A modern world of only prose, a uni-verse with no single poet, or even justice, it seems.. no metrical structure as a defining factor, an early return to the beast masquerading as truth, a brutal honesty? Can truth ever be expressed so bluntly without losing its value...thus value of impact..but what is true as always been true, beast or not, a depth into itself when the truth of itself to itself is hidden, but blatantly clear to all else, the depth signifies the reality of the truth to those who can see..the increasing artificiality of the beast without the development in between..
Who can see?
and this has always been predetermined hasn't it? in the predetermination you will find death easy, a big deal without it being a big deal, but not the modern pretend fearless negation, but a profound acceptance where reality can not become anymore real...but only your increasing exposure to it..
Is this oasis just a comprehending consistency...and relation..?
The embracing of fear to deal with fear. The fear of God eases the fear of death. A fear that brings an acceptability to a submissive nature, a nature then in a state of comfort bypasses the fear of death, and apparently death itself. How then can there ever be comfort in a time of fear? submissiveness testifies to an obedience, an obedience towards the will of the one who transcends all?... Can there ever be any comfort without true obedience? It is clear what the heart, soul and mind of any person bears at the time of their death and the way they react to the circumstance that brings about their death in the way that it does.
How many men have died before God? How many men have died before Queens and Princesses..
How many men have just..died?
Then is this modern master not open to all? Perhaps, a more feminized welcoming where submission in any form is acceptable..a quicker exit? a mindfulness for the mindless?...
Then is an honorable death a more satisfying death..before a queen? ..on a battlefield..more personal than god? more real..
Or taking into the consideration, the modern martyr, who doesn't know he is a martyr..A soldier who dies before a system...ah but all this honor, dignity, integrity stuff is no longer necessary..when the simple promises of better future living conditions are on the table. ...if he makes it out.. then he can return and go on to enjoy a basic built house with central heating..
The truthful spirit of masculinity, where power is recognized using a reference to itself where the realization of personal power brings about an appreciation for the other's higher level of power...is.. really.. not... present..
Entering respect and responsibility..or the lack thereof in modern times..who knew that respect and responsibility can bring so many wonderful things..then what becomes of life without such things?
but why stop there? even respect and responsibility are held in judgement and understood, or even a tool to be used...or perhaps those words just send your flow into a different direction..on the same road where you might find worth and pride..
how taken are you?...
Oh well, I guess Dorothy's red ruby slippers allows her to leave home without actually leaving home..a comforting safety net before her feet...you know, needed in case of an emergency..and other types of emergencies..namely period blood, giving the red slippers a cool looking trail effect on the yellow brick road....Good thing those shoes have teleportation ability ..because that period blood might signal sexual maturity ..probably not a good idea on a road where lions and others reside..
This place makes for a good gathering hidden in plain view with a philosophical garden....
Soo there's a guy, right..Who intentionally visits art galleries and believes that the painting hes sees to be the reality he is in, where he is the painting..a living one..ah a brainwashed mind, all very sparkling clean, never needing a wash ever again..so pure with no diversion, there will be no change within this change, the continuation of the change, changing in no other way than to itself, but only a similar extension of itself within the overall change, you might find reality here..or NOT!..This defines the particular nature of change for that individual aspect of change..the other aspects are of a constant changing change with a less similar extension of change..
Boo!
Yeah, words were never perfect, but they use to be pretty close! now that they are turned inwards, the simple becomes incredibly difficult..ah you know, like a bunch a grapes hanging from a tree that you just can't seem to reach regardless of your aggressive hunger!
Geez guy, all this interaction can become dangerous, oh hello, Paris..I guess she really did underestimate young desperate fatherless boys..well, i suspect if she shaved her armpit hair then their attention may have taken a different direction..Then it would of been really interesting ..like a war within himself, like the lost desperation to please his father vs the self hatred sexual expression of satisfying a white woman..hmm which one will hold his mind the longest..but his self-destruction was always inevitable.. a death of a single woman or the death of a hundred or so concert goers..
Trying to make the discrepancies positive doesn't seem to be working anymore..perhaps the modern can find another way to build a bridge to a better reality..
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"What literature toward the end of the nineteenth century was trying to grasp, within the convention of words and sentences, was the sense of life not as successive discrete entities but as a stream-of-consciousness. The phrase is William James's, and appears in a chapter in his Principles of Psychology of 1890; it became widely known through its central position in the popular Psychology: The Briefer Course, published in 1892. The notion of a stream-of- consciousness implies that even where there is a time gap, the consciousness after the elapsed time still overlaps with the consciousness before the interval, so that experienced time is not chronological but simultaneous. Of equal importance to our sense of meaning, when we experience time as a stream-of-consciousness, the transitive elements of that stream have as much meaning and impact as the substantive points which denote entities. As James writes in a striking passage:
"We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. Yet we do not: so inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use."
While conventional language held to a sense of ordered substantives bridged by the transitive prepositions, modernist literature has sought to emphasize these transitive elements as the synapses which carry the nerve impulses of feeling, to plunge one into the maelstrom of sensations. The effort is anticipated by Flaubert in Madame Bovary. In the scene at the country fair (I follow the exposition of Joseph Frank), on the street there is the surging, jos- tling mob, mingling with the livestock. Raised slightly above the street on a platform are the bombastic, speech-making officials. From a window in the inn overlooking the spectacle are the lovers Emma and Rodolphe, watching the proceedings and carrying on their conversation in stilted phrases. "Everything should sound simultaneously," Flaubert later wrote, in commenting on the scene; "one should hear the bellowing of cattle, the whispering of the lovers, and the rhetoric of the officials all at the same time." But since language proceeds in time, it is impossible to create this si- multaneity of experience except by breaking up temporal sequence. And this is exactly what Flaubert does: he dissolves the sequence by cutting back and forth (the cinematographic analogy is quite deliberate), and in a final crescendo the two sequences—M. le Pres- ident citing Cincinnatus and Rodolphe describing the irresistibly magnetic attraction between lovers—are juxtaposed in a single sentence to reach a unified effect.
