Crisis as a Way of Life

crisis, paradox, irony

Crises seem ubiquitous nowadays: at the heart of the capitalist system and in our politics, in international relations and in our interactions with the natural world, in science and the humanities. Indeed, in each of these instances, there seems to be several crises wrapped up in one. Politically, to give just one example, we are divided by increasing polarization, growing intolerance of others’ views and values, ideological radicalization, and the rise of various forms of authoritarian populism – not to mention the plainly totalitarian regimes that rule over massive swathes of today’s world. According to the largest global report on the state of democracy, “the level of democracy enjoyed by the average person in 2023 is now on par with that of 1985” (V-Dem). What is worse, even in traditionally democratic nations, inequality has been rising steadily, eroding public trust in democratic institutions and processes, as well as fueling far-right movements. As though this was not bad enough, the specter of an all-out nuclear war remains a real and present danger, just as climate emergency poses an existential threat to humanity. “Anthropocene” is not so much a descriptive term as the name of an engendered condition. A recently published report, in Science, states that “six out of nine planetary boundaries” have been breached, suggesting that Earth is “now well outside the safe operating space for humanity” (Richardson et al.).

From the private sphere to our politics to our planetary situation, there is hardly anything now that is not in a “state of crisis.” It is as though we cannot do without crises. To satisfy our hunger for ever more – and more dramatic – crises, they have been commodified in popular culture. Global platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime constantly package apocalyptic scenarios and sell it as entertainment for mass consumption, feeding on the secret pleasure of (self-)destruction and occasional guilt. The growing prevalence of eco-anxiety – the fear of imminent ecological collapse – has even become, some suggest, “the new cool.”

In a world marked by multiple crises, or “polycrisis” – where multiple crises intersect and intensify each other (see Edgar Morin or Ville Lähde, for example) – public discourse has taken on an increasingly “apocalyptic tone.” When Jacques Derrida published his influential essay, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” back in 1984, the phrase still referred to something new and exceptional. Meanwhile, with so many crises going on, and even more to come, the apocalypse seems to have become a way of life.

Historically, the term “apocalypse” (ἀποκάλυψις) refers to an unveiling, revelation, or disclosure of hidden truths at the end of times. Today, however, this “apocalyptic tone” in the public discourse reflects primarily a sense of impending or already occurring destruction (Hentschel). The situation reveals not one crisis or another, but history itself defined as an ending state of crisis.

There is a great paradox here, and an even greater irony. Major breakthroughs in human evolution have simultaneously solved certain problems while creating new, and potentially fatal, ones. The agricultural revolution solved the issue of food scarcity, but it also led to exploitation, malnutrition, and mass violence. The scientific and industrial revolutions alleviated mobility constraints and spurred extraordinary technological advances in medicine and other fields, yet also gave rise to technology-based genocides, climate emergency, and the threat of nuclear war. The digital and AI revolutions have opened vast potential for progress, yet they also bring a range of new challenges, including mental health crises, the potential for unprecedented political manipulation and control, the undermining of democracy, and the radicalization of warfare through AI-powered autonomous machines (Schaake). In this context, the techno-optimist “solutionism” of Silicon Valley, of which Evgeny Morozov speaks, and which reduces problems like suffering, aging, and death to mere technical challenges (Gray), paradoxically generates a host of new issues.

Human history, then, unfolds under the triple sign of crisis, paradox, and irony: the very advancements that have propelled human progress also threaten our survival, bringing closer the real possibility of self-destruction through nuclear war, AI-powered war machines, or climate collapse.

how we relate to crisis

For all their prevalence in the popular imagination, academic parlance, and political discourse, there is no agreement among thinkers on the nature, role, and ultimate significance of crises in the grand scheme of human affairs. A few, like Jacques Derrida, have even questioned the utility of the term altogether. In his above-mentioned essay on the “apocalyptic tone” (“Of an Apocalyptic Tone”), he reflects on how the idea of “the end” – whether of an era, a system, or the world itself – often functions as a form of political rhetoric that implies a final, conclusive crisis. For him, apocalyptic thinking – and, by extension, crisis thinking – can be dangerous because it assumes that finality is either possible or desirable. This perspective, he argues, oversimplifies history, reducing its complexity to a binary of “before” and “after,” crisis and resolution, often framing crises within a narrative of linear development and progress. Let’s call this the no-crisis mode of understanding crises.

According to another interpretation, crises tend to disrupt the normal course of life, unsettle established routines, and cause great distress. We should do everything we can to avoid them. If we can’t avoid them, we should do our best to address them and move on as quickly as possible. This crisis-averse mode of thinking recognizes crises for what they are, yet does not recommend them in any way. The crisis-averse mode takes a variety of practical forms, from the creative-spiritual approaches that we come across in Daoism and Confucianism to the plainly pathological ones that we find in reactionary politics, for instance.

