In the previous chapter we saw that nihilism 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. Nihilism is thus much closer to optimism, idealism, and sympathy than it is to pessimism, cynicism, and apathy. And yet we also saw that pessimism, cynicism, and apathy can help to generate nihilism as the negativity of such ways of life can lead people to seek out more positive ways of life. Such a conclusion suggests that a philosophy that argues that life has a meaning1 is much more likely to be nihilistic than a philosophy that argues that life is meaningless.2
And yet for many people nihilism is simply the rejection of the meaningfulness of life. In his 1988 book The Specter of the Absurd: Sources & Criticisms of Modern Nihilism, Donald Crosby offers a typology of nihilism that distinguished five different species of nihilism. Crosby writes,
Common to the types of nihilism discussed in this chapter is an attitude of negation or denial, as is implied by the term nihilism itself. Each type denies some important aspect of human life. Political nihilism negates the political structures within which life is currently lived, as well as the social and cultural outlooks that inform these structures. It has little or no vision of constructive alternatives or of how to achieve them. Moral nihilism denies the sense of moral obligation, the objectivity of moral principles, or the moral viewpoint. Epistemological nihilism denies that there can be anything like truths or meanings not strictly confined within, or wholly relative to, a single individual, group, or conceptual scheme. Cosmic nihilism disavows intelligibility or value in nature, seeing it as indifferent or hostile to fundamental human concerns. Existential nihilism negates the meaning of life.3
As Crosby shows, even when we try to distinguish different types of nihilism, it is nearly impossible to avoid ultimately uniting them all into “existential nihilism” as “each type denies some important aspect of human life.” This helps to explain why nihilism is often associated not only with character traits like cynicism but also with philosophical positions like relativism. However, we must be careful here as treating different versions of nihilism as different versions of “an attitude of negation or denial” has the effect of reducing the significance of nihilism by making it seem like it is only an individual concern.
For this reason we need to come to a definitive understanding of what nihilism is. For example, is nihilism an attitude, a character trait, a philosophical position, or something else entirely? In order to achieve such an understanding, in this chapter I will explore four ways of thinking of nihilism. Each of these philosophical perspectives on the nature of nihilism can help to reveal not only what nihilism is but also why nihilism can be dangerous, and dangerous not just for individuals, but for the world.
As the contemporary analytic philosopher James Tartaglia announces in the title of his book—Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality (2016)—he believes that life is meaningless. Tartaglia defines nihilism as the denial that life is itself meaningful and so identifies himself as a nihilist. However, viewing nihilism as a statement of fact about reality, Tartaglia further argues that we are wrong to think of nihilism as bad or as negative or as in any way motivating bad or negative actions. Comparing life to a game of chess, Tartaglia suggests that the moves of the game are meaningful even if the game is itself meaningless, and so similarly we can find meaning in our lives even if life is itself meaningless. Indeed Tartaglia sees that we already do find meaning in our lives every day without having any evidence or reason to believe that life is itself meaningful, and so we should not assume that the meaninglessness of life is somehow some sort of existential or moral disaster.
Nihilism is for Tartaglia descriptive rather than prescriptive. While we are absorbed in the world, in the “frameworks” of our everyday lives, we are, according to Tartaglia, driven to act in certain biological and social ways, in ways that we find meaningful. We then analogize from the meaning of parts of life to the meaning of the whole of life itself, assuming that if our actions have a point, then the point of our actions must have a point as well. However, following Heidegger, Tartaglia sees in our experiences of anxiety and boredom an “attunement” to nihilism, an ability to free ourselves from our everyday frameworks and to gain sight of the pointlessness, the sheer contingency, of these frameworks. Yet Tartaglia sees our ability to move from anxiety and boredom back to absorption in these frameworks as proof that—contrary to Nietzsche—nihilism has no practical or motivational power. Tartaglia is thus critical of Nietzsche for having seen nihilism as something dangerous and as something to be overcome, rather than recognizing it as simply a fact and a fact that we can and do easily ignore.
Tartaglia’s deflationary approach to nihilism leads him to see every other philosopher who has focused on nihilism as having had an overinflated sense of nihilism’s importance. For Tartaglia it is something of a category mistake to think that the question of the meaning of life is itself meaningful in our day-to-day lives. The question of whether life is itself meaningful is for Tartaglia a metaphysical question, and so philosophers who think nihilism is negative or dangerous mistakenly believe that metaphysics matters as much in the daily lives of regular people as it does to philosophers.
