An Existential Danger to Keeping Our Interest

1966: shocking. 2022: Ho-hum.

In high school some friends of mine would fake-argue as they walked around the campus. One would shout "Essence!" and the other would yell "Existence!"

Nerd humor is what can happen after one takes a philosophy course about existentialism. At one time existentialism was all the rage among the cognoscenti. It was European. It provoked the straight-laced. It said God did not exist during a time when being an atheist probably meant you were a communist.

In the history of philosophy, essence preceding existence is a prerequisite for religion while existence preceding essence means that God ain't necessarily so. Existentialism is a serious matter.

But not in 2022.

Existentialism's power and meaning has been eroded to nothingness by the overuse of the adjective existential. [bold added]

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the other day that “climate change is the existential threat of our time.” The New York Times editorialized that Donald Trump and his supporters pose an “existential threat” to the Republic. Scientific American declared that wildfires are putting giant sequoias at “existential risk.” A Barron’s headline read, “Bitcoin is facing an existential crisis.” Bloomberg Law wrote, “Wall Street ends crazy year with existential angst.”

...The wordsmiths at Merriam-Webster report that “existential” began trending two years ago when then- Sen. Kamala Harris used the term in a vice-presidential debate with Mike Pence. Referring to climate change, she said it is “an existential threat to us as human beings.” According to Webster, lookups of the word spiked 8,000% that night.

(Sandberg image)

From your humble blogger's perspective it's easy to see why the adjective existential rose in popularity, and it has very little to do with philosophy. Existential is a short-hand way of saying it-endangers-the-very-existence-of ("the asteroid is an existential threat to life on earth").

To get people's attention in a world of sound and fury, dangers must be hyped, such as Kamala Harris' referring to climate change as an existential threat to humanity. As the writer noted, the word has been overused to the point where “French dressing faces an existential crisis.”

It's time to strike existential from existence.