Description/Reviews   An Essay by George Cotkin

An Essay by George Cotkin

How might an existential attitude, based on a sense of despair, trembling in the face of our freedom and responsibility, help us in these dark, post-September 11 times, in the wake of the Columbia disaster, and in the face of disasters sure to come? In the immediate aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, pundits thought that Americans might engage in an existential reckoning with their own mortality, with the health of the nation, and with the relationship of the nation to the world. Death, it now seemed, was no longer distanced from the shores of our nation. Tragedy had hit home.

Yet no one should expect existentialism to provide easy answers to profound problems. There are no simple existential positions on war with Iraq or North Korea, on globalization, or on tax cuts. The value of existentialism is that it makes things messy, it complicates. It demolishes abstraction in favor of the concrete. It fills us with anxiety. We act in spite of this anxiety but with deeper conviction. We become, as individuals and a nation, more like William James’s Twice-Born Sick Souls – capable of heroic actions but always with the nagging pain of our limitations. Existentialism punctures our hubris.

Unfortunately, whatever personal, existential accountings may have occurred in those days immediately following the attacks on the World Trade Center, the general political climate has been high-jacked from one of self-searching and doubt to one of national cheerleading and naïve resoluteness. Political leaders seem to be determined to wage war in the name of abstract principles, without international support, and without laying out plans for a post-war Iraq. Existentialism does not say that we should be pacifists, that we should not wage wars when we can justify them. After all, French activists working within an emerging existential tradition, men such as Albert Camus, were quite able to resist the evil of Nazism in an effective and forthright manner. Bob Moses, armed with his existentialism, was able to face death and abuse in voting rights drives in Mississippi. But Camus and Moses, unlike our leaders today, acted without hubris. They acted with a sense of limits, with a chastened sensitivity to others. Existentialism in this grain suggests that the world that confronts us today is a complicated place, one where irony confounds us at every step, where our sense of certitude exists only when our doubt is hidden from us.

Existentialism, then, gives us no essential answer on how to proceed with Saddam Hussein or what to do with the space program. But it does suggest that we need to weigh factors more fully, to engage the problems with a greater sense of tragedy and limitation than we are currently. Existentialism also hastens to tell us that sacrifice is necessary in order to wage war, not just on the part of the soldier, but also on the home front. To act as if everything is as normal at home, and in the world, is to live in an inauthentic manner. Only through such an existential reckoning will our actions, bathed in limits and weighted with responsibility, have any chance of imposing an order on a chaos that we often fail to understand. With existential ideals in mind we walk on a slippery slope, without them, we only tumble into the abyss. The choice is ours. That’s what existentialism is all about in these tense and trying times.

George Cotkin is a professor of history at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. He is the author of Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880-1900 and William James, Public Philosopher, the latter published by Johns Hopkins.