Substack latest.
With Halloween upon us, it is appropriate that I should present to my esteemed readers for their delectation if not horror the scariest passage in Kant's magnum opus:
Category: Nihilism
Could there have been nothing at all?
Civilization Versus the New Nihilists
Put the question to your friends and acquaintances: Which side are you on? If they are not on the side of civilization, cut them off. Make them pay a price for their willful self-enstupidation. Why should they get the benefit of your friendship? If enough of us ostracize enough of them, this will have an effect. (The usual ceteris paribus qualifications apply.)
Here's my take from 2017:
The Nihilism of the Left
Leftists are so far gone that they are willing to protract their nihilism unto the destruction of the very secular values that they supposedly champion. Pascal Bruckner:
Generations of leftists saw the working class as the messianic leaven of a radiant humanity; now, willing to flirt with the most obscurantist bigotry and to betray their own principles, they [have] transferred their hopes to the Islamists.
The Muslim as the new proletarian.
The worst of the great religions, "the saddest and poorest form of theism," (Schopenhauer) is defended when a defining project of the Left was the cleansing of the earth of the "opium of the people." (Karl Marx, full quotation here.)
Add to that the absurdity that the Left, whose own secular values are secularizations of Christian notions, attacks Christianity viciously while cozying up to Islamists.
It's insane, but then the Left is insane in any case.
………………..
And here is another by my man Hanson, the writing machine, on the insanity of leftists. It's on the russia, Russia, RUSSIA! hoax. To hell with these TDS-ers and their self-induced lunacy. They don't seem to grasp that they have a moral obligation to exercise due diligence in the formation of their beliefs. That is an obligation that they regularly flout.
There is just no moral or intellectual equivalence between Right and Left.
The Truth of Life and the Art of Life
We must face reality to learn the truth of life. But the art of life requires that we sometimes turn away, look away, shrug our shoulders, peremptorily dismiss, ask not why, and acquiesce in a jaded ignoramus et ignorabimus. Prudent folk often acquiesce in such an unreflective understanding. They sense the difference between the true and the life-enhancing. But the tension does not much concern them; perhaps they feel that to fret over it would be the opposite of life-enhancing and get them into trouble. Not for them the examined life.
The tension is left to the philosophers to reflect on. Their sort of life is enhanced by the paradoxical, the antinomian, and the absurd. Desirous of Sense they will wander to the edge of Nonsense and peer over the edge into an Abgrund, risking Nietzsche's warning that "if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." (Beyond Good and Evil, sec.146.)
The weak among them will shrink back and take comfort in the smiley-faced nihilism of the Last Man of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The resolute will weather the Great Doubt and press on with faith and determination.
“You’ve Ruined my Life, Professor Craig!”
Here, with William Lane Craig's response.
The Revolt of the Worthless
Across the land the erasure of history via the destruction of monuments and memorials is proceeding apace. The worthless and unaccomplished are attacking the memories of people of great worth and accomplishment. Where are the authorities to whom we have entrusted the preservation of civilization? In abdication, mainly. They lack the will to put a stop to the rampages of dangerous children.
And children they are. Their thinking lacks all depth and nuance. Theirs is an adolescent passion unconstrained by either knowledge or wisdom. And yet adult fools take the likes of Greta Thunberg and A. Ocasio-Cortez seriously, granting them positions of power and influence. This too is a form of abdication.
You know what you have to do come November.
Idolatry without God
"I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have false gods before me."
If God exists and you worship anything in his place, then that thing is a false god and you are an idolater. But if God does not exist, and you worship anything at all, then you are also an idolater. Or so say I. For idolatry entails worshipping something unworthy of worship, and if God (or some other Absolute such as the Plotinian One) does not exist, then nothing is worthy of worship.
