11/19/2022
Nihilism is typically defined as a belief in nothing. Depending on a person’s flavor of nihilism, nihilists don’t believe in objective morality, no good or evil. There is no objective knowledge, no truths and no falsehoods. There is no reason to even exist, because we are all going to be dead in the end. The universe is, and beyond that nothing: no order, no structure, no design, no purpose. Is it truly all for naught? Nothing matters.
Arguably the best thinker on nihilism was 19th century German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche said there were many different stages to nihilism, but all of them relied on a willing towards nothing. Nietzsche believed liberal democracies, modernity, and capitalism inaugurated a new, higher form of nihilism: Theoretical Nihilism.
Friedrich’s proclamation of the Death of God is the realization that all the highest values have been devalued.
Citations:
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Untimely Meditations. Edited by Daniel Breazeale. Translated by Reginald J. Hollingdale, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014. 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 Wilhelm. Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ. Buy here!
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic. Buy here!
Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Buy here!
Heidegger, Martin. “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God Is Dead.’” The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 2004. Buy Here!
Ceika, Jonas. How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the 21st-Century Left. Watkins Publishing, 2022. Buy Here!
Fincher, David, director. Fight Club. 20th Century Fox, 1999. Buy Here!
Liv Agar:
WallStreetBets, Gamestop, & Nietzsche’s Account of Nihilism
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You wake up every morning still tired. You grab some food but you still end up hungry. You take a shower and scream for five minutes in angst at existence. You go to work… work…. Work… for a time, only to leave exhausted and return home unsatisfied. You eat, spend the rest of your night just staring for awhile, before going back to sleep. Then, you repeat… then, you repeat… repeat…. Repeat this endlessly, till your dying breath.
What was the point? Of any of it? From birth to death? Was it just a blip? Forgotten as if it never mattered? Is there a point? Or is it all nihil, nothing. Why even get out of bed?
Nihilism is typically defined as a belief in nothing. Depending on a person’s flavor of nihilism, nihilists don’t believe in objective morality, no good or evil. There is no objective knowledge, no truths and no falsehoods. There is no reason to even exist, because we are all going to be dead in the end. The universe is, and beyond that nothing: no order, no structure, no design, no purpose. Is it truly all for naught?
Nothing matters.
But, there is an underlying presupposition that is prior to believing in nothing and that is a willing towards nothingness.
Nihilism was first used by German philosopher Friedrich Jacobi who used the term to describe the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant. According to Jacobi, Kant’s philosophy will lead to everything being known leaving nothing left to believe in and no mysteries left to search for. Jacobi saw nihilism as leading us towards inaction, where nothing is done. Other nihilists include Russian novelists like Ivan Turgenev who used the term to describe the disillusionment of the youth towards both progressivism and traditionalism.
Arguably the best thinker on nihilism was 19th century 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.
In a previous essay, we analyzed how most religions and philosophies are nihilistic because the people who believe them are willing-towards-nothing. Even modernity didn’t escape this phenomena.
But modernity also inaugurates a new, higher form of nihilism.
Friedrich’s proclamation of the Death of God 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.
The appearance of a new type of nihilism, one which goes beyond a mere willing-towards-nothingness, occurs with the Death of God, first proclaimed by Nietzsche in aphorism 125 “The Madman” in the 1882 book The Gay Science.
