Struggling with the uncertainty of life under coronavirus? How Kierkegaard's philosophy can help
- Written by Patrick Stokes, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Deakin University
I’m writing this in the inner north of Melbourne, near two major roads that normally provide a constant hum of traffic noise. Yet if I stick my head out the front door after 8pm there’s near-total silence. A citywide curfew, unimaginable a month ago, is in full effect.
COVID-19 is pushing us all in ways we’ve never been pushed, and making us do thing we’ve never done. It’s also stressing us in very peculiar ways. Perhaps one of the most tiring things is the all encompassing lack of certainty.
In Melbourne, we’re hoping the curfew will lift after six weeks of this — but we simply don’t know. Neither do the people making these decisions, through no fault of their own. No-one can say with much confidence what will happen or when.
Read more: What would Seneca say? Six Stoic tips for surviving lockdown
Certain-uncertainty
It’s astonishing how much daily life has changed in such a short time. Yet what is instructive about COVID-19 is not so much what it has changed as what it has exposed — and not just about weaknesses in institutions and economic structures. It’s not that COVID-19 has suddenly made the world uncertain; it’s that it has shown how uncertain it was all along.
Everything in our lives is subject to sudden and arbitrary reversals. We can lose our jobs, our health, or our relationships at any time, not just during a pandemic. Intellectually, we all know this. But mostly, like background noise, we don’t really notice this constant note of insecurity.
Wikimedia CommonsThe most obvious example of this pervasive uncertainty, of course, is death itself. In his 1845 discourse At a Graveside, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard — who lost his parents and five of his seven siblings before he was 30 — dwells on what he calls the “uncertain-certainty” of death.
We know we will die, but also have no idea when we will die. Death could come for us at any moment, decades hence or “this very day.”
It’s understandable that we spend so much time and energy trying to escape this knowledge. One way of doing so is through a flight to statistics. We try to defang the spectre of death by appealing to actuarial tables, or simply by acting as if we are never going to die.
Read more: Friday essay: on reckoning with the fact of one's death
Playing the odds
Many critics take precisely this route to argue against the sort of restrictions now in place. Few of us, statistically speaking, are likely to contract COVID-19; even fewer are likely to die from it. This possibility is then weighed against the things we have always taken to be bankable certainties: work, sport, family, friends and the knowledge that every year looks comfortingly similar to the one before.
Authors: Patrick Stokes, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Deakin University