Yet another mode of thinking suggests that crises represent moments of great transformation, opportunities for the human species to make progress. This may be termed the crisis-embracing mode. According to this line of thinking, we should not avoid crises because with them come new thinking and creativity, intuition and insight, grit and resilience, adaptability, and plasticity. Crises don’t mean just impasse or loss of direction – they also provide conditions for self-discovery and self-understanding. To find yourself in a crisis and to seek a way out is to look yourself in the mirror and re-assess your whole life. This mode has its own pathological forms, such as the self-help industrial complex and the vast coaching business that instrumentalize and commodify crises, marketing them as excellent opportunities for personal development.

From accepting crises to provoking them is just a small step, which some haven’t hesitated to take. This would be yet another way of understanding crises – let’s call it crisis-centric. Echoing a certain strain of existentialist thinking, the latter Derrida exalted paradoxes and conceived any ethical and political decision as premised on infinite sacrifice (Gift of Death; see also Ungureanu). In a different key and remembering Marx's and Engels’ thinking on the role of revolutionary violence, Jean-Paul Sartre, in his discussion of revolutionary crisis, speaks of violence as highly “necessary.” “Violence is the midwife of history,” as he famously put it.

Under certain circumstances, this crisis-centric mode can be, paradoxically, combined with a crisis-averse one. Think of how orthodox Marxism envisioned a crisis-free post-historical human condition. Authoritarian populists likewise may adopt a mixed mode: catastrophism (the world is irremediably corrupt and fallen, a “swamp” really) and salvationism are part of the same dual logic that is simultaneously predicated on and averse to crisis.

“incongruous animals”

Faced with such perplexing disagreement, we may have to try a more conventional and safer avenue: etymology. The modern term crisis originates from the Greek krisis, meaning a moment of judgment and decision, a turning point. Krisis requires drawing distinctions, pondering alternatives, and making decisions. It has the same root (krinein) as “critic,” “critique,” and “criticism.” In this understanding, crises are not only disruptive but also potentially generative – they make room for new judgments, choices, possibilities. Not only that, but crises seem to be intrinsic to the human condition. Far from being mere obstacles to overcome, they determine who we are and shape who we may become. To be human, in some sense, is to be in a state of crisis – always grappling with incongruities, whether existential, spiritual, cultural, or political.

In this sense, we are perpetually “out of place,” never fully in harmony with the world around us, with the others or even with ourselves. Helmuth Plessner’s notion of excentric positionality (exzentrische Positionalität) offers a useful framework for understanding our situation. According to Plessner, humans experience the world from a position outside of themselves. Unlike other animals, whose behavior is largely dictated by instinct and who perceive themselves as embedded within the natural world, humans are capable of self-reflection, of imaginative self-distancing, and of distancing themselves from their own world. We have the capacity to relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world as if from a distance, which makes us “excentric,” and therefore capable of decision and critique: simultaneously within the world and yet apart from it.

This dual relation with the world creates a state of constant tension and incongruity, yet something which, paradoxically, enhances human life and thought. Plessner refers to humans as “insufficient animals,” emphasizing our openness to the world and our capacity for self-consciousness. This ongoing tension and incongruity – this state of crisis – is part of the fabric of human existence. Their dramatic or comic expressions, giving voice to the tensions and incongruities (spiritual, religious, moral, political) of the human condition, are two sides of the same coin.

Crisis, then, is an inherent feature of our way of life as incongruous and self-reflective animals. The pre-human world had been replete with cataclysmic events (natural disasters, extinctions, etc.), yet, strictly speaking, these were not crises as such. The current eco-social crisis – the crisis of the “Anthropocene” – has emerged through human agency. Yet, it’s also human beings that can recognize the crisis as a “critical moment,” make judgments, decisions, and envision solutions.

a sampler

Given all this, trying to map out in any detail the vast, wild expanses of crisis would be a fool’s errand. What may work better, instead, would be a sample of recent scholarly contributions that would place us in a better position to grasp some of our ongoing crises, and with some luck observe some of their less visible features. The collection of essays that follows, then, does not intend to “exhaust” the topic of crisis – that would be both useless and unrealistic. Rather, it’s an attempt to look at it from multiple standpoints, thematic perspectives, and disciplinary angles. They are, if you will, messages in a bottle, with no singular origin, safe trajectory, or clear destination, yet each contributing to a larger conversation on the nature, role, and significance of crisis as something intrinsic to the human condition. If anything, these contributions should be seen not as “solutions” to our “polycrisis,” but – more modestly – attempts at making some (imperfect) sense of it. Like any sampler, this collection has a simple function: to make you ask for more.

In the first cluster of contributions (“On Crisis – Broadly Speaking”), crisis is considered either conceptually or in broad theoretical terms. The job of this cluster, in a certain sense, is to create a comprehensive and flexible framework for the discussions that follow. In the first essay, “The Humanism Crisis,” Joan Ramon Resina paints an ambitious portrait of today’s world as one fundamentally “out of joint,” and traces the origin of this crisis in a major act of historical uprooting, which has profoundly affected the Western humanities. “The twenty-first century’s assault on old-world structures and the rise of the network society,” he writes, have “induced unprecedented cultural obsolescence.” Nothing, in his view, has been “so displaced from the core of modern education as the humanities.” As a geographical counterpoint of sorts, in their contribution, “Reconsidering the Context of Crisis,” Paul J. D’Ambrosio and Daniel J. Sarafinas explore a major current in the Eastern thought about crisis, which may be seen as challenging Western-centric approaches to crisis. While Confucianism and Daoism were born out of political turmoil and moral crisis, they measure changes against (and idealize) Dao, or “the way things should be.” In the third contribution to this cluster, “Regimes of Crisis,” Miguel de Beistegui argues that in the case of crises of contradiction defined by the unsustainable coexistence of norms in a given system, a “creative” or “revolutionary” moment, which introduces a new normative order, is necessary.

