If I should cast off this tattered coat,
And go free into the mighty sky;
If I should find nothing there
But a vast blue,
Echoless, ignorant—
What then?
THE BLACK RIDERS AND OTHER LINES
NIHILISM IS MORE a feeling than a philosophy, more a solitary stance before the universe than a worldview. Strictly speaking, nihilism is a denial of any philosophy or worldview—a denial of the possibility of knowledge, a denial that anything is valuable. If it proceeds to the absolute denial of everything, it even denies the reality of existence itself. In other words, nihilism is the negation of everything—knowledge, ethics, beauty, reality. In nihilism no statement has validity; nothing has meaning. Everything is gratuitous, de trop—that is, just there.
Those who have been untouched by the feelings of despair, anxiety, and ennui associated with nihilism may find it hard to imagine that nihilism could be a seriously held orientation of the heart. But it is, and it is well for everyone who wants to understand the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to experience, if only vicariously, something of nihilism as a stance toward human existence.
Modern art galleries are full of its products—if one can speak of something (art objects) coming from nothing (artists who, if they exist, deny the ultimate value of their existence). As we shall see later, no art is ultimately nihilistic, but some art attempts to embody many of nihilism’s characteristics. Marcel Duchamp’s ordinary urinal purchased on the common market, signed with a fictional name, and labeled Fountain will do for a start. Samuel Beckett’s plays, notably End Game and Waiting for Godot, are prime examples in drama. But Beckett’s nihilistic art perhaps reached its climax in Breath, a thirty-five-second play that has no human actors. The props consist of a pile of rubbish on the stage, lit by a light that begins dim, brightens (but never fully), and then recedes And this computer, which was called the Earth, was so large that it was frequently mistaken for a planet—especially by the strange apelike beings who roamed its surface, totally unaware that they were simply part of a gigantic computer program.to dimness. There are no words, only a “recorded” cry opening the play, an inhaled breath, an exhaled breath, and an identical “recorded” cry closing the play. For Beckett life is such a “breath.”
Douglas Adams’s cosmic science-fiction novels picture the situation for those who seek an answer to human meaning in computer science. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe and Everything; and So Long and Thanks for All the Fish Adams tells the story of the universe from the point of view of four time travelers who hitchhike back and forth across intergalactic time and space, from creation in the Big Bang to the final destruction of the universe.1 During the course of this history a race of hyperintelligent, pandimensional beings (mice, actually) build a giant computer (“the size of a small city”) to answer “The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything.” This computer, which they call Deep Thought, spends seven and a half million years on the calculation.2
For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact Forty-two—and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was.
And this is very odd, because without that fairly simple and obvious piece of knowledge, nothing that ever happened on the Earth could possibly make the slightest bit of sense. Sadly, however, just before the critical moment of read-out, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished by the Vogons to make way—so they claimed—for a new hyperspace bypass, and so all hope of discovering a meaning for life was lost for ever. Or so it would seem.3
By the end of the second novel, the time travelers discover that the “question itself” (the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything) is “What is six times nine?”4 So, they discover, both the question and the answer are inane. Not only is forty-two a meaningless answer to the question on a human level (the level of purpose and meaning), it is bad mathematics. The most rational discipline in the university has been reduced to absurdity.
By the end of the third novel, we have an explanation for why the question and the answer do not seem to fit each other. Prak, the character who is supposed to know the ultimate, says this: “I’m afraid . . . that the Question and the Answer are mutually exclusive. Knowledge of one logically precludes knowledge of the other. It is impossible that both can ever be known about the same Universe.”5 (Physics students will detect here a play on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, where the position and momentum of an electron can each be known, but not with precision at the same time.)
So we can know the Answers—like forty-two—which don’t mean anything without the Questions. Or we can have the Questions (which give direction to our quest). But we can’t have both. That is, we cannot satisfy our longing for ultimate meaning. To read Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Eugène Ionesco, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and more recently, Douglas Adams is to begin to feel—if one does not already in our depressing age—the pangs of human emptiness, of life that is without value, without purpose, without meaning.6
But how does one get from naturalism to nihilism? Wasn’t naturalism the enlightened readout of the assured results of science and open intellectual inquiry? As a worldview, did it not account for human beings, their uniqueness among the things of the cosmos? Did it not show human dignity and value? As the highest of creation, the only self-conscious, self-determined beings in the universe, men and women are rulers of all, free to value what they will, free even to control the future of their own evolution. What more could one wish?
