What if all your beliefs are actually nothing? No justification, no proof, no authority? This willing-towards-nothing is itself a nihilism. Dogmatism, religion, philosophy, all a willing-towards-nothing. Obviously, the tradition of the West doesn’t believe it’s willing towards nothingness. It fervently, without reservation, believes these values (God, the Forms, a Pure world, a world which is realer than this world of mere appearances). This nihilism is practical because it is performed through action, not reflection. Practical nihilism is a willing towards nothingness, but a nothingness that is still rich with meaning because even a willing-towards-nothing creates values. But these values, which supposedly transcend and seem above us, are nihilistic because they are profoundly anti-life.
Citations:
Friedrich, Hegel Georg Wilhelm. The Science of Logic. Cambridge University Press, 2010. Buy here!
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Buy here!
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Buy here!
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Buy here!
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ. Buy here!
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic. Buy here!
Plato. Phaedrus. Plato Complete Works. 247c-e. Buy here!
Heidegger, Martin. “‘The Word of Nietzsche: God Is Dead.’” The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2013. Buy here!
Hughes, Peter. “Nietzsche & Nihilism.” Ethical Society. 22 Nov. 2009.
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Practical Nihilism
When we think of nihilism, we don’t usually think of mainstream religions. Nihilists believe in nothing, afterall?
Religions believe in all sorts of crazy s***: virgin births, zombie gods, space gods on suicide missions, something about a galactic federation,
and whatever the fuck this means.
Certainly, these beliefs exist, right? Right? They have too. How else could they inspire such passion and seem to have the staying power of many millennia?
All beliefs have meaning, and, therefore, can inspire and persevere. But, as we’ve discussed in previous videos, even things which don’t exist can have meaning. Religious people aren’t believing in nothing, or, at least, they don’t believe they are believing in nothing. The religious ideas transcends the physical and temporary; their meaning (allegedly) escapes what we ourselves can never escape: death. Belief in such ideas have a tranquilizing effect, they numb their believers from the dangers and suffering of the world which we experience through our senses with our physical bodies. Religion is the opiate of the masses, says some old German. Despite having meaning, belief in such ideas means one is willing towards something which is not: towards a nothing. The word nihilism comes from the Latin nihil, the nothing.
Arguably the best thinker on nihilism was another old German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche, a miserably cantankorous individual, whose life was burdened by excruciating stomach and migraine pain, and who died in a madhouse unable to feed himself, said there were many different stages to nihilism, but all of them relied on a willing towards nothing.
Friedrich’s famously declared the death of god which is the realization that all values that we believed to be eternal, true, good, beautiful, divine, necessary and so on and so forth, are none of these things.
God doesn’t exist, and neither do all the truths and morality that come with Him. All of these things are merely our creations, and are therefore, contingent, transitory, and can be easily overthrown.
This realization has a profound effect on a person, oftentimes, a deep pessimism or existential crisis. Nothing matters.
But this realization points towards a deeper and darker realization, that these allegedly objective, eternal, true values have always been nothing.
For Nietzsche, practical nihilism refers to the religious doctrines which dominated Western Europe for nearly two thousand years: mainly Christianity. Yet, Nietzsche doesn’t stop there, but also refers to the philosophical schools of thought descending from Socrates and Plato, and even modernity itself to a certain extent.
Obviously, the tradition of the West doesn’t believe it’s willing towards nothingness. It fervently, without reservation, believes these values (God, the Forms, a Pure world, a world which is realer than this world of mere appearances). This nihilism is practical because it is performed through action, not reflection. The practical proceeds what we will later call theoretical nihilism, which will be talked about in a later video. Practical nihilism is a willing towards nothingness, but a nothingness that is still rich with meaning because even a willing-towards-nothing creates values. Friedrich says, “It is the profound, suspicious fear of an incurable pessimism that forces whole millennia to bury their teeth in and cling to a religious interpenetration of existence.” (BGE 59)
But these values, which supposedly transcend and seem above us, are nihilistic because they are profoundly anti-life. And, being anti-life is the greatest burden of nihilism for Friedrich, because all willing-towards-nothingness is anti-life.