Boredom and anxiety may reveal to us the meaninglessness of our activities, but since people—people who are not philosophers—are able to stop being bored or anxious and continue on with their lives, Tartaglia concludes that the truth of nihilism can be revealed to us without it making us suicidal or immoral. If people do become suicidal or immoral after discovering the truth of nihilism, that is not, for Tartaglia, the fault of nihilism, but of the illusion such people were previously laboring under. If we had been living our lives and trying to be good while nihilism was nevertheless true, then, according to Tartaglia, nothing more should be changed by discovering the truth of nihilism than having a mistaken metaphysical belief replaced with a true metaphysical belief.
Tartaglia thinks that if people try to be good, become bored, find life to be meaningless, stop being bored, and go back to trying to be good, then it is a mistake—a mistake made by Nietzsche and everyone who followed him—to think nihilism has any power over us. Tartaglia writes,
I think that Nietzsche and many other philosophers have massively overestimated the motivational and moral significance of belief in overall purpose. Such belief is not essential to framework engagement, after all; if it were, then it is doubtful we would have ever heard of nihilism, since nobody would have been motivated enough to write about it. Perhaps such belief is very important to some religious people’s framework engagement, especially in the moral sphere. But it cannot always be essential, because people do sometimes lose their faith and carry on.4
Tartaglia claims that if people can lose faith and yet continue on as before, then faith must not have been as “essential” as people—or philosophers like Nietzsche—have assumed.
However, this criticism of “Nietzsche and many other philosophers” is based on a misunderstanding of what Nietzsche and these many other philosophers were focused on in their analyses of nihilism, for it was precisely our ability to “carry on” that concerned Nietzsche and those who followed in his wake. Such philosophers did not think that nihilism was a statement of fact about reality, something about which one made truth claims. Rather nihilism was seen as a reaction to reality. Discovering life is meaningless is not nihilism for Nietzsche; rather discovering life is meaningless and yet going on with our lives anyway is nihilism. What Tartaglia views as the way to respond to nihilism—to stop being bored or anxious and just reimmerse ourselves in our daily lives—is precisely what Nietzsche meant by nihilism. In other words, what Nietzsche wants us to overcome is not what Tartaglia means by “nihilism” but rather what Tartaglia means by “life.”
Tartaglia treats nihilism like the solution to a math problem. If you think math is meaningful, that pi is somehow significant in a cosmic sense, then you have a problem, a problem that can be solved by nihilism. Nihilism would then not affect the truth of math, but would only reveal the lack of truth about whatever metaphysical implications we have mistakenly derived from math. And since metaphysical implications are not what most people are worried about during most of their lives, nihilism is not something most people are worried about during most of their lives.
However for Nietzsche, as we have already seen, nihilism is about what’s in the world, not what’s behind it. According to Nietzsche, the meaninglessness of life is due not to the nature of the universe, but to the nature of our culture. Life is meaningful, but only if we live. But to live meaningfully—to live as humans, to live in accordance with our own values rather than those that have been imposed on us—would endanger our culture and would endanger those who are powerful because of our culture. So to protect our society, those in power have led us to believe that there is only one way to be moral, that to be moral is to achieve self-control. We learn to control our urges, our desires, our instincts, and go about our daily lives as civilized adults. We do this, though, not because we want to live such lives, but because we have been raised to believe that we should want such lives. Trying to live the lives that we should want is, according to Nietzsche, what makes us nihilistic, for which reason we come to see death as freedom, as freedom from life, from what our culture has defined as life, from what Tartaglia has defined as life.
Tartaglia sees that our lives are meaningless, but he simply accepts this as a fact of reality. This acceptance leads Tartaglia to advocate that we try not to think about it, that we go back to living our meaningless lives. Tartaglia writes,
As to the question of what we should do upon realizing the truth of nihilism, then, there may be more than a little relevance in Lin-Chi’s advice to “Just act ordinary, without trying to do anything in particular. Move your bowels, piss, get dressed, eat your rice, and if you get tired, then lie down.”5
What Tartaglia accepts as the way to live our lives is what Nietzsche would see as nihilism in the most meaningful sense of the word. Tartaglia may appear to be in agreement with Nietzsche about the idea that nihilism is about living in denial, but what Nietzsche means by “denial” is what Tartaglia means by “acceptance.” Tartaglia’s treatment of nihilism as an unimportant concern thus results in the treatment of life as an unimportant concern.
