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Definition
Existential rage is an untenable, despairing, and acute flooding of one’s inner defenses in response to feeling a lack of ontological status, meaninglessness to life, or lack of agency, signifying intense upset and displeasure with these or related existential concerns in one’s life.
Introduction
Playwright Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606, 2004) contained a somber line uttered by the character Macbeth upon losing his wife, “[life is]…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (5.5, 25.7, p. 206). Five centuries later, the loud ferocity of the natural sciences, notably expressed in neuroscience, affirms the widower’s nihilistic sentiments. Laws of nature increasingly find credence in the scientific community’s perspective as governing everything human including the synaptic wiring of the brain. At the extreme end of this worldview is Harman’s (1973) thought experiment that identified humans as being brains in a vat,...
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References
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Whitaker, A. (2019). Existential Rage. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_2343-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_2343-1
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