A Defence of Nihilism, by James Tartaglia and Tracy Llanera
🖤🤔😬🤷🖤
What is nihilism, why is it important, why do people fear it or attack it, and how can we set them straight? This is more or less the impetus for philosophers and self-identified nihilists James Tartaglia and Tracy Llanera’s recent work, “A Defence of Nihilism” (2021). This book could also be seen as a response to Nolan Gertz’s 2019 work, “Nihilism”, reviewed here.
To Tartaglia and Llanera, nihilism is nothing more than the belief that life is meaningless — that there’s no cosmic purpose, no creator, no master plan. As they spell out on the first page:
We are just people going in and out of rooms, sending electronic messages, falling in love, eating apples, signing nuclear non-proliferation treaties, and so on. All these things go on, some of them are really important to us, but they don’t add up to anything in the cosmic scheme of things, for the simple reason that there isn’t a cosmic scheme of things.
They admit that the term nihilism is, in practice, equivocal — that it’s a “strong contender for the most ambiguous word in philosophy, a true nothing-word” — that different people, both past and present, use it in different ways, for different purposes, with different emphases, different meanings, and different valuations (although, mostly, with the valuation of something in the ballpark of “bad”). They see it as high-time to put all of the confusion to rest, to make the equivocal univocal, and in doing so, dispel all the unwarranted fear around it. So far so good.
Starting from the definition they have chosen, the authors then proceed to explain why concern about nihilism is unwarranted — in particular, the concern that nihilism will lead to destruction (or self-destruction), a concern that many noted thinkers over the past two hundred and fifty years have forewarned against. The authors point out that the destructive effects don’t follow from the nihilistic cause in any rational way, which is an entirely reasonable argument to make, so long as you overlook two points: first, people aren’t rational; and second, the prognosticators of nihilistic doom did not all agree on what they meant by nihilism in the first place. To some it was a rejection of monotheism while others saw it as a rejection of all meaning; some found it in the Kantian rejection of our access to the thing-in-itself, while still others saw it (and continue to see it) in the increasingly manipulative and objective framing of the world (i.e., scientism). So although Tartaglia and Llanera do a fantastic job of explaining why doom is not a logical consequence of nihilism as they have defined it, they tend to act is if this should take all of the air out of the nihilism-is-doom balloon, while skating over over the fact that the balloon was filled not by a single definition but by a long, confusing, equivocal, and even contradictory process involving many thinkers, many definitions, and many concerns.
After this discursion, Tartaglia and Llanera proceed to justify their chosen definition by examining the history of the concept. Instead of the living-in-denial-of-the-human-condition form of nihilism that Gertz traces from the Socratic caves of the past to the “Netflix-and-chill” of the present, Tartaglia and Llanera take the word at face value — starting with its introduction by a church deacon in the early 1700s, through its increasing usage in the late 1700s against the new metaphysical inquiries and systems from the likes of Spinoza, Kant, and Fichte, then being later appropriated and repurposed by Russian movements for freedom in the mid 1800s, only to be re-established, yet further confused, by Nietzsche in the late 1800s, until finally ending with Heidegger’s reading of nihilism as a historical process that began with Plato’s metaphysics and culminating in Nietzsche as “the last metaphysician.” Although it’s not entirely clear throughout this discussion why the authors think that their chosen definition is the best candidate in light of this historical morass, their historical analysis and illumination is rich nonetheless, and a worthy rejoinder to Gertz’s own attempts at historical justification. At the very least, their attempts to appeal to history feel no more (and no less) willful than Gertz’s.
The authors then turn to what is, at first appearances, an attempt to disambiguate nihilism from its close cousin, pessimism: “The nihilist view that there’s no meaning of life — none whatsoever — should obviously not be confused with the view that there’s an awful, terrible meaning of life.” However, this project of disambiguation quickly morphs into a rather passionate screed against pessimism — and like most passionate appeals, the authors seem to let their passions get the better of them. They misconstrue the arguments of various pessimists while engaging in ad-hominen attacks against their characters. Schopenhauer takes the brunt of their nihilistic nay-saying, but David Benatar doesn’t fair much better. In the former, they halfheartedly convey Schopenhauer’s metaphysics while casting aspersions on his relationship with his mother and engaging in association-fallacy arguments based on his misogyny. In the latter, they completely ignore Benatar’s primary arguments around axiological asymmetry, and instead present one of his secondary arguments — the “argument from philanthropy” — as if it were his primary argument. (As for his other secondary argument — his “argument from misanthropy” — they don’t even mention it). In all of this, their mocking, tongue-in-cheek tone around all-things-pessimism seems to betray an underlying disposition that inadvertently gives credence not to their own definition of nihilism but to the Gertzian definition they want to supplant (namely, that nihilism is a denial of reality through a willful return to childlike naivete). That being said, their writing is also crisp, clear, and often hilarious, so I’m certainly not disappointed in their style, even if I would have liked to see them more honestly and thoroughly engage with the discourse.
After getting pessimism off their chest, the authors turn to modern calls by post-Heideggerian philosophers to reclaim a sense of the sacred in modern life as a way to combat the ill effects of nihilism (and in particular, to combat the modern lack of humility, the intellectual, moral, and spiritual rigidity so often on display in the modern world). Tartaglia and Llanera point out that post-Heideggarian philosophers have both misunderstood the root cause of these modern character flaws, as well as the solution. They posit, in conjunction with Richard Rorty, that modern man is afflicted not by nihilism, but by egotism, and they take up Rorty’s call for a global project of “self-enlargement” — which, in essence, they see as a project of coming into contact with more and more people, cultures, and ideas. The level of un-self-aware utopian thinking here is fairly impressive. To see these calls for self-enlargment without a corresponding examination of the global-historical process of globalization — a process that is leading to exactly the social mixing called for by Rorty, with the exact opposite effects of what he predicted — is an unfortunate omission. I am reminded of Gertz’s definition of nihilism once again: “The nihilist does not despair like the pessimist, detest like the cynic, nor detach like the apathetic individual. Nihilists can be optimistic, idealistic, and sympathetic, as their aim in life is to be happy, to be as happy and carefree as they were when they were children, as happy and carefree as they were before they discovered that life lacked the meaning they thought they’d find in it when they grew up.”
Tartaglia and Llanera end their all-too-short work by revisiting their calls for a reappraisal of nihilism and its (supposedly) deleterious effects:
We don’t think the meaning of life is an idea that should be retained in the transition from a religious to an atheistic context. We think it does more harm than good. Nihilists don’t think there is a meaning of life, and there’s no better way to dispel an idea about something than to deny that the ‘something’ exists. Cultivating rational scepticism about the existence of witchcraft is what dealt the greatest blow to the pernicious usage of that idea, an idea which led to women being drowned and burned.
They go on to reiterate their desire for humans (and especially pessimists) to stop giving any appraisal to life. To them, if life has no meaning, then any attempt to judge life is confused and meaningless in turn. In short: watch your telly; laugh and be merry; or don’t, it’s your choice — but whatever you do, don’t try to induce anything about your life, or the human condition, as a whole. But in all of this, they seem to confuse the difference between “cosmic purpose” and meaning. Just because something has no purpose or no creator does not entail that it has no meaning. Even that which has happened by accident, or through blind, evolutionary forces, can have a meaning, and can be judged. In fact, the paradox of the human condition — the fact that we are meaning-beings confronted with the likelihood of a meaningless universe, that we are beings forever driven by purpose for no purpose whatsoever — is a deeply meaningful truth. It matters that nothing matters.