For a deeper understanding of what nihilism means, we must then seek out a deeper understanding of what life means, such as can be found in the philosophy of existentialism. Existentialism can be traced back to the work of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Even just the titles of his works—such as Fear and Trembling (1843), The Concept of Anxiety (1844), and The Sickness unto Death (1849)—evoke the angst-ridden themes that are associated with existentialism, themes such as mortality, faith, and hypocrisy. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger is also an important foundational figure for existentialism. Though Heidegger was a critic of existentialism, his work was nevertheless influential to existentialists. Particularly influential was his Being and Time (1927), in which he explores the “inauthenticity” of everyday life insofar as it is occupied with pointless activities like chitchat that help us to avoid the anxiety of confronting death that would make us “authentically” human.
However, existentialism is most often associated with French philosophers, with smoking, with drinking wine, and with being obsessed with death. None of this is wrong, but it does tend to focus our attention more on who the existentialists were rather than on what they were writing about. And indeed that existentialism has come to be associated more with their biographies than with their books is precisely the sort of superficiality that Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus were trying to reveal in both their philosophical and their literary writing.
What Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus have in common in their work, and in common with Kierkegaard and Heidegger, is a concern with the question of the meaning of life. As we have already seen, this question has been a perennial concern for philosophers and, in particular, a metaphysical concern. What was different in how existentialists approached this question was how the experience of living through World War II made life seem to be not only meaningless but absurd.
Millions of people were being killed. Nazism and Fascism were spreading. The end of the world appeared to be imminent. And yet people continued to eat, to work, to gossip, to buy groceries, to sleep, to go on living as if nothing had changed. To see the routines that make up normal life continue when life was decidedly abnormal was to see how such routines not only help to make life easy to navigate but also help to make life easy to ignore. Whether faced with global war or with our own mortality, by maintaining order, regularity, and discipline we are able to reduce ourselves and the world to the most mundane concerns and so avoid having to think about anything more than what we’re going to eat for dinner. In other words, we live lives that are absurd.
Whether faced with global war or with our own mortality, by maintaining order, regularity, and discipline we are able to reduce ourselves and the world to the most mundane concerns and so avoid having to think about anything more than what we’re going to eat for dinner.
Yet, as existentialists argue, we paradoxically achieve this reduction through transcendence. We act as if life doesn’t matter, but we do this because we believe that death doesn’t matter. Seeing ourselves as beings who were created, we see ourselves as like other created things, and thus we see ourselves as having a creator, a creator that imbued us with an essence, an essence that transcends our individual existence. Whether we see this creator as God or as DNA is less important than we tend to assume, as in both cases we see ourselves as having been created with an essence, an essence that defines us as human and that gives us a purpose as part of humanity. What we do in our everyday lives can thus be seen from this perspective as the result not of our individual freedom, but of our essence, or, as we more commonly call it, our human nature.
For denying the existence of God and for denying that life has a purpose, the existentialists were seen as nihilistic atheists. But the existentialists were not trying to advocate for atheism, for as we have already seen, DNA can serve the same explanatory function as God. Rather, the existentialists were trying to reveal that it is our belief in human nature that is nihilistic. When we justify our actions by saying that we’re “just being human”—whether we think humans were created by God or programmed by DNA—we’re avoiding having to take responsibility for our actions. Relying on human nature to explain our actions is to see ourselves as determined rather than as free, to see ourselves as things that can be determined rather than as humans who can make decisions for ourselves.
Sartre states that the motto of existentialism is that “existence precedes essence.”6 In other words, that we are comes before what we are. If we have an essence, then it comes from our decisions, not from any supernatural creator or genetic inheritance. We are not made; we are instead what we make of ourselves. For this reason we can only have the freedom that we at least claim to want if we recognize that freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin. Following Heidegger, existentialists see our denial of responsibility and of freedom as the result of our denial of death.