But, what is God to Nietzsche? What exactly has died? Nietzsche describes God generally as “the name for the realm of Ideas and ideals” (Heidegger 61) and specifically as “the last, thinnest, emptiest [concept] … placed as the first, as cause in itself, as an ens realissimum (or the realest being).” (TI 47). So, what has died is the realm of ideas and more importantly, their influence on us. Philosopher Gilles Deleuze says of modern nihilism that it “is no longer the devaluation of life in the name of higher values but rather the devaluation of higher values themselves.” (Deleuze 148)
Kant’s continued reliance on eternal, a priori concepts is a continuation of practical nihilism. But, Kant goes further than any of his predecessors and helps inaugurates “a higher history than any history hitherto.” Kant still splits the world into a sensuous and a suprasensuous. There are phenomena, the mere appearances of things acquired by our imperfect senses and categorized by our limited understanding, and the noumena, the thing in-itself that is the true, objective actuality of a thing which we have no access too. When It comes to morality, Kant simply says we have a duty to be good, not to God or even ourselves, but to reason itself, the so-called categorical imperative. Kantian morality doesn’t even provide us a reward for good behavior; Kant demands a complete excision from any bodily joy. If you enjoy doing good, well, it’s not immoral but it’s also not moral, but amoral. You have to stand there, with no emotion whatsoever and tell the Nazis there are Jews in your attic, because reason dictates objectively that lying is wrong.
The Eternal Forms of Plato could still be achieved, by the wise philosopher-king and through the “Platonic” love with teenage boys. Heaven was attainable to those that followed the ascetic ideals of Christianity.
But with Kant, 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.
The words of Martin:
“The suprasensory is transformed into an unstable product of the sensory. And with such a debasement of its antithesis, the sensory denies its own essence. The deposing of the suprasensory does away with the merely sensory and thus with the difference between the two. The deposing of the suprasensory culminates in a ‘neither-nor’ in relation to the distinction between the sensory and the non-sensory. It culminates in meaninglessness. It remains, nevertheless, the unthought and invincible pressupposition of its own blind attempts to extricate itself from meaninglessness through a mere assigning of sense and meaning.”
Heidegger, Martin. “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God Is Dead.’” The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 2004.
All of the transcendent values created by Socratic nihilism and cemented by Christianity have now been devalued. If objective truth and morality no longer exist, do we not live in absolute relativism, where truth and morality cease to have any meaning? For if all truths and values are equal, then they may as well be equally nothing.
Fyoder Dostoevsky famously said, “If God is dead, then everything is permitted.” If objective morality doesn’t exist, how do we maintain that murder, rape, pedophilia, torture, cannibalism, school shootings, terrorism and so on and so forth are wrong, are undesirable, that we ought not do them? Of course, everything is permitted with a living God as well.
“This America, God struck it in its heart and destroyed its biggest buildings, so we have to thank God for that. America was filled with terror from the north to the south and from east to west. What America is living through today is nothing compared to what we have been living through for decades. Our nation has been living for more than 80 years with this kind of oppression. Its people are being killed and slaughtered and its religious symbols attacked but nobody listened or responded. But now God blessed a group of Muslims and opened His doors before them, so they were able to destroy America and I hope God will exalt them and welcome them in His heaven.”
Osama Bin Laden
Modernity claims that all humans are equal, a notion which is profoundly Christian. Friedrich was famously anti-egalitarian. Egalitarianism or the idea of equality are deeply antithetical to Friedrich’s philosophy. Unfortunately, his anti-egalitarianism has lead many conservative & fascist groups openly embracing Nietzsche, despite him also being hostile to the modern state, nationalism, racism, and anti-semitism. It’s worth looking at Friedrich’s critique of equality and perform a genealogy of the concept. As Cuck Philosophy said in his book on Nietzsche & Marx:
“Such a view [egalitarianism] emerged through a synthesis of Christianity (all individuals possessing a fundamentally equal soul that is independent of all particular properties and empirical circumstances) and capitalist ideology (all individuals being equal in their capacity as rights-holders, contract-signers, transactional agents).”
Ceika, Jonas. How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the 21st-Century Left. Watkins Publishing, 2022
The presupposition of equality is that there are pre-made individuals that can exist absent of any social conditioning, which, to put it mildly, is silly. Liberal theory will state that all people in modern, capitalist society have a right to equality of opportunity, however, there is no guarantee of equality of outcome. Yet equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are self-perpetuating. Those individuals born into wealthy, alabaster families have greater access to opportunities than their impoverished piers and because of that greater access to opportunity have better outcomes. In reality, individuals only exist because they are constructed out of society. (Something the vulgar objectivists, those sycophantic followers of Ayn Rand seem unable to comprehend).
