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Existentialism and dread and absurdity have very little to do with practical problems like pandemics and more to do with the human condition. I feel like the author does a poor job of establishing the premise introduced in the title and first paragraph, and the rest of the article is just a summary of existentialist thought.
Existentialism is something that's about you as an individual, it's all very inward facing. The idea that society at-large is facing a problem, and therefore we're all having an existentialist moment together is a weird claim to me.
Existentialism is about going back to reality as you perceive it. It's not about being self-centered. You should read or re-read The Stranger, and you'll see that it has much to do with the current pandemic.
If you were going to name one Camus novel to illustrate your point, why didn't you choose La Peste (The Plague)? The subject matter is even timely!
The Plague is Camus' most novel-ish book and least philosophical. There is philosophy there (should a doctor resist an inevitable plague?) but there is also a lot of metaphor (many read it as an allegory for nazi-sympathizing france) and even just classic character development. This is very different from The Stranger, which spends like 1/3 of its words on a philosophical conversation, or something like Myth of Sisyphus, which doesn't even attempt to be a story.
I've thought a lot about this book this year, though I haven't read it since I was a teen.
I don't know. Cutting everyone off from human contact so that they face life alone feels fairly existential to me - not in theory, but in practice.
It's about the "dizziness of freedom", it's about wanting your cake and to eat it, too. When you have no choice in the matter, where's the internal conflict?
You are completely alone in the universe. Nobody is going to make any choices for you or help define your life. You have to decide who you are and how you live.
That's how it came down, practically and especially emotionally, to a lot of people who were quarantined. Seems pretty existential to me.
> You are completely alone in the universe. Nobody is going to make any choices for you or help define your life. You have to decide who you are and how you live.
That depends a lot on what you think you are. As far as hyper-individualistic egocentrism is internalized, indeed you are an insular, isolated entity hopelessly alone in your existence. If you throw a dash of blank-slatist postmodernism on it, indeed you are whatever you define to be and gosh it is so hard to choose what to be and you might as well be nothing.
If you see yourself as the continuation of past generations with a purpose to leave something for future generations, while doing your share for your current fellow humans, in short, if you matter to other people, then your life has meaning and you are as connected as one can ever be. If you see the struggle of your ancestors on these same problems, and the gifts they have left for you including the genes, epigenetic methilations and memes (i.e. everything from science to culture to music), if you see yourself as the fallible human being with the curse of having infinite potential (because we are the best generalist species but can only be so many things and achieve so much in our lives) therefore making sure to raise and leave something valuable for your following generations (doesn’t even have to be own kids), suddenly your choices are not as high stakes and you just have to do your best with what you got.
Both definitiions straddle the same existential problems, isolation, meaning, choice/responsibility and death. One gets crushed under them, the other thrives with the challenge they provide.
>Nobody is going to make any choices for you or help define your life. You have to decide who you are and how you live.
Except of course the culture and language you’re born into, the public education and legal systems that curb and define your behavior, popular gender and sexual mores...
Modern humanity is a massively socially-constructed and mediated entity, defined by these interactions in their present and historic forms. Existentialism is largely a retreat from this reality into the fictive notion of an individuality because it shields one from engaging with the larger terrain, within and without oneself.
I think Sartre said when you look over the edge of a high building you feel fear, but when you realize nothing is stopping you from throwing yourself off, you feel anxiety. A real life of the party, he was. If you want to read a slightly less-depressing existentialist, try Kierkegaard.
Sartre can speak for himself. Those aren't the emotions I feel.
> When you have no choice in the matter, where's the internal conflict?
Uh.... this completely misunderstands like literally everything Sartre wrote, the point of which was that you ALWAYS have a choice.
How is the current pandemic now causing dread in people? Sure, most people experience existential crises individually, but now we have an event that is causing a lot of people to experience it at once.
In fact, the first time existentialism became mainstream was in the aftermath of World War II, a large scale global disaster that shook people's faith in God and Government (capital G). Is the coronavirus pandemic not the most global disaster since WWII?
The feeling i get from reading existentialist works compared to the popular usage of the word existential are quite far separated, the same goes for any school of thought with a name entering the popular vocabulary (i.e. cynic, stoic, hedonist, ...)
In scope, even more global than WWII, in intensity though, nowhere remotely close... very different kinds of situation that don’t easily draw comparison.
