Inspired by the non-shitty shitstorm here at Superfani called ‘twitter philosophy’ [->], I’m spinning the discussion off from lelangir’s epigram:
nihilism is knowledge/power; in most cases, it can only be realized/actualized within capitalist institutions, thus materialism is the means towards idealism, towards the construction of contingent truths, towards a philosophical happiness that grants material happiness.
Responses to this by the commenters abound, but I’ll get to them later. Meanwhile I greeted an important guest that invited himself into my media consumption schedule. I don’t mind because he’s a favorite of mine: the novelist and semiotician, Umberto Eco. He told me to tell lelangir,
“Listen to the fags that contributed to this supposedly non-shitty shitstorm first.”
So I was like, “uh, okay.” Let us then to the relevant responses:
So, in capitalist society nihilism will arise more frequently. This will lead to idealism, since we can scribble what we want on the empty canvas of Everything. Since it has been brought about by knowledge and power, we will be able to realize our ideals, leading to idealism, in it’s own turn leading to material wealth (for… everyone? The nihilists?).
The ‘Empty Canvas of Everything’ Kaiser is talking about refers to my claiming nihilism as a powerful state wherein creation is possible rather than a bleak wasteland of no possibility. I try to build on Kaiser’s point…
Most people are ‘trapped’ in constructs that they hold to be absolute truths. Nihilism holds none of these ‘truths’ privileged, and allows for power and freedom to create. Deconstructions: Capital/money is not necessarily morally repugnant. We can build a bigger needle within whose eye camels can saunter through – or just genetically engineer nanocamels.
Ideals can be constructed/pastiched/invented – and will not suffer from the hegemony of accepted traditions. Capital, which is coveted by the institutions that foment the accepted traditions is a great leveler.
But I don’t think I can establish a complete causal framework between nihilism and capitalism.
I didn’t think I could, but somebody else sure did:
i think that causal connection between capitalism and nihilism is there. simply stated, money buys everything which means it destroys boundaries including boundaries of meanings. For example, last year my wife and I went to Germany and Greece. Let me say that again: last year, I, a simple islander and my thai wife visited GERMANY and GREECE. Our ancestors 100 years ago, not to mention 200 or 500, would have never been able to do so. And what happens? my wife says: oh, I want to go to Egypt next, and so on. The world becomes totally flat, totally accessible. There are no boundaries, and thus we start to realize that all of those amazing “constructs”, cultures are on the same plane. If i can have have anything i want with money, how i can put things and places on pedestals??? I visited Napoleon’s Tomb about 3 years ago. I!! What’s Napoleon now. Nothing. Then nihilism creeps in..
That’s clear enough, and I could totally get behind it after reading the ouvre of Thomas L. Friedman, particularly The World is Flat (2005) [->]. To reduce the points of the novel and consider animekritik’s, it boils down to capital provides access to the exotic and mystic, removing their mythological veneer (for some) — by extension, all the way to nothing (empty and meaningless), as with the artifacts of history that animekritik mentioned. Now lelangir steps in:
A psychological privilege such as Nihilism can only be enacted/actualized within capitalist institutions (universities) once you’ve accumulated the knowledge necessary to reconstruct your perception of the world. Maybe the pseudo-intelligent believe that there really is such an absolute truth as “equality”, but then why on earth does racism persist to this day?
The relationship between discourses is not hierarchical. A discourse of absolute truths (i.e. rich people are evil) cannot be so easily overturned by a discourse of contingent truths (i.e. rich people are not always evil). It’s amplified here because the discourse of contingent truths is situated in the very substance of the discourse of absolute truths. It’s like a patient in a straight jacket: you think you’re sane, and in your straight jacket, you say “I’m sane! Let me free! I’m sane!” – and the doctors look and say “of course someone in a straight jacket would say they’re sane!”. Thus, a rich person who has the education to say that rich people are not always evil says to a poor person “rich people are not always evil” will surely get some murderous glares from poor people who think that all rich people are evil.
Now we’re getting somewhere. Money and capital, while not the only enabler of education, is very powerful.
