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Nihilism

Nihilism (from the Latin nihil, nothing) is a philosophical position which argues that Being, especially past and current human existence, is without objective meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value. Nihilists generally assert some or all of the following:

there is no reasonable proof of the existence of a higher ruler or creator, a "true morality" does not exist, and objective secular ethics are impossible; therefore, life has, in a sense, no truth, and no action is objectively preferable to any other. The term nihilism is sometimes used synonymously with anomie to denote a general mood of despair at the pointlessness of existence.

Nihilism can be a charge leveled against a particular idea, movement, or group, however it is also a philosophical position to which one may overtly subscribe. Movements such as Dada, Futurism, and deconstructionism, among others, have been identified by commentators as "nihilistic" at various times in various contexts. Often this means or is meant to imply that the beliefs of the accuser are more substantial or truthful, whereas the beliefs of the accused are nihilistic, and thereby comparatively amount to nothing (or are simply claimed to be destructively amoralistic).

Nihilism is also a characteristic that has been ascribed to time periods: for example, Jean Baudrillard and others have called postmodernity a nihilistic epoch, and some Christian theologians and figures of religious authority have asserted that postmodernity and many aspects of modernity represent the rejection of God, and therefore are nihilistic.

Nihilism differs from skepticism in that skepticism doesn’t reject claims to truth outright; it only rejects these claims if there is insufficient empirical evidence to support them. Additionally, skepticism does not necessarily come to any conclusions about the reality of moral concepts nor does it deal so intimately with questions about the meaning of an existence without knowable truth.

In the domain of ethics, nihilist or nihilistic is often used as a derogatory term referring to a complete rejection of all systems of authority, morality, and normativity, or one who purportedly makes such a rejection. Either through the rejection of previously accepted bases of belief or through extreme relativism or skepticism, the moral nihilist is construed as one who believes that none of these claims to power are valid. Nihilism not only dismisses received moral values, but rejects ’morality’ outright.

Historical development

Though the term nihilism was first popularized by the novelist Ivan Turgenev, it was first introduced into philosophical discourse by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743 - 1819), who used the term to characterize rationalism, and in particular Immanuel Kant’s "critical" philosophy in order to carry out a reductio ad absurdum according to which all rationalism (philosophy as criticism) reduces to nihilism, and thus it should be avoided and replaced with a return to some type of faith and revelation. A related concept is fideism.

Nihilism is often associated with the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose views accorded with certain aspects of one reading of the position; the modern definition, however, does not apply to him. For while Nietzsche could be accurately categorized as a nihilist in the descriptive sense, he never advocated nihilism as a practical mode of living and was typically quite critical of nihilism as he construed it. His later work displays a preoccupation with nihilism. Nietzsche characterized nihilism as emptying the world and especially human existence of meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value. He hints that nihilism can become a false belief, when it leads individuals to discard any hope of meaning in the world and thus to invent some compensatory alternate measure of significance. Nietzsche used the phrase ’Christians and other nihilists’, which is in line with his low estimation of Christianity in general.

Another prominent philosopher who has written on the subject is Martin Heidegger, who argued that "[the term] nihilism has a very specific meaning. What remains unquestioned and forgotten in metaphysics is being; and hence, it is nihilistic."

Nietzschean nihilism

Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche While few philosophers would claim to be nihilists, nihilism is most often associated with Friedrich Nietzsche. In most contexts, Nietzsche defined the term as any philosophy that results in an apathy toward life and a poisoning of the human soul-and opposed it vehemently. He describes it as "the will to nothingness" or, more specifically:

A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the pathos of ’in vain’ is the nihilists’ pathos - at the same time, as pathos, an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists.

- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 585, translated by Walter Kaufmann

Stanley Rosen identifies Nietzsche’s equation of nihilism with "the situation which obtains when ’everything is permitted.’" Nietzsche asserts that this nihilism is a result of valuing "higher", "divine" or "meta-physical" things (such as God), that do not in turn value "base", "human" or "earthly" things. But a person who rejects God and the divine may still retain the belief that all "base", "earthly", or "human" ideas are still valueless because they were considered so in the previous belief system (such as a Christian who becomes a communist and believes fully in the party structure and leader).In this interpretation, any form of idealism, after being rejected by the idealist, leads to nihilism. Moreover, this is the source of "inconsistency on the part of the nihilists". The nihilist continues to believe that only "higher" values and truths are worthy of being called such, but rejects the idea that they exist. Because of this rejection, all ideas described as true or valuable are rejected by the nihilist as impossible because they do not meet the previously established standards.

