Monday, May 26, 2014


147. Beyond nihilism: Nietzsche
 
Old absolutes have produced their own demise. Religious transcendence led to a sacrifice of the self, a denial of earthly life and of the body. Nietzsche called it a form of decadence. And the relentless search for truth led to the discovery that we cannot know objective, absolute truth. To tell the truth: we cannot tell the truth. 

According to Nietzsche the despair of nihilism should not produce a flight into triviality, hedonism, or indifference, which would constitute another form of decadence. Despair can be positive, producing a novel perspective, in a ‘revaluation of all values’. Nietzsche preached truth relativism but not value relativism.

Reginster[1] proposed that a revaluation of all values is contradictory, self-defeating, because it negates also the value, the perspective from which the revaluation is done. However, if one rejects absolute values of the true and the good, then, to avoid a search without end, an infinite regress, one must stop somewhere, and take some value for granted. But to be consistent one must allow for the need to arise to change that principle. That is the idea of imperfection on the move.

Now the most fundamental value in Nietzsche’s revaluation is change, a perspective of ‘being’ not as a noun but as a verb, as an ongoing process of transformation, Dionysian creative destruction. And change would include the change of change, perhaps a negation of change, which again would be temporary.

As I have argued at several places in this blog, stability and change alternate, in processes of transformation.     

The central principle producing change that Nietzsche arrives at is the ‘will to power’. Reginster proposed that the crux of it is an appreciation of overcoming resistance, not just the acceptance of it as the price to paid for transformation, but the lust, the delight, the relish of it.

As the will to power is turned to the change of ideas, some of the old values of the Enlightenment re-appear: the virtues of intellectual honesty, integrity, open-mindedness, and autonomy. Inspired by classical Greek thought Nietzsche added values of contest, courage, excellence, creative self-determination, and self-overcoming. The highest manifestation of the will to power is artistic creation.

The ultimate goal to which the will to power is the instrument is the flourishing, the vitality of life, and the ‘elevation and strengthening’, ‘the advancement and prosperity of man’.[2] Here is the transcendent in Nietzsche’s revaluation. However, it is not the transcendent of God or an afterlife, but the transcendent of a future of human flourishing. 

The crucial question for me now is whether and how this can avoid relativism. Why adopt this perspective rather than any other? Did Nietzsche raise the will to power to a new absolute, or is it also subject to change?

Reginster argued that Nietzsche’s stance was ‘fictionalist’. Values are to be taken seriously, not ironically, as if they were absolute, in a suspension of disbelief, demanding commitment, without, however, falling back on any claim of absolute validity.

This seriousness is found in how children play (‘and then you were the princess, and I the slayer of dragons …’), and how rules of games are observed. They are taken seriously, with full commitment, and with indignation when the rules are not observed, even while one is aware that they are not ‘really true’ or even relevant outside the game.

This make-belief and self-delusion would have been quite a step for someone as committed to the courage of ever seeking and facing the truth as Nietzsche was, and therefore I find it difficult to accept.

My view on the matter is as follows. As I indicated, the underlying, more fundamental value of Nietzschean philosophy lies in ongoing change. I think this must imply that the will to power is subject to revision. Indeed, I think that Nietzsche himself would not have wanted it otherwise.

What would he have thought if he could have witnessed the atrocities, in the holocaust, for which Nazism had usurped passages from Nietzsche’s texts (e.g. on the ‘blond beast’)? I suggest that he would have revised his views, not on the fundamental value of Dionysian creative destruction, but on the principle of the will to power. 

So, what might a revised endorsement of creative destruction, with a successor to will to power look like? That is the subject for the next item.


[1]Bernard Reginster, 2006, The affirmation of life; Nietzsche on overcoming nihilism, Harvard University Press.
[2] Quoted in Nimrod Aloni, 1991, Beyond nihilism: Nietzsche’s healing and edifying philosophy, University Press of America, p. 28.

Sunday, May 18, 2014


146. Meaning nihilism
 
Meaning nihilism entails that words and expressions have no individual, determinate and fixed meaning, regardless of context, but depend on perspective and situational conditions. If one endorses the correspondence view of truth that certain elementary notions or expressions correspond with elements in objective reality, then meaning nihilism is related to epistemological nihilism, the lack of certain, objective knowledge and truth.

