I can think of no better time, in my long life, for a serious treatment of nihilism, both as an attitude and as a social disorder. Today is a time when our planet’s ability to sustain the lives of our grandchildren and great grandchildren is quickly fading; a time when a right-wing politics exchanges pieces of silver in return for opposing all plans for climate mitigation; when an immense electronic system of political and profit-based spying invades deep regions of our lives; a time of hollow autocrats rising to power on no other basis than creating fear and hatred of strangers, as if the immense tragedies of WW II never occurred; when the preference for reason over wishful thinking is put under question and obvious public lying is no barrier to the acceptance of ideas. This is a time, in other words, of a deep and dangerous rejection of important norms of thinking and acting.

Nolen Gertz is not about to provide a brief and convenient definition of nihilism. Rather, he approaches the issue by focusing upon other beliefs and attitudes that have been associated with it. Nihil, means “not anything” in Latin, but a nihilist is not someone who does or believes in nothing. Neither of those is possible. A nihilist is not, by definition, pessimistic or necessarily evil-doing or depressed or apathetic. It is not skepticism.

Gertz takes the reader through some of the highlights of western Philosophy, pointing out the relevance of some of their ideas to understanding nihilism. Socrates lived, and died, trying to convince Athenians (who were losing a thirty-one-year war) that the tenets underlying their beloved home state were corrupt. He tried, in other words to shake up their commitments, beliefs and attitudes in favor of an examined and examining life, the only one worthy of human living. Plato waged deadly intellectual war against democracy, as Gertz points out, trying to replace the dialogue of the unprepared citizens of the Agora, where Socrates roamed, with that of the educated experts of Plato’s Academy. (I had never thought of it quite that way.) The European Enlightenment, for example Rene’ Descartes, sought to undermine the Scholastic Aristotelianism on which the Roman Church and the late middle ages had come to depend, to be replaced with a new, scientific method of thinking. The great Scotsman David Hume undermined the most foundational concepts of common sense (the soul, the self) and of science (cause and effect). These were destroyers all, but in favor something better. Bertolt Brecht captured this spirit in his play, Galileo. The friar, who was Galileo’s assistant, worried to Galileo what he should reveal of this radical new science to his parents who are sustained by the prayer and the Church each day as they carry the heavy water buckets up the side of the mountain. How could he destroy the faith that they so relied upon to weather the burdens of their lives? Galileo advises him to suggest that they accept the new science and use it to ease their burdens by inventing another way to bring the water up the hill. More later on technology.

At this point Gertz slows his pace and takes time with the writings on nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900). Nietzsche was a great stylist who possessed a prophetic vision of his own time, as one frozen at a great crossroads. This appears most dramatically in the parable of the Madman, of which Gertz might have made better use,

THE MADMAN—-Have you not heard of that madman who … ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!” [This] provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? … The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. … What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? … Is there still any up or down? Has it not become colder? … What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: … What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? … Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?  (The Gay Science (The Joyful Wisdom), 1882, trans. Walter Kaufmann.)

Nietzsche is describing a great shift that was happening in the worlds of his fellow Europeans. An entire framework, sets of assumptions, ways of seeing and judging, how lives were organized, the point of it all, these were fading, gradually, into oblivion. The total scheme of Christianity was fast disappearing from within its people, even if the rituals remained. This movement had, “… unchained this earth from its sun…” so now, ” … is there any up or down left? …” All the sacred talk of gods, their rules, their ownership of us, had to be replaced. So, what “… sacred games shall we have to invent?”, “Must we ourselves not become gods” to do this? This is the problem. The dying system was never consciously or intentionally created. Its parts were never debated or voted upon. In theory was all created, ruled and sustained, on this dying view, by a single, higher being. How could a new system, knowingly created by humans, gain the allegiance of humans? And what should it be like?

What once organized and directed lives, experiences and communities, was not handed to us by a higher power of unquestioned authority. Once-sacred texts do not contain unquestionable truth. To face this fact is to stare into a great abyss. Such a nothingness can be confronted by an entire culture (as Nietzsche’s madman saw it) or by a singular individual. In the latter case, Gertz notes Descartes’ earlier comment that it was the great misfortune of every human to have once been a child. Children(the fortunate ones at least) could believe that there were answers to every question and protections from every threat. Such a child would later face the necessity of having to figure it out all over again, this time by themselves and absent of certainty.  