In this sense, it is the philosophical equivalent to the Russian political movement: the leap beyond skepticism - the desire to destroy meaning, knowledge, and value. To Nietzsche, it was irrational because the human soul thrives on value. Nihilism, then, was in a sense like suicide and mass murder all at once. He considered faith in the categories of reason, seeking either to overcome or ignore nature, to be the cause of such nihilism. "We have measured the value of the world according to categories that refer to a purely fictitious world". He saw this philosophy as present in Christianity (which he described as ’slave morality’), Buddhism, morality, asceticism and any excessively skeptical philosophy.

As the first philosopher to study nihilism extensively, however, Nietzsche was also quite influenced by its ideas. Nietzsche’s complex relationship with nihilism is most evident in the following well-known quote:

I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism’s] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength!

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Complete Works Vol. 13

While this may appear to imply his allegiance to the nihilist viewpoint, it would be more accurate to say that Nietzsche saw the coming of nihilism as valuable in the long term (as well as ironically acknowledging that nihilism exists in the world so has more gravity compared with categories that refer to a purely fictitious world). According to Nietzsche, it is only once nihilism is overcome that a culture can have a true foundation upon which to thrive. He wished to hasten its coming only so that he could also hasten its ultimate departure.

Nietzsche’s philosophy also shares with nihilism a rejection of any perfect source of absolute, universal and transcendent values. Still, he did not consider all values of equal worth. Recognizing the chaos of nihilism, he advocated a philosophy that willfully transcends it. Furthermore, his positive attitude towards truth as a vehicle of faith and belief distinguishes him from the extreme pessimism that nihilism is often associated with.

’To the clean are all things clean’ - thus say the people. I, however, say unto you: To the swine all things become swinish! Therefore preach the visionaries and bowed-heads (whose hearts are also bowed down): ’The world itself is a filthy monster.’ For these are all unclean spirits; especially those, however, who have no peace or rest, unless they see the world FROM THE BACKSIDE - the backworldsmen! TO THOSE do I say it to the face, although it sound unpleasantly: the world resembleth man, in that it hath a backside, - SO MUCH is true! There is in the world much filth: SO MUCH is true! But the world itself is not therefore a filthy monster!

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

A major cause of Nietzsche’s continued association with nihilism is his famous proclamation that "God is dead." This is Nietzsche’s way of saying that the idea of God is no longer capable of acting as a source of any moral code or teleology. God is dead, then, in the sense that his existence is now irrelevant to the bulk of humanity. "And we," writes Nietzsche in The Gay Science, "have killed him." Alternately, some have interpreted Nietzsche’s comment to be a statement of faith that the world has no rational order. Nietzsche also believed that, even though Christian morality is nihilistic, without God humanity is left with no epistemological or moral base from which we can derive absolute beliefs. Thus, even though nihilism has been a threat in the past, through Christianity, Platonism, and various political movements that aim toward a distant utopian future, and any other philosophy that devalues human life and the world around us (and any philosophy that devalues the world around us by privileging some other or future world necessarily devalues human life), Nietzsche tells us it is also a threat for humanity’s future. This warning can also be taken as a polemic against 19th and 20th century scientism.

Nietzsche advocated a remedy for nihilism’s destructive effects and a hope for humanity’s future in the form of the &Uulm;bermensch (English: overman or superman), a position especially apparent in his works Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Antichrist. The &Uulm;bermensch is an exercise of action and life: one must give value to their existence by behaving as if one’s very existence were a work of art. Nietzsche believed that the &Uulm;bermensch "exercise" would be a necessity for human survival in the post-religious era. Another part of Nietzsche’s remedy for nihilism is a revaluation of morals - he hoped that we are able to discard the old morality of equality and servitude and adopt a new code, turning Judeo-Christian morality on its head. Excess, carelessness, callousness, and sin, then, are not the damning acts of a person with no regard for his salvation, nor that which plummets a society toward decadence and decline, but the signifier of a soul already withering and the sign that a society is in decline. The only true sin to Nietzsche is that which is - against a human nature - aimed at the expression and venting of one’s power over oneself. Virtue, likewise, is not to act according to what has been commanded, but to contribute to all that betters a human soul.