This spatialization of form (to use Joseph Frank's phrase) inter- rupts the time-flow of a narrative to fix attention on the interplay of relationships within an immobilized time area. It is one strategy to capture what James called the "perceptual flux." The other, which is at the heart of the experiments of Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, is to immerse the reader in the stream of time itself. In Jacob's Room (1922), Virginia Woolf creates a shift of sensibility through the interaction of images which dissolve into one another. In Mrs. Dalloway (1925), the story of one day in the life of a woman, the technique of flashbacks creates the stream-of- consciousness. In The Waves (1931), the novel has become entirely a series of interior monologues. Joyce's Ulysses (1922), in the most extraordinary display of virtuosity, exhibits all the techniques of the assemblages of time and emphasizes the idea of shifting perspecfives, not only by juxtapositions and flashbacks but also by the adoption of a different style for each chapter, so as to emphasize the multiple ways a story can be told. And Gertrude Stein, in the ear- liest effort of all (The Making of Americans, published in 1925 but written zo years before), seeks to exemplify her idea of "time- knowledge" (but not "narrative") by writing the total and repeti- tious history of a family (the book runs to 900 pages) almost entirely in the present tense. As she observed about the novel:
. . . in The Making of Americans . . . I gradually and slowly found out there were two things I had to think about: the fact that knowledge is acquired, so to speak, by memory; but when you know anything, memory doesn't come in. At any moment that you are conscious of knowing anything, memory plays no part. When any of you feels anybody else, memory doesn't come into it. You have the sense of the immediate.
. . . I was trying to get this present immediacy without trying to drag in anything else. I had to use present participles, new constructions of grammar. The grammar-constructions are correct, but they are changed, in order to get this immediacy. In short, from that time I have been trying in every possible way to get the sense of immediacy, and practically all the work I have done has been in that direction.
In music one finds similar patterns of change. In the modernist canon there has been a growing obsession with sound—that is, with the foreground alone. The change from Wagner to Schoenberg indicates this transition.
The period from 1890 to 1930 was the great period of modernism, in its brilliant explorations of style and its dazzling experiments of form. In the 45 years since, there has been almost no innovation that was not attempted in that period, with the exception of those efforts to fuse technology with music or technology with painting and sculpture (e.g., the "environments" created by Rauschenberg, in which the patterns of light and the arrangement of "sculpture" are changed randomly by the weight of the spectators on pressure mats or the heat effects of a spectator's body on sensors), efforts that put the burden of art on memory (rather than on objects), yet which have left nothing memorable. If there has been a single aesthetic it has been the effort to destroy the idea of the object. This began with a changing conception of the "duration" of art. Tchelitchew once complained that the paintings of Picasso would not last more than 50 years because of the quality of the canvas, and Picasso shrugged. There were the experiments in art as self-destruction, in the machinesof Tinguely; or as "instantaneous events," such as the "flashlight pictures" that Picasso "drew" for Clouzot (which are recorded on film). If there was a new aesthetic it was the effort, as analyzed by Harold Rosenberg, to define the meaning of painting in "action," arguing that the value of the painting lay not in the object produced, but in the action of the painter in producing it; and what the spectator had to learn to appreciate was not the image he saw,but the suggestion of kinesthetic activity behind it. For an art that was thus oriented to the "new," a remarkable burden was being placed on "memory" to sustain it.
The extraordinary point is that in all the arts—painting, poetry, fiction, music—the modernist impulse has a common syntax of expression underlying the diverse nature of the genres. It is, as I have said, the eclipse of distance between the spectator and the artist, between the aesthetic experience and the work of art. One sees this as the eclipse of psychic distance, social distance, and aesthetic distance.
The loss of psychic distance means the suspension of time. Freud has said that in the unconscious there is no sense of time: one experiences the events of the past not as if they were of the present; but with the immediacy, the actualite, of the present. This is why the unconscious, with its storehouse of the past, and especially of childhood terrors, remains so threatening and has to be held down. The meaning of maturity, for Freud, was the ability to interpose the necessary distance, a sense of past and present, in order to make the necessary distinctions between what was past, as past, and what derived from the present. But the thrust of modernist culture is to disrupt or break up that sense of past and present. In Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, sensory experience awakens involuntary memory, showing how deeply the past remains within us and how it can overcome the present.
All of this, inevitably, creates a distortion of commonsense per- ception in the total range of human experience. The effect of im- mediacy, impact, simultaneity, and sensation as the mode of aesthetic —and psychological—experience is to dramatize each moment, to increase our tensions to a fever pitch, and yet to leave us without a resolution, reconciliation, or transforming moment, which is the catharsis of a ritual. This is necessarily the case, since the effects that are created derive not from content (some transcendental call, a transfiguration, or a purgation through tragedy or suffering) but almost entirely from technique. There is constant stimulation and dis- orientation, yet there is also emptiness after the psychedelic moment has passed. One is enveloped and thrown about, given a psychic "high" or the thrill of the edge of madness; yet beyond the involvement in the whirlwind of the senses, there are the dull routines of everyday life. In the theater the curtain falls, the play ends. In life one has to go home, go to bed, awaken the next morning, brush one's teeth, wash one's face, shave, defecate, and go to work. Everyday time, necessarily, is different from psychedelic time; and how far can this disjunction be stretched?
