself again through Samantha’s care. Dardenne suggests that joy arises in the relationship with the Other—when the Other’s joy becomes my own. Belonging does not arise from power or a desire for eternity, but from the experience of being recognized and loved. The film portrays this delicately. A single gesture, a single touch, gradually melts Cyril’s isolation.

Chapter 10 turns to trauma and time.
Why do we keep returning to the past?
Because what remains unresolved is not just memory, but unhealed pain that continues to seize the present.
Dardenne describes this return as an “active nostalgia for a lost home that no one has ever truly had.”
Cyril’s constant biking becomes a gesture toward that home—a search for lost love, for time that can still be reclaimed.
And when another appears who is willing to sit beside that pain, time no longer holds only suffering,
but begins to carry the possibility of joy.

Chapter 11 is where the birth of a child intersects with the death of the adult.
Dardenne suggests that the child’s birth displaces the adult, but also reawakens their capacity to love.
The child silently asks, “Who am I?”—and in doing so, compels the adult to ask themselves the same question.
To educate is to prioritize another, to extend life beyond oneself.
Samantha is not Cyril’s biological mother, but she becomes the adult who offers him love.
Her love is education, responsibility, and the willingness to continue a relationship in defiance of death.

The final chapter, Chapter 12, is a meditation on art.
Art does not shy away from suffering.
It expresses pain, but also imagines a way out.
The Kid with a Bike does not romanticize fragility, but invites us to gaze upon it—together.
That is the greatness of this film: it looks directly at another’s pain,
while never losing sight of the possibility of salvation.
It is philosophy.
It is art.
And above all, it is a human prayer.

After reading On the Human Condition, watching The Kid with a Bike once more,
Cyril no longer appeared to me as just a boy.
He had become a metaphor for the human condition.
And Samantha—she was the possibility of love that holds that condition to the end.

The Dardenne brothers tell us:
It is in the moment when the one who suffers speaks again through the love of the other
that the human being finally begins to exist.

At the place where philosophy becomes cinema,
and cinema becomes philosophy,
we are asked once more: “Who are you?”

And now,
we must be ready to answer:
“I am someone who survived because I was loved.”