Sep 6, 2020 01:27 AM
(This post was last modified: Sep 6, 2020 02:37 AM by C C.)
https://bostonreview.net/philosophy-reli...alist-turn
EXCERPTS: Existentialist ideas have seen a remarkable comeback during the COVID-19 pandemic, from Albert Camus’s frequently invoked novel The Plague, Friedrich Nietzsche’s turn to tragedy, and Simone de Beauvoir’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s critique of bad faith, to Giorgio Agamben’s Carl Schmitt-inspired musings about the state of emergency and what Michel de Montaigne, Martin Heidegger, and Blaise Pascal can teach us about facing death.
The thread running through all these appeals to existentialism is a sensitivity to human fragility felt to be especially pertinent in the midst of a global pandemic and stark disruptions of social order. [...] This resurgence of interest in existentialism is not entirely surprising. The body of work we now think of as existentialist emerged during the first half of the twentieth century in conflict-ridden Germany and France, where uncertainty permeated every dimension of society. Its major advocates and sole explicit supporters were Beauvoir and Sartre, who gained immense popularity in postwar France. They followed German existentialist thinkers such as Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Karl Barth, who had already risen to fame in interwar Weimar with their readings of Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard. Though their work varied in the details, they all shared a type of thinking that rejected religious and political dogma, expressed scorn for academic abstraction, and focused on the finitude and absurdity of human existence.
Yet, while existentialism emerged in modern Germany and France, existentialist concerns of human meaning have shaped the history of philosophy and religion for millennia. [...] Last century’s existentialism won wide appeal in part because of the special new emphasis it placed on ideas of human freedom. What Sartre called “bad faith,” Heidegger “inauthenticity,” and Jaspers “life in a shell”: each articulates a form of distraction that blinds us to our freedom. One reason we define ourselves and others on the basis of class, religion, race, and nationality, or even childhood influences and subconscious drives, is to gain control over the contingencies of the world and insert ourselves in the myriad ways people have failed and succeeded in human history. But this control is illusory and deceptive, existentialists insisted. It might be an alluring distraction from our own fragility but it eventually yields a pseudo-power that corrodes our ability to live well.
Instead, they suggested reversing perspective. Why, they wondered, do we have to view existential, political, and epistemic uncertainties as a problem that requires a solution? Given our vulnerability, shouldn’t groundlessness itself become a ground for human existence? A generation later, the sociologist Bruno Latour provocatively asked whether we have ever been modern. Each in their own way, existentialists had raised a similar question: whether we have ever been certain.
Over the last few months, we have witnessed a broad range of responses to a profound new wave of social and personal uncertainty. On the one hand, and for the most part, people have expressed an urge to restore certainty. We might have found that we prefer to be certain about the future, however grim it may be. We might have sought targets to blame for the suffering, pain and hopelessness that surround us. [...] On the other hand, there have also been responses that find containment in the admission of not knowing ... Existentialist writers give us a sense of how we might imagine dwelling in not knowing -- beyond resignation or cynicism, and beyond false promises of salvation.
Where does existentialism fall along this spectrum? Can its turn to uncertainty really teach us something about life in terra incognita? Not only do existentialists define anxiety as our “dizziness of freedom” (in the words of Kierkegaard)-the dizzying effect of looking into the contingent boundlessness of one’s own possibilities as a precondition for personal growth-but many also offer reflections on plagues and epidemics.
[...] Yet existentialist responses to human dizziness also vary strongly. Often, their idea of uncertainty ends in some higher form of certitude. Heidegger, for instance, glorified the tragic hero, who reaches into the abyss with resolve and determination; Schmitt was terrified by chaos and vouched for the political authority that controls the state of emergency; and Sartre knew quite well who his (changing) enemies were. Taken together, however, these different perspectives are instructive. They offer a vivid commentary on how we respond to uncertainty. In combination and with all their contradictions, they form a conversation that can give us a sense of how we might imagine dwelling in not knowing-beyond resignation or cynicism, and beyond false promises of salvation... (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS: Existentialist ideas have seen a remarkable comeback during the COVID-19 pandemic, from Albert Camus’s frequently invoked novel The Plague, Friedrich Nietzsche’s turn to tragedy, and Simone de Beauvoir’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s critique of bad faith, to Giorgio Agamben’s Carl Schmitt-inspired musings about the state of emergency and what Michel de Montaigne, Martin Heidegger, and Blaise Pascal can teach us about facing death.