The search for the modern was a search for the heightening of experience in all dimensions, and the attempt to make those experi- ences immediate to the sensibility of people. Yet there is every indication that we have come to the end of that phase, at least in the element of high culture (if such a conception is still possible), especially as these searches have passed over into the vulgarizations of the cultural mass. The literature of modernity—the literature of Yeats, Lawrence, Joyce, and Kafka—was a literature which, as Lionel Trilling put it, took "to itself the dark power which certain aspects of religion once exercised over the human mind." It was, in its private way, concerned with spiritual salvation. But its succes- sors seem to have lost concern with salvation itself. In this sense, present-day art has become post-modern and post-Christian.
The new sensibility was a redemption of the senses from the mind. "Sensations, feelings, the abstract forms and styles of sensibil- ity count. It is to these that contemporary art addresses itself . . . we are what we are able to see (hear, taste, smell, feel) even more powerfully and profoundly than we are what furniture of ideas we have stocked in our heads."
Moreover, "if art is understood as ... a programming of sensa- tions, then the feeling (or sensation) given off by a Rauschenberg painting might be like that of a song by the Supremes." Thus, further distinctions were erased, and sophisticated painting and popular music became equally valid for the "reorganization of con- sciousness" (or of the "sensorium"), which was now proclaimed as the function of art. In all this there was a "democratization" of culture in which nothing could be considered high or low, a syncretism of styles in which all sensations mingled equally, and a world of sensibility which was accessible to all.
If there was a democratization of culture in which a radical egali- tarianism of feeling superseded the older hierarchy of mind, there was also, by the end of the 19605, a democratization of "genius." The idea of the artist as genius, as a being apart who (in the de- scription of Edward Shils) "need not regard the laws of society and its authorities" and who aims "only to be guided by the inner neces- sities of the expansion of the self—to embrace new experiences," goes back to the early ipth century. The artist, it was thought, looked at the world from a special point of view. Whistler pro- claimed that artists were a class apart whose standards and aspira- tions stood outside the comprehension of the vulgar. If there was "a conflict between a genius and his public," Hegel declared in a sen- tence which (as Irving Howe has noted) thousands of critics, writers, and publicists have echoed through the years, "it must be the public that is to blame . . . the only obligation the artist can have is to follow truth and his genius."
In France, where the "man of letters," as Tocqueville observed, had long taken the lead in "shaping the national temperament and the outlook on life," this tradition took particularly deep hold. Not only were artists different, by virtue of their genius, from other mortals; they were also intended to be, as Victor Hugo put it, the "sacred leaders" of the nation. Indeed, with the decline of religion, the writer was more and more invested with the prerogatives of the priest, for he was seen as a man endowed with supernatural vision.
In a constricted world, the writer alone was the unadaptable man, the wanderer—like Rimbaud—in perpetual flight from the mun- dane. Joyce in Trieste, Pound in London, Hemingway in Paris, Lawrence in Taos, Allen Ginsberg in India—these are the very prototypes of this artist-hero type in the twentieth century. The pilgrimage to places far from the bourgeois home had become a necessary step in attaining independence of vision. Underlying all of this is the belief that art tells a truth which is higher than that perceived via the ordinary cognitive mode, that the "language" of art, in the words of Herbert Marcuse, "must communicate a truth, an objectivity which is not accessible to ordinary language and ordinary experience."
But what if, as Lionel Trilling has wryly observed (in a view which even "rather surprises" himself), ". . . art does not always tell the truth or the best kind of truth and does not always point out the right way"? What if art "can even generate falsehood and habituate us to it, and . . . on frequent occasions . . . might well be subject, in the interests of autonomy, to the scrutiny of the rational intellect"?
This question is perhaps too large to be gone into here. But the exaltation of the artistic vision above all others also raises another, more pressing question: If the language of art is not accessible to ordinary language and ordinary experience, how can it be accessible to ordinary people? One solution of the 19605 was to make each man his own artist-hero. In May 1968 the students at the f',cole des Beaux Arts in Paris called for a development of consciousness which would guide the "creative activity immanent in every individual," so that the "work of art" and "the artist" would become "mere moments in this activity." And a 1969 catalogue of revolutionary art at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm carried this injunction further by declaring that "Revolution is Poetry. There is poetry in all those acts which break the system of organization." But such activist pronouncements—and the 19605 were not lacking in them—do not solve the problem of modernism, they only evade it.
"Action" art thus brought "action" response, and every man became his own artist. But in the process, all notion of objective judgment went by the board.
The democratization of genius is made possible by the fact that while one can quarrel with judgments, one cannot quarrel with feelings. The emotions generated by a work either appeal to you or they don't, and no man's feelings have more authority than another man's. With the expansion of higher education, and the growth of a semi-skilled intelligentsia, moreover, a significant change has taken place in the scale of all this. Large numbers of people who might previously have been oblivious to the matter now insist on the right to participate in the artistic enterprise—not in order to cultivate their minds or sensibilities, but to "fulfill" their personalities. Both in the character of art itself and in the nature of the response to it, the concern with self takes precedence over any objective standards.
This development has not been unforeseen. Thirty years ago Karl Mannheim warned that:
. . . the open character of democratic mass society, together with its growth in size and the tendency toward general public participation, not only produces far too many elites but also deprives these elites of the exclusiveness which they need for the sublimation of impulse. If this minimum of exclusiveness is lost, then the deliberate formulation of taste, of a guiding principle of style, becomes impossible. The new impulses, intuitions and fresh approaches to the world, if they have no time to mature in small groups, will be apprehended by the masses as mere stimuli…" [Capitalism]
"The prototype of the new sensibility in the drama was the Living Theatre, organized by Julian Beck and Judith Malina. After traveling in Europe for several years, the troupe evolved a new style of random action and preached a form of revolutionary anarchism. Their new credo was that "the theater must be set free" and "taken out into the street." In words reminiscent of Marinetti's Futuristic Manifesto, Beck launched an attack on the theater of the past:
All forms of the theater of lies will go.. . . We don't need Shakespeare's objective wisdom, his sense of tragedy reserved only for the experience of the high-born. His ignorance of collective joy makes him useless to our time. It is important not to be seduced by the poetry. That is why Artaud says, "Burn the Texts."
