The uses and abuses of Nihilism

[dust1n]

Based on what little I have seen regarding Post-Modernism, today's nihilism is not radical at all. Nihilism as an ends is inherently reactionary for it is the destruction of meaning, whereas nihilism as a means is a revolutionary overthrow to establish a new order, a new conception of truth, of right and of meaning. It is not enough that 'god is dead' since we are burdened by his absence. The goal of nihilism must not be the death of god, but that man can live without one, that we have no need to substitute one illusion for another. mankind must become god in so far as we are the source of our own meaning and not subservient to ones which are alien from our existence in some supernatural realm.

This appears to me to be Nietzsche central focus after investigating Nihilism. I'm not a scholar or anything, of course. But this was my take away.

By the way, there are a couple of really good philosophy encyclopedias for this sort of referencing, one being IEP:

"For Nietzsche, there is no objective order or structure in the world except what we give it. Penetrating the façades buttressing convictions, the nihilist discovers that all values are baseless and that reason is impotent. "Every belief, every considering something-true," Nietzsche writes, "is necessarily false because there is simply no true world" (Will to Power [notes from 1883-1888]). For him, nihilism requires a radical repudiation of all imposed values and meaning: "Nihilism is . . . not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one's shoulder to the plough; one destroys" (Will to Power).

The caustic strength of nihilism is absolute, Nietzsche argues, and under its withering scrutiny "the highest values devalue themselves. The aim is lacking, and 'Why' finds no answer" (Will to Power). Inevitably, nihilism will expose all cherished beliefs and sacrosanct truths as symptoms of a defective Western mythos. This collapse of meaning, relevance, and purpose will be the most destructive force in history, constituting a total assault on reality and nothing less than the greatest crisis of humanity:

What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. . . . For some time now our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end. . . . (Will to Power)

Since Nietzsche's compelling critique, nihilistic themes--epistemological failure, value destruction, and cosmic purposelessness--have preoccupied artists, social critics, and philosophers. Convinced that Nietzsche's analysis was accurate, for example, Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West (1926) studied several cultures to confirm that patterns of nihilism were indeed a conspicuous feature of collapsing civilizations. In each of the failed cultures he examines, Spengler noticed that centuries-old religious, artistic, and political traditions were weakened and finally toppled by the insidious workings of several distinct nihilistic postures: the Faustian nihilist "shatters the ideals"; the Apollinian nihilist "watches them crumble before his eyes"; and the Indian nihilist "withdraws from their presence into himself." Withdrawal, for instance, often identified with the negation of reality and resignation advocated by Eastern religions, is in the West associated with various versions of epicureanism and stoicism. In his study, Spengler concludes that Western civilization is already in the advanced stages of decay with all three forms of nihilism working to undermine epistemological authority and ontological grounding.

In 1927, Martin Heidegger, to cite another example, observed that nihilism in various and hidden forms was already "the normal state of man" (The Question of Being). Other philosophers' predictions about nihilism's impact have been dire. Outlining the symptoms of nihilism in the 20th century, Helmut Thielicke wrote that "Nihilism literally has only one truth to declare, namely, that ultimately Nothingness prevails and the world is meaningless" (Nihilism: Its Origin and Nature, with a Christian Answer, 1969). From the nihilist's perspective, one can conclude that life is completely amoral, a conclusion, Thielicke believes, that motivates such monstrosities as the Nazi reign of terror. Gloomy predictions of nihilism's impact are also charted in Eugene Rose's Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age (1994). If nihilism proves victorious--and it's well on its way, he argues--our world will become "a cold, inhuman world" where "nothingness, incoherence, and absurdity" will triumph.

Nihilism | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Emphasis added.

Unfortunately too many books on nihilism to actually get through in a lifetime.

If the world is a simulation that is not born of natural causes, is necessitates a supernatural cause. God remains the source of existence and meaning. Nihilism is that sense is denial of religion, not our liberation from it as we remain mastered by forces outside of our control. We have the freedom to believe in any illusion we wish, but not the freedom to establish the truth.

As far as my dumb brain can figure, Baudrillard's nihilism comes from the image of reality preceding reality. He's basically saying that in postmodern capitalism, humans are isolated from real events and the experience and knowledge that comes from it, but the real events are mediated traditionally through control of the flow of information, but now more so as function of the over-proliferation over the mediation between events and experiences. The unreal precedes the real. The more analysis, as he is suggesting that is poured over, just continuously contributes to obfuscation of truth, because the mediation process itself is flawed.