To recognize that we could die at any moment would require that we take every moment of our lives seriously, as seriously as if it were our last. But because we do not want such responsibility, we act as if we’re going to live forever, and we see such a way of life as free. We may say that we know we’re going to die, but we view death as something that would happen far in the future or that science and technology might somehow cure. Consequently, we do not take our daily lives seriously and do not take our decisions seriously, and thus the only freedom we exercise is the freedom to blame others, to blame God, or DNA, or society, or anyone but ourselves, for who we have become and how our lives have turned out.
This is not to say, however, that others do not play a role in how we turn out. Rather, existentialists want us to recognize our willingness to accept the illusion that what is contingent (e.g., character) is actually necessary and that what is necessary (e.g., death) is actually contingent. As de Beauvoir argues in The Second Sex (1949), “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.”7 We are willing to accept the idea that women are different from men due to differences in chromosomes because such ideas relieve the pressure of having to define ourselves by our actions rather than by our genetics. Moreover, we do not question the source of distinctions like “women” and “men” but instead embrace such distinctions and try to live in accordance with them, letting them define who we are and determine who we should be.
Women should always be women. Men should always be men. Heroes should always be good. Villains should always be evil. Such narratives are comforting. They replace the absurdity of existence with the clarity of essentialism. Yet they are comforting precisely because they are fictions, fictions that we are born into and that we perpetuate, fictions that transform the anxiety-inducing gray of life into the reassuring black-and-white of a 1950s sitcom. Black-and-white labels make life easier, but they do so by making life lifeless.
Existentialism reveals that in trying to avoid responsibility, we end up avoiding freedom, and that in trying to avoid death, we end up avoiding life. Nihilism is thus seen as the result of our fear of death, and so the more we flee from death, the more nihilistic we become. To say that life is meaningless, as the existentialists do, is not to advocate nihilism but to combat it. By removing the false sources of meaning we rely on (such as God or DNA), we can confront the fact that we are alone and embrace the consequence of that fact: that we alone are capable of giving meaning to our lives.
Existentialism was so associated with the lives of Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus that their deaths could not help but bring about the decline of existentialism. Postmodernism, however, is not associated with any particular figure or figures. Indeed “postmodernism” has become such a term of abuse or of mockery that few, if any, individuals want to be associated with it, let alone identify themselves as postmodern. Therefore, there might not be any agreement about what “postmodern” means other than as a term to describe that which we don’t understand, that which seems incapable of being understood, and that which appears to have been made in order to challenge our beliefs about our being able to understand anything. In other words, postmodernism is seen by many as not only nihilistic but as purposefully nihilistic, as nihilism made hip, as performative nihilism.
One of the few exceptions to the rule that no one wants to be identified with postmodernism is the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, who in 1979 published The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Invoking the concept of “language games” from the Philosophical Investigations of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lyotard argues that every field of knowledge, every academic discipline, every science, operates through specific narratives with their own gamelike rules in order not only to transmit knowledge but even to legitimate its claims as knowledge. Claims are written, presented, published, interrogated, and challenged all in accordance with these rules, rules which are not written down and formalized, but which all participants in each field of knowledge come to learn and to perpetuate. What makes these language games more than just games is that their legitimation practices are themselves legitimated by narratives that exist outside each field of knowledge, by narratives that are accepted by society as a whole as providing a foundation for the field of knowledge, by narratives that Lyotard calls “metanarratives.”8
Or at least that’s how knowledge operated before the postmodern era. According to Lyotard, with the rise of computer technology, metanarratives have lost more and more of their legitimating power as knowledge has increasingly come to be seen as information. Metanarratives about scientists working for the good of humanity and seeking knowledge for its own sake have become outdated. To see knowledge as information is to see knowledge as power, as that which must have not only explanatory power within the field of knowledge but also political and economic power within society. The claims of scientists were never legitimated solely by scientists, as government funding and public support have always been important aspects of legitimation. Yet more and more governments fund and publics support only that which is productive, only that which produces the information necessary to make political and economic decisions. In other words, what is true has become less important than what is profitable. Consequently, the humanities have less funding and less support today than do the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the fields that produce what is more easily recognizable as truth as they produce what is more easily measured in profits.