This is because the most fundamental aspect of life for Friedrich is the will to power, Wille zur Macht. “Only where there is life is there also will: not will to life but–thus I teach you–will to power” (Z 115). What does this mean? The will is not a will to life because will and life are synonymous for Nietzsche. Anything that doesn’t will is not alive. At the same time, all willing is towards something, something beyond itself, something which is more than itself. In willing, power is discharged in order to push forward and more power is needed. Once a will has achieved power, it then seeks more power. The will’s only principle is willing in-order-to will more. Will to power means the will to will more, to surpass itself, because failing to do so means death.
At the same time, to live is to evaluate, to create values. ”Behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, too, there stands valuations or, more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of life.” (BGE a.3) The will evaluates the power it achieves in order to determine how to overcome itself. According to philosopher Peter Hughes, “To have no values is to be dead. For example, perception itself is valuation: the human color spectrum is valuable to us evolutionarily in order to gain power.” Humanity creates values, exalts them, reifies them, and, if need be, discards them when they are no longer useful. Values preserve and enhance humanity as a species.
Yet, the values of practical nihilism negate life, react with hostility towards a world in which it suffers, seeks an escape from life, and, is in fact, resentful of life. These nihilistic values are produced by a willing against the real, the world, towards a nothing. A willing-towards-nothingness.
How is it so that the will could will towards nothingness? Because a “basic fact of the human will… it needs a goal – and it would rather will nothingness that not will.” (Nietzsche, GM a. 1)
Friedrich calls religious values ascetic ideals, for the ascetic is the one who starves themselves of any sensation. Once these ascetic ideals are cemented in civilization, once they become the True, the Pure, the Transcendent ideals, then all other forms of willing—all other values—are crushed, snuffed out for the One, the Same, the Only true value.
Do not despair. Everything is NOT meaningless. There is a purpose, a goal, a reason for our existence. Just deny life, deny this imperfect apparent world and the promised real world is eternally waiting.
We’ll look at three examples of Practical Nihilism (not necessarily in this order): the philosophy of Socrates & Plato, Christianity, and Modernity.
Example 1: Christianity
“Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, ill-constituted, it has made an ideal out of opposition to the preservative instincts of strong life; it has depraved the reason even of the intellectually strongest natures by teaching men to feel the supreme values of intellectuality as sin, as misleading, as temptation.” (A a. 5)
The Anti-Christ.
Christianity. The belief in a space god, who sent his only begotten son (which is actually just Himself in disguise) on a suicide mission to save the souls of humanity, and he’s a God but he’s also a single parent and in order to save your soul you need to cannibalize his body and blood.
Christianity. The belief in an infinite, eternal, & perfect being, of which we are mere temporary images of, sinful images of.Christianity teaches us that pride, lust, gluttony, greed, wrath and so on, these most natural of instincts born out of a sensuous body in the world, are actually evil. They are sins of the flesh, impure compared to the divine nature of God. The Christian God taught humanity to reinterpret its animal instincts as guilt before God. Man is a sick animal, sick with sin. Christianity opposes these Evils with its own Goods: pity, celibacy, poverty, weakness, abstinence. These are the ascetic ideals of Christianity. Deny your senses for they are evil; deny this world for it is imperfect and fleeting. Bound yourselves to these ascetic ideals for these are the keys to heaven, the eternal, the afterlife, divine peace, TRUTH: everything this world is not.
Friedrich says:
“The church fights passion with excision in every sense: its practice, its ‘cure,’ is castratism. It never asks: ‘How can one spiritualize, beautify, deify a craving?’ It has at all times laid the stress of discipline on extirpation (of sensuality, of pride, of the lust to rule, of avarice, of vengefulness). But an attack on the roots of passion means an attack on the roots of life: the practice of the church is hostile to life.” (pg. 52)
Twilight of the Idols.
Christianity gave the West an absolute value despite humanities smallness and puny mortality.