But Baudrillard goes far more deeper:

"The more hegemonic the system, the more the imagination is struck by the smallest of its reversals. The challenge, even infinitesimal, is the image of a chain failure. Only this reversibility without a counterpart is an event today, on the nihilistic and disaffected stage of the political. Only it mobilizes the imaginary.

If being a nihilist, is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical trait of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to answer through its own death, then I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us. But such a sentiment is Utopian. Because it would be beautiful to be a nihilist, if there were still a radicality - as it would be nice to be a terrorist, if death, including that of the terrorist, still had meaning.

But it is at this point that things become insoluble. Because to this active nihilism of radicality, the system opposes its own, the nihilism of neutralization. The system is itself also nihilistic, in the sense that it has the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference.

In this system, death itself shines by virtue of its absence. (The Bologna train station, the Oktoberfest in Munich: the dead are annulled by indifference, that is where terrorism is the involuntary accomplice of the whole system, not politically, but in the accelerated form of indifference that it contributes to imposing.) Death no longer has a stage, neither phantasmatic nor political, on which to represent itself, to play itself out, either a ceremonial or a violent one. And this is the victory of the other nihilism, of the other terrorism, that of the system.

There is no longer a stage, not even the minimal illusion that makes events capable of adopting the force of reality-no more stage either of mental or political solidarity: what do Chile, Biafra, the boat people, Bologna, or Poland matter? All of that comes to be annihilated on the television screen. We are in the era of events without consequences (and of theories without consequences).

There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is, appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself."

The extermination of appearances is driven by a hatred of our powerlessness, our despair and our hopelessness. We remain prisoners of the essence of religion whilst we have overcome its appearance. As a civilisation, never have we been more close to apocolpyse whether it is nuclear weapons, climate change or any number of problems. but because we diminish ourselves to being just subjective beings, just individuals we live in constant denial of it. our culture is szchiophrenic where on the one hand we celebrate the individuals pursuit of selfisness, whilst mouring the ultimate fate of mankind arising from the destructiveness of that selfishness. We have been seduced by manufactured illusions, no longer of the perfection of a deity, but by the perfectability of the individual to live up to unobtainable standards of consumerism. Man is a commodity and he must sell himself daily to renew his illusions; the act of denying our ability to create meaning and purpose is quite real. You can believe in anyone or anything you want... except yourself.

You pretty much got this stuff down.

"13.
The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends. It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.

14.
The society which rests on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist. In the spectacle, which is the image of the ruling economy, the goal is nothing, development everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.

15.
As the indispensable decoration of the objects produced today, as the general expose of the rationality of the system, as the advanced economic sector which directly shapes a growing multitude of image-objects, the spectacle is the main production of present-day society.

16.
The spectacle subjugates living men to itself to the extent that the economy has totally subjugated them. It is no more than the economy developing for itself. It is the true reflection of the production of things, and the false objectification of the producers.

17.
The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all human realization the obvious degradation of being into having. The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into appearing, from which all actual “having” must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function. At the same time all individual reality has become social reality directly dependent on social power and shaped by it. It is allowed to appear only to the extent that it is not.

18.
Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle, as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present-day society. But the spectacle is not identifiable with mere gazing, even combined with hearing. It is that which escapes the activity of men, that which escapes reconsideration and correction by their work. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever there is independent representation, the spectacle reconstitutes itself.

19.
The spectacle inherits all the weaknesses of the Western philosophical project which undertook to comprehend activity in terms of the categories of seeing; furthermore, it is based on the incessant spread of the precise technical rationality which grew out of this thought. The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality. The concrete life of everyone has been degraded into a speculative universe.

20.
Philosophy, the power of separate thought and the thought of separate power, could never by itself supersede theology. The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispelled the religious clouds where men had placed their own powers detached from themselves; it has only tied them to an earthly base. The most earthly life thus becomes opaque and unbreathable. It no longer projects into the sky but shelters within itself its absolute denial, its fallacious paradise. The spectacle is the technical realization of the exile of human powers into a beyond; it is separation perfected within the interior of man.

21.
To the extent that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary. The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep.

22.
The fact that the practical power of modern society detached itself and built an independent empire in the spectacle can be explained only by the fact that this practical power continued to lack cohesion and remained in contradiction with itself.

23.
The oldest social specialization, the specialization of power, is at the root of the spectacle. The spectacle is thus a specialized activity which speaks for all the others. It is the diplomatic representation of hierarchic society to itself, where all other expression is banned. Here the most modern is also the most archaic."

Society of the Spectacle

In order for a person to be killed by meaning, that meaning must necessarily be contary to his interests and therefore alien to him. The great revolution of the twenieth century consisted not simply in the radical destruction of appearances, but a profound and deep hatred of life itself culminating in the industrialisation of mass murder. We burned books before we burned people.

