Can a word have an existential crisis?

A while back, a philosopher friend of mine was fretting about the adjective “existential.” She was irked by people using it to refer to situations which threaten the existence of something, as when someone refers to climate change as an “existential crisis,” or more commonly, as “an existential threat.”

Is the meaning of “existential” being corrupted?

Dictionaries give the meaning as “of, relating to, or affirming existence” and “grounded in existence or the experience of existence,” neither of which is much help. I do think “existential” has become a bit of a buzzword, but I’m not worried about its meaning.

Historically, an “existential crisis” has referred to philosophical or psychological questions of purpose, identity, and the meaning of life; and to the periods of anxiety that such questions produce. And indeed, this seems to be the way the phrase is used in serious journalism, at least in headlines like these from the New York Times:

No one expects the state of Iowa to cease to exist (perhaps becoming East Dakota). The same goes for Monday Night Football, Baseball, the G.O.P., married motherhood, or law school. The headlines refer to identity crises, not threats to existence (well, maybe for the G.O.P.). The shift of “existential crisis” from referring to a personal identity crisis to a cultural one is nothing to fret about. 

Folks who use “existential crisis” only in its human “identity crisis” meaning may not like the way it is extended in these headlines, but what really annoys them is the phrase being used to indicate something is a threat to humanity. This use is becoming increasingly common, as for example, when President Joe Biden called climate change “a global, existential crisis.” Is it a crisis of the earth’s identity or a crisis of human existence? It could be both I suppose, which may be how the extended meaning comes about.

The naturalness of the semantic shift may not satisfy my philosopher friend or other critics. Feeling that you have a special interest in technical terms is only human. As a linguist, I would occasionally snark when people used the term “deep structure” to refer to some hidden meaning in a phrase. For linguists of a certain generation, its technical use referred to a particular level of analysis (the output of the phrase structure component). The expression has shifted enough so that linguists now talk about d-structure, omitting the “deep.”

Some of my literature colleagues used to worry about the casual use of “deconstruction” to mean “analysis” or “taking things apart” (though, in fact, that meaning preceded its literary use). Just about everyone in the sciences gets upset at the use of “theory” to refer to “hunch” rather than to a precisely formulated and tested body of principles offered to explain phenomena about the world. And philosophers are no doubt put out when non-philosopher friends talk about their “philosophy of life.”

My philosophy, so to speak, is to appreciate these shifts but not get too upset about them. Words and phrases, it turns out, have their own existential crises—and they come out of them with new meanings.

_{Featured image by Anne Nygård via Unsplash}