Nietzsche attempts to reintroduce what he calls a master morality, which values personal excellence over forced compassion and creative acts of will over the herd instinct, a moral outlook he attributes to the ancient Greeks. The Christian moral ideals developed in opposition to this master morality, he says, as the reversal of the value system of the elite social class due to the oppressed class’ resentment of their Roman masters. Nietzsche, however, did not believe that humans should adopt master morality as the be-all-end-all code of behavior - he believed that the revaluation of morals would correct the inconsistencies in both master and slave morality - but simply that master morality was preferable to slave morality, although this is debatable. Walter Kaufmann, for one, disagrees that Nietzsche actually preferred master morality to slave morality. He certainly gives slave morality a much harder time, but this is partly because he believes that slave morality is modern society’s more imminent danger. The Antichrist had been meant as the first book in a four-book series, "Toward a Re-Evaluation of All Morals", which might have made his views more explicit, but Nietzsche was afflicted by mental collapse that rendered him unable to write the later three books.

Postmodernism and the breakdown of knowledge

Postmodern and poststructuralist thought deny the very grounds on which Western cultures have based their ’truths’: absolute knowledge and meaning, a ’decentralization’ of authorship, the accumulation of positive knowledge, historical progress, and the ideals of humanism and the Enlightenment. These are often labeled nihilistic, though nihilism itself is open to postmodern criticism: nihilism is a claim to a universal truth (i.e. the proposition "existence lacks meaning" as universally true), exactly that which postmodernism rejects.

Jacques Derrida, whose deconstruction is perhaps most commonly labeled nihilistic did not himself make the nihilistic move that others have claimed. Derridean deconstructionists argue that this approach rather frees texts, individuals or organisations from a restrictive truth, and that deconstruction opens up the possibility of other ways of being. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, for example, uses deconstruction to create an ethics of opening up Western scholarship to the voice of the subaltern and to philosophies outside of the canon of western texts. Derrida himself built a philosophy based upon a ’responsibility to the other’ Deconstruction can thus be seen not as a denial of truth, but as a denial of our ability to know truth (it makes an epistemological claim compared to nihilism’s ontological claim).

Lyotard argues that, rather than relying on an objective truth or method to prove their claims, philosophers legitimize their truths by reference to a story about the world which is inseparable from the age and system the stories belong to, referred to by Lyotard as meta-narratives. He then goes on to define the postmodern condition as one characterized by a rejection both of these meta-narratives and of the process of legitimation by meta-narratives. "In lieu of meta-narratives we have created new language-games in order to legitimize our claims which rely on changing relationships and mutable truths, none of which is privileged over the other to speak to ultimate truth." This concept of the instability of truth and meaning leads in the direction of nihilism, though Lyotard stops short of embracing the latter.

Postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote briefly of nihilism from the postmodern viewpoint in Simulacra and Simulation. He stuck mainly to topics of interpretations of the real world over the simulations that the real world is composed of. The uses of meaning was an important subject in Baudrillard’s discussion of nihilism:

The apocalypse is finished, today it is the precession of the neutral, of forms of the neutral and of indifference.. all that remains, is the fascination for desertlike and indifferent forms, for the very operation of the system that annihilates us. Now, fascination (in contrast to seduction, which was attached to appearances, and to dialectical reason, which was attached to meaning) is a nihilistic passion par excellence, it is the passion proper to the mode of disappearance. We are fascinated by all forms of disappearance, of our disappearance. Melancholic and fascinated, such is our general situation in an era of involuntary transparency.

- Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, "On Nihilism", trans. 1995

Self-consistency and paradox

Nihilism is often described as a belief in the nonexistence of truth. In its more extreme forms, such a belief is difficult to justify, because it contains a variation on the liar paradox: if it is true that truth does not exist, the statement "truth does not exist" is itself a truth, therefore showing itself to be inconsistent. A formally identical criticism has been leveled against relativism and the verifiability theory of meaning of logical positivism.

A more sophisticated interpretation of the claim might be that while truth may exist, it is inaccessible in practice, but this leaves open the problem of how the nihilist has accessed it. It may be a reasonable reply that the nihilist has not accessed truth directly, but has come to the conclusion, based on past experience, that truth is ultimately unattainable within the confines of human circumstance. Thus, since nihilists believe they have learned that truth cannot be attained in this life, they look upon the activities of those rigorously seeking truth as futile. Of course one may add that nihilism is a self fulfilling prophecy, as without making any attempts to attain the truth one is presumably less likely to find it.

Extreme versions of nihilism would maintain that the truth of logical propositions cannot be known, so the fact that nihilism leads to a contradiction isn’t a problem, since contradictions are only problematic for those who accept logic. The classification of nihilism as a ’belief’ can also be contested, as believing one is a nihilist would constitute believing in something and having a belief, a position incompatible with some interpretations of nihilism.