I'll have to think about that some more.

The catastrophes of the twenieth centuries were born from nihilism, of a crisis of intrinsic values, that crisis of the liberal belief in the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Today we have nothing but a weltanschauung of catastrophe, a crisis of a belief in our own powers, whether we doubt the continued existence of the human race, belief in the end of the universe, or believe in the end of rational laws on the level of quantum mechanics. The deserts in our minds are becoming the deserts of the real world, as we are trapped by our "realism", are prisoners- not of the absence of meaning, but of the denial our the instrinic meaning of happiness. We live as if we are already dead and then are manufacturing the means to achieve our collective suicicde. We can create untold wonders of science and technology, and yet dare not pentrate the mind for fear of the collapse of the belief in our own perfection. we exchange the destruction of the illusion of self for the destruction of the real world.

It find it very much the case for liberals and conservatives that the illusion of meaningful life is much more strongly revered, mediated by the somewhat sort of equivalent to a superego to economically powered institutions of entertainment, than the work necessary to make life meaningful. Default mode.

If I am a nihilist, I'm definetely an active nihilist.

This is sort of why I tend to identify with Absurdism as opposed to Nihilism, because Absurdism essentially says that one can't even claim that there is or is no meaning. The question is devoid of meaning, because there is no means to actually discern it.

This is a complex extract, but I think it's argument is ultimately reducable to the "I can't have knowledge of the objective world without having objective knowledge of the self". Would I be right in thinking that?

For Camus the fundamental philosophical problem is why one shouldn't go ahead and kill themselves, and this part of the first section in which he describes what absurdity is, the state of nature, that which is separate of the self:

"Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal."

He then sort of goes on to explain that only two things that can actually be establishment is the existence of the self and the existence of the world. And from that, nothing can be deduced from understanding. It's sort of like doing a Cartesian exercise again, except God isn't there to magically fix the problem of uncertainty.

"Of whom and of what indeed can I say: "I know that!" This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction."

The chain of reasoning to explain anything sort of relies on the ability to explain everything. "Why?" never ends. Language breaks down. There is reason, and the reasons for believing things can be adequately rationalized in the mind, at least for the purposes of living, without resting a foundational truth that is claimed to be inhuman. There is no answer. And I think for Camus, knowing how ignorant we truly are was a priority, especially when it comes to deciding who lives and who dies. How humans judge.

"Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know."



By the way, I almost lost all this, because I auto-signed out while writing it, but thank goodness it's somehow still here.

 

[Antics34]

I skimmed Dust1n and Red Economists posts. Look, in my opinion all modern thought ends with Jean Paul Sartre; after that Philosophy becomes an absurdity intentionally. When absurdist Philosophers look back on Philosophy there goal is to deconstruct instead of seeing the Philosophy in light of the issues and thinking of the time. So, all the quotes I've read so far with the exception of the Heidegger quote come from Post-Modern thinkers who are largely irrelevant to the Western Canon. The Western Canon dies with Sarte and then dies in America with people like Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald. What this means is that there work is not definitive and should not be read other than as a reflection of their musings; not as a serious analysis or critique of philosophy.

So, when the less informed read the often easy writing of these contemporary thinkers (I use the term loosely) they are often taken in by it's accessibility but unfortunately are unaware that what they are reading means nothing; they are absurd and intend to be absurd. So when someone says, "I am Nihilist," the either ill-informed or mean some new construction of the terms which is irrelevant to the reality of the term i.e. an absurdist.

A previous poster wrote something profound, "it's a way to sound edgy but the moment you put some subjective meaning on it it is existentialism." He get's it. I completely agree with him. In my humble opinion it is either existentialism or absurdism. If you are being existentialist you have to defend it. If you are being absurd I just won't take you seriously.

 

[dust1n]

I skimmed Dust1n and Red Economists posts. Look, in my opinion all modern thought ends with Jean Paul Sartre; after that Philosophy becomes an absurdity intentionally. When absurdist Philosophers look back on Philosophy there goal is to deconstruct instead of seeing the Philosophy in light of the issues and thinking of the time.

Interesting you find this so, as Camus's "The Myth of Sisyphus" was published before Sartre's "Being and Nothingness." By the way, I only understand bits and pieces of Sartre. "Being and Nothing" and "Das Kapital" just might too much my weak mind. I might be unlikely I ever have to time to figure out when Husserl was on about.

So, all the quotes I've read so far with the exception of the Heidegger quote come from Post-Modern thinkers who are largely irrelevant to the Western Canon.

Why would I care what falls into the Western Canon?