Most naturalists are satisfied to end their inquiry right here. They do in fact wish for no more. For them there is no route to nihilism.7
But for a growing number of people the results of reason are not so assured, the closed universe is confining, the notion of death as extinction is psychologically disturbing, our position as the highest in creation is seen either as an alienation from the universe or as a union with it such that we are no more valuable than a pebble on the beach. In fact, pebbles “live” longer! What bridges led from a naturalism that affirms the value of human life to a naturalism that does not? Just how did nihilism come about?
Nihilism came about not because theists and deists picked away at naturalism from the outside. Nihilism is the natural child of naturalism.
THE FIRST BRIDGE: NECESSITY AND CHANCE
The first and most basic reason for nihilism is found in the direct, logical implications of naturalism’s primary propositions. Notice what happens to the concept of human nature when one takes seriously the notions that (1) matter is all there is and it is eternal, and (2) the cosmos operates with a uniformity of cause and effect in a closed system. These mean that a human being is a part of the system. Though they may not understand the implications for human freedom, naturalists agree, as we saw in proposition 3 of chapter four: Human beings are complex machines whose personality is a function of highly complex chemical and physical properties not yet understood. Nietzsche, however, bites the bullet and recognizes the loss to human dignity: Human beings are simply deluded about having free will.
Still many naturalists try to hold on to human freedom within the closed system. Their argument goes like this. Every event in the universe is caused by a previous state of affairs, including each person’s genetic makeup, environmental situation, and even the person’s wants and desires. But each person is free to express those wants and desires. If I want a sandwich and a deli is around the corner, I can choose to have a sandwich. If I want to steal the sandwich when the owner isn’t looking, I can do that. Nothing constrains my choice. My actions are self-determined.
Thus human beings who are obviously self-conscious and, it would appear, self-determined can act significantly and be held responsible for their actions. I can be arrested for stealing the sandwich and reasonably required to pay the penalty.
But are things so simple? Many think not. The issue of human freedom goes deeper than these naturalists see. To be sure I can do anything I want, but what I want is the result of past states of affairs over which ultimately I had no control. I did not freely select my particular genetic makeup or my original family environment. By the time I asked whether I was free to act freely, I was so molded by nature and nurture that the very fact that the question occurred to me was determined. That is, my self itself was determined by outside forces. I can indeed ask such questions, I can act according to my wants and desires, and I can appear to myself to be free, but it is appearance only. Nietzsche is right: “the acting man’s delusion about himself, his assumption that free will exists, is also part of the calculating mechanism.”
If one were omniscient, one would be able to calculate each individual [human] action in advance, each step in the progress of knowledge, each error, each act of malice. To be sure, the acting man is caught in his illusion of volition; if the wheel of the world were to stand still for a moment and an omniscient calculating mind were there to take advantage of this interruption, he would be able to tell into the farthest future of each being and describe every rut that wheel will roll upon. The acting man’s delusion about himself, his assumption that free will exists, is also part of the calculating mechanism.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
The problem is that if the universe is truly closed, then its activity can be governed only from within. Any force that acts to change the cosmos on whatever level (microcosmic, human, macrocosmic) is a part of the cosmos. There would thus seem to be only one explanation for change: the present state of affairs must govern the future state. In other words, the present must cause the future, which in turn must cause the next future, and so on.
The objection that in an Einsteinian universe of time-relativity simultaneity is impossible to define and causal links are impossible to prove is beside the point. We are not talking here about how the events are linked together, only noting that they are linked. Events occur because other events have occurred. All activity in the universe is connected this way. We cannot, perhaps, know what the links are, but the premise of a closed universe forces us to conclude that they must exist.
Moreover, there is evidence that such links exist, for patterns of events are perceivable, and some events can be predicted from the standpoint of earth time with almost absolute precision, for example, precisely when and where the next eclipse will take place. For every eclipse in the next fifteen centuries the exact shadow can be predicted and tracked in space and time across the earth. Most events cannot be so predicted, but the presumption is that that is because all the variables and their interrelations are not known. Some events are more predictable than others, but none is uncertain. Each event must come to be.