In fact the whole theater of the intellect will go. The theater of our century, and centuries past, is a theater whose presentation and appeal is intellectual. One leaves the theater of our time and goes and thinks. But our thinking, conditioned by our already conditioned minds, is so corrupt that it is not to be trusted.
In the United States of the 19605, where the children of the afflu- ent played, sometimes fatally, at revolution, and toyed, sometimes fatally, with hallucination, it was inevitable that theories like those behind Artaud's "Theater of Cruelty" would become fashionable without ever being really understood. For in all the talk which went on during this period about the theater as ritual, there was a curi- ous sense of emptiness, lack of conviction, and sheer theatricality.
Ritual, as fimile Durkheim has pointed out, depends first of all upon a clear distinction between the sacred and the profane, agreed upon by all participants in the culture. Ritual guards the portals of the sacred, and one of its functions is to preserve those taboos es- sential to an ongoing society through the sense of awe that ritual invokes; ritual, in other words, is a dramatized representation of sacred power. In a society which does not, however, start with this fundamental distinction between two realms of being, and which denies all notions of a hierarchy of ordered values, how can there be anything like meaningful ritual?
What the new theater called ritual devolved inevitably upon some celebration of violence. At first the violence remained within the confines of the work itself—as in the rite of exorcism'in The Blacks, in which the murder of a white man by a black is symbolically reenacted. Later, however, when the hunger for sensation had escalated into a demand for something more lifelike, happenings gradually came to replace written plays as the chief arena for the enactment of violence. The theater only simulates life, after all,but in a happening real blood could—and did—flow. In the "Destruction in Art" symposium held in the Judson Church in New York in 1968, one of the participants suspended a live white chicken from the ceiling, swung it back and forth, and then snipped off its head with a pair of hedge clippers. He then placed the severed head between his legs, inside his unzippered fly, and proceeded to hammer the insides of a piano with the carcass. At the Cinematheque in
1968, the German artist Herman Nitsch disemboweled a sheep on- stage, poured the entrails and blood over a young girl, and nailed the carcass of the animal to a cross. At this happening, performers of the Orgy-Mystery Theater hurled quantities of blood and animal intestines over each other, presumably reenacting the taurobolium rite of Rome, where a sacrificial bull was slaughtered over the head of a man in a pit as part of his initiation into the Phrygian mysteries. Both these events were reported, with pictures, in the magazine Art in America. Another event presided over by Mr. Nitsch, involv- ing the ritual slaughter of an animal, was featured in a front-page picture in the Village Voice.
Traditionally, violence has been repugnant to the intellectual as a confession of failure. In discourse, individuals resorted to force only when they had lost the power of persuasion by means of reason. So, too, in art the resort to force—in the sense of a literal reenactment of violence on the canvas, on the stage, or on the written page-— signified that the artist, lacking the artistic power to suggest the emotion, was reduced to invoking the shock of it directly.
But in the 1960's violence was justified not only as therapy but as a necessary accompaniment to social change. Watching the children of the French upper bourgeoisie mouth the phrases of violence and chant from Mao's Little Red Book in Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise, one realized that a corrupt romanticism was covering some dreadful drive to murder. Similarly, in Godard's Weekend, where a real slaughter of live animals takes place, one realized that the roots of a sinister blood-lust were being touched, not for catharsis but for kicks.
What the rhetoric of revolution permits—both in the new sensi- bility and the new politics—is the eradication of the line between playacting and reality, so that life (and such "revolutionary" ac- tions as demonstrations) is played out as theater, while the craving for violence, first in the theater and then in the street demonstrations, becomes a necessary psychological drug, a form of addiction." [Capitalism]
The takes on Nihilism so far, are all imbalanced. [Gillespie is a Heideggerian.]
Quote :
"Nihilism originated as a distinct philosophical concept in the 18th century. As Michael Gillespie reports, “the concept of nihilism first came into general usage as a description of the danger [German] idealism posed for the intellectual, spiritual, and political health of humanity. The first to use the term in print was apparently F. L. Goetzius in his De nonismo et nihilism in theologia (1733).” Tracts portraying Kantian critical philosophy as a form of nihilism appeared near the end of the century, but it would fall to F.H. Jacobi to give the first explicit formulation of the concept. Convinced that idealism posed an existential threat to traditional Christian belief, Jacobi attacked both Kant and Fichte, the former in his essay, “Idealism and Nihilism,” and the latter in a letter to Fichte in 1799. He branded Fichte’s philosophy as nihilism by drawing a stark contrast between a steadfast faith in a God beyond human subjectivity and an insatiable reason that, as Otto Poeggeler puts it, “perceives only itself” and “dissolves everything that is given into the nothingness of subjectivity.” Jacobi believed that idealism entailed a lopsided focus on human subjectivity that not only shut out the divine, but severed itself from any external reality whatsoever, including nature. If things-in-themselves cannot be cognized, and actuality itself is but a category of the understanding, then it seems to follow that things-in-themselves do not actually exist. Idealism shifts, to use Gilson’s formulation, from the “exterior to the interior,” but does not make the move from the “interior to the superior”; in fact, it does not “move” at all, since the exterior—nature—is regarded as a realm of mere appearances. For Jacobi, it is only through a decisive act of will, a recognition of the stark either/or before us and a resolute commitment to God, that humans can find their proper place. As Jacobi challenges Fichte: “God is and is outside of me, a living essence that subsists for itself, or I am God. There is no third possibility."