The Western Canon dies with Sarte and then dies in America with people like Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald.

It died with novelists? I really don't understand why I would be expected to better relate to 1920's middle class people in a city I've never been too. Perhaps I just prefer different Canons.

There both fine to me. Sometimes an old novel is out of this world. Sometimes a new novel is.

What this means is that there work is not definitive and should not be read other than as a reflection of their musings; not as a serious analysis or critique of philosophy.

Thanks for determining in advance how I should take future books neither of us have read yet.

So, when the less informed read the often easy writing of these contemporary thinkers (I use the term loosely) they are often taken in by it's accessibility but unfortunately are unaware that what they are reading means nothing; they are absurd and intend to be absurd. So when someone says, "I am Nihilist," the either ill-informed or mean some new construction of the terms which is irrelevant to the reality of the term i.e. an absurdist

Hmm, I generally hear stuff like this get criticized for it's inaccessibility. I don't really know how accessible any philosophy is really. Most people engage basically none at all. Heck, I'm pretty light for a casual reader myself. There are fewer scholars.

A previous poster wrote something profound, "it's a way to sound edgy but the moment you put some subjective meaning on it it is existentialism." He get's it. I completely agree with him.

"What this means is that there work is not definitive and should not be read other than as a reflection of their musings; not as a serious analysis or critique of philosophy."

In my humble opinion it is either existentialism or absurdism. If you are being existentialist you have to defend it. If you are being absurd I just won't take you seriously.

I'm not an existentialist. As far as being not take seriously, I don't really mind it.

 

[Antics34]

Dust1n please don't take me brashness personally. I can't write right now because I am on me cell phone. I write from a perspective of someone who is religious but suffers from a sincere case of nihilism; that is why I am not good company and why I take a thread like this so personally. To me nihilism is an experience where you are beyond a depression to the point where you have a hard time loving others. It is much darker than that but I can't elaborate while on my phone.

So when I hear someone who I suspect is not nihilist say they are nihilist with a revolutionary pride or with a sense of glamour I feel like a person with terminal cancer listening to people without cancer celebrating the greatness of cancer.

My nihilism is a religious nihilism which just means I recognize that the stars accidently, randomly alligned so that I would get it...but for ninety person of the people on the planet it does not work out that way...and it depresses me...I don' t believe in hell but maybe they just reincarnate until they get luck and in the end it is just luck. (Along with nothingness randomness is also a root cause of nihilism.)

 

[Laika]

I skimmed Dust1n and Red Economists posts. Look, in my opinion all modern thought ends with Jean Paul Sartre; after that Philosophy becomes an absurdity intentionally. When absurdist Philosophers look back on Philosophy there goal is to deconstruct instead of seeing the Philosophy in light of the issues and thinking of the time. So, all the quotes I've read so far with the exception of the Heidegger quote come from Post-Modern thinkers who are largely irrelevant to the Western Canon. The Western Canon dies with Sarte and then dies in America with people like Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald. What this means is that there work is not definitive and should not be read other than as a reflection of their musings; not as a serious analysis or critique of philosophy.

So, when the less informed read the often easy writing of these contemporary thinkers (I use the term loosely) they are often taken in by it's accessibility but unfortunately are unaware that what they are reading means nothing; they are absurd and intend to be absurd. So when someone says, "I am Nihilist," the either ill-informed or mean some new construction of the terms which is irrelevant to the reality of the term i.e. an absurdist.

A previous poster wrote something profound, "it's a way to sound edgy but the moment you put some subjective meaning on it it is existentialism." He get's it. I completely agree with him. In my humble opinion it is either existentialism or absurdism. If you are being existentialist you have to defend it. If you are being absurd I just won't take you seriously.

I haven't read many philosophers first hand, but I know enough to know that the superficial nature of philosophy in recent times- an emphasis on intellectualism as the triumph of appearance over substance is familar. A kind of "if I use long words that people don't understand, everyone else will nodd approvingly" approach to knowledge. it's got to the point where it is taken as a joke as the abstract devolves into the absurd. e.g. the postmodernist essay generator: Communications From Elsewhere

Dust1n please don't take me brashness personally. I can't write right now because I am on me cell phone. I write from a perspective of someone who is religious but suffers from a sincere case of nihilism; that is why I am not good company and why I take a thread like this so personally. To me nihilism is an experience where you are beyond a depression to the point where you have a hard time loving others. It is much darker than that but I can't elaborate while on my phone.

So when I hear someone who I suspect is not nihilist say they are nihilist with a revolutionary pride or with a sense of glamour I feel like a person with terminal cancer listening to people without cancer celebrating the greatness of cancer.