In a closed universe the possibility that some things need not be, that others are possible, is not possible. For the only way change can come is by a force moving to make that change, and the only way that force can come is if it is moved by another force, ad infinitum. There is no break in this chain, from eternity past to eternity future, forever and ever, amen.
To the ordinary person determinism does not appear to be the case. We generally perceive ourselves as free agents. But our perception is an illusion. We just do not know what “caused” us to decide. Something did, of course, but we feel it was our free choice. Such perceived freedom—if one does not think much about its implications—is quite sufficient, at least according to some.8
In a closed universe, in other words, freedom must be a determinacy unrecognized, and for those who work out its implications, this is not enough to allow for self-determinacy or moral responsibility. For if I robbed a bank, that would ultimately be due to inexorable (though unperceived) forces triggering my decisions in such a way that I could no longer consider these decisions mine. If these decisions are not mine, I cannot be held responsible. And such would be the case for every act of every person.
A human being is thus a mere piece of machinery, a toy—complicated, very complicated, but a toy of impersonal cosmic forces. A person’s self-consciousness is only an epiphenomenon; it is just part of the machinery looking at itself. But consciousness is only part of the machinery; there is no “self” apart from the machinery. There is no “ego” that can stand over against the system and manipulate it at its own will. Its “will” is the will of the cosmos. In this picture, by the way, we have a rather good description of human beings as seen by behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner. To change people, says Skinner, change their environment, the contingencies under which they act, the forces acting on them. A person must respond in kind, for in Skinner’s view every person is only a reactor: “A person does not act on the world, the world acts on him.”9
The nihilists follow this argument, which can now be stated briefly: Human beings are conscious machines without the ability to affect their own destiny or do anything significant; therefore, human beings as valuable beings are dead. Their life is Beckett’s “breath,” not the life God “breathed” into the first person in the Garden (Genesis 2:7).
But perhaps the course of my argument has moved too fast. Have I missed something? Some naturalists would certainly say so. They would say that I went wrong when I said that the only explanation for change is the continuity of cause and effect. Jacques Monod, for example, attributes all basic change—certainly the appearance of anything genuinely new—to chance. And naturalists admit that new things have come into being by the uncountable trillions: every step on the evolutionary scale from hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and so forth in free association to the formation of complex amino acids and other basic building blocks of life. At every turn—and these are beyond count—chance introduced the new thing. Then necessity, or what Monod calls “the machinery of invariance,” took over and duplicated the chance-produced pattern. Slowly over eons of time through the cooperation of chance and necessity, cellular life, multicellular life, the plant and animal kingdoms, and human beings emerged.10 So chance is offered as the trigger for humanity’s emergence.
But what is chance? Either chance is the inexorable proclivity of reality to happen as it does, appearing to be chance because we do not know the reason for what happens (making chance another name for our ignorance of the forces of determinism), or it is absolutely irrational.11 In the first case, chance is just unknown determinism and not freedom at all. In the second case, chance is not an explanation but the absence of an explanation.12 An event occurs. No cause can be assigned. It is a chance event. Not only might such an event have not happened, it could never have been expected to happen. So while chance produces the appearance of freedom, it actually introduces absurdity. Chance is causeless, purposeless, directionless.13 It is sudden givenness—gratuity incarnated in time and space.
But as Monod says, it introduced into time and space a push in a new direction. A chance event is causeless, but it itself is a cause and is now an integral part of the closed universe. Chance opens the universe not to reason, meaning, and purpose but to absurdity. Suddenly we don’t know where we are. We are no longer a flower in the seamless fabric of the universe, but a chance wart on the smooth skin of the impersonal.
Chance, then, does not supply a naturalist with what is necessary for a person to be both self-conscious and free. It only allows one to be self-conscious and subject to caprice. Capricious action is not a free expression of a person with character. It is simply gratuitous, uncaused. Capricious action is by definition not a response to self-determination, and thus we are still left without a basis for morality.14 Such action simply is.
