The Mental Side of the Pandemic

     In Simon Critchley's article "To Philosophize is to Learn how to Die" he talked about the difference between fear and anxiety. He spoke about how fear is the human reaction to an actual threat like a bear coming up to your door and how that fear goes away as soon as the bear goes away. Critchley differentiates fear and anxiety by saying that anxiety has no particular object, such as the bear. His description of anxiety is that everything feels strange and uncanny. Critchley relates this anxiety to the pandemic that is currently happening around the world and how most people are living with a strange anxiety every day. Critchley also explains how philosophy could be a sort of an illumination to help us out of our daily struggles. He believes philosophy has failed to solve any major problems in thousands of years and he is hoping that it can help us now. This is where the title of the article "To Philosophize is to Learn how to Die" comes in to play. Critchley used a quote from Montaigne that says "He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave" and I believe this quote is very powerful in the situation we are in today. I believe what Critchley is trying to say here is that once you accept that we are all going to die you will be able to escape the grips of anxiety. This applies to the pandemic because most people are currently living with anxiety and are not able to see that they can escape this anxiety by welcoming deaths approach and not living afraid of it. 

    I completely agree with Critchley in the sense that most of the world right now is living with anxiety due to the pandemic. I believe that if people take a philosophical approach to life and learn to welcome deaths approach that we be able to break free from the anxiety. I think that this goes for anything in life not just the pandemic, people all around the world have been dealing with anxiety for years and if they were somehow able to embrace the idea of welcoming death then they might be able to escape the anxiety.