Gertz moves at this point to the French existentialist trinity of Simone De Beauvoir, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Each in their way generalized this abyss to the universe itself, a universe that is “benignly indifferent”, as Camus writes, to all of our ceaseless strivings. To understand this, is to face a nothingness, but one that creates a project for our life. The project is to live authentically in a world devoid of certainties and objective meaning, and to do this without resurrecting the discredited god, (1) either whole and entire (The final temptation for the soon-to-be hanged Meursault, the “Stranger”, was to confess to god before his death.) or (2) to bring the god back in the some new form of a natural, necessary or pre-ordained way of proper living. Examples of the latter: The Social Darwinist underpinnings of Capitalism, Sexist ideas of the “place of women”, Racist ideas of manifest Destiny or how a nation gets a right to a homeland.  The examples are mine. Gertz does an excellent job framing this issue.

But how shall we respond to this challenge? If we could, should we turn away from it? Think of the terrible consequences of the sins of Eve and Adam in the Biblical story of Genesis; Adam forced to scrape the earth for food and Eve with her excruciating pain in childbirth. But think as well of the “knowledge of good and evil” they had acquired, something Yahweh had previously withheld from them. Nietzsche’s madman states that the rejection of god was the greatest of all historical events, yet “… whoever is born after us — for the sake of this deed, he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.” What is painful and fundamentally confusing provides an opportunity for “a higher history.”

  Gertz takes up ideas of Martin Heidegger and later, Jacques Ellul, on the more recent consequences of technology. This discussion has much in common with the treatment of the master/servant relationship as described by GWF Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1806). The master is free and the servant is not. Both recognize and accept these facts. But as their interconnected lives develop, the servant becomes more and more adept at satisfying the master’s need, while the master falls into an indolent life of instant fulfillment. The slave gains more and more power as the master has less and less. Marx picked up on this dialectic as a way of framing the trajectory of the Bourgeois/Proletariat relationship.

Humans create technology and are, as such, masters of the dumb machines. We use our creations to fulfill our pre-existing needs, as Galileo suggested to the friar. Eventually, of course, these technologies begin to shape newer needs for us, ones that are more complicated than before, which creates newer needs for more refined and complicated technologies. This dialectic becomes clear, Gertz notes, when we consider the simple smart phone. It provides us with the opportunity to be in contact with almost anyone at any time. We take advantage of that new power. As you know, we soon need to be in contact, we have contracted a phobia for aloneness. The cell tells where we are, where to go, how to get there, the time, what needs to be done and when. Of course, the cell is our servant, always at our disposal. But how many of us can voluntarily put it away? For how long? And with how much anxiety? There is a loss of power in living a life addicted to technology. Gertz notes, “We have elevated technologies under the guise that in doing so we have elevated ourselves… in order to maintain the illusion of empowerment, the illusion that this world is for us, we have redefined ourselves as … ‘informationally embodied organisms (inforgs)'” (the latter expression due to Luciano Floridi.) Gertz refers to this life with a phrase from Hannah Arendt, it is life in a dessert.

The author does not in the end provide a definition of Nihilism. There is a glossary at the book’s end, “existentialism”, “humanism”, “metaphysics”, etc., but when we come to “Nihilism” we find, “Wanting complicated ideas reduced to one sentence made easily available in the back of the book.” Humor is good. Still I think we can say that the moment of nihilism is when a culture or person faces a breakdown of all that is comfortable and familiar, the loss of the roadmaps with which we travel through life, what Nietzsche described as, “… the highest values devaluing themselves.”

As Nietzsche warned, there is danger in such moments. One could easily postulate that white nationalism is a response to such a situation, unprepared for men marrying men, ditto for women, multiple genders, non-Hispanic whites a minority in the US, Artificial Intelligence replacing good jobs on the production lines, coal demonized, women bosses in the workplace, the power of “Me Too.” Whether a silk purse can be forged from this sow’s ear is yet to be seen. But it’s within this context of fear and confusion (think too of Weimar Germany) that a person may be tempted to say to the puffed-up autocrat-in-the making, “Go ahead, lie to me all you want. I’ll listen, as long as it makes me feel better.”

Nolen Gertz’s Nihilism is not a simple book to read. It has the feel of pasted together pieces, lecture notes perhaps. And the topics and thinkers he presents do not always have clear connections to nihilism. But it gave me much to think about and motives to do so. I love that in a book. I would recommend it, especially for those with a modicum of familiarity with the history of western philosophy and an unresolved struggle to understand today’s craziness.

© 2019 John Mullen

John Mullen is a philosopher and writer living in Gloucester, Massachusetts. In his youth he wrote the widely read, Kierkegaard’s Philosophy: Self-Deception and Cowardice in the Modern Age. Then, with Byron M. Roth, Decision Making: Its Logic and Practice. Then, Hard Thinking: The Re-introduction of Logic into Everyday Life. His novel, The Woman Who Hated Philosophers (Swallow Tail Press) came out in 2017. His stories are sprinkled about the web and his many reviews appear in Christian Perring’s Metapsychology Online Reviews.