Unfairly parodied as sombre and self-indulgent, existentialism can be a powerful force for change. Its diverse thinking can help reimagine our relationship to the earth and safeguard our future, writes Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei

That existentialism may inspire hope for our ecological future would not be immediately obvious even to a devoted reader. The philosophy after all focuses on subjective human consciousness rather than global and material concerns, and the experience of the existential subject is often negatively conceived. Sartre diagnoses the ontological split between the world (being) and consciousness (nothingness), while his novel Nausea responds to its realization. Camus’s novel The Stranger describes not only its protagonist Mersault at odds with his own society but the human mind aware of an indifferent universe. His essay The Myth of Sisyphus refigures for the modern imagination that offender of the gods condemned to push his boulder up the mountain, only to watch it roll down again, ad infinitum. The futility of such a predicament serves an analogy for modern life.

Kierkegaard, perhaps the first ‘philosopher of existence,’ also worried about the fate of the human individual in modernity. In a review essay published as The Present Age, he agonized over the prospects for an authentic life, alarmed at what he regarded as a culture of competitive materialism, mass consumption, envy and anonymity. Kierkegaard worried that with the relentless externalisation of the self to an anonymous public, the inner life was dying—this a century and a half before the invention of social media. Other philosophers who came to be associated with existentialism echoed this cultural scepticism, with Nietzsche and Heidegger condemning the fallenness of modern culture.

At face value this all sounds rather sombre and, in comparison to urgent practical problems facing humanity, self-indulgent. What matter the authenticity of the self when humanity is facing problems on a global scale? Why the urgency for individuals to ponder their existential situation, while, in the twenty-first century, the very existence of many is precarious? World hunger is on the rise, billions of our fellow humans live in abject poverty, and countless suffer the injuries of violent conflict. What had once appeared as the world’s most robust democracies have been exposed as fragile. Racist oppression has yet to be rooted out. The current pandemic has killed millions in a single year and has crushed many economies, trailing grief and destitution.  In this context, it may be easy to forget that humanity and indeed all living beings on the planet face an impending ecological crisis. The exquisite amplifications of self-awareness by existential thinking would only tune out these urgent matters that affect us all.

Existentialists turned philosophy away from the pursuit of a god’s-eye perspective and toward the actual experience of living human subjects.

But there are reasons to draw more deeply from the resources of existentialist thinking for just such a crisis. This may be especially so when we look beyond its popular reception and recognize the heterogeneity of existentialist thought, its motivations for turning philosophy’s gaze to concrete experience. Its focus on suffering need not be merely individualistic, no matter that this takes a first-person perspective when it is recognized that our own suffering is a key to our sympathy with others and with our common human vulnerability. This sympathy may also extend to the vulnerability of the living planet as a whole.