Yet the bifurcation of humanities and STEM has eroded the legitimacy of both. Humanities produced the metanarratives that legitimated scientific knowledge, whether these metanarratives were spiritual or moral, as they embedded scientific pursuits into the pursuit of the meaning of life. At the same time, because scientists engaged in language games like those of the humanities, they helped to legitimate the language games of the humanities. But when scientists no longer needed to explain their activities and only needed to produce results, the language games of spirituality and of morality were replaced by the language games of output and of profit. Scientific and technological progress is, however, still identified with human progress, but with the decline of the humanities the metanarrative of “human progress” cannot speak to us in any other language than that of cost-benefit analysis.
Lyotard writes, “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward meta-narratives.”9 Postmodernism is the recognition that the narratives, the ideas, and the values we use to give life meaning are empty shells—or, to be more precise, the recognition that these narratives, ideas, and values have always been empty shells. The rise of computer technology did not undermine the fabric of society; instead it revealed it, and what was revealed was that beneath the fabric there was nothing. What Lyotard sees as the crisis of legitimacy is not that the legitimation practices of the sciences have become corrupted by capitalism, but that—thanks to capitalism—we have become aware of the fact that the legitimation of the sciences was produced by practices, by nothing but practices, by practices that were themselves legitimated by nothing other than practices.
Postmodernism is the recognition that the narratives, the ideas, and the values we use to give life meaning are empty shells—or, to be more precise, the recognition that these narratives, ideas, and values have always been empty shells.
Postmodernism, however, does not lament the crisis of legitimacy, but welcomes it. To recognize that meaning is a production, a production of human practices, is to recognize the creative possibilities that surround meaning and to be free of the stultifying illusion that meaning is eternal, universal, and immutable. Rather than accept traditional narratives, ideas, and values as the bedrock of reality, postmodernism contends that reality has no bedrock, no foundation, other than practices, practices such as those surrounding the acceptance of such foundations as discovered rather than as invented.
The antifoundationalism of postmodernism, the idea that meaning is constructed rather than concrete, has been seen by critics as tantamount to promoting relativism, solipsism, and anarchy. To argue that there is no foundation for what we find meaningful and that we can consequently redefine the meaning of what is meaningful is to be seen as arguing that meaning is meaningless. For if something can mean anything, then everything means nothing. Critics thus see postmodernism as nihilistic.
Yet, from the perspective of postmodernism, such critics are merely clinging to meaning as given rather than interrogating the givenness of meaning. To reify human creations and treat them as though they were discoveries, as though they were found by us rather than made by us, is not only to deny human agency but also to reject the meaning of meaning. It is thus the critics of postmodernism, the foundationalists, who embrace meaninglessness by not admitting the need to investigate the nature and history of meaning.
What these critics misunderstand is that postmodernism is not advocating for the social construction of meaning but is rather arguing that meaning is and always has been socially constructed. To deny social construction is thus to deny reality. Foundationalists assume that there must be some ultimate ground to meaning—such as God or nature or scientific facts—and that postmodernism is a rejection of such grounds in the name of revolution. But postmodernists argue instead that there is nothing to reject, that there is nothing against which to revolt, because there is no ultimate ground to meaning. Postmodernism is thus not opposed to foundations, but to foundationalism, for while foundations have complicated cultural and political histories that need to be investigated, foundationalism is the rejection of such investigations due to the unwillingness to see that “God” and “nature” and “scientific facts” have histories behind them.
To deny social construction is thus to deny reality.
Postmodernism can thus be seen as having taken the insight of existentialism that “existence precedes essence” and having applied it not just to humanity but to everything. Yet, because Sartre coined this existentialist motto in order to make clear why humans are not like anything else and why humans can therefore not be defined in the way that objects are, there appears to be a tension between existentialism and postmodernism.
For existentialism, nihilism arises due to a rejection of the meaning of death, which leads to a rejection of the meaning of freedom, of responsibility, and, consequently, a rejection of the humanity of humanity. For postmodernism, nihilism arises due to a rejection of the death of meaning, which leads to a rejection of history, of language, of creativity, and, consequently, a rejection of the meaning of meaning. But then postmodernism would appear to see existentialism as nihilistic for having constructed a foundationalism centered on death having an eternal and immutable meaning. And likewise existentialism would appear to see postmodernism as nihilistic insofar as the antifoundational claim that all meaning is socially constructed and mutable could be seen as an evasion of death by denying that death has any inherent meaning.