Three things stand out in this passage. First, Jabobi is simultaneously charging Fichte with pantheism and atheism, positions he regards as basically identical. Before mounting his assault on idealism, Jacobi had argued that Spinoza’s pantheism was actually atheism. Jacobi seems to have regarded Fichte’s idealism as a doomed attempt to marry the focus on freedom in Descartes and Kant to Spinoza’s holistic and divinized view of nature. So nihilism is portrayed as emerging, roughly speaking, out of attempts to integrate modern conceptions of freedom and nature. Second, Jacobi’s denial of a “third way” is, as we will see, a common complaint among critics of nihilism, or of philosophies alleged to be nihilistic. Those who cannot accept the basic dualities and either/or’s of existence, so the thinking goes, attempt to sublate them in elaborate monistic philosophies that bend logic and language beyond their breaking points in order to chart a third way--to, in Kierkegaard’s turn of biblical phrase, join what God has separated. The attempt to include everything ends up embracing nothing. Third, it is more than a little ironic that Jacobi’s fideistic focus on the will, intended as an antidote to nihilism, would later be pointed to as a symptom of nihilism by Nietzsche because the will is directed toward a false object (God) and by Heidegger because the triumph of the will in modern thought is the fruition of the ancient seed of metaphysics, the drive to frame being as presence.
On Löwith’s telling, Ever since the middle of the [19th] century, the construction of the history of Europe has not proceeded according to a schema of progress, but instead according to that of decline. This change began not at the end of the century but rather at its beginning, with Fichte’s lectures, which he saw as an age of ‘perfected iniquity.’ From there, there proceeds through European literature and philosophy an uninterrupted chain of critiques...which decisively condition not simply the academic but the actual intellectual history between Hegel and Nietzsche. The state of Being in decline along with one’s own time is also the ground and soil for Heidegger’s ‘destruction,’ for his will to dismantle and rebuild, back to the foundations of a tradition which has become untenable.
Fichte’s indictment of the present age would be the prototype for a long list of scathing critiques of modern society, from Kierkegaard’s The Present Age to Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations. Once Hegel had, as Löwith puts it, “made the negation of what exists” the principle of genuine philosophy, the task of philosophy would widely become identified with Zeitdiagnose, and the role of the philosopher was to become, as Nietzsche put it, the physician of culture. Löwith shows how this spirit is embodied by thinkers as disparate as Marx and Kierkegaard: Marx’s worldly critique of the bourgeois-capitalist world corresponds to Kierkegaard’s critique of the bourgeois-Christian world, which is as foreign to Christianity in its origins as the bourgeois or civil state is to a polis. That Marx places the outward existential relations of the masses before a decision and Kierkegaard the inward existential relation of the individual to himself, that Marx philosophizes without God and Kierkegaard before God—these apparent oppositions have as a common presupposition the decay of existence along with God and the world.
Both thinkers, he continues, “conceived ‘what is’ as a world determined by commodities and money, and as an existence defined throughout by irony and boredom.” Marx’s assertion of a purely “human” world and Kierkegaard’s espousal of a “worldless Christianity” both share in common the severance of the human from the natural. For Marx, nature is merely the positum there to be negated and appropriated by human labor. For Kierkegaard, as Walter Kaufmann quips, nature is irrelevant to human life: “He sweeps away the whole conception of a cosmos as a mere distraction... Here is man, and ‘one thing is needful’: a decision.” Hans Jonas, another of Heidegger’s students, detected a similar problem with Heidegger’s own account of human existence: namely, that it did not place humans within any kind of scala natura that is the locus of value. Löwith’s larger point, though, is that the disintegration of the Hegelian vision resulted in a grab bag of incompatible viewpoints usually consisting of a scathing critique of the present, a longing for a lost age, and/or a radical program for individual or social renewal.
Though Lewis does not explicitly mention the specter of nihilism in his classic The Abolition of Man, he clearly laments its corrosive effects on Western civilization and insists it arose largely due to a disruption in humanity’s relationship to nature. The abolition of human nature, he hypothesizes, is the unintended consequence of the attempt to bend nature to human purposes and is the endgame of scientific naturalism. Moreover, this attempt to defeat nature and scrub it free of undesirables results, paradoxically, in nature’s total victory. The more of reality we concede to the objective, value-free domain of “mere nature,” the less free we become; or more precisely, the more freedom becomes a curse, because its polestars for navigating the field of possibilities—an objective morality rooted in nature or the “Tao,” Lewis’ catchall phrase for premodern notions of nature as a cosmos to which humans must conform—have been snuffed out. The human is left with nothing but his drives and instincts to decide how to act; he is left, in other words, with nothing but nature to guide him. But since this is not a cosmic nature with a logos, an ordered hierarchy of matter, body, soul, and spirit, but a nature bereft of reason or moral value, and since reason has been downgraded to a tool and morality whittled down to a matter of preference, it is a matter of the blind leading the blind; a matter, in short, of nihilism. What happens, then, is that whatever someone happens to prefer is called natural. Somehow, the attempt to make everything “natural” ends up denaturing the very notion of nature.
Like Lewis, Rosen describes nihilism as partly the collapse in the belief in objective moral truths, which is abetted by the widespread adoption of a non-normative, instrumental view of reason. Once the will is decoupled from the intellect and no longer choosing from among the ends the intellect presents to it, and once the logos is removed from nature, then there are no longer any objective moral truths that the intellect can apprehend and present to the will as worthy candidates for action. Everything falls to the will, and since the will cannot furnish reasons for acting one way or another—and since reason itself has been relieved of command to do so—then everything is permitted. Rosen defines nihilism in this Nietzschean sense, and asserts that “For those who are not gods, recourse to a [value] creation ex nihilo...reduces reason to nonsense by equating the sense or significance of speech with silence.”
