What is nihilism? It’s a simple question with a complex answer that Nolen Gertz expertly breaks down in this concise, 200 page introduction.
To some, nihilism is merely a (derogatory) term to be used against anyone who claims that life is meaningless. To others, it refers to destructive (“an-nihil-ating”) political movements. Today, some see nihilism in the increasingly dehumanizing scientism and technologism of the present age, while others see it in the emptiness of transactional consumerism. In addition, self-righteous individuals often accuse others of nihilism — although they are often accused of the same in turn. Taken together, this whole state of affairs can make it seem as if anything and everything (and therefore nothing) can be nihilistic.
In fact, although the term nihilism only appeared in the 18th century, the phenomenon to which the term applies dates back much farther, according to Gertz:
Thanks to Plato, we know that Socrates engaged with nihilism, comparing the unexamined (read: nihilistic) lives of his fellow Athenians to prisoners in a cave, mistaking shadows for reality. For Socrates, the only way out was through radical questioning and enlightenment.
René Descartes, disillusioned by the common falsehoods of his time, interrogated the foundations of knowledge — and came up empty-handed. But he also found that he struggled to adjust his disposition to this abyss, because he found it so troubling. Reflecting on how casually he would slide back into his old habits and beliefs, he admitted that the illusion was more “pleasant” than the examined life. To Descartes, the only way to escape from the seductions of his former illusions — in other words, the seductions of nihilism — was through “scientific certainty”, achieved by a combination of “self-restraint and rule-following”.
David Hume found in nihilism a temporary escape from the melancholy engendered by his brutally honest skepticism of life and all of its supposed truths and certainties. However, unlike Descartes and Socrates, Hume saw no escape from nihilism, nor any need to escape from it. For Hume, nihilistic escapism was a necessary palliative to the psychological effects of skepticism.
It was Hume’s epistemological skepticism that Immanuel Kant admits woke him from his “dogmatic slumber”, challenging him to erect knowledge on a new foundation of certainty. But in an ironic twist, Kant’s solution to Hume’s skepticism led Kant’s critics to refer to Kant as “nihilistic” (one of the first recorded usages of the term). Kant claimed that we can have knowledge of universal, “a priori” truths independent of experience through reason — but the cost was “having to accept the idea that experience is shaped by us rather than given to us.” Since Kant held that this meant that we could have no access to to the thing-in-itself — that is, to what’s real, what exists beyond mere appearance — his critics accused his philosophy as nihilistic, as reducing human experience to mere shadow, trapping us back in Socrates’ cave.
Of all philosophers, however, none is more associated with nihilism than Nietzsche. Through both his private and public writings, Nietzsche offered far-ranging (and sometimes contradictory) analyses of nihilism. He was both an opponent of nihilism, and a proponent of nihilism — though what he meant in all of this has taken over a century to crystallize through generations of scholarship. The key to deciphering Nietzsche’s thoughts on nihilism lies in one of his final published works: On the Genealogy of Morals. In it, he argues that not only was the dominant Christian morality of his day “one morality among many possible conflicting moralities”, but that it, and morality in general, was dangerous, “hostile to life” — a nihilistic suppression and rejection of life. His advocacy for nihilism was then seen as a way to exacerbate nihilism to the point of self-destruction — to fight fire with fire, in order to liberate mankind from the tyranny of morality that suppresses man’s true nature.
Although all of the preceding philosophers were concerned with nihilism, seeing it as either as a tendency to combat, or as an unfortunate yet necessary palliative, they were also all accused of promoting nihilism in turn — complicating efforts to disentangle nihilism from self-righteous argumentation. Even worse, those who label others as “nihilistic” often conflate nihilism with superficially similar yet fundamentally different philosophical dispositions: pessimism, cynicism, skepticism, and apathy. In order to disentangle this mess, we can start with the following provisional definition. When philosophers throughout the ages have engaged with nihilism, the through-line connecting all of their elucidations of the concept comes back to this: to be “nihilistic” is to willfully turn your back on reality — to evade any attempt to confront the human condition, to confront what it is to be a finite creature capable of knowing that you are a finite creature. As Gertz summarizes:
Nihilism is not merely the denial that life is inherently meaningful, as nihilism can instead be seen as a particular way of responding to the anxiety caused by the discovery of life’s inherent meaninglessness. 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.
With this definition, Gertz elaborates the ways nihilists live in denial:
Nihilists deny death (as it happens, a concept I just reviewed here),
Nihilists deny the death of meaning (i.e., the post-modernist discoveries of empty foundations)
Nihilists deny the death of the meaning of childhood (i.e., they deny the reality of ambiguity)
And through these denials, Gertz goes on to find and illuminate, at length, nihilism in the home, in our schools, in our workplaces, and in our political systems. In a sense, Gertz finds nihilism to be pervasive in the modern world not because people claim that life is meaningless, but because they claim that it isn’t.
The book ends with a sort of “now what?” section titled “What is the Future of Nihilism?” Is there a solution to nihilism, a way of overcoming it? And if so, is the solution to be found in the person (as Socrates, Descartes, and Nietzche would have it), or in the system (as existentialist Hannah Arendt argued)? Nolen ends with an examination of the role of technology in society, weaving together the works of the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the sociologist Jacques Ellul, and finds in technology both the cause of, and the (potential) solution to, the problem of nihilism:
Technologies may not be creating new values, but they are creating new forms of nihilism. As Nietzsche suggested, it possible that we could become so nihilistic, that we could become so destructive, that we could destroy even our nihilistic values and the nihilistic systems that sustain them. So to end on a hopeful note, if the nihilism generated by technological progress doesn’t make us too self-destructive, then perhaps instead it will make us just destructive enough to force us to finally become creative. In other words, if nihilism doesn’t kill us, it might make us stronger.
In these, the book’s concluding sections, Gertz is at his weakest. Although the quality of writing and scholarship doesn’t fall, Gertz seems at times to become almost as in-denial about the reality of the human condition as the nihilists he has just expertly torn apart. After outlining several millennia of pervasive nihilism in people and cultures all over the world, and after highlighting how even some of the greatest minds in humanity succumbed to nihilism, he veers quite close to Utopian thinking around the possibilities for its elimination. Perhaps, like Descartes, like Hume, like all of us, really, Gertz can only bear so much reality.
