Description
Existentialism offers a valuable framework for understanding the anxieties and uncertainties that come with the Anthropocene, the proposed geological age of human activities being the main driving force behind global environmental change. It also helps in sketching the imaginaries and responses to looming mass extinction due to anthropogenic factors. However, there are also potential risks of applying existentialist thought in contextualizing the crises in the Anthropocene. Its humanist origins contradict the revival of human-nature entanglement within the critical Anthropocene discourse, and its emphasis on individualism could pose challenges to collective action and ecological justice. The equivalent value of choosing and not choosing at all can also lead to fatalism, stalling the exploration of radical alternatives that the challenges in the Anthropocene demand. This paper presents an examination of these philosophical contradictions in search of a theoretical convergence between existentialist thinking and Anthropocene living.