Friedrich says Christians are resentful of life, ressentiment. The early monotheists, Judaism and Christianity, resented the morality of the noble Romans, what Friedrich calls Master Morality. What the Romans called good: strength, power, conquest, proficiency, the Christian calls evil. Meanwhile, what the Romans called bad: weakness, resentment, pity, poverty, etc. the Christians called good. Nietzsche calls moralities of resentment, slave morality. Yet, even if of a lower cast or a slave how could one view weakness as an inherent good? Friedrich says, “the ascetic ideal means: that something was lacking, that an enormous void surrounded man—he did not know how to justify himself to explain, to affirm himself; he suffered from the problem of his meaning.” (GM III a. 28) Master morality left the slaves, serfs, and peasants with a lack of meaning or purpose: what was their life even worth? What does their suffering mean? Yet, even slaves, serfs, and peasants must will, must create values. So they follow the ascetic priests. The ascetic priest does not seek to react against suffering, overcome suffering, nor does he seek to abolish it. Friedrich concludes, “he wants it, he even seeks it out, provided one shows him a meaning for it, a to-this-end of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering in itself, was the curse that thus far lay stretched out over humanity—and the ascetic ideal offered it a meaning.” (GM III something) Any meaning is better than no meaning, and humans will suffer willingly as long as they have a purpose, even if that purpose is ultimately nothing.
“All the concepts of the Church are recognized for what they are: the most malicious false coinage there is for the purpose of devaluing natural & natural values; the priest himself is recognized for what he is: the most dangerous form of parasite, the actual poison-spider of life…. The concepts ‘Beyond’, ‘Last Judgement’, ‘immortality of the soul’, the ‘soul’ itself: they are the instruments of torture, they are forms of systematic cruelty by virtue of which the priest has become master, stays master.” (a. 38)
The Anti-Christ.
Example 2: The Shadow of Forms
“In every age the wisest have passed the identical judgement on life: it is worthless….” (pg. 39)
Twilight of the Idols.
Socrates & Plato. These Ancient Greek Philosophers’ influence on Western civilization cannot be understated. 20th century philosopher Alfred Whitehead once famously stated (and I’m paraphrasing) that all of European civilization is but a series of footnotes to the ideas of the Socratic Method and Platonic Forms. And, the monotheistic omni-God of Christianity & Islam is grounded in the philosophies of Plato & Aristotle.
According to Plato, Socrates’ dying words were: “‘Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?” Asclepius was the Greek God of Medicine. One repayed the debt of being healed from a sickness by providing an offering to him. Friedrich interprets this as “’To live—that means to be a long time sick: I owe a cock to the savior Asclepius.’ Even Socrates had had enough of life.” (TI 39) For the Greeks, to be sick was to lack health, to be deficient in health. Socrates was not forced to drink hemlock and die for his crimes against Athens. He was originally sentenced to exile, but chose death instead. In drinking hemlock, Socrates thanks Asclepius for curing him of the sickness of life. For Nietzsche, Socrates is the OG nihilist. Socrates affirmed a tradition of static death.
Socrates pupil, Plato, applied Socratic Nihilism to his metaphysics, epistemology, and morality. The world we are trapped in, the world of becoming, perishing, darkness, the world that is a mere cave, that is a paltry shadow of the True world. What does it mean to truly be? The Ancient Greek word for Being is ousia, which means to be present. All entities (rocks, cats, people, schnologosters) share one thing in common: they are all present, and in being present, they endure the ravages of time. For Plato, a Being which ceases to be is a wimpy, wimpy, wimpy Being, not a hefty, hefty, hefty Being. Plato knew that the perfect Being, the Perfect Form of Presence, would be a presence that is eternally present and never ceases to be present. Plato espoused the theory of Forms, or the Eternally existing essences for all things, of which our world is a mere, puny reflection of.
Plato’s Forms exist so far above that even the mighty Gods of Mt. Olympus must fly upwards to feast. Plato says:
“The place beyond heaven—none of our earthly poets has ever sung or ever will sing its praises enough! Still, this is the way it is—risky as it may be, you see, I must attempt to seek the truth, especially since the truth is my subject. What is in this place is without color and without shape and without solidity, a being that really is what it is, the subject of all true knowledge, visible only to intelligence, the soul’s steersman. Now a god’s mind is nourished by intelligence and pure knowledge, as is the mind of any soul that is concerned to take in what is appropriate to it, and so it is delighted at last to be seeing what is real and watching what is true, feeding on all this and feeling wonderful, until the circular motion brings it around to where it started. On the way around it has a view of Justice as it is; it has a view of Self-Control; it has a view of Knowledge—not the knowledge that is close to change, that becomes different as it knows the different things which we consider real down here. No, it is the knowledge of what really is what it is. And when the soul has seen all the things as they are and feasted on them, it sinks back inside heaven and goes home.” (Phaedrus 247c-e)
Plato. Plato Complete Works.
