recent thoughts on existentialism

1.

I was around 17 or 18 when I started having panic attacks in the shower.

A vastness consumed my body from head to toe and a feeling of smallness floored me. I felt like I was staring at the entire universe. I’d struggle to breath, feeling faint and nauseous. I’d scramble for answers but my mind found none. Luckily these were only minor panics – my mind soon returned to normal and to the preoccupations of a sulky horny teenager.

At the time I lacked the language to describe what was happening. I didn’t understand what a “panic attack” was or that they were something that happened to me. I didn’t understand that my questions, which I told to no one, had been asked by many people before me, or that I was feeling what philosophers call “existentialism”. I knew too little about anything to inspect the absurd predicament of my existence.

In the years since I have become more familiar with the language surrounding these ideas. Below is a jumble of my recent thoughts on them.

2.

The term existentialism, put simply, refers to the belief that nothing in existence has any inherent value. It was named and written about mainly by French philosophers in the 1930s and 40s. They believed life to have no meaning or purpose. Life is an absurd stream of events, they said, and the meanings individuals find in their own lives are conjured by the individual’s imagination to escape the madness of a life of no meaning.

A doctor once said to me that these thoughts are only fleeting queries in a healthy mind. That someone caught up in the flow and fun of life will rarely question the grand scheme behind it. And that it is only when a person is feeling down or depressed that they spend enough time outside of the present moment to think of these questions. It makes sense. And it might say something about the mood of your average philosopher.

This is why existentialism holds a more intense interest than other branches of philosophy. Few people will ever read Plato’s thoughts on a better society but everyone has heard of an “existential crisis”. People claim to be going through them all the time. But whether this line of questioning is the symptom of a depressed mind or not, questioning your own existence is something no one will make it through life having never done, and it’s better to delve deep if you are to delve at all.

3.

It’s not hard to guess why these beliefs began to gain a following when they did: amidst the two worst wars the world has seen; in an ever-growing secular society; Nietzsche pronounced “God is dead”; science began its rein over religion.

Up to this period, humans had used religion to guide them through the dark waters of the unknown. Religion has been a part of humanity since humans lived as tribes of hunter-gatherers. And for the last 2000 – 3000 years Christianity, Judaism and Islam have been the ruling religions, countless others among them, that have provided a structure for most of humanity.

I come from a non-religious background. My parents disregarded religion and told Young Me that if Jesus wasn’t made up then he was likely a con artist, faking his miracles for the money and hospitality of the amazed people of the time. I saw religious lessons in school as little more than story time. I did little investigation into religion beyond this.

Religion has many angry detractors (ala Richard Dawkins) and almost all share a similar story: a childhood of unquestioned religious teachings, an adolescence of unanswered prayers, and a moment of clarity leading to rampant atheism. I had no reason to be angry at religion, it had fitted only gently into my first-hand experiences, but I was a bookish teen who wanted to be seen as having the contrarian opinion and religion was an easy target. Lots of my favourite comedians – Jim Jeffries, Bill Burr, Bill Hicks to name a few – used their routines to point out the hypocrisy in religion. It was cool to hate on god (and still is).

Journalist Christopher Hitchens spent years of his career making cases against religion. I ate up his contrarian views on faith. His book “God is Not Great” is worth a read – it’s as good an argument against religion as I imagine has ever been made. Hitchens explains the major flaws and inconsistencies of every major religion, from both the West and the East. And then makes an argument why religion of any kind is damaging to society. Religion gives people false hope for an afterlife or eternal salvation instead of focusing on their life here on Earth. It leads to major arguments over interpretations of man-made texts. And it leads to denial or ignorance of important scientific discoveries. Hitchens thought the universe was beautiful and only a person of no imagination could need the aid of gods and the supernatural to make it interesting.

I’ve seen the view put forth by many that Atheism is like a religion itself. Many atheists angrily bash religions. It’s a cliché to talk about “bible bashing” Christians who try ferociously to convert atheists to a life of god, but there are atheists who use the same fervour to try and “cure” the religious of their faith. I’ve been guilty of this attitude myself. But I’ve witnessed how hard life can be for many people – I’m certainly more fortunate than most to have lived the life I’ve lived – and no one should be given a hard time for seeking refuge in the answers religion provides. I still view religious devotion as a sort of weakness, but everyone has moments of weakness and finding a crutch in religion is far from the worst thing anyone could do. I believe a secular world would be a better world but the problem of religion resides in the churches and priests, the religious texts, the pope and the bible bashers, but not in the everyday follower.

