We're All Existentialists Now

Greg Artus contemplates (dis)embodiment, Zoom life and social media, through the ‘Looks’ of Sartre, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty.

- Greg Artus

In this past year of severe restrictions on physical social interaction, everyone seems to have been made starkly aware of the importance of what some existentialists would call Being-with-Others. A social life conducted through screens has shown people how impoverished life is without the physical presence of others. The popular expression of this has been through the language of ‘hugs’: everyone talks of missing hugs and other physical contact.

People seem surprised by the way this lack of other bodies has affected us. Perhaps this is because before this year of disembodied socialising we had been seduced by a view of ourselves as primarily minds who interact with one another through language and ideas. This view has dominated Western thought at least since Descartes, but perhaps even since the ancient Greeks. On such a view, it should not matter whether the interaction occurs in person or through a screen, since the body plays no essential part in the exchange of ideas and feelings. If both language and ideas are abstract, non-physical, then communication shouldn’t be affected by one’s bodily presence. Yet we have found that it is affected. We have found that we miss the bodily presence of others more than our dominant paradigm suggests we should.