To summarize: The first reason naturalism turns into nihilism is that naturalism does not supply a basis on which a person can act significantly. Rather, it denies the possibility of a self-determining being who can choose on the basis of an innate self-conscious character. We are machines—determined or capricious. We are not persons with self-consciousness and self-determination.
THE SECOND BRIDGE: THE GREAT CLOUD OF UNKNOWING
The metaphysical presupposition that the cosmos is a closed system has implications not only for metaphysics but also for epistemology. The argument in brief is this: if any given person is the result of impersonal forces—whether working haphazardly or by inexorable law—that person has no way of knowing whether what he or she seems to know is illusion or truth. Let us see how that is so.
Naturalism holds that perception and knowledge are either identical with or a byproduct of the brain; they arise from the functioning of matter. Without matter’s functioning there would be no thought. But matter functions by a nature of its own. There is no reason to think that matter has any interest in leading a conscious being to true perception or to logical (that is, correct) conclusions based on accurate observation and true presuppositions.15 The only beings in the universe who care about such matters are humans. But people are bound to their bodies. Their consciousness arises from a complex interrelation of highly “ordered” matter. Why should whatever that matter is conscious of be in any way related to what actually is the case? Is there a test for distinguishing illusion from reality? Naturalists point to the methods of scientific inquiry, pragmatic tests and so forth. But all these utilize the brain they are testing. Each test could well be a futile exercise in spinning out the consistency of an illusion.
For naturalism nothing exists outside the system itself. There is no God— deceiving or nondeceiving, perfect or imperfect, personal or impersonal. There is only the cosmos, and humans are the only conscious beings. But they are latecomers. They “arose,” but how far? Can they trust their mind, their reason?
Charles Darwin himself once said, “The horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the conviction of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”16 In other words, if my brain is no more than that of a superior monkey, I cannot even be sure that my own theory of my origin is to be trusted.
Here is a curious case: If Darwin’s naturalism is true, there is no way of even establishing its credibility, let alone proving it. Confidence in logic is ruled out. Darwin’s own theory of human origins must therefore be accepted by an act of faith. One must hold that a brain, a device that came to be through natural selection and chance-sponsored mutations, can actually know a proposition or set of propositions to be true.
C. S. Lewis puts the case this way:
If all that exists is Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our own deepest convictions are merely the by-products of an irrational process, then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that our sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tell us anything about a reality external to ourselves. Our convictions are simply a fact about us—like the colour of our hair. If Naturalism is true we have no reason to trust our conviction that Nature is uniform.17
What we need for such certainty is the existence of some “Rational Spirit” outside both ourselves and nature from which our own rationality could derive. Theism assumes such a ground; naturalism does not.
Not only are we boxed in by the past—our origin in inanimate, unconscious matter—we are also boxed in by our present situation as thinkers. Let us say that I have just completed an argument on the level of “All men are mortal; Aristotle Onassis is a man; Aristotle Onassis is mortal.” That’s a proven conclusion. Right?
Well, how do we know it’s right? Simple. I have obeyed the laws of logic. What laws? How do we know them to be true? They are self-evident. After all, would any thought or communication be possible without them? No. So aren’t they true? Not necessarily.
Any argument we construct implies such laws—the classical ones of identity, noncontradiction, and the excluded middle. But that fact does not guarantee the “truthfulness” of these laws in the sense that anything we think or say that obeys them necessarily relates to what is so in the objective, external universe. Moreover, any argument to check the validity of an argument is itself an argument that might be mistaken. When we begin to think like this, we are not far from an infinite regress; our argument chases its tail down the ever- receding corridors of the mind. Or, to change the image, we lose our bearings in a sea of infinity.
But haven’t we gone astray in arguing against the possibility of knowledge? We do seem to be able to test our knowledge in a way that generally satisfies us. Some things we think we know can be shown to be false or at least highly unlikely—for example, that microbes are spontaneously generated from totally inorganic mud. And all of us know how to boil water, scratch our itches, recognize our friends and distinguish them from others in a crowd.
