Navigating Past Nihilism

[mgc1961]

“Nihilism stands at the door,” wrote Nietzsche. “Whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?” The year was 1885 or 1886, and Nietzsche was writing in a notebook whose contents were not intended for publication. The discussion of nihilism ─ the sense that it is no longer obvious what our most fundamental commitments are, or what matters in a life of distinction and worth, the sense that the world is an abyss of meaning rather than its God-given preserve ─ finds no sustained treatment in the works that Nietzsche prepared for publication during his lifetime. But a few years earlier, in 1882, the German philosopher had already published a possible answer to the question of nihilism’s ultimate source. “God is dead,” Nietzsche wrote in a famous passage from “The Gay Science.” “God remains dead. And we have killed him.”

There is much debate about the meaning of Nietzsche’s famous claim, and I will not attempt to settle that scholarly dispute here. But at least one of the things that Nietzsche could have meant is that the social role that the Judeo-Christian God plays in our culture is radically different from the one he has traditionally played in prior epochs of the West. For it used to be the case in the European Middle Ages for example ─ that the mainstream of society was grounded so firmly in its Christian beliefs that someone who did not share those beliefs could therefore not be taken seriously as living an even potentially admirable life. Indeed, a life outside the Church was not only execrable but condemnable, and in certain periods of European history it invited a close encounter with a burning pyre.

Whatever role religion plays in our society today, it is not this one. For today’s religious believers feel strong social pressure to admit that someone who doesn’t share their religious belief might nevertheless be living a life worthy of their admiration. That is not to say that every religious believer accepts this constraint. But to the extent that they do not, then society now rightly condemns them as dangerous religious fanatics rather than sanctioning them as scions of the Church or mosque. God is dead, therefore, in a very particular sense. He no longer plays his traditional social role of organizing us around a commitment to a single right way to live. Nihilism is one state a culture may reach when it no longer has a unique and agreed upon social ground.

Cross posted from Editorials/Other articles. http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x574018

On edit, here's the original link: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/navigating-past-nihilism/?hp

[DonCoquixote]

1. OK

I tend to have atheists yell at me a lot, but this is one case where I have to make a point.

The old ways of western religion needed to change or end. Truth be told, in all it's phases, the Abraham religions are TOXIC. The Jews, Christians AND the Muslims have turned their faith into an excuse to be psychopathic children. If the three faiths that came out of Jerusalem were taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism, the world would be peaceful.

However, the solution to the death of the old ways did NOT have to become Nihilism. The problem was that many people were too damn lazy to think of a moral system to replace the old, as well as a way to feel connected to something besides the material world. Yes, a few people tried to make Gaia into some sort of deity, but nature can turn on you no matter how much you love her. It is hard to relate to something that frankly, has no desire to relate to you. Some tried to make Marxist myth a new paradigm: in the hands of Trotsky, it might have worked, but Mao and Stalin have soured that pool. Otherwise, many people said "so what?" The so what is that when people realize they are going to die, they do not want to say "so what?" even the foxhole atheist.

[MineralMan]

2. Mankind creates its own gods. That's why mankind can kill

them off. That's what Nietzsche meant. Deities are the creations of humans - not the reverse. Whence the Greek, Roman, and Nordic deities? It is that simple. Old Yahweh is next to go.

Atheists are not nihilists. They simply recognize that life is what it is. We're born. We live for a variable amount of time. We die. That is it. Our impact during our lives determines how our lives affect others, and can survive our deaths. That is the only "immortality" we have, but it's a very important thing. I have tended to think of religionists as the real nihilists.

Please see my signature line.

[ZombieHorde]

3. Children starve while we spend billions on senseless wars.

We lock up stoners and acid heads while torturers go free.

People continue to purchase country music.

Would a nihilistic planet really look any worse? I don't think so.

[cleanhippie]

4. "people continue to purchase country music"....

ZH, this was perhaps your BEST. POST. EVER. Well done, my man, well done!





PS- you owe me a keyboard for the country music line.

[Jim__]

5. Do our problems, then, stem from the fact that we have not become …

… a highly cultured and poetical nation?

Melville himself seems to have recognized that the presence of many gods — many distinct and incommensurate good ways of life — was a possibility our own American culture could and should be aiming at. The death of God therefore, in Melville’s inspiring picture, leads not to a culture overtaken by meaninglessness but to a culture directed by a rich sense for many new possible and incommensurate meanings. Such a nation would have to be “highly cultured and poetical,” according to Melville. It would have to take seriously, in other words, its sense of itself as having grown out of a rich history that needs to be preserved and celebrated, but also a history that needs to be re-appropriated for an even richer future. Indeed, Melville’s own novel could be the founding text for such a culture. Though the details of that story will have to wait for another day, I can at least leave you with Melville’s own cryptic, but inspirational comment on this possibility. “If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation,” he writes:

Shall lure back to their birthright, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; on the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove’s high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it.

And is our great risk that we may raise the Sperm Whale to Jove’s high seat?

[ladjf]

6. Judeo-Christian and Islamic religious thought and practices

have glorified superstitious thinking processes and have punished objective thinking and by so doing are perhaps the leading cause of the decline of life quality on Earth.