But looking back through history I can see the importance of religion. Every conscious being will eventually question the reasons behind their existence and without the explanations of modern science the tales of religion were the best answers the world could provide. And even when the earliest humans lived among nature, religions provided a helpful structure. I accept religion’s importance while now believing the cold hard facts of science are the only true answers to the universe.

Science doesn’t entirely disprove religion: Darwin’s Theory of Evolution may be denied by many Christians but there is nothing in the concept of evolution that means someone can’t ask if some sort of higher power didn’t intervene to create life in the universe; and the Big Bang may be very different from the Christian creation story but there is nothing to say that a God (in whatever form a God might take) didn’t cause the Big Bang. But if you accept that this question, of if there is a supreme power in work further back in time than the big bang, is the only real religious question, then you admit that the rest of religion is entirely unneeded. And that is why I choose science to provide answers.

4.

Here is a story: it starts with a big bang. The creation of matter in the universe is the most unlikely thing to ever happen, and yet of course it is the most likely thing to ever happen because it did happen and here we are now. But not only that, planets formed, and in one small speck of this infinite cosmos the rocks began to gravitate together. These formed the planet we call Earth. The number of prerequisites for a planet to support life of any sort is in the billions. The likeliness of a planet even housing bacteria is in the billionths, if not trillionths. But Earth managed it. And it didn’t just house bacteria but plants and trees, gigantic rainforests and jungles, oceans and mountains. Insects and fauna, some bigger than any that now inhabit the Earth, filled the land. Animals grew. Fish filled the sea. Dinosaurs came to life, lived out their existence, and were then wiped out. And eventually, among this grand eco-system were born the apes and chimpanzees that would later evolve into homo sapiens. Even the process of human evolution, the millions of years it took to come to fruition, is amazing in its sheer unlikeliness. Little known fact: at one point, there were eight different types of human (including homo sapiens) inhabiting the Earth at the same time. Homo Neanderthals are the most well-known of these breeds. Possibly through chance, or maybe through greed and bullying, homo sapiens became the only breed left. For thousands of years homo sapiens survived in small tribes as “middle of the food chain”-level animals. If aliens had landed on Earth during this time they would have viewed humans like any other part of the Earth’s natural eco-system, no different in the scheme of things to Lions or Bears or Sharks.

During the last ice age it is estimated that only a few hundred humans survived – meaning the entire human race can be traced back to maybe three hundred individuals who hid in a cave together to escape the freezing temperatures. Imagine if a person was to go in a time machine back to this cave and kill just one of these humans. When the time traveller returned to their present time humanity would be completely unrecognisable. The ripples of this killing would be felt for all eternity (or, at least all of humanity’s eternity).

I recently read Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens which maps the history of the human race, explaining how early ape-like animals evolved into us. Harari notes that the invention of fire was an important starting push. To simplify things, when animals began to be cooked regularly as food instead of eaten raw, the human body could use less energy digesting food and more energy powering the brain. More energy than any other animal spends on their brains. Humans became conscious beings, the most advanced conscious beings we know of, the only ones able to ponder their own existence. Imagine that: the miracle of the universe took place and the odds were that there was to be nobody to contemplate it, or even acknowledge it.

Around 10,000 years ago, in Harari’s arc of humanity, the Agricultural Revolution took place, in which humans stopped travelling around in small tribes, quit their lives as hunter-gatherers, and began to set up villages and communities based around farming crops and animals. This, slowly, over thousands of years, allowed groups of humans to grow into the first empires and lay the foundations for what we now call civilisation and culture.

This is an over-simplified timeline of humanity and Harari’s history of humans can’t possibly cover everything. But the story of the universe and the science behind it is a better guiding light than any religious text. Science provides more than a timeline, whether it is through Biology or Chemistry, or through the theories of Hawking or Einstein, or the countless other areas of research - science provides answers (or is at least happy to accept its areas of ignorance) and it can make the universe a lot more magical than Moses’s parting of the seas or Noah’s magically extravagant boat.