Almost all our discoveries are due to our violences, to the exacerbation of our instability. Even God insofar as He interests us—it is not in our inmost selves that we discern God, but at the extreme limits of our fever, at the very point where, our rage confronting His, a shock results, an encounter as ruinous for Him as for us. Blasted by the curse attached to acts, the man of violence forces his nature, rises above himself only to relapse, an aggressor, followed by his enterprises, which come to punish him for having instigated them. Every work turns against its author: the poem will crush the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action. Destruction awaits anyone who, answering to his vocation and fulfilling it, exerts himself within history; only the man who sacrifices every gift and talent escapes: released from his humanity, he may lodge himself in Being. If I aspire to a metaphysical career, I cannot, at any price, retain my identity: whatever residue I retain must be liquidated; if, on the contrary, I assume a historical role it is my responsibility to exasperate my faculties until I explode along with them. One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.
E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist
Virtually no one is a full-fledged epistemological nihilist. Yet naturalism does not allow a person to have any solid reason for confidence in human reason. We thus end in an ironic paradox. Naturalism, born in the Age of Enlightenment, was launched on a firm acceptance of the human ability to know. Now naturalists find that they can place no confidence in their knowing.
The whole point of this argument can be summarized briefly: Naturalism places us as human beings in a box. But for us to have any confidence that our knowledge that we are in a box is true, we need to stand outside the box or to have some other being outside the box provide us with information (theologians call this “revelation”). But there is nothing or no one outside the box to give us revelation, and we cannot ourselves transcend the box. Ergo: epistemological nihilism.
A naturalist who fails to perceive this is like the man in Stephen Crane’s poem:
I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
“It is futile,” I said,
“You can never—”
“You lie,” he cried,
And ran on.18
In the naturalistic framework, people pursue a knowledge that forever recedes before them. We can never know.
One of the worst consequences of taking epistemological nihilism seriously is that it has led some to question the very facticity of the universe.19 To some, nothing is real, not even themselves. People who reach this state are in deep trouble, for they can no longer function as human beings. Or, as we often say, they can’t cope.
We usually do not recognize this situation as metaphysical or epistemological nihilism. Rather, we call it schizophrenia, hallucination, fantasizing, daydreaming, or living in a dream world. And we treat the person as a “case,” the problem as a “disease.” I have no particular quarrel with doing this, for I do believe in the reality of an external world, one I hold in common with others in my space-time frame. Those who cannot recognize this are beyond coping. But while we think of such situations primarily in psychological terms and while we commit such people to institutions where someone will keep them alive and others will help them return from their inner trip and get back to waking reality, we should realize that some of these far-out cases may be perfect examples of what happens when a person no longer knows in the common-sense way of knowing. It is the “proper” state, the logical result, of epistemological nihilism. If I cannot know, then any perception or dream or image or fantasy becomes equally real or unreal. Life in the ordinary world is based on our ability to make distinctions. Ask the man who has just swallowed colorless liquid, which he thought was water but which was actually wood alcohol.
Most of us never see the far-out “cases.” They are quickly committed. But they exist, and I have met some people whose stories are frightening. Most full epistemological nihilists, however, fall in the class described by Robert Farrar Capon, who simply has no time for such nonsense:
The skeptic is never for real. There he stands, cocktail in hand, left arm draped languorously on one end of the mantelpiece, telling you that he can’t be sure of anything, not even of his own existence. I’ll give you my secret method of demolishing universal skepticism in four words. Whisper to him: “Your fly is open.” If he thinks knowledge is so all-fired impossible, why does he always look?20
As noted above, there is just too much evidence that knowledge is possible. What we need is a way to explain why we have it. This naturalism does not do. So the one who remains a consistent naturalist must be a closet nihilist who does not know where he is.
THE THIRD BRIDGE: IS AND OUGHT
Many naturalists—most, so far as I know—are very moral people. They are not thieves; they do not tend to be libertines. Many are faithful husbands and wives. Some are scandalized by the personal and public immorality of our day. The problem is not that moral values are not recognized but that they have no basis. Summing up the position reached by Nietzsche and Max Weber, Allan Bloom remarks, “Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.”21
Remember that for a naturalist the world is merely there. It does not provide humanity with a sense of oughtness. It only is. Ethics, however, is about what ought to be, whether it is or not.22 Where, then, does one go for a basis for morality? Where is oughtness found?
As I have noted, every person has moral values. There is no tribe without taboos. But these are merely facts of a social nature, and the specific values vary widely. In fact, many of these values conflict with each other. Thus we are forced to ask, Which values are the true values, or the higher values?