 Wittgenstein (in his later work) and Heidegger proposed that in our cognition and language ideas and words have meaning not as individual, isolated entities, but only holistically, as a coherent system associated with a body of practice and discourse.[1]

Wittgenstein called those constellations ‘language games’ and ‘forms of life’. Heidegger called it ‘Being’ as acting in the world. Knowledge, language and practical conduct are not grounded in abstract, absolute, objective, basic notions and logic. It is the other way around: practice is primary and abstractions follow. Understanding is not contemplation of truths but ability to perform a practice. Mostly, we do not rationally develop and justify beliefs before we adopt them but take them for granted as we adopt them.

One absurd consequence of predetermined meanings would be that all future uses are enfolded in the beginning, which is equivalent to saying that there can be no future. Meanings change along with the practices in which they arise.

We are socialized and cognitively formed in practices that are taken for granted and form our terms of reference, which have no outside foundation and we cannot step out of. We can only point to established practice, in some community or context. There is no ultimate justification. Rationalization remains internal to the practice, delving from within the terms in which the justification is made. At some point all we can say is ‘this is how it is done’. Notions of right and wrong can arise only within, not between language games. One can say in chess that a certain move is illegitimate, but one cannot say that chess is wrong.

This response to semantic nihilism yields the same cultural relativism as Richard Rorty’s response to nihilism more widely, discussed in the preceding item in this blog: judgement of legitimacy operates only within cultures.

This is reminiscent of a famous debate in the philosophy of science, with Thomas Kuhn’s notion of incommensurability between different paradigms.

As before, in the preceding item this blog, my problem with this is that if all attempts at debate across language games, paradigms or cultures are renounced as hopeless, the result is either mutual indifference and isolation or a settling of differences by power and violence. That would eliminate the potential of variety for intellectual and spiritual growth, and it would entail surrender to war and conflict.

While I admit that differences can be so fundamental as to preclude any meaningful debate, I think that most of the time some commonality can be found, in some similarity of experience, from which with clever metaphors some bridges of understanding can be built.

Earlier in this blog (in items 57, 58, and 66) I discussed this in terms of cognitive distance and attempts to bridge it. I discussed meaning and its change in items 37, 36, and 37.

[1] Cf. Lee Braver, 2012, Groundless grounds; A study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, MIT press.

Monday, May 12, 2014


145. Responses to nihilism: relativism

A radical response to nihilism is to reject the claim that absolute values are needed or even desirable, and to seek life without them. Two forms are Richard Rorty’s indifference and Nietzsche’s passionate ‘revaluation of all values’. 

One can become indifferent, shrugging at nihilism. What is the point of regretting values that cannot be achieved? Let us rejoice in being freed from them. This is the stance of (some) postmodernists, notably Richard Rorty.

This yields a pragmatist view: ideas and actions are good if they are useful, contribute to a good life.

This entails perspectivism: what one considers valid or true, in some sense, or good, depends on one’s perspective, which depends on history, circumstances, culture and personal perspective.

If the criterion for adequacy or validity is contribution to the good life, the question then is, of course, what the good life is and who determines that.

For Rorty that is a matter of consensus in some community, with different communities making different choices, without any perspective- and interest-free argument to adjudicate between them.

For Nietzsche the old absolutes were not just impossible to achieve but were inimical to the good life. Life entails variety and ongoing change of perspectives, and this is blocked by absolutes, any absolutes. For Nietzsche the good life is contribution to the flourishing of life, the furthering of human life and excellence, in an ongoing movement of self-transcendence and ‘Dionysian’ creative destruction, driven by the ‘will to power’. I will discuss that in a later item.  

Concerning knowledge, one can take refuge in epistemological scepticism, like Pyrrho, and later philosophers, such as Montaigne and David Hume. This skepticism can, but does not necessarily, lead to radical relativism: no claim to knowledge or truth is inherently better than any other.

An alternative to radical relativism is to accept that values can be legitimate and reasons can be sufficient without being absolute, while they are not arbitrary and are subject to debate and to improvement.

In pragmatism, absolute, objective truth is replaced by warranted assertability (which goes back to John Dewey). Something is to be accepted is there are good arguments for it, to be settled in debate. In pragmatism the central warrant for assertability is that it ‘works’, stands up in practice and furthers practical conduct.

As indicated, for Rorty the warrant lies in consensus in some community (in ‘ethnocentrism’). Karen Carr argued[1], correctly in my view, that this entails a surrender to conservatism, the status quo. And if there is no basis for adjudication between different perspectives, ultimately it is a matter of force, the right of the strong.

