{In ‘The Banalization of Nihilism,’ Karen Leslie Carr looks at nihilism from the standpoint of Christian theology—in particular, the neo-orthodox theology of Karl Barth which further chastened humans already chastened by the Great War and the collapse of Enlightenment dreams. Pessimism was in the air, and pessimism is a well-known gateway to nihilism.}
Karen Leslie Carr (from The Banalization of Nihilism):
As the twentieth century unfolded, it became increasingly difficult to deny that the combined legacy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was dubious at best, for it had left its heirs with, on the one hand, a conviction of the desirability, even the necessity of truth, and, on the other hand, a radical suspicion of all claims to have found truth. The existentialist response was widely criticized as pessimistic, even nihilistic. This criticism stemmed not so much from the fact that the existentialists pointed to a world of purely human origin and found its promise of meaning counterfeit, but because they seemed to welcome this void, even to cultivate it, as a necessary aspect of human existence.
God having been pronounced dead in the nineteenth century, what followed his demise was not encouraging. “Man come of age,” as Bonhoeffer was to christen him, seemed distressingly immature, if not downright infantile. The first half of the twentieth century could be considered one long tantrum by overgrown children obsessed with ideology and armed with weapons of mass destruction.
Nietzsche, among others (e.g., Dostoyevsky), had seen it coming:
Nietzsche, dubbing it ‘the uncanniest of all guests,’ believed nihilism to be ‘one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection, of humanity.’ Characterizing it as a disease that was pathological in its intensity, Nietzsche nonetheless thought that nihilism had within it the possibility of redemption from an interpretation of life that was both hypocritical and debilitating. 1
Fortunately, as Carr explains, dialectics, as put forward by Hegel and perfected by Marx, came to the rescue, effortlessly reconciling opposites, squaring circles, and turning sows’ ears into silk purses:
There is something both provocative and perverse in the often grim insistence of dialectical theologians that the dissolution of sense is the beginning of real meaning. Central to their construction of what could be called a ‘soteriology of ambiguity’ were two related beliefs: an understanding of nihilism as the loss of something deemed desirable, even necessary, for human survival, coupled with a conviction of the importance and value of truthfulness in the face of such loss. It was precisely the tension between what one wanted—in this case, a transcendental meaning or ground accessible to human inquiry—and the realization that this could never be had that provided the content for the vision of humanity such theologians proposed. The despair bred of this tension was constitutive of human existence, they argued; recognizing and accepting the basic ambiguity of all human endeavors despite one’s ineradicable need for certainty was made the basis for authenticity among existential thinkers more generally. 2 To be fully human meant to affirm both the utter emptiness of a world devoid of meaning and the human need for a meaningful world. To give up either—to lose oneself in an ‘ism’ purporting to be absolute truth or to deny the fundamental drive for meaning shared by all members of the human race—was, from this point of view, to succumb either to inauthenticity, in the former case, or unthinking animality, in the latter.
The good thing about nihilism—aside from the fact that we are stuck with it—is that, by clearing the ground of traditional meaning(s), it allows us the freedom to make our own existential choices, among which the primary contenders are Karl Barth’s Old Testament God, postmodern variations of Marxism, and the pleasures of consumer capitalism. 3 So far, the first option seems out of favor, the second is little more than a red herring mostly invoked by its opponents, and the third option has the overwhelming support of ordinary people for whom shopping is more satisfying than either ideological combat or prayer.
The pursuit of happiness takes many unexpected twists and turns, but for the most part, it's fair to say that the motto of nihilistic modernity is, we’d rather shop than fight.
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1 The “pathological” nature of modernity has also been emphasized by, among others, Eric Voegelin. I would add that the diagnostic profile should include “anosognosia,” that is, the sick patient is not aware of being sick but considers their condition to be normal.
2 Again, Carr is here following Voegelin, who labeled “Gnostic” the refusal to accept the tension between transcendental ideals and mundane reality, that is, life in the metaxy.
3 Of course, that sort of freedom is exactly what conservative thinkers like Eric Voegelin and Alasdair Macintyre thought was wrong with modernity.
Nihilism: Accept No Substitutes
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