Cultural anthropologists, recognizing that this situation prevails, answer clearly: Moral values are relative to one’s culture. What the tribe, nation, social unit says is valuable is valuable. But there is a serious flaw here. It is only another way of saying that is (the fact of a specific value) equals ought (what should be so). Moreover, it does not account for the situation of cultural rebels whose moral values are not those of their neighbors. The cultural rebel’s is is not considered ought. Why? The answer of cultural relativism is that the rebel’s moral values cannot be allowed if they upset social cohesiveness and jeopardize cultural survival. So we discover that is is not ought after all. The cultural relativist has affirmed a value—the preservation of a culture in its current state—as more valuable than its destruction or transformation by one or more rebels within it. Once more, we are forced to ask why.
Cultural relativism, it turns out, is not forever relative. It rests on a primary value affirmed by cultural relativists themselves: that cultures should be preserved. So cultural relativism does not rely only on is but on what its adherents think ought to be the case. The trouble here is that some anthropologists are not cultural relativists. Some think certain values are so important that cultures that do not recognize them should recognize them.23 So cultural relativists must, if they are to convince their colleagues, show why their values are the true values.24 Again we approach the infinite corridor down which we chase our arguments.
But let’s look again. We must be sure we see what is implied by the fact that values do really vary widely. Between neighboring tribes values conflict. One tribe may conduct “religious wars” to spread its values. Such wars are. Ought they to be? Perhaps, but only if there is indeed a nonrelative standard by which to measure the values in conflict. But a naturalist has no way of determining which values among the ones in existence are the basic ones that give meaning to the specific tribal variations. A naturalist can point only to the fact of value, never to an absolute standard.
This situation is not so critical as long as sufficient space separates peoples of radically differing values. But in the global community of the twenty-first century this luxury is no longer ours. We are forced to deal with values in conflict, and naturalists have no standard, no way of knowing when peace is more important than preserving another value. We may give up our property to avoid doing violence to a robber. But what shall we say to white racists who own rental property in the city? Whose values are to govern their actions when a black person attempts to rent their property? Who shall say? How shall we decide?
The argument can again be summarized like that above: Naturalism places us as human beings in an ethically relative box. For us to know what values within that box are true values, we need a measure imposed on us from outside the box; we need a moral plumb line by which we can evaluate the conflicting moral values we observe in ourselves and others. But there is nothing outside the box; there is no moral plumb line, no ultimate, nonchanging standard of value. Ergo: ethical nihilism.25
But nihilism is a feeling, not just a philosophy. And on the level of human perception, Franz Kafka catches in a brief parable the feeling of life in a universe without a moral plumb line.
I ran past the first watchman. Then I was horrified, ran back again and said to the watchman: “I ran through here while you were looking the other way.” The watchman gazed ahead of him and said nothing. “I suppose I really oughtn’t to have done it,” I said. The watchman still said nothing. “Does your silence indicate permission to pass?”26
When people were conscious of a God whose character was moral law, when their consciences were informed by a sense of rightness, their watchmen would shout halt when they trespassed the law. Now their watchmen are silent. They serve no king and protect no kingdom. The wall is a fact without a meaning. One scales it, crosses it, breaches it, and no watchman ever complains. One is left not with the fact but with the feeling of guilt.27
One knows my demand of philosophers that they place themselves beyond good and evil—and that they have the illusion of moral judgement beneath them. This demand follows from an insight formulated by me: that there are no moral facts whatever. Moral judgment has this in common with religious judgment that it believes in realities which do not exist.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “The ‘Improvers’ of Mankind”
In a haunting dream sequence in Ingmar Bergman’s film Wild Strawberries, an old professor is arraigned before the bar of justice. When he asks the charge, the judge replies, “You are guilty of guilt.”
“Is that serious?” the professor asks.
“Very serious,” says the judge.
But that is all that is said on the subject of guilt. In a universe where God is dead, people are not guilty of violating a moral law; they are only guilty of guilt, and that is very serious, for nothing can be done about it. If one had sinned, there might be atonement. If one had broken a law, the lawmaker might forgive the criminal. But if one is only guilty of guilt, there is no way to solve the very personal problem.28
And that states the case for a nihilist, for no one can avoid acting as if moral values exist and as if there is some bar of justice that measures guilt by objective standards. But there is no bar of justice, and we are left not in sin, but in guilt. Very serious, indeed.