My nihilism is a religious nihilism which just means I recognize that the stars accidently, randomly alligned so that I would get it...but for ninety person of the people on the planet it does not work out that way...and it depresses me...I don' t believe in hell but maybe they just reincarnate until they get luck and in the end it is just luck. (Along with nothingness randomness is also a root cause of nihilism.)

My issue is that once you've got Nihilism, like Cancer, you have to find someway to keep going. you have to fight it in order to keep going. I am comfortable saying I am an 'active nihilist', in so far to rationally deconstruct ideas and meaning as part of the process of recovering from depression, but I am not- nor ever will be- a passive nihilist where nihilism is the end goal. passive nihilism is death. there really isn't any other way to put it- hell or oblivion might be an adequate description. The only way to fight passive nihilism is some form of active nihilism in which we try to create new meaning for ourselves in the wake of this. The ferosity of my rhetorhic is really a freudian slip for the ferousity of the struggle I have had with my own problems and if I come accross as a nihilist "with a revolutionary pride" it is because I have survived it and have a desire to continue to survive it. Feeling guilty about having these experiences only makes it worse. I wouldn't glamourise it though as it's too painful and you wouldn't inflict it on others or encourage them to chose it. But once you've got it- it must be overcome.

 

[Laika]

This appears to me to be Nietzsche central focus after investigating Nihilism. I'm not a scholar or anything, of course. But this was my take away.

By the way, there are a couple of really good philosophy encyclopedias for this sort of referencing, one being IEP:

"For Nietzsche, there is no objective order or structure in the world except what we give it. Penetrating the façades buttressing convictions, the nihilist discovers that all values are baseless and that reason is impotent. "Every belief, every considering something-true," Nietzsche writes, "is necessarily false because there is simply no true world" (Will to Power [notes from 1883-1888]). For him, nihilism requires a radical repudiation of all imposed values and meaning: "Nihilism is . . . not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one's shoulder to the plough; one destroys" (Will to Power).

The caustic strength of nihilism is absolute, Nietzsche argues, and under its withering scrutiny "the highest values devalue themselves. The aim is lacking, and 'Why' finds no answer" (Will to Power). Inevitably, nihilism will expose all cherished beliefs and sacrosanct truths as symptoms of a defective Western mythos. This collapse of meaning, relevance, and purpose will be the most destructive force in history, constituting a total assault on reality and nothing less than the greatest crisis of humanity:

What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. . . . For some time now our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end. . . . (Will to Power)

Since Nietzsche's compelling critique, nihilistic themes--epistemological failure, value destruction, and cosmic purposelessness--have preoccupied artists, social critics, and philosophers. Convinced that Nietzsche's analysis was accurate, for example, Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West (1926) studied several cultures to confirm that patterns of nihilism were indeed a conspicuous feature of collapsing civilizations. In each of the failed cultures he examines, Spengler noticed that centuries-old religious, artistic, and political traditions were weakened and finally toppled by the insidious workings of several distinct nihilistic postures: the Faustian nihilist "shatters the ideals"; the Apollinian nihilist "watches them crumble before his eyes"; and the Indian nihilist "withdraws from their presence into himself." Withdrawal, for instance, often identified with the negation of reality and resignation advocated by Eastern religions, is in the West associated with various versions of epicureanism and stoicism. In his study, Spengler concludes that Western civilization is already in the advanced stages of decay with all three forms of nihilism working to undermine epistemological authority and ontological grounding.

In 1927, Martin Heidegger, to cite another example, observed that nihilism in various and hidden forms was already "the normal state of man" (The Question of Being). Other philosophers' predictions about nihilism's impact have been dire. Outlining the symptoms of nihilism in the 20th century, Helmut Thielicke wrote that "Nihilism literally has only one truth to declare, namely, that ultimately Nothingness prevails and the world is meaningless" (Nihilism: Its Origin and Nature, with a Christian Answer, 1969). From the nihilist's perspective, one can conclude that life is completely amoral, a conclusion, Thielicke believes, that motivates such monstrosities as the Nazi reign of terror. Gloomy predictions of nihilism's impact are also charted in Eugene Rose's Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age (1994). If nihilism proves victorious--and it's well on its way, he argues--our world will become "a cold, inhuman world" where "nothingness, incoherence, and absurdity" will triumph.

Nihilism | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Emphasis added.

Unfortunately too many books on nihilism to actually get through in a lifetime.



As far as my dumb brain can figure, Baudrillard's nihilism comes from the image of reality preceding reality. He's basically saying that in postmodern capitalism, humans are isolated from real events and the experience and knowledge that comes from it, but the real events are mediated traditionally through control of the flow of information, but now more so as function of the over-proliferation over the mediation between events and experiences. The unreal precedes the real. The more analysis, as he is suggesting that is poured over, just continuously contributes to obfuscation of truth, because the mediation process itself is flawed.

