Kierkegaard believed that "each generation has its own mission and need not worry too much about whether it is decisive for previous and future generations"; he wrote in his treatise The Concept of Anxiety in 1844, a treatise that talked about angst, existential anxiety, that is, the anguish that man feels in front of his unlimited possibilities and options, while in reality he is afraid to take responsibility in front of a future that seems ominous.
For Kierkegaard the first stress experienced by man is found in Adam's choice to eat from the forbidden tree of God's knowledge or not. Adam had until then no awareness of the concept of good and evil and did not know that eating from the tree was "bad". He only knew that God told him not to eat from the tree. So his anxiety comes from the fact that God's prohibition itself implies that Adam is free and could choose to obey God or not.
The concept of good and evil, which preoccupies much of Kierkegaard's work, is structural in the development of human history. It is found in all cultures and runs through time through religions, popular traditions, ideologies, arts. It is no coincidence that children have a tendency to rationalize the world through the dichotomy of good and bad, which tendency is reinforced throughout time in every way by adult societies. In children's fairy tales the role of evil is aesthetically distinct. Our collective unconscious is full of this record of the clear boundaries of good and evil.
And the question arises as to whether modern man can respond to conditions of particularly complex complexity where in almost no field is good and bad, who is good and who is bad, not at all distinct?
We live in an age where it is very difficult to find distinct boundaries in so many fields, let alone the good-bad dichotomy. Multiculturalism, pluralism, polyphony, collapse of ideologies, information explosion, technological revolution, annihilation of time, annihilation of distances, fake news, immigration, activism, climate change, natural disasters, pandemics, decline of faith and trust in institutions, Trumpism , populism, political correctness, rise of the extreme right, collapse of the left, intellectual poverty, geopolitical realignments, redefinition of the forces between West and East, terrorism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, wars.
At the local level, we have not had time to recover from the multi-year economic crisis that led to a political crisis, which continues after the collapse of PASOK with the dissolution of SYRIZA and now the complete collapse of the center-left which has led a large part of the population to ideological identity crisis. The world is saying goodnight to Kemal while the ND is searching for its own limits amid a background of fires, floods and natural disasters.
Oh what a world dad…
The 7the October, what followed and the fear of what is to come, created a new intersection and further blurred the lines of good and evil.
Modern man, let's talk about the westerner who we think we understand the most, doesn't know which side of history to be on.
These changes and the complexity of the modern world are characterized as new phenomena with the term "polycrisis" which refers to a situation of successive crises or "permanent crisis" which refers to the condition of permanent crises and the year 2022-2023 was a characteristic and unprecedented example in the world level. Dozens of environmental, social, technological and economic stressors are interacting with increasing speed. Their combined impact causes unpredictable future shocks of greater intensity.
We are used to not connecting angst with collective reality and the collective unconscious. Freudian psychoanalytic thought of the 20th centuryου century directed the focus of existential anguish particularly on the individual, on his conscious and unconscious, on his ego and superego, distancing it from society as a whole, let alone from the largest population group of each generation and its own zeitgeist.
We are used to connecting our psychological state with our individual experiences and facts within our own social microcosm. Today, however, the limits of our personal smallness with global becoming are a click away on the internet and social media. The information, the infinite and merciless in relay speed information is literally bursting at us and clattering.
The angst of the 21st century manου century, his existential anguish exceeds the individual limit and dives into the collective and conversely the collective comes to aggravate the already burdened individual, with the result that people's angst is now found at particularly high levels.
Could we perhaps talk about collective depression?
For Kierkegaard, anxiety or anguish is "the reality of freedom as the possibility of possibility." To make himself understood he uses the example of a man standing on the edge of a tall building or a cliff. When the man looks over the edge, he experiences an aversion to the possibility of falling, but at the same time, the man feels a terrifying urge to deliberately fall into the void. This experience creates anxiety because of our complete freedom to choose to either throw ourselves or stay put. The mere fact that one has the ability and the freedom to choose it evokes immense feelings of dread. Kierkegaard called this "the vertigo of freedom."
Let us now put in the place of the man of Kierkegaard's example, the whole of humanity. The magnitude of the terror multiplies exponentially as the individual while integrating with the collective simultaneously maintains the individual consciousness of experiencing both the freedom of choice and the possibility of every possibility.
And it seems that modern man does not feel on an individual level that he has the choice of the man of Kierkegaard's example not to fall off the cliff; because it simply seems to have been assigned to the collective that falls reluctantly into the void...
*Cover photo: Henri Cartier-Bresson