While the premodern task of philosophy, generally speaking, was (partly) to discern the unchanging logos within nature, in the modern period it is expanded to tracing the logos within history—but this leads, somehow, to the paradoxical view that all rational speech is reducible to historical, i.e., contingent, conditions. The strange thing is that such a nihilism can equally accommodate the view that “everything is natural”—since there is no reason or necessity governing human affairs and action, they are merely an arbitrary matter of chance, will, or instinct--and “nothing is natural”—since there are no trans-historical or trans-cultural metaphysical or moral truths and everything, including theses about nature, is a product of history. Rosen insists that the notion of “creativity” played an important part in this process. According to this view, a person’s moral life consists not in obeying the dictates of a conscience common to all or by acting in accordance with his rationally knowable nature, but by being faithful to the oracle of his inner genius, the natural creativity welling up from below. Once creativity, not reason, is enshrined as the center of gravity in human nature, the next logical step is to adopt the view that all speech about being—all philosophy, science, and mathematics—is poetry. Rosen thinks that the influence of historicism on the view of reason and metaphysics, and the effect of the notion of creativity on the view of morality and human nature, are the main causes of the advent of nihilism: “the fundamental problem in a study of nihilism is to dissect the language of historicist ontology with the associated doctrine of human creativity.” Heidegger and Nietzsche are the most important thinkers in this drama; Heidegger because of his attempt to think being in terms of time, and Nietzsche because of his reduction of all human faculties to a creative will to power.
Though their diagnoses of nihilism are unparalleled, Rosen thinks their solutions are flawed because both are victims of the modern “rationalistic view of reason”: By detaching ‘reasonable’ from ‘good,’ the friends of reason made it impossible to assert the goodness of reason.... If reason is conceived exclusively on the model of mathematics, and if mathematics is itself understood in terms of Newtonian rather than Pythagorean science, then the impossibility of asserting the goodness of reason is the extreme instance of the manifest evil of reason. Reason (we are told) objectifies, reifies, alienates; it debases or destroys the genuinely human.... Man has become alienated from his own authentic or creative existence by the erroneous projection of the supersensible world of Platonic ideas...and so of an autonomous technology, which, as the authentic contemporary historical manifestation of ‘rationalism,’ will destroy us or enslave us to machines.
As such, since the good was not to be found by the light of reason, it had to found somewhere else; but since the very notion of good becomes unintelligible when severed from reason, it was nowhere to be found, and thus had to be created. But since the goodness of this creativity consists in its spontaneity and novelty, it must supply its own criterion and guarantee its own legitimacy.
“Weber,” Bloom observes, “saw that all we care for was threatened by Nietzsche’s insight [that God is dead].... We require values, which in turn require a peculiar human creativity that is drying up and in any event has no cosmic support.” But instead of introducing a mood of despair and a sense of the tragic, nihilism was parlayed into an ethos of self-help, the psychology of self-esteem, a therapeutic culture, and a glib relativism. As Bloom writes, “There is a whole arsenal of terms for talking about nothing—caring, self-fulfillment, expanding consciousness.... Nothing determinate, nothing that has a referent.... American nihilism is a mood, a mood of moodiness, a vague disquiet. It is nihilism without the abyss (CAM 154). What irks Bloom is that Americans embraced the language of value and creativity with such ease, without gleaning their darker implications and ignorant of the turbulent intellectual, cultural, and political history that produced them. Reminiscent of Heidegger’s discussion of idle talk, Bloom notes how the nostrums of nihilism calcify into democratic dogma: “these words are not reasons, nor were they intended to be reasons. All to the contrary, they were meant to show that our deep human need to know what we are doing and to be good cannot be satisfied. By some miracle these very terms became our justification: nihilism as moralism” (CAM 238-9). This form of nihilism is the most insidious because the most unconscious, what Nietzsche called “passive nihilism.” It is the most unconscious because its victims are unaware of their condition and incapable of contemplating alternatives.
Nature has to be branded as indifferent if not hostile to human flourishing in order for the project to make sense, and human nature must be redrawn as a- or pre-political. As Bloom puts it, “Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau all found that one way or another nature led men to war, and that civil society’s purpose was not to cooperate with a natural tendency in man toward perfection but to make peace where nature’s imperfection causes war” (CAM 163). Moreover, nature’s obstacles have to be conceived as surmountable through applied science: “if, instead of fighting one another, we band together and make war on our stepmother [nature], who keeps her riches from us, we can at the same time provide for ourselves and end our strife. The conquest of nature, which is made possible by the insight of science and by the power it produces, is the key to the political” (CAM 165). But nature has to be conquered in two senses. Before it can be literally conquered via applied science, it must be theoretically transformed from a great chain of being, a cosmos, into an ontologically homogenous plane of extended matter in motion. Just as nature is reduced to its lowest common denominator, politics comes to be based not on virtue or the good, but on the most basic human drives: the fear of death, the desire for comfort, and the goal of self-preservation. This lowering of the human center of gravity—what Strauss called the “low but solid ground” on which the moderns built—is what eventually leads to Nietzsche’s last man.