It’s easy to see Science as cold and un-guiding but this is far from the truth. Take a moment to think about how small you are in the grand scheme of things. In the face of the timeline of the universe. This doesn’t have to be a scary thought. It can be both helpful and discerning. It is helpful in that everyone must make sense of this cosmic vastness in their own way. No living being is above it. If everyone took time to think about how absurd life is, how similar we all really are, and how much the small annoyances of life don’t matter, imagine how much more compassionate and caring people would be. Imagine how much more understanding the average person would show. But this vastness is worrying too: take a moment to think how destructive humanity is. How many species we have made extinct and how much of our own planet, the greatest planet in existence that we know of (in terms of survivable conditions) that we have destroyed. Think of humans’ current research into Nano-technology and the alteration of living beings. Just imagine a future of superhumans, more like gods than another part of the eco-system. Or, imagine humans leaving the Earth due to their own destructive nature, inhabiting another planet, only to later move to another planet once this next one has been destroyed. Would this race of beings be like gods or would they be more like a virus? Slowly destroying and enslaving the whole of the universe. This is a scary thought, but it is important to consider these things, to try to be better.

5.

It is commonly said that science brought an end to religion, or at least brought an end to a word where very few people question religion. But I think, less discussed, is that science brought an end to many branches of philosophy too.

A friend of mine, who also shares existential views, recently told me that if he was ever to write a novel the subject matter would explore the phrase “existence precedes essence” which is a quote from existential philosopher Sartre. It is a debated term that means the value or character of anything that exists (person, place, object, whatever) is not pre-determined. For example, that a person’s existence, the very fact of their birth, is entirely random and that their personality, their life story, their “destiny” if you will, are not set out already but are instead created randomly as the present moment is created.

I’d argue that science proves Sartre’s quote is correct. And no over-complex philosophising or leaps of faith are needed. Science denies that any fate or destiny exists and instead gives provable facts that provide the template for the randomness of the universe.

I’m sure every person’s existentialism is symbolised by a different image in the existentialist’s mind. In my teenage mind the world seemed very quickly to be shifting from the structure of school life and the simplicity of lazing around my parent’s home, into the randomness of the wider world. I felt small and helpless. The future daunted me.

6.

I feel like for this discussion it is worth bringing up psychedelics.

The mind altering power of drugs like acid or magic mushrooms can be either a fun recreational dance into the mania of the mind or a wormhole that many people fall into searching for answers. These drugs are experienced differently by every user, and each trip is different even for the same user. Meaning it would be stupid of me to say that there are answers or no answers definitely to be found in these drugs. That's something people can find for themselves.

The human mind will go crazy trying to comprehend the infinities that exist before and after the short anomaly of its existing. With the push of a drug like acid this comprehension becomes a little easier. Drug users often talk of experiencing "ego death". This is when, during a trip, the user forgets entirely who they are. They might not recognise anyone or anything around them. Might not even remember who their family is or that they’ve taken a drug. This experience may sound horrible, and to someone who is in a bad environment or doesn’t know what they are doing it surely is. But ego death can be a sobering experience. To think of consciousness entirely in the moment, a short burst of life free of the shackles that comes with one’s own identity can be lovely.

Psychedelics are a unique experience. They will not solve an existential crisis. And they won’t hand the user a meaning to their life. But they are a good reminder of the power inside the mind and the ability to change and do good, regardless of how small this good may be.

7.

I recently read/watched two great existentialist works: Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus and Pixar’s Toy Story.

Albert Camus has the rare distinction of being a “cool” philosopher. He was always pictured wearing a leather jacket and his drinking and womanising followed him everywhere. His existentialist works are said to be a lot easier to read than other philosophers of the time. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus outlines the existentialist’s mind, writing that the delusions of the modern man, be them through religion or through finding meaning in war or love, are easy answers that will leave as fast as they arrived. Camus notes the scariness of looking at the abyss of the world, yet says never to turn away from the abyss.