While existentialism and postmodernism may oppose each other over the meaning of death, what should concern us here is that they nevertheless appear to agree on the meaning of nihilism. Whereas existentialism sees nihilism as resulting from the denial of death, postmodernism sees nihilism as resulting from the denial of the death of meaning. In both cases, though, nihilism is understood to be an evasion of reality, whether by not being willing to face what it means to be human or by not being willing to face the humanity of meaning. More specifically, both for existentialism and for postmodernism, nihilism is an evasion of reality in the form of an evasion of freedom.
Simone de Beauvoir—an existentialist who was far more postmodern than either Sartre or Camus—provides a portrait of the nature of nihilism in her 1948 work The Ethics of Ambiguity. Inspired by Descartes’s claim that adults are unhappy due to having previously been children, de Beauvoir describes how nihilism is related to the attempt to become a kid again. Children find themselves in a world not of their own making, in a world where everything has already been figured out by adults, in a world of definitions to learn and rules to obey. De Beauvoir labels the world of adults as seen by the child as the “serious” world in order to distinguish it from the world of frivolity that the child feels free to experience since—thanks to adult seriousness—nothing the child does seems to matter.
As we grow up, however, we lose our childish innocence and discover that our view of the world was naive, that the world has not been figured out, that our lives are not as predetermined as they appeared to be, and that our actions are far more consequential than we realized. Childhood thus proves to have been not a freedom from responsibility but a freedom from reality, a freedom from the reality of freedom. The loss of such freedom, according to de Beauvoir, can drive us to go beyond becoming nostalgic for our childhood and to try to make ourselves children again by seeing the world as we did when we were children. De Beauvoir calls this the “spirit of seriousness,”10 for individuals consumed by such nostalgia try to make real the serious world of their childhood imagination.
Serious people evade freedom and responsibility through seeking infantilism and paternalism. Serious people turn themselves into children, wanting nothing more than definitions to learn and rules to obey. They thus require some external authority that can provide such definitions and such rules and that can guarantee that these definitions and rules will remain unchanging and absolute. Hence, serious people say things like “I know my rights!” in much the same way that children say “My daddy said don’t do that!” for in both cases there is an appeal to an external authority whose mere existence is seen as sufficient to require that everyone must behave in accordance with the dictates of that authority.
But just as fathers can say that everything will be all right and yet children still experience pain and tragedy, so too can rights claim to protect us and yet violations can occur without penalty. Children and serious people are thus both ultimately forced to realize that no external authority can serve as the guarantor that they required, the guarantor that life will turn out as promised, that justice will be served, that the good guys will win, and that the pain and suffering we experience will ultimately prove to have had a purpose. In other words, no external authority can prevent either children or serious people from having to confront the ambiguity, the volatility, and the inexplicability of life.
According to de Beauvoir, just as children—for whom life did not turn out how they imagined it to be—can grow up to become serious people, so serious people—for whom life did not turn out how they desired it to be—can further regress and become nihilists. De Beauvoir writes,
This failure of the serious sometimes brings about a radical disorder. Conscious of being unable to be anything, man then decides to be nothing. We shall call this attitude nihilistic. The nihilist is close to the spirit of seriousness, for instead of realizing his negativity as a living movement, he conceives his annihilation in a substantial way. He wants to be nothing, and this nothing that he dreams of is still another sort of being, the exact Hegelian antithesis of being, a stationary datum. Nihilism is disappointed seriousness turned back against itself. […] It appears either at the moment of adolescence, when the individual, seeing his child’s universe flow away, feels the lack which is in his heart, or, later on, when the attempts to fulfill himself as a being have failed; in any case, among men who wish to rid themselves of the anxiety of their freedom by denying the world and themselves.11
De Beauvoir conceives of nihilism as a “radical disorder,” as an “attitude,” as “annihilation” of oneself, and as a way to get rid of “anxiety” by “denying” existence, all of which she sums up by defining nihilism as “disappointed seriousness turned back against itself.” Nietzsche defined nihilism as the “highest values devaluing themselves.” De Beauvoir is here echoing Nietzsche’s definition, as the serious man who wanted to find proof that life is meaningful cannot find such proof, and in his disappointment he ends up rejecting meaningfulness as such.