The thread running through all these appeals to existentialism is a sensitivity to human fragility felt to be especially pertinent in the midst of a global pandemic and stark disruptions of social order. [...] This resurgence of interest in existentialism is not entirely surprising. The body of work we now think of as existentialist emerged during the first half of the twentieth century in conflict-ridden Germany and France, where uncertainty permeated every dimension of society. Its major advocates and sole explicit supporters were Beauvoir and Sartre, who gained immense popularity in postwar France. They followed German existentialist thinkers such as Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Karl Barth, who had already risen to fame in interwar Weimar with their readings of Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard. Though their work varied in the details, they all shared a type of thinking that rejected religious and political dogma, expressed scorn for academic abstraction, and focused on the finitude and absurdity of human existence.
Yet, while existentialism emerged in modern Germany and France, existentialist concerns of human meaning have shaped the history of philosophy and religion for millennia. [...] Last century’s existentialism won wide appeal in part because of the special new emphasis it placed on ideas of human freedom. What Sartre called “bad faith,” Heidegger “inauthenticity,” and Jaspers “life in a shell”: each articulates a form of distraction that blinds us to our freedom. One reason we define ourselves and others on the basis of class, religion, race, and nationality, or even childhood influences and subconscious drives, is to gain control over the contingencies of the world and insert ourselves in the myriad ways people have failed and succeeded in human history. But this control is illusory and deceptive, existentialists insisted. It might be an alluring distraction from our own fragility but it eventually yields a pseudo-power that corrodes our ability to live well.
Instead, they suggested reversing perspective. Why, they wondered, do we have to view existential, political, and epistemic uncertainties as a problem that requires a solution? Given our vulnerability, shouldn’t groundlessness itself become a ground for human existence? A generation later, the sociologist Bruno Latour provocatively asked whether we have ever been modern. Each in their own way, existentialists had raised a similar question: whether we have ever been certain.
Over the last few months, we have witnessed a broad range of responses to a profound new wave of social and personal uncertainty. On the one hand, and for the most part, people have expressed an urge to restore certainty. We might have found that we prefer to be certain about the future, however grim it may be. We might have sought targets to blame for the suffering, pain and hopelessness that surround us. [...] On the other hand, there have also been responses that find containment in the admission of not knowing ... Existentialist writers give us a sense of how we might imagine dwelling in not knowing -- beyond resignation or cynicism, and beyond false promises of salvation.
Where does existentialism fall along this spectrum? Can its turn to uncertainty really teach us something about life in terra incognita? Not only do existentialists define anxiety as our “dizziness of freedom” (in the words of Kierkegaard)-the dizzying effect of looking into the contingent boundlessness of one’s own possibilities as a precondition for personal growth-but many also offer reflections on plagues and epidemics.
[...] Yet existentialist responses to human dizziness also vary strongly. Often, their idea of uncertainty ends in some higher form of certitude. Heidegger, for instance, glorified the tragic hero, who reaches into the abyss with resolve and determination; Schmitt was terrified by chaos and vouched for the political authority that controls the state of emergency; and Sartre knew quite well who his (changing) enemies were. Taken together, however, these different perspectives are instructive. They offer a vivid commentary on how we respond to uncertainty. In combination and with all their contradictions, they form a conversation that can give us a sense of how we might imagine dwelling in not knowing-beyond resignation or cynicism, and beyond false promises of salvation... (MORE - details)