Camus uses the Greek story of Sisyphus to drive home his point. Sisyphus was a man who disobeyed the gods; as punishment, he was condemned for all eternity to a mountain in hades. On the mountain he was made to push a boulder up to the stop. Once at the top the boulder would roll back down to the bottom. And Sisyphus had to walk down and push the boulder again. Forever. Camus's point is that the days of every person’s life are a little like that of Sisyphus. Most people wander and toil through life with no guiding light. Sisyphus’s endless repetitions up the mountain could easily drive him mad. As could a person who was forever looking at the world from a satellite view, crippled by her smallness in view of everything. Camus finds a way out, though. He says that Sisyphus must find his own reason for pushing the boulder every time. If he views each climb up the mountain as treacherous and pointless then that is what each climb will be. But, if he instead views each climb as if it was his first trip up the mountain, finds his own personal meaning for pushing the boulder each time, then he shall not go mad. And that every walk down the mountain should not be the same: Sisyphus must marvel at the rocks and the view as if they are not the same as his last journey.

Camus's book isn't a self help guide and his lessons may not put the existential mind to ease, but his writing does show how the fears of the endless void can be mirrored into a passion for living. Camus notes that a good aim for life is to experience as much as possible: travelling, meeting people, trying new food. But that only a man who could get by with as little as Sisyphus could use all of these experiences to escape his existential dread.

Now: Toy Story. Buzz Lightyear, a children's toy, is brought to the home of a child, Andy. But Buzz believes himself to be the character he is modelled off of, an intergalactic hero and space explorer, no matter how many times he's told he's a toy. Buzz doesn't questions his existence; his belief mirrors the simplicity of childhood. In the film's most crushing scene he catches a TV advert about Buzz Lightyear toys and realises the truth of his existence. His whole life is a lie. Like a bad acid trip that he will never wake from. Buzz dresses himself up in the clothes of some girl's toys and babbles on about having a tea party in what seems a moment of crushing insanity. What releases him from this is a speech from Woody, a cowboy toy, on Andy's love for Buzz. This eventually picks Buzz up – having a meaning in the world, to bring joy to his owner, is enough to propel him on despite the absurdity of his life as a toy in a human world. Pixar reaches the same conclusion as most existentialists: that a meaning for existence can not be given, but must be personal and found within.

8.

I was recently on holiday in Amsterdam and during a long trek back to our hostel my girlfriend and me were trapped by the sweltering heat of the sun. We found shelter and a moments rest in an underpass. Further down the underpass was a scraggily looking homeless man playing piano. He had a sci-fi sounding synth backing track and his piano keys pressed hard and dramatically into the summer air. It was loud enough to be heard long outside the underpass. And there we sat, 20 minutes, maybe longer, my girlfriend's feet blistering and my body dripping with sweat, listening to a man I'd never met and would never see again tap out vibrations that beautifully sounded out into the world never to be heard again. I barely remember the sound of the music now, only that I enjoyed it. But it was a beautiful moment, and not because I enjoyed the music, regardless of that really, but just to sit there in this short, sweet moment with my girlfriend, hearing sounds which would never be heard again other that at this moment in time in this specific place. Surely that is worth living for.

Later in the holiday, after an argument, in a sour mood and slightly stoned, I looked out upon the subtle tides of an Amsterdam river as night time began to fill the sky. I looked out at the endlessly turning water, it carrying a small lit up boat full of tourists. I imagined a nuclear missile crashing down from the sky and me watching everything in view burn away with total indifference. Maybe this is depression, not existentialism; but either way it's a view of the world that switches direction as much as the tides at sea. And surely that is the fate of anyone that is perpetually staring into the abyss. Everyone remains in a state of flux. I no longer get panic attacks in the shower, which tells me I've somewhat come to peace with these thoughts, even if I shall never banish them.

9.

One final thought. This summer I am learning to swim. I gather that it is somewhat unusual to not be able to swim at 20 years old (hence the learning) but I have never come face to face with a situation where I would need to swim, and it is likely I will never come across one, and for the sake of argument lets say we know I will never need to be able to swim. The fact I can swim won't be remembered after I die; hell, most people won't know or care while I'm still alive. And in the grander scheme of things it's such a small detail that it isn't worth mentioning. But what a wonderful thing it is to swim.