THE LOSS OF MEANING
The strands of epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical nihilism weave together to make a rope long enough and strong enough to hang a whole culture. The name of the rope is Loss of Meaning. We end in a total despair of ever seeing ourselves, the world, and others as in any way significant. Nothing has meaning.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr., in a parody of Genesis 1, captures this modern dilemma:
In the beginning God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.
And God said, “Let Us make creatures out of mud, so mud can see what We have done.” And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around and spoke. Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely.
“Everything must have a purpose?” asked God.
“Certainly,” said man.
“Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God. And he went away.29
This may first appear to be a satire on theism’s notion of the origin of the universe and human beings, but it is quite the contrary. It is a satire on the naturalist’s view, for it shows our human dilemma. We have been thrown up by an impersonal universe. The moment a self-conscious, self-determining being appears on the scene, that person asks the big question: What is the meaning of all this? What is the purpose of the cosmos? But the person’s creator—the impersonal forces of bedrock matter—cannot respond. If the cosmos is to have meaning, we must manufacture it for ourselves.
As Stephen Crane put it in the poem quoted in the opening of the first chapter, the existence of people has not created in the universe “a sense of obligation.” Precisely: We exist. Period. Our maker has no sense of value, no sense of obligation. We alone make values. Are our values valuable? By what standard? Only our own. Whose own? Each person’s own. Each of us is monarch and bishop of our own realm, but our realm is Pointland. For the moment we meet another person, we meet another monarch and bishop. There is no way to arbitrate between two free value makers. There is no monarch to whom both give obeisance. There are values, but no Value. Society is only a bunch of windowless monads, a collection of points, not an organic body obeying a superior, all-encompassing form that arbitrates the values of its separate arms, legs, warts, and wrinkles. Society is not a body at all. It is only a bunch.
Thus does naturalism lead to nihilism. If we take seriously the implications of the death of God, the disappearance of the transcendent, the closedness of the universe, we end right there.
Why, then, aren’t most naturalists nihilists? The obvious answer is the best one: Most naturalists do not take their naturalism seriously. They are inconsistent. They affirm a set of values. They have friends who affirm a similar set. They appear to know and don’t ask how they know they know. They seem to be able to choose and don’t ask themselves whether their apparent freedom is really caprice or determinism. Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living, but for a naturalist he is wrong. For a naturalist it is the examined life that is not worth living.
INNER TENSIONS IN NIHILISM
The trouble is that no one can live the examined life if examination leads to nihilism, for nobody can live a life consistent with nihilism. At every step, at every moment, nihilists think, and think their thinking has substance, and thus they cheat on their philosophy. There are, I believe, at least five reasons that nihilism is unlivable.
First, from meaninglessness nothing at all follows, or rather, anything follows. If the universe is meaningless and a person cannot know and nothing is immoral, any course of action is open. One can respond to meaninglessness by any act whatsoever, for none is more or less appropriate. Suicide is one act, but it does not “follow” as any more appropriate than going to a Walt Disney movie.
Yet whenever we set ourselves on a course of action, putting one foot in front of the other in other than a haphazard way, we are affirming a goal. We are affirming the value of a course of action, even if to no one other than ourselves. Thus we are not living by nihilism. We are creating value by choice. From this type of argument comes Albert Camus’s attempt to go beyond nihilism to existentialism, which we will consider in the following chapter.30
Second, every time nihilists think and trust their thinking, they are inconsistent, for they have denied that thinking is of value or that it can lead to knowledge. But at the heart of a nihilist’s one affirmation lies a self-contradiction. There is no meaning in the universe, nihilists scream. That means that their only affirmation is meaningless, for if it were to mean anything it would be false.31 Nihilists are indeed boxed in. They can get absolutely nowhere. They merely are; they merely think; and none of this has any significance whatsoever. Except for those whose actions place them in institutions, no one seems to act out their nihilism. Those who do we treat as patients.