But Baudrillard goes far more deeper:

"The more hegemonic the system, the more the imagination is struck by the smallest of its reversals. The challenge, even infinitesimal, is the image of a chain failure. Only this reversibility without a counterpart is an event today, on the nihilistic and disaffected stage of the political. Only it mobilizes the imaginary.

If being a nihilist, is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical trait of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to answer through its own death, then I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us. But such a sentiment is Utopian. Because it would be beautiful to be a nihilist, if there were still a radicality - as it would be nice to be a terrorist, if death, including that of the terrorist, still had meaning.

But it is at this point that things become insoluble. Because to this active nihilism of radicality, the system opposes its own, the nihilism of neutralization. The system is itself also nihilistic, in the sense that it has the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference.

In this system, death itself shines by virtue of its absence. (The Bologna train station, the Oktoberfest in Munich: the dead are annulled by indifference, that is where terrorism is the involuntary accomplice of the whole system, not politically, but in the accelerated form of indifference that it contributes to imposing.) Death no longer has a stage, neither phantasmatic nor political, on which to represent itself, to play itself out, either a ceremonial or a violent one. And this is the victory of the other nihilism, of the other terrorism, that of the system.

There is no longer a stage, not even the minimal illusion that makes events capable of adopting the force of reality-no more stage either of mental or political solidarity: what do Chile, Biafra, the boat people, Bologna, or Poland matter? All of that comes to be annihilated on the television screen. We are in the era of events without consequences (and of theories without consequences).

There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is, appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself."



You pretty much got this stuff down.

"13.
The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends. It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.

14.
The society which rests on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist. In the spectacle, which is the image of the ruling economy, the goal is nothing, development everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.

15.
As the indispensable decoration of the objects produced today, as the general expose of the rationality of the system, as the advanced economic sector which directly shapes a growing multitude of image-objects, the spectacle is the main production of present-day society.

16.
The spectacle subjugates living men to itself to the extent that the economy has totally subjugated them. It is no more than the economy developing for itself. It is the true reflection of the production of things, and the false objectification of the producers.

17.
The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all human realization the obvious degradation of being into having. The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into appearing, from which all actual “having” must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function. At the same time all individual reality has become social reality directly dependent on social power and shaped by it. It is allowed to appear only to the extent that it is not.

18.
Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle, as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present-day society. But the spectacle is not identifiable with mere gazing, even combined with hearing. It is that which escapes the activity of men, that which escapes reconsideration and correction by their work. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever there is independent representation, the spectacle reconstitutes itself.

19.
The spectacle inherits all the weaknesses of the Western philosophical project which undertook to comprehend activity in terms of the categories of seeing; furthermore, it is based on the incessant spread of the precise technical rationality which grew out of this thought. The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality. The concrete life of everyone has been degraded into a speculative universe.

20.
Philosophy, the power of separate thought and the thought of separate power, could never by itself supersede theology. The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispelled the religious clouds where men had placed their own powers detached from themselves; it has only tied them to an earthly base. The most earthly life thus becomes opaque and unbreathable. It no longer projects into the sky but shelters within itself its absolute denial, its fallacious paradise. The spectacle is the technical realization of the exile of human powers into a beyond; it is separation perfected within the interior of man.

21.
To the extent that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary. The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep.

22.
The fact that the practical power of modern society detached itself and built an independent empire in the spectacle can be explained only by the fact that this practical power continued to lack cohesion and remained in contradiction with itself.

23.
The oldest social specialization, the specialization of power, is at the root of the spectacle. The spectacle is thus a specialized activity which speaks for all the others. It is the diplomatic representation of hierarchic society to itself, where all other expression is banned. Here the most modern is also the most archaic."

Society of the Spectacle




I'll have to think about that some more.



It find it very much the case for liberals and conservatives that the illusion of meaningful life is much more strongly revered, mediated by the somewhat sort of equivalent to a superego to economically powered institutions of entertainment, than the work necessary to make life meaningful. Default mode.



This is sort of why I tend to identify with Absurdism as opposed to Nihilism, because Absurdism essentially says that one can't even claim that there is or is no meaning. The question is devoid of meaning, because there is no means to actually discern it.






For Camus the fundamental philosophical problem is why one shouldn't go ahead and kill themselves, and this part of the first section in which he describes what absurdity is, the state of nature, that which is separate of the self:

"Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal."

