In 2022, ordinary Sri Lankans gathered at Galle Face and refused to go home. This paper asks what existentialist philosophy can tell us about that refusal, and what the Aragalaya can tell existentialism in return.
1 · Condemned to be free
Sartre argued that human beings have no fixed essence to fall back on. We are what we make of ourselves, and we cannot escape the responsibility of choosing. For most of modern Sri Lankan political life, that responsibility was handed upward to parties, families and institutions. The protests marked a moment when large numbers of people took it back.
“Man is condemned to be free.”
2 · Agency in the crowd
Yet freedom in the existentialist sense is never abstract. It is exercised in a situation, against a background of scarcity, history and other people’s choices. The fuel queues, the power cuts and the shortages of 2022 were that situation.
A crowd is often described as the place where individuals disappear. The Aragalaya complicates that picture…