However, this foundation is highly unstable and its implications are deeply ambiguous. Rousseau was the first to tap the fissure that would grow into the abyss addressed by Nietzsche, and this gap has to do with the new concept of nature. As Bloom writes, “For Hobbes and Locke nature is near and unattractive, and man’s movement into society was easy and unambiguously good. For Rousseau nature is distant and attractive, and the move was hard and divided man” (CAM 169). Rousseau, Bloom writes, realizes just how difficult it is to sever the ontological bond between nature and human nature, and that the attempt to do so creates great confusion: “Now there are two competing views about man’s relation to nature, both founded on the modern distinction between nature and society. Nature is the raw material of man’s freedom from harsh necessity, or else man is the polluter of nature. Nature in both cases means dead nature, or nature without man and untouched by man...” (CAM 173). One view sees nature as the problem, while the other sees humanity as the problem; but both views, and all three thinkers, share the prejudice that nature is “dead,” i.e., bereft of soul or subjectivity and flatly opposed to the human order of history, politics, and society.
Bloom gives an excellent summary of the difference between the ancient and modern views of nature: [In the modern view,] all higher purposiveness in nature, which might have been consulted by men’s reason and used to limit human passion, had disappeared. Nature tells us nothing about man specifically and provides no imperatives for his conduct.... Man somehow remains a part of nature, but in a different and much more problematic way than in, say, Aristotle’s philosophy, where soul is at the center and what is highest in man is akin to what is highest in nature, or where soul is nature. Man is really only a part and not the microcosm. Nature has no rank order or hierarchy of being, nor does the self (CAM 176).
This is the consequence of the collapse of the cosmos, the same disproportion between humanity and nature that Rosen points to. There are no “natural limits” to the passions, because only the passions are natural, and all claims of reason are taken to be in some way derived from or motivated by them.
Crosby traces many religious and philosophical sources of nihilism through the Western tradition, but here I just want to focus on two of the more general ones, since they bear directly on our conceptions of nature: anthropocentrism and value externalism. Anthropocentrism, he explains, involves the subordination of nature to human beings and stems from the Judeo-Christian assumption that nature must revolve around us: “we humans are either at the pinnacle of a nature regarded as subservient to our needs and concerns, or we are nowhere. Everything in the universe must focus mainly on us and the problems and prospects of our personal existence, or else the universe is meaningless and our lives are drained of purpose” (SA 128). Once these unrealistic expectations are disappointed and we fall back to earth, the alternatives—dualism and materialism— seem unsatisfying. It is as though we had resided so long on a mountaintop that the lowlands came to seem inhospitable. But Crosby points out that our pique at realizing we are not the center of the universe is conditioned by our clinging to anthropocentric views.
He approves of, e.g., Nietzsche’s critique of the Christian view: “Nietzsche is correct when he claims that the anthropomorphic assumption is a fundamental cause of nihilism. ‘We have measured the value of the world,’ he says, ‘according to the categories that refer to a purely fictitious world.... What we find here is still the hyperbolic naievete of man: positing himself as the meaning and measure of the value of things’” (SA 129). This brings us to the second source of nihilism, what Crosby calls the “externality of value.” This notion, he says, “requires that we deny that nature has, or can have, any intrinsic significance; it supposes that the only value or importance it may have is that which is externally bestowed” (SA 131). Originally this assumption took root in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the idea that the goodness of nature and natural beings lay in the fact that they were created by God. Later, however, once the cosmos is collapsed and God disappears, humans replace him as the value-bestowers in chief.
Michael Gillespie offers perhaps the most revisionist account of nihilism, arguing that its roots can be traced from late medieval nominalism to Descartes’ epistemological revolution, Fichte’s absolute idealism, and the “dark side” of Romanticism. The principle source of the concept, he contends, is the rise of the capricious, voluntaristic, omnipotent God unleashed by nominalism. Long before Nietzsche pronounced the death of God, the seed of nihilism was sown by the birth of the God of nominalism. It was not the weakness of the human will that lead to nihilism, but its apotheosis.
According to Gillespie, "Nietzsche’s definition of nihilism is actually a reversal of the concept as it was originally understood, and...his solution to nihilism is in fact only a deeper entanglement in the problem of nihilism. Contrary to Nietzsche’s account, nihilism is not the result of the death of God but the consequence of the birth or rebirth of a different kind of God, an omnipotent God of will who calls into question all of reason and nature and thus overturns all eternal standards of truth and justice, and good and evil. This idea of God came to predominance in the fourteenth century and shattered the medieval synthesis of philosophy and theology.... This new way was in turn the foundation for modernity as the realm of human self-assertion. Nihilism thus has its roots in the very foundations of modernity…."
Not only is Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the cause of nihilism—the death of God— wrongheaded, but his cure fails because he is unconscious of the prejudices guiding his valorization of the will to power. Nietzsche’s spirituality of the Dionysian over-god-man, try as it might to escape the gravity of Christianity, remains squarely within the ambit of one of its mutations in the transition from the medieval to the modern period. “The Dionysian will to power,” Gillespie writes, “is in fact a further development of the absolute will that first appeared in the nominalist notion of God and became a world-historical force with Fichte’s notion of the absolute I.... Nietzsche’s Dionysus...is thus not an alternative to the Christian God but his final and in a sense greatest modern mask” (NBN xxi). Gillespie’s account is, by his own admission, not entirely original in that it is a modification of Heidegger’s view that Nietzsche was merely the crest of the wave of the will that motored modern philosophy from Descartes onward, but his novel claim is that that power was unleashed by the rupture of the medieval cosmos at the hands of the nominalists.
Gillespie contrasts nominalism with the thoroughgoing realism of medieval scholasticism. Though the latter certainly embraced divine omnipotence, this was usually seen as somehow limited by the perfect order of creation which reflected the perfect order of the divine mind. The divine will and the divine intellect are seen as integrated. The notion of a completely arbitrary and all-powerful divine will would be seen not as a true representation of God’s freedom but as a reflection of fallen, human freedom. Moreover, for realism the divine will is not entirely inscrutable, since it produces an order that can be understood by observing nature, an intelligible cosmos reflecting it.