He then sort of goes on to explain that only two things that can actually be establishment is the existence of the self and the existence of the world. And from that, nothing can be deduced from understanding. It's sort of like doing a Cartesian exercise again, except God isn't there to magically fix the problem of uncertainty.

"Of whom and of what indeed can I say: "I know that!" This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction."

The chain of reasoning to explain anything sort of relies on the ability to explain everything. "Why?" never ends. Language breaks down. There is reason, and the reasons for believing things can be adequately rationalized in the mind, at least for the purposes of living, without resting a foundational truth that is claimed to be inhuman. There is no answer. And I think for Camus, knowing how ignorant we truly are was a priority, especially when it comes to deciding who lives and who dies. How humans judge.

"Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know."



By the way, I almost lost all this, because I auto-signed out while writing it, but thank goodness it's somehow still here.

I've done that a few times.

Some accounts of Marxist theory (Soviet especially) would say that nihilism is not an innate triat of meaning and the mind, but of the ideological dis-intergration of capitalism as the ideology and institutions become increasingly incompatable with the new scientific and technological realities. I remember that "society of the spectactle" was a book written by New Left thinkers, but the belief that the meaninglessness of society stems from the human condition itself does not end nihilism and merely perpetuates it. Nihilism is not the cause of the abcsence of meaning, but is the effect of capitalism's denial of intrinsic meaning. the latter- which 'hard'- at least poses a solution to the problem of nihilism- namely a form of communism in which meaning ceases to be the property of the individual within their mind, but instead becomes the property of society and of it's scientific, technological and economic progress.

 

[dust1n]

I remember that "society of the spectactle" was a book written by New Left thinkers, but the belief that the meaninglessness of society stems from the human condition itself does not end nihilism and merely perpetuates it. Nihilism is not the cause of the abcsence of meaning, but is the effect of capitalism's denial of intrinsic meaning. the latter- which 'hard'- at least poses a solution to the problem of nihilism- namely a form of communism in which meaning ceases to be the property of the individual within their mind, but instead becomes the property of society and of it's scientific, technological and economic progress.

122.
When constantly growing capitalist alienation at all levels makes it increasingly difficult for workers to recognize and name their own misery, forcing them to face the alternative of rejecting the totality of their misery or nothing, the revolutionary organization has to learn that it can no longer combat alienation with alienated forms.

 

[Antics34]

My issue is that once you've got Nihilism, like Cancer, you have to find someway to keep going. you have to fight it in order to keep going. I am comfortable saying I am an 'active nihilist', in so far to rationally deconstruct ideas and meaning as part of the process of recovering from depression, but I am not- nor ever will be- a passive nihilist where nihilism is the end goal. passive nihilism is death. there really isn't any other way to put it- hell or oblivion might be an adequate description. The only way to fight passive nihilism is some form of active nihilism in which we try to create new meaning for ourselves in the wake of this. The ferosity of my rhetorhic is really a freudian slip for the ferousity of the struggle I have had with my own problems and if I come accross as a nihilist "with a revolutionary pride" it is because I have survived it and have a desire to continue to survive it. Feeling guilty about having these experiences only makes it worse. I wouldn't glamourise it though as it's too painful and you wouldn't inflict it on others or encourage them to chose it. But once you've got it- it must be overcome.

Well that is well put. Ultimately, it does not matter what we call whatever it is that helps have hope, happiness, love for others. If this idea of active Nihilism is helpful that's all that matters. I may see it as an absurdity because I cling to tradition but really that alienates me and not you.

 

[Laika]

122.
When constantly growing capitalist alienation at all levels makes it increasingly difficult for workers to recognize and name their own misery, forcing them to face the alternative of rejecting the totality of their misery or nothing, the revolutionary organization has to learn that it can no longer combat alienation with alienated forms.

need I say more?

Well that is well put. Ultimately, it does not matter what we call whatever it is that helps have hope, happiness, love for others. If this idea of active Nihilism is helpful that's all that matters. I may see it as an absurdity because I cling to tradition but really that alienates me and not you.

I think Absurdity may be a product of excessively abstract thinking, that we deconstruct the meaning to a point where we realise that our conception of the world is illusionary, but cannot identify the source of the illusion as being our perception of the material world. I think active nihilism helps in so far as I can recognise the nature of the illusion, whilst still believing that it has some objective source.

 

[dust1n]

Dust1n please don't take me brashness personally. I can't write right now because I am on me cell phone. I write from a perspective of someone who is religious but suffers from a sincere case of nihilism; that is why I am not good company and why I take a thread like this so personally. To me nihilism is an experience where you are beyond a depression to the point where you have a hard time loving others. It is much darker than that but I can't elaborate while on my phone.