I mean existentialism literally gained popularity post WWII. See how much more popular Neitszche and Kierkegaard became many years after they had died. Camus, on the other hand, was celebrated during his lifetime.
Is it so absurd to think that the pandemic is probably one of the worst events many people today have ever experienced? One of the reoccurring themes of existentialism is that individuals form their own meaning, a meaning that may be radically altered if they've lost their job due to the pandemic, have been hospitalized due to the pandemic, or have lost someone to the pandemic.
The pandemic isn't just bad, like getting hurt or losing money. It turned our lives upside down, calling into question the meaning and value of institutions we previous largely took for granted -- from school to office to commute to social relationships and how we interact.
"First, it has been reproached as an invitation to people to dwell in quietism of despair. For if every way to a solution is barred, one would have to regard any action in this world as
entirely inefective, and one would arrive finally at a contemplative philosophy. Moreover, since contemplation is a luxury, this would be only another bourgeois philosophy. This is, especially, the reproach made by the Communists"
-- Sartre, second paragraph of Existentialism is a Humanism, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exis...
We certainly live in strange times.
My life and those of my loved ones goes pretty well. But I see issues in my social circle.
People realize their lifes suck.
They worked all week in a shitty job, just to go to a party, concert, or the cinema at the weekend.
They worked all year in a shitty job, just to have 2-4 weeks of holidays that were fun.
They were in relationships that only survived, because they were able to take some time without their partner.
Nobody in my social circle died of Corona, but a few people killed themselves or broke up with their partners of over ten years.
That showed me how thin the layer of "goodness" around many peoples life really is.
You forgot: work until you're 65 so you can enjoy your last 10 years with a broken body
Reminds me of this I heard/read somewhere:
When you're young, you have the energy and time, but no money.
When you're middle-aged, you have the energy and money, but no time.
When you're old, you have the time and money, but no energy.
There's a certain survivorship bias at work, but I see old people around with plenty of energy. I think many use lack of energy as a plausible excuse when they're really just lazy.
It's even worse.
The previous generation can just put in 9-5, work in one company their whole lives. and rely on their retirement pension in old age.
Millennials today have no such luxury. They have to manage their careers and finances personally or they will be left penniless when they are old.
Very good point.
Somehow I reached the point in my life where I started to question all these things many years ago.
65? Good luck, those goal posts are moving. Someone has to support the growing base of retirees with a shrinking tax base.
>On the one hand, and for the most part, people have expressed an urge to restore certainty ... Politically speaking, citizens have looked to strong leaders for containment and control, a phenomenon some call the “authoritarian reflex.” And the uncertainty vacuum has been filled by conspiracy theories, war rhetoric, the denial of scientific facts, and an increase in surveillance measures.
Interesting take on the rise of authoritarianism around the world.
Interesting take on the fact that there are basically no scientific facts for people who claim to support them.
A list of questions that should have been answered before any response was put in place.
What is the death rate per infection.
What is the asymptomatic rate in the general population.
What is the transmission rate for asymptomatic carriers.
A small army of less than 10k researchers sampling the whole population of the US at random would have been able to answer those questions in a week and we could have decided on an actual scientific response. Instead of whatever ideological response we get depending on who is in power at whatever level of the government.
It could be that letting the virus run wild as fast as possible is the best possible response. It could be that we need to take a note from China and weld people in their houses. We don't know, and no one wants to find out.
Anyone who says 'scientific facts' with a straight face when making a suggestion about the pandemic with the state of knowledge we have is at best clueless and at worst a charlatan and should be removed from whatever position they currently occupy.
I feel this is true of most things governments do.. ideological responses where we could just research the correct response.
Another segment of citizens is looking for predictable leadership, one that has a discernible, cohesive strategy in handling both domestic and foreign relations. To me, that sounds far more certain-- or there are two competing definitions of what 'certainty' is.
Liberal democracy is on a downward slope ever since the 2008 recession. Individual economic uncertainty in wide groups of society has been fueling anti-capitalist sentiment, while left liberalism was entirely fixated on sexuality/race/gender, without ever acknowledging deeper problems under the surface causing economic exclusion and divide.
Liberal democracy has been on a downward slope since reaching a high-point when communism collapsed in the early 1990s. There's no longer a need for countries with marginal commitments to the principle of democracy to keep up a democratic pretext in the interests of keeping communism at bay.
