Existential crisis
Existential crisis, also known as existential dread, are moments
when individuals question whether their lives have meaning, purpose,
or value, and are negatively impacted by the contemplation.[1] It may
be commonly, but not necessarily, tied to depression or inevitably
negative speculations on purpose in life such as the futility of all effort
(e.g., "if one day I will be forgotten, what is the point of all of my
work?"). This issue of the meaning and purpose of human existence is
a major focus of the philosophical tradition of existentialism.
Contents
Feelings of loneliness and
insignificance in the face of nature
are common in existential crises
Description
Handling
Cultural contexts
See also
References
Further reading
External links
Description
An existential crisis may often be provoked by a significant event in the person's life—psychological trauma,
marriage, separation, major loss, the death of a loved one, a life-threatening experience, a new love partner,
psychoactive drug use, adult children leaving home, reaching a personally significant age (turning 18, turning
40, etc.), etc. Usually, it provokes the sufferer's introspection about personal mortality, thus revealing the
psychological repression of said awareness. Existential crisis can be similar to anxiety and depression.[2]
In existentialist philosophy, the term 'existential crisis' specifically relates to the crisis of the individual when
they realize that they must always define their own lives through the choices they make. The existential crisis
occurs when one recognizes that even the decision to either refrain from action or withhold assent to a
particular choice is, in itself, a choice. In other words, humankind is "condemned" to freedom.[3]
Handling
Peter Wessel Zapffe, a Norwegian philosopher and adherent of nihilism and antinatalism, asserted in his essay,
The Last Messiah, four methods that he believed all self-conscious beings use in order to cope with their
apprehension of indifference and absurdity in existence—anchoring, isolation, distraction, and sublimation:[4]
Anchoring is the "fixation of points within, or construction of walls around, the liquid fray of
consciousness". The anchoring mechanism provides individuals with a value or an ideal that
allows them to focus their attentions in a consistent manner. Zapffe also applied the anchoring
principle to society, and stated "God, the Church, the State, morality, fate, the laws of life, the
people, the future" are all examples of collective primary anchoring firmaments.
Isolation is "a fully arbitrary dismissal from consciousness of all disturbing and destructive
thought and feeling".
Distraction occurs when "one limits attention to the critical bounds by constantly enthralling it
with impressions". Distraction focuses all of one's energy on a task or idea to prevent the mind
from turning in on itself.
Sublimation is the refocusing of energy away from negative outlets, toward positive ones.
Individuals distance themselves and look at their existence from an aesthetic point of view
(e.g., writers, poets, painters). Zapffe himself pointed out that his written works were the product
of sublimation.
Others believe an existential crisis is actually a good thing—a burden of gifted individuals and deep thinkers
that sets them apart from those who don’t think deeply about life:[5]
Why should such existential concerns occur disproportionately among gifted persons? Partially, it
is because substantial thought and reflection must occur to even consider such notions, rather than
simply focusing on superficial day-to-day aspects of life.
— James Webb, “Existential depression in gifted individuals”[6]
Cultural contexts
In the 19th century, Kierkegaard considered that angst and existential despair would appear when an inherited
or borrowed world-view (often of a collective nature) proved unable to handle unexpected and extreme lifeexperiences.[7] Nietzsche extended his views to suggest that the Death of God—the loss of collective faith in
religion and traditional morality—created a more widespread existential crisis for the philosophically aware.[8]
Existential crisis has indeed been seen as the inevitable accompaniment of modernism (c.1890–1945).[9]
Whereas Durkheim saw individual crises as the by-product of social pathology and a (partial) lack of collective
norms,[10] others have seen existentialism as arising more broadly from the modernist crisis of the loss of
meaning throughout the modern world.[11] Its twin answers were either a religion revivified by the experience
of anomie (as with Martin Buber), or an individualistic existentialism based on facing directly the absurd
contingency of human fate within a meaningless and alien universe, as with Sartre and Camus.[12]
Irvin Yalom, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University has made fundamental contributions to
the field of existential psychotherapy. Rollo May is another of the founders of this approach.
Fredric Jameson has suggested that postmodernism, with its saturation of social space by a visual consumer
culture, has replaced the modernist angst of the traditional subject, and with it the existential crisis of old, by a
new social pathology of flattened affect and a fragmented subject.[13]
See also
Absurdism
Antinatalism
"Dark Night of the Soul"
Depersonalization
Duḥkha
Ego death
Existentialism
Identity crisis
Limit situation
Meaning of life
Midlife crisis
Scholarly approaches to mysticism
Nihilism
Positive disintegration
The Sickness unto Death
Spiritual crisis
Viktor Frankl
References
1. Richard K. James, Crisis intervention strategies (https://books.google.com/books?id=fAFg7z93
gDwC&pg=PA13)
2. admin (2020-09-03). "Existential Crisis - What You Need to Know, Definition, Meaning,
Symptom" (https://www.drugaddictionnow.com/2020/09/03/existential-crisis/). Addiction Now |
Substance Abuse, Drug Addiction and Recovery News Source. Retrieved 2020-09-10.
3. Flynn, Thomas. "Jean-Paul Sartre" (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/#Ont). Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 1 April 2014.
4. Zapffe, Peter Wessel, "The Last Messiah" (http://www.philosophynow.org/issue45/45zapffe.ht
m). Philosophy Now. Retrieved April 2, 2008.
5. Kowalski, Kyle, "The Meaning of Existential Crisis & 7 Ways to Navigate It" (https://www.sloww.
co/existential-crisis/). Sloww. Retrieved 15 June 2018.
6. Webb, J. T. (Jan 1999), "Existential Depression in Gifted Individuals", Our Gifted Children,
Royal Fireworks Press, pp. 7–9, reprinted with permission on Davidson Gifted Database (http://
www.davidsongifted.org/Search-Database/entry/A10269), retrieved 2019-07-05.
7. S. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death (1980) p. 41
8. Albert Camus, The Rebel (Vintage 1950[?]) p. 66-77
9. M. Hardt/K. Weeks, The Jameson Reader (2000) p. 197
10. E. Durkeheim, Suicide (1952) p. 214 and p. 382
11. M. Hardt/K. Weeks, The Jameson Reader (2000) p. 265
12. J. Childers/G. Hentzi eds., The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism
(1995) p. 103-4
13. M. Hardt/K. Weeks, The Jameson Reader (2000) p. 267-8 and p. 199-200
Further reading
J. Watson, Caring Science as Sacred Science 2005. Chapter 4: "Existential Crisis in Science
and Human Sciences".
T.M. Cousineau, A. Seibring, M.T. Barnard, P-673 Making meaning of infertility: Existential
crisis or personal transformation? Fertility and Sterility, 2006.
Sanders, Marc, Existential Depression. How to recognize and cure life-related sadness in
gifted people, 2013.
External links
Alan Watts on meaningless life, and its resolution (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m72iWC0UpU)
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Existential_crisis&oldid=1026449742"
This page was last edited on 2 June 2021, at 10:09 (UTC).
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this
site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia
Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.