There’s a perfect form for everything: The Form of Darkness, Form of Motion, Form of Rest, Form of Plato, Perfect Form of Hitler seemingly ad infinitum. Most importantly, there is also a Perfect Form of Good. Here we see the beginnings of a mighty fallacy, where what is natural is at the same time considered to be inherently good.
The Christian God later absorbed Plato’s philosophy into itself becoming the self-caused first cause, the infinite & eternal, the Perfect Being. As we stated earlier, Christianity also saw the world of appearances and the flesh as a sickness, sin, that had to be abstained from for Judgment Day, where the Kingdom of Heaven or actual reality awaits.
The Platonic tradition still continues to this day.
Rene Descartes continued the supremacy of the supresensory world with the mind/body dualism distinguishing the sensual, res extensa, the extensive, physical thing from res cogitans, a thinking or spiritual thing. For Descartes, it was our senses which revealed the physical world to us. At the same time, our senses were the very thing which we should be most in doubt about. Reason, which sprung from our mind or soul, gave us the most certain & distinct knowledge.
With Hegel, we have the Absolute or “the sum of all being, actual and potential”. Hegel privileges the ideal, the concept, above the material. Hegel says, “Only the absolute Idea of Being, imperishable Life, self-knowing Truth, and it is all Truth.” (Science of Logic)
Everywhere we see the privileging of the supresensory over the sensuous.
Our Nihilistic tradition: philosophers have continued to create a world (instead of allowing nature to create) somehow separate and more perfect than the real world. Nietzsche vehemently rejects this thought that man and his concepts are somehow the same as they were in the beginning. “Everything has evolved; there are no eternal facts, as there are likewise no absolute truths” (Human A. 2). Everywhere all we really see is the shadows of Plato’s forms; humans are rational animals, but animals whose bodies are sickly & deformed.
From Plato to Hegel, a willing-towards-nothingness, the suprasensory that depreciates the sensory; the entire world-historical movement of meta-physics (literally meaning, beyond the physical) has dominated Western society. Therefore, according to Friedrich, all of philosophy since Plato has been nihilistic.
“You ask me about the idiosyncracies of philosophers?…. Their hatred of even the idea of becoming…. Death, change, age, as well as procreation and growth, are for them objections—refutations even. What is, does not become; what becomes, is not…. Be a philosopher, be a mummy, represent monotono-theism by a gravedigger-mimicry! – And away, above all, with the body, that pitiable idea fixe [from the viewpoint of eternity] of the senses! Infected with every error of logic there is, refuted, impossible even, notwithstanding it is impudent enough to behave as if it actually existed!’…. (pg. 45)
Twilight of the Idols. Buy here!
Modernity
“Nihilism is the world-historical movement of the peoples of the earth who have been drawn into the power realm of the modern era.” (pg. 62-63)
Heidegger, Martin. “‘The Word of Nietzsche: God Is Dead.’” The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2013.
From Plato to Christianity, we see an anthropomorphizing of the world. This is because philosophy has applied human values to nature. Anthropomorphic means ascribing human form or attributes to a being or thing not human. The word is itself contradictory; as it assumes there is such a form that applies to all humans.
For Plato, the Form of Being is ultimately subservient to the Form of the Good. Just as the shining of the sun is not itself sight, but is in fact the cause of all sight or the realm where visibility is possible. The Form of the Good is the realm of intelligibility.
The monotheistic deity is the summum bonum, the Ultimate Good, meaning all of God’s creations are created by that which is the greatest good.
Everywhere we see the problem of the is/ought distinction first discovered by Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume.
What is, is not the same as what ought to be. Values like good & bad are human inventions, and it is ultimately silly to say that what is natural is good or what is good is natural. This is a mere anthropormorphizing of nature.
