Existential Risks?

I recently received an invitation to an online seminar with Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus) and Gillian Tett (Provost of King’s, Cambridge) on the subject of existential risks, sponsored by the ‘Cambridge Existential Risks Initiative’. The blurb defined an ‘existential risk’ in the following way: ‘An “existential risk” (x-risk) is an event that could permanently and drastically reduce humanity’s potential, for example by causing human extinction,’ going on to list climate change, nuclear war, and engineered pandemics as amongst these risks. Well, who wouldn’t be concerned about those risks, though I am suspicious of the swift move to the pseudo-technical ‘x-risk’—just how much longer does it take to say ‘existential risk’ than ‘x-risk’? I also note that there are rhetorical echoes of the transhumanist agenda, who argue that the existential risks facing humanity today are so great that they can only be countered by re-engineering humanity and bringing about some sort of cyborg life, to be lived on this planet or en route to the stars.

To those who know their history of philosophy, this is a complete upending of the whole idea of the ‘existential’ as that was developed in existentialism. Existential in this ‘existentialist’ sense is about a self-and-self-world-relation that is not susceptible to technological fixes, since it’s about who we are and who we feel ourselves to be. It’s against this background that Heidegger described the advent of nuclear weapons as no more than the ultimate outcome of a loss in our human self-world relation that had long since taken place—very much in the spirit of Goethe’s ‘Lacking ourselves, we lack everything’ (a very rough translation). It is not a future threat, but a threat from a certain kind of moral-spiritual loss that long preceded Operation Manhattan. What the ‘Existential Risks Initiative’ is talking about is ‘survival’ not ‘existence’—and in muddling the terminology in this way it is further concealing what is even more urgently at issues than, for example, the climate crisis, namely, ourselves.

Goethe’s insight is not final, though. At least in Christian existentialism, the final desideratum is not ‘to be’ but to be in a certain way, the way of love. In this spirit, we can gloss Goethe’s saying with St Paul’s comment that ‘If I am without love, then I am a sounding gong or a clanging cymbal’.