Nihilism

One of the concerns often brought up by religious leaders is nihilism, the idea that aspects of life have no intrinsic value. The philosopher most identified with nihilism may be Nietzsche - I'd like to say I know a lot about him and nihilism but I never studied either in school, so I was interested to see the latest post at the NYT's philosophy blog - Navigating Past Nihilism by Harvard philosophy professor Sean D. Kelley.

Here's the beginning of the post ...

“Nihilism stands at the door,” wrote Nietzsche. “Whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?” The year was 1885 or 1886, and Nietzsche was writing in a notebook whose contents were not intended for publication. The discussion of nihilism ─ the sense that it is no longer obvious what our most fundamental commitments are, or what matters in a life of distinction and worth, the sense that the world is an abyss of meaning rather than its God-given preserve ─ finds no sustained treatment in the works that Nietzsche prepared for publication during his lifetime. But a few years earlier, in 1882, the German philosopher had already published a possible answer to the question of nihilism’s ultimate source. “God is dead,” Nietzsche wrote in a famous passage from “The Gay Science.” “God remains dead. And we have killed him.”

There is much debate about the meaning of Nietzsche’s famous claim, and I will not attempt to settle that scholarly dispute here. But at least one of the things that Nietzsche could have meant is that the social role that the Judeo-Christian God plays in our culture is radically different from the one he has traditionally played in prior epochs of the West. For it used to be the case in the European Middle Ages for example ─ that the mainstream of society was grounded so firmly in its Christian beliefs that someone who did not share those beliefs could therefore not be taken seriously as living an even potentially admirable life. Indeed, a life outside the Church was not only execrable but condemnable, and in certain periods of European history it invited a close encounter with a burning pyre. Whatever role religion plays in our society today, it is not this one ......

The post goes on to mention the downside of nihilism as expressed by David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide not long ago ....

[T]hey [people experiencing nihilism] may feel the kind of “stomach level sadness” that David Foster Wallace described, a sadness that drives them to distract themselves by any number of entertainments, addictions, competitions, or arbitrary goals, each of which leaves them feeling emptier than the last.

I feel this way sometimes myself, but when I'm in that mood I try to remember another philosopher who believed there were no intrinsic values but who managed to still find value in life, a value no less valuable because it was self-given instead of revealed ... Sartre (existentialism). The writer of the NYT post chooses someone else as an antidote to nihilism - Herman Melville ...

Herman Melville seems to have articulated and hoped for this kind of possibility. Writing 30 years before Nietzsche, in his great novel “Moby Dick,” the canonical American author encourages us to “lower the conceit of attainable felicity”; to find happiness and meaning, in other words, not in some universal religious account of the order of the universe that holds for everyone at all times, but rather in the local and small-scale commitments that animate a life well-lived .... To give a name to Melville’s new possibility — a name with an appropriately rich range of historical resonances — we could call it polytheism.

I have to say, I like Sartre and his idea of no God at all better than I like Melville and his "polytheism" - Sartre seems more honest.

Even better, though, I like hoping that there are intrinsic values after all.