The Apeiron Blog Newsletter
Your Weekly Dose of Critical Thought #8
Philosophy in the news and our picks of the week.
Hey Fellow Philosophers!
Here are our team’s selected philosophy resources this week. I hope they provoke deep thought!
Philosophy in the News: Philosophy and the Plague
This week I wanted to focus on plagues and their relation to philosophy. Plagues, like any catastrophic event, have the capacity to elicit unrest. This is especially clear today; as the current pandemic has prompted social, but also mental unrest. It has forced us to abandon our individualistic mentality and embrace the collective. In a neoliberal society, of course, this would come as quite a shock.
Albert Camus’s The Plague reflects on this notion both philosophically and narratively. The story takes place in Oran, a fictional city in Algeria. It is an account of the plague that the city endures, and on the surface, is just that. But according to Sean Illing, the author of the article “What Camus’s The Plague can teach us about the Covid-19 pandemic,” the novel can also be read as an “intensely layered meditation on the human condition and the obligations we all have to each other.”
Illing writes:
“Camus distills [the point of The Plague] in a famous tweak he gives to Descartes. Descartes, of course, is the 17th-century thinker who gave use the “Cogito, ergo sum — I think, therefore I am.” And Camus at a certain point says, “Well, that’s all well and good, if you’re interested in making the case for an individual ego. But I’m more interested in knowing how to make a case for the collective, rather than for the individual.” And so for him, it’s not so much “I think, therefore I am.” It’s “I resist, and therefore we are.”
You can read Illing’s article in its entirety below:
As Adam Gopnik puts it in his article for The New Yorker, “Every plague must have its point.” In a different article for The New York Times, Stephen Asma argues the COVID-19 pandemic doesn’t have one. “As a naturalist,” he writes, “I resist the theological version of human exceptionalism, but as a philosopher, I’m inclined to recognize that nothing has intrinsic value until we humans imagine it so.”
Asma writes of the innate need of humans for everything to have a purpose, a point. His argument against this reality is founded on science and philosophy, and can be read below:
Philosophy in The Apeiron Blog
To complement the previous article attached on Albert Camus’s novel The Plague, I wanted to include Ocean Malandra’s article “How Camus’ “The Plague” Predicted the Covid-19 Pandemic.”
Ocean’s argument is similar to the one Illing has written: that in the western world, “greed continues to poison our response to an event that should be pulling us all together.” He argues that the philosophical lesson, of both the fictional and actual plague, is unity. He writes:
“What classics of perennial philosophy like “The Plague” remind us is that no matter what we face, rising above our individual selves and connecting to our greater relationships with humanity and the world is the key to the deepest levels of understanding and overcoming”
You can read his full article below:
The final article of this week speaks to the individualistic mentality that, despite all this talk of collectivism in the face of COVID-19, still prevails in America. Jessica Wildfire’s article “Americans Are On Our Own, and We Know It” reviews the stark realities of ignoring “the collective,” which Camus argues is central to overcoming crisis.
“There’s not really “an American” response to this pandemic.” She writes. “There never was. There’s several, and they overlap.”
Jessica’s article in its entirety can be found below:
That’s all for this week! I hope these articles get you thinking and make you consider things you normally wouldn’t.
This is a copy of an email sent out to The Apeiron Blog’s newsletter on 17/05/21. To receive articles like these to your inbox, sign up using this free link.