Now atheists typically pride themselves on 'going one god further.' Thus they typically say to the Christian, "You reject all gods but the Christian god; we just go one god further." So, consistently with his atheism, an atheist cannot worship anything without falling into idolatry. He cannot esteem anything absolutely. If he makes a clean sweep with respect to all gods, then he cannot make a god of sex, power, money, science, the Enlightenment, the state, the withering away of the state, the worker's paradise, the atheist agenda, nature, the revolution, humanity, himself, his mortal beloved, not to mention golf and Eric Clapton.
A consistent atheism, one that eschews all gods, may prove to be a difficult row to hoe. The atheist will be sorely tempted to fall into idolatry, making a god of nature, for example, as some environmentalists do, or of science, or of the Enlightenment project, or of the 'crusade' against Christianity or religion generally. If there is no Absolute, then nothing may be legitimately viewed as absolute. Our atheist must also avoid nihilism, the denial of value to everything. The atheist must find meaning in a world in which nothing is absolute, nothing holy, nothing worthy of total commitment or ultimate concern. Nice work if you can get it.
Can one live a meaningful life without God and without idols? Without an Absolute and without illicitly absolutizing anything relative? I doubt it. I suspect the atheist must fall into some sort of idolatry and end up worshipping nature or the state or the defeat of superstition or something else obviously unworthy of worship. Why must he? Because we are all naturally inclined to find life worth living in pursuit of values that transcend us, values that are not transient, contingent, and parasitic on our flickering wishes and desires. Thus I conjecture that atheists and metaphysical naturalists who do not succumb to nihilism live in a state of self-deception in which they attach absolute value to things that their theory tells them cannot have absolute value. Perhaps they should acquiesce in the nihilism of Nietzsche's Last Man.
Can an atheist live life to the full, keeping up the strenuous mood, falling neither into idolatry nor into nihilism? William James (1842-1910) would, I think, demur. In "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," we read:
The capacity of the strenuous mood lies so deep down among our natural human possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical or traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate one simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest.
The Consistent Nihilist
The consistent nihilist will hold that it doesn't matter that nothing matters. He is Nietzsche's Last Man for whom nihilism ceases to be an issue. This distinguishes him from the militant or 'evangelical' nihilist for whom it matters that nothing matters and who feels called to preach this truth and set people straight. It also distinguishes him from the nihilist who seeks to overcome nihilism like Nietzsche himself.
The Last Man: There is no truth and it doesn't matter. God is dead, the funeral is over, and the Old Man in an unmarked grave. Forget about it and pass the popcorn!
The Body: Temple or Amusement Park?
As I noted earlier, the celebrity chef, 'foodie,' and gastro-tourist, Anthony Bourdain, hanged himself in his hotel room recently. I speculated that the man was spiritually adrift. "If Bourdain had a spiritual anchor, would he have so frivolously offed himself, as he apparently did?"
When I wrote that I was unaware of the above quotation.
Now I know the man was spiritually adrift. The view he gives vent to is utter nihilism.
Perhaps later I will expand on the thought.
The Greatest Temptation
I am repeatedly visited by the thought that the greatest temptation is the temptation to see the world as nothing but a system of finitudes and relativities with nothing beyond it or behind it. It is just a play of phenomena of no ultimate significance. There is the temptation to sink into a placid nihilism: nothing finite finally matters; there is nothing that is not finite; and that this is so does not matter. And since nothing finite finally matters, there is nothing to get hung up about:
Let me take you down
'Cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry Fields forever.
This is not an angry nihilism, but something closer to the nihilism of Nietzsche's Last Man.
How does this greatest temptation connect to ordinary temptation?
It is spring, a time of enhanced sexual temptation. One's resistance to temptation is resistance without yesteryear's assurance of the evil of acquiescence. Is there really a soul about whose care one ought to be concerned? Perhaps we die utterly and it just does not matter, finally or ultimately, whether we resist or indulge these paltry temptations. Pleasure is here and now. It is concretely and undeniably real even if fleeting, unlike speculations and scruples about God and the soul and the moral law which are endlessly debatable.