Children become serious when they find that the world lacks the meaning they expected to find within it. Having conceived of meaningfulness as something to be discovered, as something that can be found in things, the child becomes a serious person in search of an external authority that can fill the void left by the lack of meaning in the world. But because the serious person conceives of meaning in such black-and-white, either/or terms, the serious person who cannot find an external authority can no longer find the world to be meaningful. Disappointed serious people thus come to reject the serious world that they formerly embraced and end up embracing meaninglessness instead, for in a world with no external authority the disappointed serious person prefers the annihilation of nihilism to the anxiety of freedom.
To say that nihilism is “disappointed seriousness turned back against itself” is to say that the logic of seriousness—if there is an external authority, then everything matters—culminates in the logic of nihilism—if there is no external authority, then nothing matters. Nihilism is thus an antidote to the anxiety of freedom because it severs freedom from responsibility and so severs freedom from anxiety. If there is no external authority to make our decisions meaningful, then the nihilist concludes that our decisions don’t matter, and so rather than be anxious, we should just try to relax and be carefree. In other words, to be a nihilist is to live life as prescribed by Tartaglia and Lin-Chi.
From the perspective of nihilism there is no point in worrying about freedom if all choices end up leading to the same destination: death. The nihilist sees death as proof of the meaninglessness of freedom and therefore of existence. Without an external authority that can guarantee that we can evade the finality of death, that can guarantee that our actions have meaning beyond our minuscule life spans, existence appears as a cruel joke with freedom as the punchline. The serious person didn’t get the joke, but the nihilist does, and so the nihilist is willing to stop being serious and to just laugh along.
To be a serious person is to try to escape anxiety by outsourcing the responsibility of freedom to an external authority. To be a nihilist is to try to annihilate anxiety by annihilating freedom, and to do so by denying the meaningfulness of decision-making. To give an example of such nihilistic annihilation, de Beauvoir refers to Nazism, as nihilists cannot deny the meaning of their own decisions (“I was just following orders”) without also wanting to deny the meaning of everyone else’s decisions (“They were just born impure”). The freedom of others is a threat to the nihilist since confronting the freedom of others is to be forced to confront one’s own freedom, which would require confronting one’s own responsibility, which would bring back one’s own anxiety. The existence of freedom anywhere is a threat to the nihilist’s desire for the nonexistence of freedom everywhere.
Of course, the attempt to annihilate freedom need not, and most often does not, take the form of mass murder. Freedom can be annihilated—as is described by existentialism—by thinking of death as not worth worrying about, by thinking we should try to enjoy life instead of being needlessly morbid. Freedom can also be annihilated—as is described by postmodernism—by thinking of meaning as not worth worrying about, by thinking we should just accept traditional meanings instead of making life needlessly complicated. De Beauvoir thus makes clear why existentialism and postmodernism need not be seen as at odds with each other, since what postmodernism identifies as nihilism is not taking the meaning of meaning seriously, and what existentialism identifies as nihilism is not taking the meaning of death seriously. We can now see then that existentialism and postmodernism are merely identifying different forms nihilism can take, different ways in which “disappointed seriousness turned back against itself.”
This is not to say though that we are acting nihilistically whenever we don’t take something seriously. There are certainly plenty of things that need not be taken seriously, like fantasy football, the British royal family, or Ayn Rand. But nihilism is not the end result of a process of determining something’s seriousness. Rather, as de Beauvoir suggests by likening nihilism to a “radical disorder,” to be nihilistic is to deny the possibility of seriousness and to do so instinctively in a way similar to what Freud meant by a “defense mechanism.” If you are caught eating cake at 2 a.m. and you say, “My genetic predisposition to snacking made me do it,” then you’re engaging in seriousness. But if you are caught eating cake at 2 a.m. and you say, “What’s the big deal? It’s just a piece of cake,” then you’re engaging in nihilism.
The nihilist does not try to defend actions like the serious person does by giving reasons that point to an external authority that could justify actions as meaningful. Rather, the nihilist—having turned seriousness against itself—does not see actions as capable of being defended and so undermines the practice of reason-giving itself. When challenged to defend their actions, nihilists turn the tables and force challengers to defend why they think there was anything in the actions worth being upset over. Nihilists appear to engage in rational arguments, but appearances are deceiving, as instead they weaponize rationality in order to make arguing purposeless.