Third, while a limited sort of practical nihilism is possible for a while, eventually a limit is reached. The comedy of Catch-22 rests on just this premise. Captain Yossarian is having a knock-down theological argument with Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife, and God is coming in for a good deal of hassling. Yossarian is speaking:
[God] is not working at all. He’s playing. Or else He’s forgotten all about us. That’s the kind of God you people talk about—a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed.
Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His system of creation?32
After several unsuccessful attempts to handle Yossarian’s verbal attack, Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife turns to violence.
“Stop it! Stop it!” Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife screamed suddenly, and began beating him ineffectually about the head with both fists. “Stop it!” . . .
“What the hell are you getting so upset about?” he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of contrite amusement. “I thought you didn’t believe in God.”
“I don’t,” she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. “But the God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He’s not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be.”33
Here is another paradox: In order to deny God one must have a God to deny. In order to be a practicing nihilist, there must be something against which to do battle. Practicing nihilists are parasites on meaning. They run out of energy when there is nothing left to deny. Cynics are out of business when they are the last ones around.
Fourth, nihilism means the death of art. Here, too, we find a paradox, for much modern art—literature, painting, drama, film—has nihilism for its ideological core. And much of this literature is excellent by the traditional canons of art. Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” Samuel Beckett’s End Game, Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Francis Bacon’s various heads of popes spring immediately to mind. The twist is this: to the extent that these artworks display the human implication of a nihilistic worldview, they are not nihilistic; to the extent that they themselves are meaningless, they are not artworks.
Art is nothing if not formal, that is, endowed with structure by the artist. But structure itself implies meaning. So to the extent that an artwork has structure, it has meaning and thus is not nihilistic. Even Beckett’s Breath has structure. A junkyard, the garbage in a trash heap, a pile of rocks just blasted from a quarry have no structure. They are not art.
Some contemporary art attempts to be antiart by being random. Much of John Cage’s music is predicated on sheer chance, randomness. But it is both dull and grating, and very few people can listen to it. It’s not art. Then there is Kafka’s “Hunger Artist,” a brilliant though painful story about an artist who tries to make art out of public fasting, that is, out of nothing. But no one looks at him; everyone passes by his display at the circus to see a young leopard pacing in his cage. Even the “nature” of the leopard is more interesting than the “art” of the nihilist. Breath too, as minimal as it is, is structured and means something. Even if it means only that human beings are meaningless, it participates in the paradox I examined above. In short, art implies meaning and is ultimately nonnihilistic, despite the ironic attempt of nihilists to display their wares by means of it.
Fifth, and finally, nihilism poses severe psychological problems for a nihilist. People cannot live with it because it denies what every fiber of their waking being calls for—meaning, value, significance, dignity, worth. “Nietzsche,” Bloom writes, “replaces easygoing or self-satisfied atheism with agonized atheism, suffering its human consequences. Longing to believe, along with intransigent refusal to satisfy that longing, is, according to him, the profound response to our entire spiritual condition.”34
A younger and an older waiter are closing a “clean, well-lighted” bar for the night. When the young waiter leaves, the older lonely waiter thinks to himself:
What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.
Ernest Hemingway, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”
Nietzsche ended his life in an asylum. Ernest Hemingway affirmed a “lifestyle” and eventually committed suicide. Beckett writes black comedy. Vonnegut and Adams revel in whimsy. And Kafka—perhaps the greatest artist of them all—lived an almost impossible life of tedium, writing novels and stories that boil down to a sustained cry: God is dead! God is dead! Isn’t he? I mean, surely he is, isn’t he? God is dead. Oh, I wish, I wish, I wish he weren’t.
It is thus that nihilism forms the hinge for modern people. No one who has not plumbed the despair of the nihilists, heard them out, felt as they felt—if only vicariously through their art—can understand the past century. Nihilism is the foggy bottomland through which we modern people must pass if we are to build a life in Western culture. There are no easy answers to our questions, and none of these answers is worth anything unless it takes seriously the problems raised by the possibility that nothing whatever of value exists.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION
1. What are some examples of nihilistic views in the culture you live in?
2. What do you think of the view that perceived freedom is sufficient, even if human freedom is ultimately an illusion?
3. Why is cultural relativism such an influential view, and what are some of its weaknesses?
4. How does understanding nihilism give you insight into Western culture, past and present?