[HN Gopher] 2020's Existentialist Turn
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2020's Existentialist Turn
Author : lermontov
Score : 45 points
Date : 2020-08-31 00:00 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bostonreview.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (bostonreview.net)
| nickysielicki wrote:
| 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.
| lavishlatern wrote:
| 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?
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| 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?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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.
| claudeganon wrote:
| >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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| My point is that, during quarantine and isolation, a
| bunch of that external stuff disappeared.
| claudeganon wrote:
| My point is that it didn't because it's not really
| "external" to us, but always a part of us and we a part
| of it.
|
| Human's evolutionary advantage over other species is our
| capacity for imitation, which allows for us to transfer
| skills and abilities outside of and beyond what is
| inherited through biological descent. But what this also
| means is that we're constantly running these imitative,
| collective structures within ourselves at all times,
| seeking more and to share our own permutations of them.
| The reason people go insane in isolation is not because
| they're confronted with they're "freedom," but because
| they're more disconnected from this networked
| collectivity from which our notion of "self" is
| constituted.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| There is an element of truth in what you say, but it's
| not wholly true. We aren't as much a slave to
| conditioning as you say - especially when the stimulus
| disappears for an extended period.
| soufron wrote:
| 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.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| 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!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plague
| matthoiland wrote:
| >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.
| eanzenberg wrote:
| Not sure if they're correlated though by timing?
| Authoritarianism has been increasing before Covid.
| erichocean wrote:
| Authoritarianism is a reaction to the perceived failures of
| (classical) liberalism to address modern challenges.
| pstuart wrote:
| Authoritarianism is a naked grab for power for personal
| gain.
| Fishysoup wrote:
| It definitely is on the part of would-be tyrants, but a
| popular shift to it is due to perceived failures. There's
| a really cool quote from the (second book of?) the Three
| Body Problem, which goes something like "alone in the
| emptiness of space, fascism becomes everyone's first
| resort".
|
| Note that I do not think we were doing that badly before
| Trump and other authoritarians. It's just that a lot of
| people perceived the world was getting dangerous for them
| (probably because it became more inclusive, and also
| because they watch Fox news).
| jimbokun wrote:
| Can certainly be both.
| bluetomcat wrote:
| 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.
| bleepblorp wrote:
| 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.
| reggieband wrote:
| > 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".
|
| 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfKyNxfyWbo
| techbio wrote:
| I'm surely not the only one who stopped watching the news to read
| Camus' "The Plague".
|
| Can't recommend this choice highly enough.
| soufron wrote:
| Go read "The Rebel" now :D I find his essays to be even more
| brilliant than his prose.
| lebrad wrote:
| "It isn't freedom from. It's freedom to." -Sartre
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