I've made that point before in a different way. Capitalism has achieved an ideological monopoly. There's no competition left from communism. It is not an accident that capitalism delivered the most for the average worker when there appeared to be an alternative way to run things. That's the period from about 1920 (the Russian Revolution) to 1980 (the USSR was still hanging on, but nobody believed in the promise of communism any more.)
China is interesting. It's theoretically communist, but in practice mostly capitalist now. It's authoritarian, but more by constant bureaucratic pressure than random hits by goon squads. There's central planning, and five-year plans that have real effect, yet most of the movers are private companies. Finance is tightly controlled; manufacturing less so. People move up in the government by starting in low-level jobs and getting promoted; there is not much movement between business and government. So far, results are reasonably good.
I would say that the decline was imminent following the collapse of communism, but I only started to notice a severe regression of civil liberties and liberal attitudes after the 9/11 terror attacks. I live in Germany, mind you. The changes have been even bigger in the US as it seems.
Even most of the current leftist ideas seem strangely authoritarian and dogmatic.
According to some historians, it is by design. I mean the left were perceived as a real danger, and were deliberately poisoned through academic types, to accept more and more the identity politics.
Not sure if they’re correlated though by timing? Authoritarianism has been increasing before Covid.
Authoritarianism is a reaction to the perceived failures of (classical) liberalism to address modern challenges.
> Authoritarianism is a reaction to the perceived failures of (classical) liberalism to address modern challenges.
Or authoritarianism is a reaction to the perceived failures of (classical) liberalism to counter modern realities that are perceived as challenges because it suits would-be authoritarians to present them that way.
If you're on the left, I'm talking about immigration, and if you're on the right, I'm talking about climate change...
Authoritarianism is a naked grab for power for personal gain.
Nah, it’s a reaction to critical theory / PC convention dominating the culture. This philosophy of everything is socially constructed and nothing is objectively true has fueled a reaction that at least feels like our feet are on solid ground. This has nothing to do with classical liberalism.
Classical liberalism can under attack from critical theory over the last 40 years and has manifested in mainstream adoption of this type of thinking. This betrayal and dismissal of classical liberalism has forced the right into authoritarianism as the norms of liberal democracy have been dismantled.
> We might have found that we prefer to be certain about the future, however grim it may be.
One of my favorite pop-psychology ideas was an idea about managers. Apparently there was some study (probably never peer reviewed or even sufficiently well founded, but what do I know?) where people were given bosses that were one of: "super nice", "super mean", or "usually nice and sometime mean". The result, as I recall, was that the bosses people disliked the most were the usually nice bosses. The speculation was that with a horrible boss you at least knew what to expect. You could plan around someone who is consistently mean. The "usually nice" bosses were unpredictable which lead to higher stress amongst the participants. I may be mis-remembering and filling in more details, but I think this result held regardless of the frequency of the "usually nice".
> Heidegger claimed that the fundamental human experience is alienation, felt as homelessness, anxiety, and a pervasive fear of death
For more on this, Lex Fridman recently had a talk with Sheldon Solomon [1]. They discuss a path from Heidegger toward Ernest Becker's "The Denial of Death".
I'm surely not the only one who stopped watching the news to read Camus' "The Plague".
Can't recommend this choice highly enough.
Go read "The Rebel" now :D I find his essays to be even more brilliant than his prose.
"It isn't freedom from. It's freedom to." -Sartre
I have dealt with the uncertainty in a surprising way.
Pre-Covid, I could map out the rest of my life with near certainty assuming no death. Stable career, next promotions, children’s age/steps, etc.
Now, the uncertainty has been freeing in a sense, because I almost felt trapped in following through with the path that my mind seemed certain until retirement/death. The certainty almost made me live all life simultaneously and therefore time flew by.
This time has been slow and steady, and I have appreciated that.
I have made similar observations. I'm not really sure how to describe it, but it is like one needs to frame a different mindset to face the new reality, and then despite the reality, that new mindset brings a certain peace with it. In accepting the uncertainty and your powerlessness, you cease to plan too much ahead and just take things for what they are. That frees you from the stress of predicting the future, which then gives you more energy to embrace the immediate. And that, among other things, slows down the perception of time.
Also, I hadn't woken up to sunlight in years. Completely transforms your sleep.
I think an overlooked factor in the social problems is structural economic issues, including ones that have been building for decades. But beyond that I think the systems of government and money are too simplistic and at this point outdated and need to be completely revised.