You're able and she's willing. It's consensual. In a while you will both be dead and it won't matter to anyone that you found an hour's pleasure in this way in violation of a monastic vow, or a marital vow, or a philosopher's vow to eschew the blandishments of the flesh the better to secure insight into the really real by keeping undimmed the eyes of the soul.
So you indulge, but not with the settled knowledge or firm belief that the act is wrong, but in a state of doubt whether it is wrong, or more radically, like a Pyrrhonist, in a state of aporia as to whether or not the whole moral question matters or even makes sense.
The greatest temptation, I said, is the temptation to think that nothing finite finally matters; that there is nothing that is not finite; and that this is so does not itself matter. My suggestion is that acquiescence in this greatest of all temptations mightily aids and abets acquiescence in ordinary temptation.
It is a temptation so deep that I am 'tempted' to say that, compared to it, the temptation to which Adam and Eve succumbed is an ordinary temptation, a temptation that presupposes but does not question Ultimate Mattering and the nonrelative opposition of good and evil.
The Nihilism of the Left
Leftists are so far gone that they are willing to protract their nihilism unto the destruction of the very secular values that they supposedly champion. Pascal Bruckner:
Generations of leftists saw the working class as the messianic leaven of a radiant humanity; now, willing to flirt with the most obscurantist bigotry and to betray their own principles, they [have] transferred their hopes to the Islamists.
The Muslim as the new proletarian.
The worst of the great religions, "the saddest and poorest form of theism," (Schopenhauer) is defended when a defining project of the Left was the cleansing of the earth of the "opium of the people." (Karl Marx, full quotation here.)
Add to that the absurdity that the Left, whose own secular values are secularizations of Christian notions, attacks Christianity viciously while cozying up to Islamists.
It's insane, but then the Left is insane in any case.
E. M. Cioran and Skepticism
I brought Cioran into my latest Pyrrhonian post to lay bare the contrast between the Christian's pursuit of a "peace that surpasses all understanding" (Philippians 4:7) and the Pyrrhonian's peace which is beneath understanding inasmuch as it is predicated upon not understanding — and not caring any more about understanding. I then asked whether this could be a peace worth wanting.
I ended my Pyrrhonian post with the quip: "To Emil Cioran I would say: safety is overrated." My point, in contemporary jargon, is that really fruitful living requires frequent and extended forays from one's 'comfort zone' into regions of stress and challenge and doxastic risk.
Kai Frederik Lorentzen comments:
I think you do Cioran wrong insofar as he seems to be ambivalent about Skepticism. In Histoire et Utopie (1960), he writes: "Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls."
Cioran's spiritual yearning appears real to me.
I have read quite a bit of Cioran but not enough to venture a definitive judgment. So I don't know whether his spiritual yearning is genuine or just a literary posture. My impression is that he is a mere litterateur. But even if he is sincere, his scepticism seems distinct from Pyrrhonian Skepticism. Acolytes of the latter try not to dogmatize whereas it is not clear to me that Cioran avoids or tries to avoid a dogmatic scepticism/nihilism. A bit of (inconclusive) evidence:
X, who instead of looking at things directly has spent his life juggling with concepts and abusing abstract terms, now that he must envisage his own death, is in desperate straits. Fortunately for him, he flings himself, as is his custom, into abstractions, into commonplaces illustrated by jargon. A glamorous hocus-pocus, such is philosophy. But ultimately, everything is hocus-pocus, except for this very assertion that participates in an order of propositions one dares not question because they emanate from an unverifiable certitude, one somehow anterior to the brain’s career. (E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered (New York: Seaver Books, 1983), translated from the French by Richard Howard, p.153)
A statement of Cioran’s scepticism. But his scepticism is half-hearted and dognatic since he insulates his central claim from sceptical corrosion. To asseverate that his central claim issues from “an unverifiable certitude” is sheer dogmatism since there is no way that this certitude can become a self-certitude luminous to itself. Compare the Cartesian cogito. In the cogito situation, a self’s indubitability is revealed to itself, and thus grounds itself. But Cioran invokes something anterior to the mind, something which, precisely because of it anteriority, cannot be known by any mind. Why then should we not consider his central claim – according to which everything is a vain and empty posturing – to be itself a vain and empty posturing?