As Gillespie recounts, "The metaphysics of traditional scholasticism is ontologically realist in positing the extramental existence of universals such as species and genera as forms of divine reason known either by divine illumination...or through an investigation of nature, God’s rational creation. Within such an ontology, nature and logic reflect one another.... On this basis, it is possible to grasp the fundamental truth about human beings and their earthly duties and obligations (NBN 12)."
The “loose end” of this realism that the nominalists would exploit, however, is divine omnipotence. “While no one denied God’s potentia absoluta (absolute power),” Gillespie writes, “scholastics generally thought that he had bound himself to a potentia ordinate (ordered power) though his own decision. The possibility that God was not bound in this way but was perfectly free and omnipotent was a terrifying possibility that nearly all medieval thinkers were unwilling to accept” (NBN 14). It is the widespread acceptance of this possibility, Gillespie contends, that formed the foundations of modernity and spurred the rise of nihilism.
The compound influence of Ockham and others was to normalize what had been a minority view in the medieval period: negative theology, the general notion that the ontological difference between God and humans (and God and nature) is so great that we cannot achieve any positive or analogical knowledge of his nature. The decoupling of human reason and God and the prioritization of divine omnipotence laid the groundwork not only for a new theology focused on revelation and faith alone (instead of natural theology and the complementarity of faith and reason), but a new understanding of nature. As Gillespie notes, “The effect of the notion of divine omnipotence on cosmology was...revolutionary. With the rejection of realism and the assertion of radical individuality, beings could no longer be conceived as members of species of genera with a certain nature or potentiality.... The rejection of formal causes was also the rejection of final causes” (NBN 21).
Denied access to God, reason would now be focused squarely on knowing nature in a more precise, certain, and complete way, and in the process, as we saw Rosen describe above, reason itself would undergo a decisive change. Since reason can no longer discover teloi in nature—including the human telos—it loses its normative status, and its sole task is instrumental, and the ends to which it is put are prescribed not by reason itself, but by the will. Gillespie notes that this is the root of Descartes’ project of doubt: “The will as doubt seeks its own negation in science in order to reconstitute itself in a higher and more powerful form for the conquest of the world. Science and understanding in other words become mere tools of the will” (NBN 43). Doubt is undertaken as a security measure needed to protect against a dangerous and unpredictable nature created and unregulated by a capricious God. God and nature can no longer be looked to for practical guidance. Humanity must seek its proper ends within itself. But since its reason can no longer recognize itself as an instance of a natural kind that fits within an ordered cosmos (in the sense of both intelligible and purposive), its reason cannot do the job, and all that is left is the will. In Gillespie’s view, all of this signals a drastic shift from a model of God as “craftsman” to a vision of God as “artist”:
The nominalist emphasis upon divine omnipotence overturned [the] conception of natural causality and established divine will and efficient causality as preeminent. God was thus no longer seen as the craftsman who models the world on a rational plan, but as an omnipotent poet whose mystically creative freedom foams forth an endless variety of absolutely individual beings.... This ‘cosmos’ is devoid of form and purpose, and the material objects that seem to exist are in fact mere illusions (NBN 53).
Gillespie writes, In [Fichte’s] interpretation of Kant...it became his goal to break the enslaving chains of the thing-in-itself and develop a system in which freedom was absolute.... Such a system in Fichte’s view could be established only by a metaphysical demonstration of the exclusive causality of freedom, and this in turn could be achieved only by a deduction of the world as a whole from freedom (NBN 76).
Freedom must be conceived not as a mere postulate that must be assumed because of a nature thoroughly determined by efficient causality (i.e., nature according to Kant via Newton), but as the principle of this nature in the first place. Fichte exacerbated the fault line between freedom and necessity broached by nominalism and wedged wider by Descartes: “Nihilism...grows out of the infinite will that Fichte discovers in the thought of Descartes and Kant. Fichte, however, radicalizes this notion of will...transforming the notion of the I into a world creating will” (NBN 66). This world-creating will is not, however, the will of the individual ego, but the source of all manifestation that alienates itself in nature: “Reality is merely a by-product of this creative will that seeks only itself.... The I of the I am is not a thing or a category but the primordial activity which brings forth all things and categories” (NBN 79). Nature is not an independent order: it is a spontaneous, free creation of the will, a negation of the absolute I. For Fichte, the moral struggle of humanity is the story of the I becoming reconciled to itself. Nature is nothing but the obstacle in the finite self’s path toward recollecting its original infinitude; or, put differently, nature is nothing other than an instrument for the perfection of humanity.
The sources are several: Greek metaphysics, Christian theology, late medieval nominalism, modern science, politics and culture, the advent of the philosophy of history, and German Idealism. The diagnoses are different: some see nihilism as a historically contingent phenomenon; some think it is rooted in human nature; and some think it issues from the nature of being itself. What they all have in common, though, is the notion that nihilism has something to do with a disruption in the relationship between humanity and nature, and many of them hold that overcoming or at least attenuating it involves developing a new conception of nature. There must be an alternative, in other words, to the positivism and scientific naturalism that rule the day because such a universe has no place for meaning and value; it offers no ground or justification for human values, and mocks human intuitions about the value of nature. Moreover, a common thread in the accounts is that nihilism involves the emergence of the view that the human will is the source of all meaning and value, and that the latter are in no way discovered but are purely created."
To define things from a Nihilistic perspective, in the average,
Objectivity via rational cost/benefits ought to be the path for those too involved, too zoomed into life, they need to step back and draw well defined boundaries to get a clearer focus on the world.
Objectivity via subjective passion/daring ought to be the path for those too detached, too zoomed out of life, they need to become more "hued" and intimately engaged to gain focus.
But this is assuming one apriori has a picture of The reality to zoom in or out,, how does one know when it is right?