I would add that it entails a surrender to what Nietzsche called the ‘herd’ and Heidegger called ‘Das Man’. It entails surrender to suppression by the anonymous power of institutions, illustrated by Foucault. It entails surrender to the prisoners’ dilemmas in which society has increasingly been caught (as in the case of banking, discussed elsewhere in this blog), where individual morality is strangled in collective interest.    

Nietzsche acknowledged that man seeks meaning and value, but rather than accepting them from some outside authority, man produces them. Is his ultimate value as contribution to the flourishing of life not a new absolute, a new metaphysics? Does it yield an escape from relativism? That is the subject for the next item.


[1] Karen Carr, 1992, The banalization of nihilism, Twentieth century responses to meaninglessness, State University of New York Press.

Sunday, May 4, 2014


144. Responses to nihilism: faith, resignation and revolution
 
Marmysz[1] defined ‘pure’ or ‘radical’ nihilism according to three characteristics:

  1. Humans are unable to achieve absolute values of God, the true, the good and the beautiful.
  2. This is not how it should be
  3. There is nothing we can do about it
In combination these three points yield despair and the feeling that life is pointless.
Responses to nihilism can be deduced as deviations from one or more of these premises.

A first type of response is to accept 1, maintaining absolute values, and drop 2, accepting that they cannot be achieved. Kierkegaard did this, and in a related fashion, so did Karl Barth (in his early work) and the ‘dialectical theologians’[2]. Here, nihilistic despair produces a leap of faith. Despair of grasping God and approaching the absolute, in a ‘sickness onto death’, yields a positive impulse, evoking all the more awe for the absolute and infinite, and inspiring utmost dedication to it. Not being able to grasp God we should surrender to him. Paradoxically, despair is needed to leap into faith but then despair is also relieved.

From a more mundane positive perspective, inability to achieve perfection is seen as normal in human life, and it can serve to incite all the more effort, and may strengthen one’s resolve to continue striving. To deal with the discrepancy between absolute values and our inability to achieve them, Marmysz proposed humour and laughter. That yields pleasure in discrepancies.  

In a more passive as well as negative response, one can dodge despair by trying to ignore it and let oneself be engulfed in the trivia of daily life, in conformism to the powers of habit and custom, in what Nietzsche called ‘the herd’ and Heidegger called ‘das Man’ (the ‘one’ in the sense of what ‘one does’).

One may also seek recourse to hedonism, distract oneself in seeking pleasure.

Or one can also face despair and resign to it, accept imperfections, and try to make oneself immune to the resulting vulnerabilities and uncertainties of life, as the Stoics did, and Schopenhauer, in ataraxia.

The existentialist response (Sartre, Camus) is to have the courage to face up to despair, accepting the pointlessness of human life, but with some appreciation for its absurdity, with humanist sympathy for the predicament people are in together, even as an opportunity for emancipation.

A second type of response is to reject point 3, that there is nothing we can do about it, and to take action. This may take a violent, anarchistic, iconoclastic form of aiming to destroy the existing order that keeps us from achieving the absolute. The Russian anarchists come to mind (such as Bakunin).

Another option is to accept that absolute values are needed, and replace existing ones by new ones, in a revolutionary overthrow. Despair is resolved with the claim of offering an alternative, new absolute ideal, in a new religion or ideology that can be achieved, be it at the cost of sacrificing the existing order. This is often seen as nihilistic, but in fact it is opposite to it. It claims that we can achieve new absolutes, if we all make the necessary commitment and sacrifice. Such ideologies tend to be totalitarian, claiming the whole of life as its domain. They evoke missionary zeal.

Communism comes to mind, but also radical capitalist market ideologies. Communism needs no elaboration on this point, I think, but perhaps capitalism does. Its totalitarianism lies in the claim, and the mission, that market logic should apply universally, everywhere, regardless of history, society or culture, in commercial as well as cultural and private affairs.

A third, radical response is to reject that absolute values are needed or even desirable. That is the response of Nietzsche, and of postmodernists, such as Richard Rorty, but with an important difference between them. I turn to that in the next item.   
 


[1] Marmysz, 2003, Laughing at nothing; Humor as a response to nihilism, State University of New York Press.
[2] See Karen Carr, The banalization of nihilism, State University of New York Press, 1992