Finding oneself in times of uncertainty and strife: an
existential journey
First published in the Carmel Beat, in January, 2021
These are existential questions, and we all have them.
As you may have guessed by now, if you don’t already know,
existentialism or existential philosophy is a form of inquiry that examines
human existence and emphasizes the existence of the individual person as responsible
for their own development through free will. Ultimately the idea of
existentialism is to understand the purpose of being and how you make your choices
and decisions and move ahead with them.
Existentialism, as a movement, emerged in the late 19th
century to mid-20th century in the time of the Second World War. The horrific
consequences of the war and its aftermath led people to ponder the meaning of
life and question the purpose of existence.
But is this mode of thinking relevant to us now, at a time of
such crisis in the world?
“Existentialist philosophy is always relevant, more so in
times of crisis. Purely because the philosophy emerged when there was such a
state of flux in the world,” says Ms. Sheryl Puthur, Assistant Professor from
the Department of English, Mount Carmel College. “We needed to rethink how we
understood ourselves, our purpose in life, our meaning.”
As Hamlet said in William
Shakespeare’s play of the same name said: “To be or not to be, that is the
question.” Here he is asking the primary existential questions- why do we exist
and what is the purpose of life? Hamlet, in this part of the play, has just
lost his father, the King of Denmark; lost his throne and his mother’s love to
his uncle Claudius; and finds himself in a position where his very purpose in
life has lost its foundation.
It is a time of crisis for
Hamlet, and that is what leads him to the question he asks. For us, this is
particularly significant because we find that we experience existential crises
when in desperate or urgent situations, just like Hamlet did.
But what is existentialism to you and me? What has it got to
do with our identity, with how we see ourselves? The answer is- everything.
Existentialism gives us the space to question every single
thing around us and in us. Existential thinker and writer Jean-Paul Sartre
believed that you shouldn't be limited by the idea laid out for you, that you
should have the ultimate freedom of choice. Sartre did not believe in the idea
of fate or that there is a pre-existing path in life for each of us to follow,
and that it is up to us to carve that path.
But during a pandemic or any other difficult situation, this
does seem very hard to do. Even if one is in the habit of examining the
existential nature of everything around one on a regular basis; the
uncertainty, the feeling of helplessness and the prospect of death hovering in
the side-lines brings one to the point of despair. We begin to question our own
mortality, our place in the world we belong in and the nature of that world.
Above all, we question our identity.
Anton Chekov’s belief that “ the world is, of course,
nothing but our conception of it,” brings up the idea that everything is a
construct, including but not limited to our identity as well, and this idea is
disconcerting to more than just a few of us.
“The word existentialism gets a lot of bad press because
people connect or compare it to nihilism and see it as some kind of emptying
philosophy. I think we should look at it as a positive concept, purely because
if you go back to Sartre’s idea -existence precedes essence- what it implies is
that you exist as a person even prior to you being given an identity or a
purpose,” says Ms Sheryl. “It is not given to you, you make it yourself. This
makes more sense in a time like this, in the middle of a pandemic, where people
have found their previous ideas of themselves, of self, of identity, coming
under question.”
Therefore, a viewpoint like existentialism becomes all the
more relevant because it tells you that you can reinvent yourself. It tells you
that there is no fixed identity to you. You are the one who gets to decide how
you construct your identity.
But when it comes to looking at our identity, in a pandemic,
or in times of any kind of uncertainty, perhaps the real question is: what is
this uncertainty and why does it disconcert us so much?
We all dislike it when we slip into any state of
uncertainty, when we are uncertain about what the future holds for us, or what
our careers are going to look like. But as existentialists ask, when were we
ever certain, not only of such life changing phases in our lives, but of
anything?
It is disconcerting for us because a crisis or a time of
uncertainty, however big or small, suddenly does not have any structure,
meaning, and all that we have come to depend on as definite suddenly is not
definite any more. Therefore, existentialism is perhaps our awareness that the
world is not as definite as we know it, and that the world as Chekov suggested,
is what we make it.
But being in a state of crisis, in a state that has no
discernible structure or meaning can cause in us a great deal of anxiety.
Contradictorily, this idea of suddenly having too much control, of suddenly
being able to construct our own world and identity can also give us a great
deal of anxiety.
Perhaps it is this duality and this ambiguity as to what a
crisis is and what it is not, that disconcerts us.
“From the
very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
But the scope that existential philosophy provides one with,
for reinventing one’s own identity is tremendous.
Existential philosophers and writers Sartre and Søren
Kierkegaard wrote extensively on the idea of subjective or relative truth. Everyone
looks at their own truth and you as an individual will create your own sense of
truth, based on the framework you create about the world around you.
Though existentialist thought appears to be a perpetual
state of questioning and of introspection, perhaps, as it is relevant in every
era and in our changing society, existentialism reflects personal growth and
the journey of one’s identity. This is especially significant because in every
crisis, minor or major, growth is what we look to and identity is what we hang
on to, and existentialism allows and urges us to explore both.
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