Sorry, just remembered this thread and that I didn't respond yet. I'm back!

I find this interesting. I get sad and happy for a number of different reasons, but most of them roughly have nothing to do with philosophical affairs. So, I apologize if nihilism seems so rough.

So when I hear someone who I suspect is not nihilist say they are nihilist with a revolutionary pride or with a sense of glamour I feel like a person with terminal cancer listening to people without cancer celebrating the greatness of cancer.

I don't celebrate the greatness of cancer. But I don't see any particular meaning or happiness in ignoring the greatness of cancer, nor do I think someone with terminal cancer would appreciate me ignoring how powerful and destructive cancer can be.

My nihilism is a religious nihilism which just means I recognize that the stars accidently, randomly alligned so that I would get it...but for ninety person of the people on the planet it does not work out that way...and it depresses me...I don' t believe in hell but maybe they just reincarnate until they get luck and in the end it is just luck. (Along with nothingness randomness is also a root cause of nihilism.)

I wasn't sure what you meant here.

 

[Willamena]

What is nihilism? The description on Wikipedia doesn't seem to jive with how the words is being used in this thread.

 

[Laika]

What is nihilism? The description on Wikipedia doesn't seem to jive with how the words is being used in this thread.

I think nihlism means 'reduced to nought'; it's an extreme form of rationalism which can deconstruct concepts, breaking them down to the point of absurdity where something becomes nothing. It can be applied to question regarding truth and knowledge, ethics, the meaning of life, etc in which all these things are shown to be inventions of the mind and exisiting subjectively based on a persons point of view.
dust1n pointed out the destinction between passive nihilism and active nihilism; passive nihilism is the 'destination' where there is no meaning, truth etc, whereas active nihilism is the process by which meaning can be deconstructed/broken down. Active nihilism often plays a role in challanging the status quo by showing it to be irrational and so is associated with radical ideas.

 

[Willamena]

I think nihlism means 'reduced to nought'; it's an extreme form of rationalism which can deconstruct concepts, breaking them down to the point of absurdity where something becomes nothing. It can be applied to question regarding truth and knowledge, ethics, the meaning of life, etc in which all these things are shown to be inventions of the mind and exisiting subjectively based on a persons point of view.
dust1n pointed out the destinction between passive nihilism and active nihilism; passive nihilism is the 'destination' where there is no meaning, truth etc, whereas active nihilism is the process by which meaning can be deconstructed/broken down. Active nihilism often plays a role in challanging the status quo by showing it to be irrational and so is associated with radical ideas.

Is nothing equated with these inventions of the mind? And is deconstruction being equated with destruction (deconstruction is something becomes its parts, and destruction is something becomes nothing)?

 

[Laika]

Is nothing equated with these inventions of the mind?

To the best of my knowledge, yes, (would ask @dust1n to answer this in more deatil). as far as I know 'nothing' means that "it", whether it is truth, ethics, etc does not have an objective form independent of the mind and therefore does not exist independentlyof how someone thinks of it.

And is deconstruction being equated with destruction (deconstruction is something becomes its parts, and destruction is something becomes nothing)?

Yes and no. In the most extreme forms nihilism is a pathological desire to destroy. However, there are 'lesser' forms of nihilism which seek to deconstruct or transform and personally I think that can be useful. destruction in that sense is necessary to create because you 'break' eggs to 'make' and ommlette and I think is used in dialectical reasoning.

 

[Willamena]

To the best of my knowledge, yes, (would ask @dust1n to answer this in more deatil). as far as I know 'nothing' means that "it", whether it is truth, ethics, etc does not have an objective form independent of the mind and therefore does not exist independentlyof how someone thinks of it.



Yes and no. In the most extreme forms nihilism is a pathological desire to destroy. However, there are 'lesser' forms of nihilism which seek to deconstruct or transform and personally I think that can be useful. destruction in that sense is necessary to create because you 'break' eggs to 'make' and ommlette and I think is used in dialectical reasoning.

Okay, thanks.

 

[dust1n]

What is nihilism? The description on Wikipedia doesn't seem to jive with how the words is being used in this thread.

Can you be more specific?

 

[Willamena]

Can you be more specific?

I know nihilism mainly as a metaphysical image and as a judgement. Damn that Sartre anyway.

 

[dust1n]

I know nihilism mainly as a metaphysical image and as a judgement. Damn that Sartre anyway.

Sorry about the late reply.

Nihilism is a metaphysical image and a judgment. Nihilism being conceived secondarily as a tool and or an end itself is Nietzschean conception. Considering the implications and all that fun stuff.