With the death of God, humans themselves must take God’s place as the creator of values. Humanity itself is viewed as an end, as a finished project, as a ready-made ideal. We’ve reached the finale of history, of civilization; there’s nothing left to do. Zarathustra says:
“One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion. No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same”
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None.
Friedrich’s fear of theoretical nihilism is not that everything is permitted, but that nothing will be done. Nothing will be overcome.
Humanity does not want to create or affirm new values. Everywhere theoretical nihilism repeats the same. With sameness, mediocrity, and passivity the Last Person appears (not the last man because #Feminism). The Last Person says, “we have invented happiness” and nothing more needs to be done except “think” about this invention, this end, this goal (Z 18). We have a goal in our modern nihilistic society, a certain goal shared by everyone. A spouse and a house, with a mouse or more. The middle class, an American dream, provides a little “mildness, peace and kindliness in thought and action.” The logic of the Last Person “soothes and gives confidence” in a world without meaning, and the Last Person’s goals provide a “certain warm, fear-dispelling narrowness and imprisonment within optimistic horizons.” (GS 370)
There is an inevitability that comes with the Last Person. If history is automatic, a foregone conclusion, then it doesn’t require anyone to do anything. There is no need for action, for resistance, for fighting or defending. The intellectual horizons of the Last Person are defined only in terms of a shallow happiness of material comfort & spiritual complacency. Any type of suffering, unhappiness, discomfort, any thing which might limit a person’s will, might force them to overcome themselves, must be banished.
The collapse of a foundationalist project means all goods are simply subjective preferences. Therefore, the only objective good is everyone is of equal worth. The only objective truth is all truths are equal.
Egalitarianism is one of the main concepts wielded by the Last Person.Another of Friedrich’s critiques of egalitarianism is if all values are equally nothing, if there is perfect equality in society, then there is nothing to overcome. Absolute or negative relativism reduces all values to nill, to zero. In the absurdist movie, Fight Club, the unnamed narrator (a literal everyman who is no-man) works for an unnamed automobile company. He inspects car accidents—events which are chaotic, tragic, and unique in their damage—in order to apply a simple mathematical equation: is it worth it? Turns out: it usually isn’t.
Friedrich not only critiques liberalism, but capitalism as well. In the Gay Science, Friedrich says:
“The busiest of all ages—our age—does not know how to make anything out of its great diligence and wealth, except always more and more wealth, and more and more diligence, and more and more industriousness.” (a. 21)
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs.
In speaking about capitalists and the capitalist state, he says:
“Nowadays the crudest and most evil forces, the egoism of the money-makers and the military despots, hold sway over almost everything on earth. In the hands of these despots and money-makers, the state certainly makes an attempt to organize everything anew out of itself and to bind and constrain all those mutually hostile forces: that is to say, it wants men to render it the same idolatry they formerly rendered the church.” (pg 150)
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Untimely Meditations. Edited by Daniel Breazeale. Translated by Reginald J. Hollingdale, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014.
In describing the cultural affects of capitalism he says in his Untimely Meditation, “Schopenhauer as Educator”:
“the greed of the money-makers” demands “a speedy education so that one may quickly become a money-earning being, yet at the same time an education sufficiently thorough to enable one to earn a very great deal of money. A man is allowed only as much culture as it is in the interest of general money-making and world commerce he should possess.” (pg. 164-165)
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Untimely Meditations. Edited by Daniel Breazeale. Translated by Reginald J. Hollingdale, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014.
Today’s education strives to make as many human beings as possible culturally bound to capitalism, to view capitalism as a natural, necessary, and moral system. Education is typically not viewed as an exploration of self and knowledge but specifically as an investment towards some semblance of success within capitalism.