Kierkegaard warned that reflection, when engaged in to a pathological degree, can lead to paralysis on both an individual and a cultural level. In his work The Present Age (1846), Kierkegaard writes,
… the present generation, wearied by its chimerical efforts, relapses into complete indolence. Its condition is that of a man who has only fallen asleep towards morning: first of all come great dreams, then a feeling of laziness, and finally a witty or clever excuse for remaining in bed. […] Instead of coming to his help, his milieu forms around him a negative intellectual opposition, which juggles for a moment with a deceptive prospect, only to deceive him in the end by pointing to a brilliant way out of the difficulty—by showing him that the shrewdest thing of all is to do nothing.12
Similarly, the German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt viewed nihilism as a way of thinking that can look rational but is really an attack on the purpose of rationality. Just as de Beauvoir defined nihilism as seriousness turned against seriousness, Arendt defined nihilism as thinking turned against thinking. In her final work, The Life of the Mind (1978), Arendt writes,
What we commonly call “nihilism”—and are tempted to date historically, decry politically, and ascribe to thinkers who allegedly dared to think “dangerous thoughts”—is actually a danger inherent in the thinking activity itself. There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous, but nihilism is not its product. Nihilism is but the other side of conventionalism; its creed consists of negations of the current so-called positive values, to which it remains bound. All critical examinations must go through a stage of at least hypothetically negating accepted opinions and “values” by searching out their implications and tacit assumptions, and in this sense nihilism may be seen as an ever-present danger of thinking.
But that danger does not arise out of the Socratic conviction that the unexamined life is not worth living, but, on the contrary, out of the desire to find results that would make further thinking unnecessary. Thinking is equally dangerous to all creeds and, by itself, does not bring forth any new creed. Its most dangerous aspect from the viewpoint of common sense is that what was meaningful while you were thinking dissolves the moment you want to apply it to everyday life.13
We can see what Arendt means by describing nihilism as arising out of “the desire to find results that would make further thinking unnecessary” by looking at one typical table-turning strategy employed by nihilists: taking such a microscopic and decontextualized view of actions as to make them seem too ridiculous to care about. For example, reducing an offensive joke to just a couple of words put together to produce laughter, or reducing sex to just a couple of bodies put together to produce pleasure. Since no one would think of themselves as opposed to laughter or to pleasure, the nihilist’s perspective can be very convincing, and so any further thought on the matter is made unnecessary. In this way nihilists are able to make serious people question the legitimacy not only of their feelings but of their seriousness. In other words, nihilism is “dangerous” not only because it is self-destructive but also because it can be contagious.
The idea that nihilism can be contagious is useful for understanding what may seem like a tension between Nietzsche’s description of nihilism as a cultural phenomenon and de Beauvoir’s description of nihilism as an individual attitude. Nihilism in an individual is a disorder, but nihilism in a society is a disease. The search of the serious for an external authority to give life meaning is not an individual endeavor. As Lyotard described, such a search is based on metanarratives, on practices and on concepts that have a history, a history that a serious person is born into and thus does not create but only adopts and perpetuates. This is why nihilism can be so contagious, as the disappointed serious person does not turn against a seriousness that is personal, but a seriousness that is cultural.
The arguments of the nihilist are convincing to those around the nihilist because the arguments are based on the logic of seriousness shared by those around the nihilist. In particular, nihilists often focus on the means/ends logic of seriousness. Seriousness seeks out external authority, but the external authority is a means to the serious person’s end, which, as we have already seen, is the ability to enjoy life like a child rather than to be filled with anxiety like an adult. The nihilist thus offers the serious person a way to achieve this end without having to worry about the means. To the extent that the nihilist succeeds in enjoying life like a child, it is not from finding a new parent as the serious person believes is required, but simply from adopting the uncaring attitude of a child. In other words, nihilism is like consequentialism, only without the pesky concern about consequences.
When the contagion of nihilism spreads, we come to increasingly see the world the way a sick person does, wanting only what we think will make us feel better and avoiding anything that we think will make us feel worse. Consequently, external authority figures like scientists come to be judged not by facts but by feelings. We readily believe those who tell us what we want to hear (“A glass of wine a day will make you live longer”) and reject those who tell us what we don’t want to hear (“We need to drastically reduce our carbon emissions to protect the environment”). So while nihilism can make us as carefree and happy as children, it can also make us as careless and destructive as children. Nihilism is therefore the ability to enjoy a glass of wine while watching the world burn.