In anthroporphizing nature, we will towards a mythical, eternal form of humanity; we will towards nothingness. Friedrich says, “We have only created the world which is of any account to man!” (GS a. 301).
Even modernity still believed in an objective truth, objective morality, natural laws, a telos or purpose or design to the world. Friedrich analyzes the origins of these concepts and finds they all originate in the Christian monotheistic God, which itself can be traced back to the Platonic Forms. Nietzsche describes these concepts as, “the ‘highest concepts’, that is to say the most general, the emptiest concepts, the last fumes of evaporating reality.” (TI 47) As Deism and atheism became increasingly popular in the 18th century, the eternal truths of logic, the concept of a grand design or purpose to civilization, the idea of humanity as an end unto itself, objective morality through the Truth of Reason, continued to stink up Western philosophy. Nietzsche’s Madman asks if, after the death of God, we cannot smell the rotting corpse of God because all that was grounded in the transcendental concept continues in Western thought. The Madman asks if we ourselves will not have to become Gods, or ends unto ourselves.
No one represents this shift better than 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant. In Kant’s magnum opus the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant seeks to ground all of metaphysics, knowledge and morality within the limits of human reason.
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia, “Kant’s main goal is to show that a critique of reason by reason itself, unaided and unrestrained by traditional authorities, establishes a secure and consistent basis for both Newtonian science and traditional morality and religion. So reason deserves the sovereignty attributed to it by the Enlightenment.” Each individual human, their own reason was the limit that showed the universal limits of reality.
Kant denied that we could have any knowledge of metaphysics beyond our senses. Yet, the senses still remain imperfect, essentially flawed and prone to error. In order to solve this problem, Kant says that both our senses and our understanding have certain a priori givens. Intuition was governed by the a priori forms of space & time, while the understanding was governed by the a priori categories of quantity, quality, relation, and modality. Kant was attempting to ground the scientific method, especially the science of Newtonian physics, in eternal, a priori structures. We cannot understand anything beyond our a posteriori senses, but the sensuous world still relies on a priori structures. Unsurprisingly, Friedrich doesn’t have a high opinion of these allegedly a priori structures. “Faith in the categories of reason is the cause of nihilism. We have measured the value of the world according to categories that refer to a purely fictitious world.” (WP 12b)
This still remains nihilistic, as it preserves the values inherited from Christianity, and does nothing to create values that enhance and affirm existence. These a priori categories are only human concepts. Kant’s categories are born out of an intense need for something beyond experience, prior to it. Only someone who is weary of the world could conceive of such things.
“Some have still need of metaphysics; but also the impatient longing for certainty which at present discharges itself in scientific, positivist fashion among large numbers of the people, the longing by all means to get at something stable (while on account of the warmth of the longing the establishing of the certainty is more leisurely and negligently undertaken): even this is still the longing for a hold, a support; in short, the instinct of weakness, which, while not actually creating religions, metaphysics, and convictions of all kinds, nevertheless—preserves them. In fact, around all these positivist systems there fume the vapors of a certain pessimistic gloom, something of weariness, fatalism, disillusionment, and a fear of new disillusionment.” (a. 347)
Nietzsche. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs.
Conclusion
Modernity’s continued reliance on eternal, a priori concepts is a continuation of practical nihilism. But, Modernity goes further than any Platonism and Christianity and helps to inaugurate what Nietzsche calls, “a higher history than any history hitherto.” Kant still splits the world into a sensuous and a suprasensuous. There are phenomena, the appearances of things acquired by our senses and categorized by our understanding, and the noumena, the thing in-itself that is the true, objective actuality of a thing which we have no access too.
The wise philosopher-king and his Platonic love with teenage boys could achieve The Eternal Forms of Plato. Heaven was attainable to those that followed the ascetic ideals of Christianity.
But with Modernity, the horror of horrors is realized: the actual world, the real, is forever beyond our grasp. Even the empty promise of an afterlife has been taken away. We are forever trapped in the apparent world… but after over 2500 years of degrading the sensual for the spiritual, it is a world which cannot bear the burden of objectivity.
So, what is the point then? Of anything? Is there a point? Or is it all nihil, nothing. Next time we’ll look at this higher form of nihilism, to answer the question: Why do I even get out of bed?