Indeed, is this not the way we must interpret it given Cioran’s two statements of nihilism cited above? If everything is nothing, then surely there cannot be “an unverifiable certitude” anterior to the mind that is impervious to sceptical assault.
Again, one may protest that I am applying logic in that I am comparing different aphorisms with an eye towards evaluating their mutual consistency. It might be suggested that our man is simply not trying to be consistent. But then I say that he is an unserious literary scribbler with no claim on our attention. But the truth of the matter lies a bit deeper: he is trying have it both ways at once. He is trying to say something true but without satisfying the canons satisfaction of which is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of anything’s being true.
My interim judgment, then, is this. What we have before us is a form of cognitive malfunction brought about by hypertrophy of the sceptical faculty. Doubt is the engine of inquiry. Thus there is a healthy form of scepticism. But Cioran’s extreme scepticism is a disease of cognition rather than a means to it. The writing, though, is brilliant.
The above commentary on the bolded passage is excerpted from a much longer entry, Some Aphorisms of E. M. Cioran with Commentary.
The Sense That Nothing Matters
Many are tempted by the thought that nothing ultimately matters, and in some this thought becomes an oppressive mood that paralyzes and renders life unlivable. Leo Tolstoy's "My Confession" is perhaps the best expression of this dark and oppressive nihilism. But the sense that nothing matters contains an insight which is as it were the silver lining of the dark cloud of nihilism.
The insight is that nothing finite is truly satisfactory, worthy of our ultimate concern, or finally real. It is an insight that serves as prophylaxis against the smug self-satisfaction of the worldling and his idolatry of the transient.
The nihilist is closer to God than he thinks, closer than the worldling, and closer than those for whom religion is a palliative and a convenience.
Nihilism: The Telos of the Liberal Mind
Here, by Steven Hayward, with a tip of the hat to an old friend, Ingvar Odegaard. My comment:
Whites who speak of 'white privilege' would do well to reflect as well on 'black privilege.' One of the 'privileges' of blacks these days, apparently, is the right to riot and loot when a decision of the criminal justice system goes against their prejudices.
Related: Some Questions About White Privilege. It begins:
There is a lot of talk these days about white privilege. I don't believe I have discussed this topic before.
1. White privilege is presumably a type of privilege. What is a privilege? This is the logically prior question. To know what white privilege is we must first know what privilege is. Let's consider some definitions.
D1. A privilege is a special entitlement or immunity granted to a particular person or group of persons by the government or some other corporate entity such as a university or a church on a conditional basis.
Driving on public roads is a privilege by this definition. It is not a right one has just in virtue of being a human being or a citizen. It is a privilege the state grants on condition that one satisfy and continue to satisfy certain requirements pertaining to age, eyesight, driving skill, etc. Being a privilege, the license to drive can be revoked. By contrast, the right to life and the right to free speech are neither conditional nor granted by the government. They can't be revoked. Please don't confuse a constitutionally protected right such as the right to free speech with a right granted by the government.
Faculty members have various privileges, a franking privilege, a library privilege, along with such perquisites as an office, a carrel, secretarial help, access to an an exclusive dining facility, etc. Immunities are also privileges, e.g., the immunity to prosecution granted to a miscreant who agrees to inform on his cohorts.
Now if (D1) captures what we mean by 'privilege,' then it it is hard to see how there could be white privilege. Are there certain special entitlements and immunities that all and only whites have in virtue of being white, entitlements and immunities granted on a conditional basis by the government and revocable by said government? No. But there is black privilege by (D1). It is called affirmative action.
So if we adopt (D1) we get the curious result that there is no white privilege, but there is black privilege! Those who speak of white privilege as of something real and something to be aware of and opposed must therefore have a different definition of privilege in mind, perhaps the following: