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Over the course of this show, I’ve leaned heavily on nihilism as being the core pathology of religion, the central factor with the capacity to make religion toxic and dangerous. Over the course of the last couple months, I’ve come to realize that many of the pathologies I’ve associated with religion in particular are endemic not only to religion but to human ideology in general. It remains the case that I’ve never pinned down what exactly I mean by nihilism in anything more than a cursory way. This episode will remedy that deficiency and explore why nihilism, such as I construe it, is a pathological ideology.
Nihilism derives from the Latin word nihil, which means “nothing.” I’ve been using the word as if it referred to a specific philosophy—and it does, somewhat, at least in contemporary discourse—but it’s a concept that can actually be applied to many different ideas, sometimes contradictory ones. In general, we might speak of a nihilism with regards to some discourse as a claim that those entities posited by the discourse do not actually exist. I, for example, could be described as a nihilist with regards to unicorns. I’m not aware of any extant discourses which claim the existence of unicorns, but if there were such a discourse, I would say that it’s mistaken because unicorns don’t actually exist. In order to better understand what we’re talking about, consider the term atheism, which generally denotes non-belief in anything that could be called “God” or “a god.” A stronger version of this claim that asserts that nothing that could be called “God” or “a god” exists at all could be described as theistic nihilism, but this is distinct from atheism, which only posits that there is no reason to believe in anything that could be called “God” or “a god.” To clarify the distinction, consider a scenario in which the existence of God was confirmed. The atheist position held prior and examined in light of the discovery of this confirmation would remain validated. The atheist would say, “Okay, God exists, but before we knew that, I had no reason to believe that God exists, and so I held the correct position at the time.” The theistic nihilist, in contrast, would be refuted. In light of such evidence, the theistic nihilist would have to say, “I claimed that God does not exist, but I was mistaken, so the position I held was incorrect.” If I claim that there is no reason to believe in unicorns, I might be described as an a-unicornist. If I claim that unicorns do not exist at all (as I would), I might better be described as a nihilist with regards to unicorns.
While the following is not necessarily intrinsic to nihilism, it is generally understood that nihilists reject even nonrealist conceptions of the discourse in question. Such nihilisms are often called error theories. To clarify, I reject moral objectivity. I do not believe that there are moral facts. I believe that moral facts do not exist. I do not believe that anything is objectively right or wrong apart from subjective human experience. However, I allow that non-realist understandings of morality are viable, and not only viable, but necessary and important. I am thus not a moral nihilist, except with regards to the existence of objective moral facts, and I am certainly not a moral error theorist. When I make the claim “It’s wrong to eat babies,” I’m not saying that there’s some objective fact of the matter that makes eating babies wrong; rather, I’m saying that, given human societies and human experience, we shouldn’t eat babies. The moral error theorist, on the other hand, says, “It’s not wrong to eat babies because the concepts right and wrong have no extant referents; nothing is right or wrong at all, in any sense, however you construe it.” If asked whether it’s wrong to eat babies, I will say “Yes,” and maybe what I mean by “wrong” and what is meant by the person asking the question are a bit different, but somehow or another, we can come to an agreement on the matter that it is, in some sense, wrong to eat babies. The moral error theorist would regard the question as not being meaningful, as if they had been asked about the direction of red or the color of truth. For the moral error theorist, reality simply lacks moral properties and there’s no viable way of construing reality as having those properties, in the same way that there’s no viable way of construing reality as including unicorns. I am thus an error theorist with regards to unicorns.
A particularly interesting example of this kind of nihilism is ontological nihilism, which posits that no things exists. It’s obvious enough that this position is very radical, but it can actually be construed in such a way as to not be completely ridiculous. In a chapter on the subject included in the sixth volume of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics (2011), philosopher Jason Turner describes the example of perforational nihilism as a subcategory of ontological nihilism. His intent here is not to describe an actual position that people hold, but rather to give an example of how ontological nihilism could work in a specific case that can then be generalized to the broader position. The perforational nihilist holds that there are no holes, that no entities exist which could properly be called holes. Perhaps you’re having a conversation with a perforational nihilist and think of a clever way to disprove their position by counterexample: you show them a donut and successfully stick your finger through the center without touching any part of the donut. “I agree that the donut is shaped in a particular way that allows you do that,” says the perforational nihilist. “Now show me the hole without the donut.” And perhaps you present them with one of those small balls of fried dough which are referred to as donut holes, but this can be no more than a joke, as it is clear to both of you that so-called donut holes are not holes proper. And you find that, indeed, you can find nothing that could be called a hole that could be presented apart from whatever thing that the hole is in, so you think that there might be something to perforational nihilism after all. Ontological nihilism just expands that understanding to the category of all objects. If you’re not willing to make that leap, and even if you don’t accept the argument of the perforational nihilist, I don’t blame you; my intent here was not to defend either position but merely to illustrate how they might be viable.
I want to note that the consensus among philosophers as to the use of the terms I’ve surveyed is inconsistent and, at times, contradictory. Some philosophers might restrict nihilism, as a term, to the description of the particular formulation which will follow presently, while describing the kind of nihilisms I’ve just described to be forms of antirealism or noncognitivism. There’s a great deal of crossover and no clear boundaries between these terms. The way I’ve construed them thus far is what makes the most sense to me based on the various formulations I’ve encountered, but if you research this topic on your own, which I always encourage, you’ll likely find some differing uses of terminology. The important thing for our purposes is the concepts themselves, rather than the terminology used to refer to them, so this need not concern us much.
When I speak of nihilism, without further specification, I am referring to that spoken against by the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s formulation of nihilism was derived from two sources: his repudiation of the teachings of his former mentor, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, and his repudiation of Christianity. I’ve seen this particular form of nihilism referred to in some sources as cosmic nihilism, and it amounts to an error theory regarding meaning and value in human life. If we ask the nihilist questions such as, “How can one live a good life?” or “How can we make our lives meaningful in the absence of objective meaning?” the nihilist replies that it is not possible to do either, either because such achievements are intrinsically unachievable or because the questions themselves are meaningless. In the former account, there might hypothetically be a good, meaningful life, but it would not be one that we could ever possibly live. In the latter account, nothing that could be called a good, meaningful life exists even in theory.
There is a sense in which Nietzsche himself was a nihilist—he described himself as such in the source that I’ll be describing presently, though that comes with some significant caveats. Whenever Nietzsche is claimed as a nihilist, it is typically the case that this is predicated on a profound misunderstanding of his beliefs and aims. Nietzsche did indeed assert that the world is absent any intrinsic or objective source of meaning and values, and was thus what we now call an existential nihilist, but he was not an error theorist with regards to these things and believed not only that it is indeed possible to find meaning and value in life regardless, but also that it is vitally important for us to do so.
The aforementioned source that I’ll be using to understand Nietzsche’s views on nihilism is a book of his writings published under the title The Will to Power, but this is a source that requires clarification and caution. The Will to Power cannot properly be described as one of Nietzsche’s books; it is, rather, collected selections from notebooks he kept from 1883 to 1888. Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, published a version of this collection in 1901, the year after her brother’s death, promoting it as his magnum opus, his final system of thought. This is a gross misrepresentation, one that is unfortunately quite typical of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche’s treatment of her brother’s work. The collected writings in The Will to Power were written for Nietzsche’s own reference rather than for other people, and contain rough ideas and sketches only. Had he known that he would not remain sane long enough to complete the book or books that he sketched in the notebooks, he likely would have preferred to see them destroyed rather than published in such an unfinished state.
I’d hate to have my own notebooks published as if they were some finished work. I often brainstorm topics by generating large numbers of relevant ideas without concern for their quality, and in doing so I generate a large quantity of complete rubbish. Sometimes an idea will strike me late at night and I’ll jot it down, only to look at it the next morning and wonder what exactly I was even thinking.
At the same time, The Will to Power includes some of Nietzsche’s most direct writing on the topic of nihilism. In section 12, Nietzsche describes nihilism as arising from three sources, three stages through which one progresses sequentially: first, one seeks intrinsic meaning in the world but comes to realize that the world lacks intrinsic meaning. Second, one seeks meaning through immersing oneself in some grand, unifying institution, but comes to realize that no such institutions exist which are up to the task. Third:
Given these two insights, that becoming has no goal and that underneath all becoming there is no grand unity in which the individual could immerse himself completely as in an element of supreme value, an escape remains: to pass sentence on this whole world of becoming as a deception and to invent a world beyond it, a true world. But as soon as man finds out how that world is fabricated solely from psychological needs, and how he has absolutely no right to it, the last form of nihilism comes into being: it includes disbelief in any metaphysical world and forbids itself any belief in a true world…. The feeling of valuelessness was reached with the realization that the overall character of existence may not be interpreted by means of the concept of “aim,” the concept of “unity,” or the concept of “truth.” Existence has no goal or end; any comprehensive unity in the plurality of events is lacking; the character of existence is not “true,” [it] is false. One simply lacks any reason for convincing oneself that there is a true world. Briefly: the categories “aim,” “unity,” [and] “being” which we used to project some value into the world—we pull out again; so the world looks valueless.
1968, p. 13
Nietzsche’s diagnosis is that our values—by which he means Christian moral values and the values of the Enlightenment in general—have themselves resulted in the devaluation of the world. Such values lead us to seek meaning where it cannot be found, and finally to give this world up entirely for some other world where it can be found, only to realize in the end that such a world exists only in our imaginations, and then we become nihilists. Nietzsche’s notes indicate that he sees this progression as both inevitable and necessary, that nihilism is something through which we must all pass in order to get to the other side (though, as a reminder, this may not have been the philosopher’s final view on the matter). “One interpretation has collapsed; but because it was considered the interpretation it now seems as if there were no meaning at all in existence, as if everything were in vain” (1968, p. 35). Nietzsche’s solution is the hammer, which is not much addressed in The Will to Power but which can be examined in the philosopher’s published books, such as Twilight of the Idols, which he wrote in 1888, his last year of sanity. Twilight of the Idols is subtitled, How One Philosophizes with a Hammer. The “idols” of which the title speaks are the old values which have led us to nihilism, and one might imagine Nietzsche strolling through a hall of such idols, casually smashing each of them in turn, but as he explains in his preface to the book, this is not how the metaphor functions; rather, the idols are “touched with a hammer as with a tuning fork” (1976, p. 466). The objective is not to smash first and ask questions later but rather to see which idols are actually hollow. And then what? To answer that question, I’ll turn to Nietzsche’s earlier work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
Can you give yourself your own evil and your own good and hang your own will over yourself as a law? Can you be your own judge and avenger of your law? Terrible it is to be alone with the judge and avenger of one’s own law. Thus is a star thrown out into the void and into the icy breath of solitude. Today you are still suffering from the many, being one: today your courage and your hopes are still whole. But the time will come when solitude will make you weary, when your pride will double up and your courage gnash its teeth. And you will cry, “I am alone!” The time will come when that which seems high to you will no longer be in sight, and that which seems low will be all-too-near; even what seems sublime to you will frighten you like a ghost. And you will cry, “All is false!”
These are the feelings which want to kill the lonely; and if they do not succeed, well, then they themselves must die. But are you capable of this—to be a murderer?
1976, p. 175
I’ve written before on how this sort of nihilism manifests in religion and beliefs in an afterlife. Such nihilism does not follow necessarily from such beliefs: one might believe in an afterlife while acknowledging the reality and value of this life. “There will be another life after this one,” such a person might say, “but this is the life that I’m living now.” But such beliefs also afford one the opportunity to “pass sentence on this whole world,” as Nietzsche put it, and live with only the next world in mind. I saw this in Nepal, where Buddhists would spend days on end circumambulating stupas and spinning prayer wheels in order to accumulate merit which might grant one a favorable rebirth in a world where enlightenment is easier to attain, rather than working to attain enlightenment in this life, as the Buddha taught. We saw this in the 9/11 attacks when Muslim terrorists destroyed over three thousand lives, including their own, in accordance with the demands of a next world in which these terrorists believed.
But nihilism is not limited to religion. Nietzsche predicted a new nihilism rising in the wake of Europe’s increasing secularism. Whether or not the nihilism of the contemporary world is exactly what Nietzsche had in mind, it remains the case that contemporary society is indeed deeply nihilistic even apart from its religious tendencies.
As an example, we can look to our handling of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. In the last episode I discussed what the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari calls imagined orders: social structures or institutions which have been socially and historically constructed but which are typically presented by cultural hegemonies as being natural and inevitable (Harari, 2015). The capitalist economy of America is one such imagined order: nothing about our essential nature as humans makes American capitalism either natural or inevitable. While American capitalism certainly has other problems, so long as we keep in mind that it is an imagined order rather than a natural one, its being an imagined order is not among those problems. But throughout the pandemic, some have argued that, in order to keep the economy going, we should simply accept the higher death count, especially among the elderly, that would result from ending the lockdowns and stay-at-home orders (examples of this can be found in Coughlin & Yoquinto, 2020). This is definitively nihilistic: human life is, in itself, a natural order, something intrinsic to the world, and its value is being negated to serve an imagined order, something which doesn’t exist beyond our intersubjective agreement that it does.
To further explore the nihilism of contemporary society, we’ll turn now to the work of postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who, in his 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation, explored the two concepts listed in its title: simulacra and simulation. To understand these concepts, consider that, at the time I wrote this section of the essay, I was listening to music, specifically an album by the Canadian funeral doom metal band Atramentus. Except I wasn’t really listening to Atramentus, I was listening to my laptop, which was simulating Atramentus by taking a stream of bits from the internet and converting them into variations in air pressure. The bits on Spotify’s servers aren’t Atramentus either; they’re copied from bits created by a music studio, and here we might at last find a connection to something real by asserting that the bits in the music studio were created as a copy of a musical performance by the band Atramentus, but that’s only partially true. It’s very unlikely that all of the musicians recorded their parts at the same time, and even if they did, there were overdubs, effects, and edits applied during the production process. The musical “performance” to which I was listening when I wrote this part of the essay never actually happened. It began not as something real but as the simulation of something real, and was then copied and recopied into simulacra which simulate a reality that never happened in the first place.
Baudrillard argued that our entire world has become like this, that our entire “reality” is not truly real but rather only simulacra and simulation, and that what is or was truly real has become a desert. In the 1999 movie The Matrix, when Morpheus shows Neo that the world he thought he was living in is a computer simulation and that the real world is an apocalyptic hellscape, Morpheus says, “Welcome to the desert of the real.” This is a paraphrase from Simulacra and Simulation, which was also the book in which Neo hid a disk of black market software at the beginning of the movie. Baudrillard’s work was a major influence on the Wachowski sisters, who wrote and directed the film, but as Baudrillard himself pointed out, The Matrix misprepresents his key ideas (though I have mention that, though the Wachowski sisters were influenced by Baudrillard, a perfectly faithful exposition of his philosophy was not their intent in the first place). In The Matrix, one can escape the simulation, as Neo did, and live in the real world. Baudrillard asserts that there is no longer any reality into which one can escape.
Baudrillard gives the example of Watergate. “Watergate,” he asserts, “is not a scandal, this is what must be said at all costs…” (1994, p. 15). Watergate’s being a scandal gives it the appearance of being an aberration within the realm of American politics, a transgression of American political values that was, once discovered, corrected, with those involved being properly punished for their crimes. If Watergate is indeed such an aberration, it means that the American political system is not, in its normal operation, corrupt and criminal. The true scandal, for Baudrillard, was the ostensible return to normalcy afterwards, the suggestion that Watergate was an aberration at all rather than merely being a visible example of the normal operations of American politics (Lane, 2000). Thus, its being a scandal was a simulation of a reality in which that sort of behavior is aberrant, a reality which does not exist, and this simulation was and continues to be copied and resimulated in various forms.
In 1991, during the Gulf War, fought between Kuwait, the United States, and other allied states on one side and Iraq on the other, Baudrillard published a series of essays in which he argued that the Gulf War was not actually taking place (while it was ongoing) and that, after it had ended, that it had not taken place. This is a radical thesis for which Baudrillard received a great deal of misplaced criticism, as he was not arguing that there was never a military conflict between these nations in 1991. His intent, rather, is that those events, as they actually occured, are not what we refer to as “The Gulf War,” and that what we refer to as “The Gulf War” is not something that ever actually happened. When I think of the Gulf War, I think of the images and footage I saw on CNN during their extensive live coverage, but as Paul Patton describes in his introduction to his translation of Baudrillard’s essays, much of this coverage was misrepresented or otherwise manipulated for strategic reasons, as the Iraqi forces were also watching CNN for intelligence purposes, and as the war required American popular support which could be helped or hindered by media representation (in Baudrillard, 1995). In general, CNN depicted the war as an exciting narrative of conflict, danger, and good versus evil. In reality, the conflict, such as it was, was largely characterized by an extensive and indiscriminate bombing campaign which resulted in massive military and civilian casualties, apocalyptic environmental damage, a refugee crisis, and the total economic collapse of the country (Salvage, 2002).
As I’ve mentioned on the show before, I myself was a propagandist for the U.S. Army during the second Iraq war. In one of the more surreal moments of my life, during a resupply mission to a larger base than the one at which I was stationed, I found myself with the rare respite of downtime. I entered a recreational area where one could play ping pong or various board games or watch television, which was, at that particular moment, playing a report on the war from a cable news network. The report concerned the Iraqi civilian attitude towards the occupying military forces, which the anchor reported was largely favorable. As evidence to this, the channel showed pictures of Arabic-language newspapers and described articles within them that praised the coalition forces. I recognized one of the newspapers, and actually the specific issue that they had pictured. My team had paid a local reporter to submit exactly such an article to that newspaper under his name. When the issue came out, we purchased a copy so that we could show it to our translator to confirm that it said what we wanted it to say. I had written the article myself.
When we can no longer negotiate between the real and the simulated, the value of the real first diminishes and then disappears entirely.
The last source I’d like to mention before concluding is the 2019 book Nihilism by philosopher Nolan Gertz. I really can’t recommend Gertz’s book strongly enough for those who have enjoyed this episode and would like to delve further into the topic. One, it’s just a very well-written, engaging, and accessible philosophy text; two, his survey of the concept is exhaustive and insightful and even provides some interesting general insights into the historical progression of Western philosophy.
“[N]ihilism,” according to Gertz, “is about evading reality rather than confronting it, about believing in other worlds rather than accepting this one, and about trying to make ourselves feel powerful rather than admitting our own weaknesses” (p. 73). In chapter 3, Gertz examines three traits that are often associated with nihilism—pessimism, cynicism, and apathy—and asserts that these associations are mistaken, that it is actually optimism, idealism, and sympathy that are more likely to be associated with nihilism. This is not to say that the antinihilist always is or should strive to be pessimistic, cynical, or apathetic, but rather that these traits do more to reveal the nihilism of others than to indicate the nihilism of those whom these traits describe.
My favorite section in Gertz’s book concerns nihilism as it exists “at work,” as he puts it: nihilism as it exists in our places of work, in our systems of “work,” and in the products we purchase.
I’ve recently become obsessed with product packaging, especially the packaging of food goods, which I find to be especially indicative of the nihilism present in contemporary capitalist society. A bag of potato chips, for example, will typically have a block of text somewhere on the back of the bag which talks about the transcendent, transformative experience that awaits me when I purchase the bag, open it, and start popping those fried potato slices into my mouth. Some time in the last month my partner purchased a bag of Kroger brand corn chips—basically a generic version of the Frito. The text on the back reads (in all capital letters without punctuation): “This crunchy chip is an all American. The proud snack of past, present, and future generations. When you see a bag in your local grocery, show the proper respect.” And a little further down, beneath an image in which three of the chips have been arranged so as to resemble a flag: “Stand. Salute. Crunch.” As a veteran, I might be somewhat irked at the suggestion that a potato chip should be saluted as if it were the American flag, but actually I find the comparison rather apt. The American flag is a symbol with which certain words are associated: valor, purity, justice, freedom, equality. But those are just words. That America is, in reality, unequal, unfree, unjust, impure, and cowardly, does little to dissuade the average American against revering the flag as an object whose significance approaches the religious. We see this in the dispute over American football players taking a knee during the national anthem to protest state violence against Black Americans and Americans of color. The American flag represents actual freedom about as much as does the aforementioned bag of chips, and I think the target of reverence for both chips and flag is, in actuality, the same: nothing at all.
In 2017, the football team the Seattle Seahawks released a statement regarding the practice of taking a knee which I’ll quote in full:
As a team, we have decided we will not participate in the national anthem. We will not stand for the injustice that has plagued people of color in this country. Out of love for our country and in honor of the sacrifices made on our behalf, we unite to oppose those that would deny our most basic freedoms. We remain committed in continuing to work towards equality and justice for all.
Ruiz, 2017, emphasis added
Commenting on the protests in a rally in Alabama, President Trump stated: “Wouldn’t you love to see these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out. He’s fired. He’s fired!’” (NFL Player Protests Sweep League after President Donald Trump’s Hostile Remarks, 2017, censorship removed). The President of the United States literally threatened the livelihoods of those who refused to worship at the church of nothing.
We find the messaging on the bag of chips innocuous because we know no one really believes it. A marketing team did research on which keywords were most likely to stimulate purchasing behaviors in their targeting demographic. Then they sent those keywords to a content writing team which developed the blurb by committee. Gertz comments on the nihilism of advanced industrial capitalism, saying:
…[B]ecause these goods and services are produced by laborers like us, laborers who are themselves working not for the sake of work but for the sake of money, then these goods and services have also lost the meaning they once had. Goods are mass produced and thus no longer provide any way to identify the individuality of their maker. Services may still be provided with a smile, but not because they still represent a genuine human interaction, but because service industry workers are trained by bosses to smile to avoid being fired, and trained by customers to smile to earn a tip.
p. 132
That Kroger brand corn chips are “the proud snack of past, present, and future generations” is likely not something that anybody working at Kroger actually believes, and I think most of the chip-purchasing public is aware of this. But this sort of advertising discourse, which is thoroughly vacuous in every aspect, constitutes a substantial quantity of the discourse that most Americans encounter on a day-to-day basis. Maybe some people buy into it. I don’t know. My experience shopping at Wal-Marts in rural mid-Western America leads me to believe that that’s certainly possible. People are still buying in to the mythology of the American flag, after all.
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Works Cited or Referenced
Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation. University of Michigan Press.
Baudrillard, J. (1995). The Gulf War did not take place. Indiana University Press.
Coughlin, J., & Yoquinto, L. B. (2020, April 13). Perspective | Many parts of America have already decided to sacrifice the elderly. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/13/many-parts-america-have-already-decided-sacrifice-elderly/
Gertz, N. (2019). Nihilism. MIT Press.
Harari, Y. N. (2015). Sapiens: A brief history of humankind (First U.S. edition). Harper.
Lane, R. J. (2000). Jean Baudrillard. Routledge.
NFL player protests sweep league after President Donald Trump’s hostile remarks. (2017, September). USA TODAY. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2017/09/24/donald-trump-nfl-player-protests-national-anthem-week-3-response/697609001/
Nietzsche, F. (1968). The Will to Power (W. Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). Vintage Books.
Nietzsche, F. W. (1976). The portable Nietzsche. Penguin Books.
Ruiz, S. (2017, September). Seahawks make refreshing statement with protest. USA TODAY. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ftw/2017/09/24/the-seahawks-transparent-reasoning-for-skipping-the-national-anthem-was-sorely-needed/105964394/
Salvage, J. (2002). Collateral Damage: The Health and Environmental Costs of the War on Iraq. Medact. https://www.ippnw.org/pdf/medact-iraq-2002.pdf
Turner, J. (2011). Ontological Nihilism. In Oxford Studies in Metaphysics: Volume 6 (Vol. 6). Oxford University Press.
Wachowski, L., & Wachowski, L. (1999). The Matrix [Action, Sci-Fi]. Warner Bros., Village Roadshow Pictures, Groucho Film Partnership.