Back in April, I wrote about Anxiety and Coronavirus (https://timboatswain.wixsite.com/website/post/the-guide-to-successful-photography-blogging). I examined the evolutionary purpose of anxiety which, although in many ways now feels hardly relevant for modern life, persists as a deep and unsettling human emotion. I also recognised that the Coronavirus would cause a considerable increase in human anxiety and as predicted there now is clear evidence that anxiety levels have gone through the roof due to the Covid-19 pandemic (20th July: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/934882.)
In my blog, I talked about how it is 'uncertainty' that fuels anxiety: Therefore, our reaction to uncertainty when we can no longer control the present or predict the future, can be acute anxiety, which may result in a range of emotional states from panic to serious depression.
Coronavirus has stoked the feeling of uncertainty at every level, from long term international health and economic issues, personal everyday living to high levels of anxiety amongst children. In response to the mental health problem caused by Covid-19 , there is a plethora of medical advice now available about hope to cope with the anxiety of uncertainty (e.g. 8th Sept: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54013718) but little attention is being given to the ‘meaning’, the philosophical base, of the concept of uncertainty and its deeper hermeneutics for humanity.
This lack of fundamental thinking about uncertainty reminded me of the little known, at least in the UK, German psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers and his theory of ‘ limit situation’ (German:Grenzsituation). He argued that fright, guilt, suffering, and ultimately death were key ‘limit situations’. All these ‘limit situations’ imposed feelings and contexts, exposing the uncertainties that plague human existence. The individual cannot escape them and at some stage, they are likely to affect everyone's life. Jaspers believed that rather than trying to avoid them or attempting to deny these uncertainties we need to respond to them and engage in a positive fashion - this response could be in the form of education, through scientific explanation, cultural rituals, religion, and individual social and mental programmes (think mindfulness, contemplation. yoga and so on).
However, though these techniques can provide a level of management to ‘ limit situations’, Jasper argued it was, in fact, more important to acknowledge and talk about the existence of uncertainties. Underpinning the human response should be a recognition that those ‘limit situations’ will never go away but we can use our consciousness to accept and live with them. Often, because they are arbitrary these feelings and situations cannot be planned for so the knowledge they will inevitably happen in one form or another is paradoxical. We know they may happen, or will happen in the case of death, but we don’t know in the future why or when. This uncertainty can be summarised ‘in knowing what we don’t know’.
Jaspers also saw that science, along with religion and ideology, as providing a sense of order but that order could be shattered by human experience and above all, though explanations could provide hope and comfort, they cannot actually produce meaning for the individual experience. This is that experience which we all suffer at some point in our lives, ‘why has this happened and why me?’
Interestingly, Jaspers, who had lived through the ordeal of Nazi Germany, also argued there was an irreducible conflict, when it came to uncertainty, between science and politics that cannot be intellectually resolved - both attempt to provide some form of certainty but there is continual conflict: knowledge versus power, the latter demanding some level of totalitarianism. While science seeks certainty, the ‘art’ of government exercises a falsity, asserting certainty where none exists. At this moment this tension between science and politics makes me think of President Trump and his demand to have an American Coronavirus vaccine before the USA elections on 3rd November.
So what is humanity to do in managing the ‘limit situation’? Jasper’s guiding compass, in the end, was the ideal of truth, "Truth is what really unites us," - no wonder the popularist politicians are wedded to fake news! How then can it be possible to link truth and uncertainty together? Of course, in the end, this begs the question ‘what is truth?'. If, however, we put that conundrum on one side and agree there can be 'facts', what he seemed to proselytise was the need to communicate the truth about ‘limit situations’, so although humanity might not be able to come to an agreement about who we are and where we want to go, we should be able to agree about what we don’t know. We need to be truthful about the uncertainties in our societies and our individual lives so they can be communicated with each other and help not only our mental health today but also that of future generations.