Finally, in reference to wage-laborers, Friedrich says that industrial civilisation is:
“the meanest mode of existence that has ever been. It is simply the law of necessity that operates here: people want to live, and have to sell themselves; but they despise him who exploits their necessity and purchases the workman. It is curious that the subjection to powerful, fear-inspiring, and even dreadful individuals, to tyrants and leaders of armies, is not at all felt so painfully as the subjection to such undistinguished and uninteresting persons as the captains of industry; in the employer the workman usually sees merely a crafty, blood-sucking dog of a man, speculating on every necessity, whose name, form, character, and reputation are altogether indifferent to him.” (a. 40)
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs.
In capitalism, all things become equal—not quantitatively—but qualitatively. Under capitalism, all things can be subjected to the ultimate axiom: exchange value. The value of everything can be reduced to an arbitrary exchange value for the purpose of creating more value. Humanity only finds value in the consumption of exchange value, which drives capitalism further. Capitalism begets more capitalism. While this may seem like the principle of the will to power, to continuously overcome itself by willing more, that Nietzsche so fervently espouses, it remains a reactive willing by humanity. We are not commanding; we are obeying this thing of our own creation, and we are doing so because this image of value (exchange value) claims it is the one, the true, the good, and so on and so forth. The unnamed narrator of Fight Club attempts to find novelty through capitalist consumption, but such a willing-towards-nothingness leaves him ill-constituted for it is an endeavor which remains anti-life.
The herd longs desperately for something stable in a meaningless & chaotic world. We find ourselves content with our gadgets and symbols, more than happy to replace them with near replicas. The herd that follows, for instance, the Apple logo, obeys the command of Apple: obey the Apple, we will tell you when to overcome, how to adapt, what you like and don’t like, what to believe. Friedrich says:
“Belief is always most desired, most pressingly needed, where there is a lack of will: for the will, as the emotion of command, is the distinguishing characteristic of sovereignty and power. That is to say, the less a person knows how to command, the more urgent is his desire for that which commands, and commands sternly… When a man arrives at the fundamental conviction that he requires to be commanded, he becomes ‘a believer.’” (a. 347)
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs.
Modernity, nihilism, capitalism—what have you—ultimately just creates a world which humanity can kneel too (Z 113). Our contemporary world of algorithms control every aspect of our lives. Twitter and Facebook give us feeds that it says we want to see. Amazon and Spotify have curated sections titled “For you.” It’s FUBU, you see, for us by us. All of our decisions have already been made for us.
Philosopher Liv Agar says it far better than I can:
“one’s social world, their political identity, their understanding of events, their sense in community, their taste in music, are all provided to one by machines. Without these machines, we are nothing. The various attributes and virtues that describe what truly defines an individual, are served to them on a platter by advanced systems of algorithms designed to turn them into perfect little consumers. This is combined with a perceived sense of choice, of course. You have five or six options to pick from the algorithmically determined set. One might tell themselves they have freedom, and by this I mean an effect on the world through actions and beliefs, and yet they have nothing. In this process, no level of originality is required. One simply begins consuming, and then never has to stop.
What other medium provides for better judgment of others virtues than on the internet, where virtue is determined on a consumption pattern. It seems more and more of our identity becomes entirely rendered by silicone.”
Agar, Liv.
WallStreetBets, Gamestop, & Nietzsche’s Account of Nihilism
Capitalism is the process of theoretical nihilism. Capitalism continuously replaces values, overcomes itself. Some do believe that the axioms of capitalism are in fact permanent, natural and good. But, for those that know better, their actual impermanence is the source of existential angst. We obey capitalism, capitalism overcomes itself, but we do not overcome capitalism or ourselves. Values are overcome, but not our values for capitalism constantly returns us towards the same, empty exchange value.
Throughout Nietzsche’s works, nihilism seems to be given the value judgment of bad; it is an undesirable condition. Theoretical nihilism, the devaluation of the highest values, is certainly bad for the believers in a monotheistic deity like Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It also appears bad for the enlightenment, to humanists, to metaphysicians, idealists, and most thinkers of modernity. All of these beliefs presuppose a kind of objectivity. Nihilism makes objectivity impossible. There are those that react resentfully to nihilism by becoming pessimists like Arthur Schopenhauer.
