Why philosophy flourishes in times of crisis

Some of the brightest minds in philosophy came up with their most enduring wisdom in the face of pandemics, economic collapse, and social unrest. Why? Because hard times force us to question things – and philosophy is the practice of reframing life as we know it.

After Covid-19 shook the world, everyone had to get used to the idea of a “new normal”. For a pioneer of Western philosophy like Socrates, this would be considered a golden opportunity to discover newfound insight.

Socrates came of age as Athens fell apart: a society ravaged by plague, war, and political turmoil. But the philosopher took such disorder as a chance to question everything, to interrogate assumptions and to unmask ignorance. That was his recipe for enlightenment.

As America prepared for a bloody and divisive civil war in the 19th century, philosopher Henry David Thoreau made a point of finding hidden beauty. His message was that if you can’t change an event, change your perception of it – as every drop of every storm contains a rainbow.

In 16th-century France, Michel de Montaigne was rocked by the death of a close friend from the same plague that had killed nearly half of his city. He retreated into solitude, writing his famous Essays as a way to communicate a new understanding of the world and himself.

Zeno founded the Stoic school of philosophy after surviving a shipwreck in 301 B.C. It was based on the idea that if we can learn to view everything with just the right level of detachment, we can handle adversity better and live life on a more even keel…

Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher born into slavery, summed up this way of thinking perfectly: “What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about things.” In other words, the world is what you make it: change the parts you can; learn to accept the rest.

Albert Camus’s novel The Plague depicted an allegorical pandemic sweeping through society, but it’s his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus (about a figure condemned to push a boulder up a hill) that may feel particularly relevant today.

Camus argued that our job as humans is not to make sense of catastrophes (they are meaningless) but to recognize the absurdity of life. We all have a boulder that we’ll be forever pushing – but it gets easier if we just keep going, investing effort regardless of reward.

Bottom line: There’s a reason philosophy is known as a “slow cure”, says WSJ writer Eric Weiner. No matter what happens in life, the only wisdom worth knowing, the only remedy for a broken spirit, comes from the insight we pick up in the face of our biggest challenges.