The contributions of the second cluster (“Philosophy of/in Crisis”) deal with specific instances in the history of thinking about crisis. In his essay, “Philosophy at a Crossroads,” Amador Vega examines the encounters of some of the most significant figures in twentieth-century philosophy with the canonical texts of Western mysticism. He argues that the intimate testimony of spiritual crisis produces a duplicate crisis or countermovement inside the philosophical tradition, with strong, perhaps unexpected, consequences for its written modes of discourse. In “Substance Abuse,” Anthony Curtis Adler, taking as his point of departure “the historical intertwinement of the concepts of crisis and disease,” explores Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “therapeutic model of philosophy” and advances a series of broader philosophical considerations on the intellectual and spiritual context of the Austrian philosopher’s oeuvre. “Wittgenstein’s philosophical therapy,” Adler concludes, is “a self-therapy that originates in an experience of the crisis of criteria for critique – a crisis that itself arises from the failure of the ethics of moderation, the lack of the obscure yet concrete measure of communal life.” In “The Culturally Educated Spirit and Its Fate,” Richard Eldridge investigates Hegel’s account of “the role of crises in the formation of a culture of lived freedom,” with special references to Denis Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew. Eldridge speaks here of a “culture of generalized alienation and dissatisfaction, in which crises of opposition are all at once universal, irresolvable,” and don’t play much of a role in “the achievement of meaningful freedom,” and yet, in the footsteps of Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Cavell, he discerns a way out.

The third cluster of contributions (“The Art of Crisis”) revolves around engagements with crisis coming from – and characteristic of – artists and fiction writers, which may differ to a significant degree from those of the philosophers. In his essay, “Apocalypse,” Robbie B.H. Goh traces the widespread presence of the apocalyptic imaginary in a range of contemporary works of literature and film, from the “Left Behind” series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins (followed by film adaptations) to The Matrix franchise to a number of films dedicated to various forms of “awakening,” such as Brazil (1985, directed by Terry Gilliam), The Thirteenth Floor (1999, Josef Rusnak), The Truman Show (1998, Peter Weir), and Inception (2010, Christopher Nolan). In some way or another, the apocalypse is lurking behind them all. The apocalypse, according to Goh, is “the cultural unconscious of the existential crisis of the human race.” In his contribution, “Cristi Puiu and Vladimir Solovyov,” Camil Ungureanu analyzes Cristi Puiu’s revisiting of Vladimir Solovyov’s literary-philosophical testament (Three Conversations, Including a Short Tale of the Antichrist). Puiu stages a conversation between progressive and conservative voices without involving their corresponding assurances, namely the appeal to either historical progress or the traditional order. In “‘Something Completely Mad and Extraordinary,’” Sonia Arribas and Irene Valle Corpas interpret the complex work of the German artist of Jewish origin, Charlotte Salomon (1917–43), who was murdered at Auschwitz at the age of twenty-six. Their essay’s focus is on how the artist deals with memory, love, suicidal crisis, and artistic creation in troubled times.

The contributions in the final cluster (“Crisis Politics: Three Case Studies”), in some way or another, explore the political aspects of crisis, of which there are plenty. Like much of the collection, the composition of this cluster reminds the reader of the near-impossibility of mapping out crisis as such – we can only afford to examine a handful of “case studies.” In her contribution, “Kuwait’s Modernity in Crisis,” Mai Al-Nakib imaginatively explores “the crisis of Kuwait’s modernity by way of postcards.” She hopes that, by a close investigation of these artefacts, along with other aspects of Kuwaiti life, she could retrieve a “phantasmic national narrative of Kuwait ignored today,” and indeed a “counter-memory of the past,” which would eventually help the Kuwaitis “better register the ongoing failures of the state” with a view of envisioning “more humane and sustainable alternatives.” In their multi-author contribution, “Harnessing Ignorance?,” Adriana Mica, Gertrude J. Fraser, Bashir Bello, Mikołaj Pawlak, and Paweł Kubicki explore the complex ignorance and crisis based on a pilot exploration of the inequalities of failure during COVID-19 in eight countries, Nigeria in particular. Finally, in his markedly personal and wide-ranging essay, “The Crisis of No Crisis,” Mark C. Taylor uses the politics of the “global water crisis” as a possible solution to a set of larger problems we face today. “Fluid dynamics suggest a radically relational world in which everything is co-emergent and codependent,” he writes. Understanding how complex adaptive systems operate would “make it possible to develop strategies that enable us to face the future with hope rather than despair.”