But, Friedrich wants us to lean into nihilism, to affirm nihilism within ourselves, to accept that all values must be overcome eternally. Nietzsche’s project is the eternally recurring revaluation of all values because the objective eye is a myth. “Here it is always demanded that we think an eye that cannot possibly be thought, an eye that must not have any direction, in which the active and interpretative forces through which seeing first becomes seeing-something are to be shut off, are to be absent.” (GM III a. 12) Objectivity is impossible; subjectivity is necessary. Subjectivity throws us into relativism. But, this isn’t the negative relativism we spoke of earlier, where all truths and morals are equally true and valid, and therefore, equally meaningless. This is a positive relativism or what Friedrich calls perspectivism. I talked about perspectivism a little bit in an essay on famous singer and convicted pedophile Robert Sylvester Kelly.
Nietzsche’s point here is there is no knowledge, no eye, no objectivity that has no specific perspective.
Any objectivity that amounts to a “disinterested contemplation” is “a non-concept and absurdity.” All perspectives are finite and only show a limited view. “There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’.” (GM III a. 12)
As literally everything Nietzsche, his perspectivism is based on the existential principle of the will to power. There are no equal wills. There are strong wills and weak wills, and similarly strong perspectives and weak perspectives. As we saw in the R. Kelly video, there is a battle between perspectives and strong perspectives subsume weak perspectives, making weak perspectives obey the commands of the strong perspectives. Because there is no equality, there is nothing but difference. The world is meaningless until we apply meaning to it. The cosmos is “to all eternity chaos,” and the will to power grasps onto differences in order to preserve and enhance itself; in order to keep willing.
The nihilists of western civilization have been precisely this crushing of difference, of the world, and of life. Plato’s Forms crushed the difference of the sophists. Christianity crushed the difference of the 7 devils: the heretic, the witch, the soothsayer, the fool, the doubter, the unholy one, and the villain. Modernity crushed the difference of the insane, the irrational, the hysteric, the savage, and so on and so forth.
Friedrich doesn’t want an eye with no perspective or only one perspective. He wants as many perspectives as possible. “the more affects we allow to speak about a matter, the more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that much more complete will our ‘concept’ of this matter, our ‘objectivity’ be.” (GM III a. 12) The absolute subjectivity that Friedrich demands is more objective than the most rational and pure of objectivities of modernity. The more perspectives we have at our disposal, the greater the chance we will find the correct solution to a current and temporary problem. Friedrich wants us to have “the capacity to have one’s pro and contras in one’s own power, and to shift them in and out; so that one knows how to make precisely the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations useful for knowledge.” (GM III a. 12) If we continuously affirm a multiplicity of perspectives, only then does theoretical nihilism, the devaluation of the highest values, cease to be a problem for humanity, instead it is a source of great overcoming. “You must wish to consume yourself in your own flame: how could you wish to become new unless you had first becomes ashes!… I love him who wants to create over and beyond himself and thus perishes. Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” (Part 1: On the Way of the Creator. 64-65)
And only then does our willing cease to be a willing-towards-nothingness, and becomes willing which affirms existence.
“I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say onto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.” (Z. Prologue 5. 17)
So, is there a point to existence? To getting out of bed? Yes, there’s many points to existing, and many ways of getting out of bed, but you will never find them beyond this world, you will never find eternal points that are unassailable. Your existence has meaning only if you are willing to embrace and affirm the differences inherent and primary in a world which is to all eternity chaos. We asked in the beginning if we are destined to be forgotten, and we asked it as if it was an undesirable outcome. But forgetfullness is not necessarily a bad thing. One needs to be able to forget in order to create the new. Every repetition is always a repetition of something new, unique, novel, but only if we’re willing to accept each from a new, unique, novel perspective.
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