Cultural manifestations

In art

There have been various movements in art, such as surrealism and cubism, which have been criticized for touching on nihilism, and others like Dada which have embraced it openly. More generally, modern art has been criticized as nihilistic due to its often non-representative nature, as happened with the Nazi party’s Degenerate art exhibit. In some Stalinist regimes, modern art is also seen as degenerative, and rules for "aesthetic realism" are forged to stop its influence over public and artist themselves.

Nihilistic themes can be found in literature and music as well. This is especially true of contemporary music and literature, where the uncertainty following what some perceive as the demise of modernism is explored in detail. Rorschach from Alan Moore’s universally acclaimed graphic novel Watchmen is a borderline nihilist who says, "We are born to scrawl our own designs upon this morally blank world" and observes that existence "Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long". It should be noted, however, that Rorschach does adhere to a personal code of moral absolutism, as reflected by his journal writings.

Dada

The term Dada was first used during World War I, an event that precipitated the movement, which lasted from approximately 1916 to 1923. The Dada Movement began in the old town of Z&Uulm;rich, Switzerland known as the "Niederdorf" or "Niederd&oulm;rfli," which is now sporadically inhabited by dadaist squatters. The Dadaists claimed that Dada was not an art movement, but an anti-art movement, sometimes using found objects in a manner similar to found poetry and labeling them art, thus undermining ideas of what art is and what it can be. The "anti-art" drive is thought to have stemmed from a post-war emptiness that lacked passion or meaning in life. Sometimes Dadaists paid attention to aesthetic guidelines only so they could be avoided, attempting to render their works devoid of meaning and aesthetic value. This tendency toward devaluation of art has led many to claim that Dada was an essentially nihilist movement; a destruction without creation. War and destruction had washed away peoples’ mindset of creation and aesthetic.

In film

Perhaps the most commonly referenced portrayal of Nihilism in contemporary film is 1999’s Fight Club, in which the unnamed narrator’s disillusionment with the search for meaning in a consumerist, emasculated society results at first in the antagonist (Tyler Durden) winning him over to a philosophy of antipathy, self-mutilation, and outright animosity towards life. Durden’s Nihilism is blurred, however, by the Existentialist flavor of his rebellion against society. His credo that "It is only after we have lost everything that we are free to do anything" reflects a Sartrean insistence on the infinite responsibility of free will, while his desire for common men to rise up and overthrow the shallow values of society is remniscent of Nietzsche’s discussion of master-slave morality.

John Malkovich’s character in the 1993 movie In the Line of Fire espouses an outlook on life that could be seen as nihilistic over a telephone conversation with a secret service agent played by Clint Eastwood. Malkovich’s character, a would-be presidential assassin, describes life and death as lacking any intrinsic justice and being random and meaningless, and gives his motive for the assassination attempt as being "to punctuate the dreariness".

A more fatalist treatment of Nihilism can be seen in the later I ? Huckabees, which includes Nihilism among other theories to develop the film’s take on life in general. A similar use of Nihilism as a study in futility and meaninglessness can be seen in Jim Jarmusch’s 2005 film Broken Flowers.

The 1998 movie The Big Lebowski written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, without treating Nihilism as a serious thematic concern, uses several Nihilist characters as comic narrative devices. Three black-clad men with German accents confront protagonist "The Dude" (Lebowski) claiming "We are Nihilists, Lebowski. We believe in nothing. Yeah, nothing." Also, upon being told that a man on a chair that is floating in a pool with a bottle of Jack Daniels next to him is a Nihilist, "The Dude" responds "Oh, that must be exhausting." This satirical treatment of Nihilists is in contrast with one of the earliest Nihilist characters in cinema, "Animal Mother" in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. Animal Mother is a machine gunner who believes victory should be the only object of war, is contemptuous of any authority other than his own, and rules by intimidation.

A more subtle reference can be found in the 1999 movie The Matrix, in which the protagonist Neo seems to continually hold this view, or is in a continual search to find meaning to life, which draws him to the group of separatists who seem to offer meaning ("What is the Matrix?"). This is hinted at early on when Neo opens Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation to the chapter "On Nihilism," where it is discovered he hides his illegal programs and money. Near the end of the 2003 sequel The Matrix Revolutions, the antagonist Agent Smith overtly claims that "the purpose of life is to end".