Jean-Paul Sartre
I wish I had a nickel for every time in the last few weeks that I’ve heard the phrase “existential crisis” or “existential threat,” applied variously to Israel and its Arab neighbors/opponents, the situation faced by a regrettable array of mid-East tyrants, the future of the Euro and of the Occupy movement.
In every case, of course, the connection to genuine existentialism has been tenuous at best, referring instead to the simple question of whether Israel, a particular mid-East tyrant, the Euro or the Occupy movement will continue to exist. A question of existence, indeed, but hardly a genuinely existential question.
Those of us whose political, philosophical, and social concerns were pretty much honed in the 60s have a special place in our psyches for existentialism … and this isn’t simply a fondness for espresso and the wearing of black turtle necks while darkly discussing the meaning(lessness) of life. It is—or at least, was—a way of approaching a difficult world, of making sense of situations that are, to say the least, challenging.
The existential perspective is one that I, at least, have never relinquished; if anything, it’s more important to me these days than ever before, even as its major practitioners no longer seem to matter, or at minimum, no longer occupy the acknowledged barricades of serious, current thought.
I’m referring specifically to some of the old existential war-horses, such as Kierkegaard and Jaspers (for the religiously inclined) or Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus (for my fellow atheists), people who insist on the necessity of free choices, freely made, “either/or” and not “this and that,” and taking responsibility for who we are by virtue of how we choose to live. Existence preceding essence, and all that. Being condemned to be free. Conceiving Sisyphus, as Camus told us in his extraordinary essay thereupon, as genuinely heroic and—most stunning of all—happy.
It’s a perspective that immensely strengthened my wife and I as we engaged in decades-long antinuclear struggles … and still does, with its assurance that even though the ultimate success of our endeavors (as with the ultimate meaning of anyone’s life) is not just questionable but in fact doomed to failure, if only because we shall all die: As the crazed fugitive announces to his captives, no one is getting out of here alive.
A genuine existential crisis occurs when one is forced to confront the question of meaning in one’s actions and life, not so much whether you will continue to exist as whether your continued existence amounts to anything. We are confronted these days not so much with an existential crisis, or a series of such crises, but rather, with an existentialist crisis: an insufficiency of good, tough existentialist thinking when we need it most.
(image from Wikipedia)