Umberto Eco would agree with this, it seems. He wrote (speaking about some functions of literature):
What use is this intangible power we call literature? The obvious reply is the one I have already made, namely, that it is consumed for its own sake and therefore does not have to serve any purpose. But such a disembodied view of the pleasure of literature risks reducing it to the status of jogging or doing crossword puzzles–both of which primarily serve some purpose, the former the health of the body, the latter the expansion of one’s vocabulary. What I intend to discuss is therefore a series of roles that literature plays in bout our individual and our social lives.
Above all, literature keeps language alive as our collective heritage. By definition language goes its own way; no decree from on high, emanating either from politicians or from the academy, can stop its progress and divert it toward situations that they claim are for the best. The Fascists triid to make Italians say mescita instead of bar, coda di gallo instead of cocktail, rete instead of goal, auto publicca instead of taxi, and our language paid no attention. Then it suggested a lexical monstrosity, an unacceptable archaism like autista instead of chauffeur, and the language accepted it. Maybe because it avoided a sound unknown to Italian. It kept taxi, but gradually, at least in the spoken language, turned this into tassì.
Language goes where it wants to but is sensitive to the suggestions of literature. Without Dante there would have been on unified Italian language. When, in his De Vulgari Eloquentia (On Vernacular Eloquence), Dante condemns the various Italian dialects and decides to forge a new “illustrious vernacular.”
Twenty years of Fascist talk of “Rome’s fated hills” and “ineluctable destinies,” of “unavoidable events” and “plows tracing furrows in the ground,” have in the end left no trace in contemporary Italian, whereas traces have been left by certain virtuoso experiments of futurist prose, which were unacceptable at the time. And while I often hear people complain about the victory of a middle Italian that has been popularized by television, let us not forget that the appeal to a middle Italian, in its noblest form, came through the plain and perfectly acceptable prose of Manzoni, and later Svevo or Moravia.
By helping to create language, literature creates a sense of identity and community. I spoke initially of Dante, but we might also think of what Greek civilization would have been like without Homer, German identity without Luther’s translation of the Bible, the Russian language without Pushkin, or Indian civilization without its foundation epics.
And literature keeps the individual’s language alive as well. these days many lament the birth of a new “telegraphese,” which is being foisted on us through email and mobil-phone text messages, where one can even say “I love you” with short-message symbols; but let us not forget that the youngsters who send messages in this new form of shorthand are, at least in part, the same young people who crowd those new cathedrals of the book, the multistory bookstores, and who, even when they flick through a book without buying it, come into contact with the cultivated and the elaborate literary styles to which their parents, and certainly their grandparents, had never been exposed.
Although there are more of them compared with the readers of previous generations, these young people clearly are a minority of the six billion inhabitants of this planet; nor am I idealistic enough to believe that literature can offer relief to the vast number of people who lack basic food and medicine. But I would like to make one point: the wretches who roam around aimlessly in gangs and kill people by throwing stones from a highway bridge or setting fire to a child–whoever these people are–turn out this way not because they have been corrupted by computer “new-speak” (they don’t even have access to a computer) but rather because they are excluded from the universe of literature and from those places where, through education and discussion, they might be reached by a glimmer from the world of values that stems from and sends us back again to books.
From on literature, (2002)
Did you get that lelangir? Professor Eco seconds your assertion! He used a lot more words, but he said it pretty so I blockquoted him. This post is less about nihilism, than the utility of media/literature/cultural production, which actually means nothing in absolute terms (but not in contingent terms) anyway, so I guess nihilism stands.
I extend Eco’s point to our preferred medium, anime. I daresay that it’s changing people’s behavior outside of Japan, creating sub-sub-sub-cultures that we don’t wholly know or are even aware of. The distribution of anime internationally is never limited to the university setting, but the intellectualization of it, and most media occurs there. Intellectual activity can be located in the universities, and it is through capital that this is possible: capital pays for labor, that is supplied by the intellectuals by either creating content for books, journals, and other media or teaching the students who can afford the tuition.
On a personal level, I’ve come to realize that I’m no longer in this center ergo my own thinking and work is far from where the ‘action’ is. It is through weblogs, particularly this one where I get an opportunity to intellectualize and reflect. It bears note that the proponents of Superfani are academics to some degree, and some of its participants are still of university/graduate school age. So I take this in and appreciate my good fortune.
My ability to participate is enabled by the university system of which I am a product of, paid for by the compensation for my parents’ labor in a capitalist system.
So with this ability to participate, knowing fully the ultimate meaninglessness of this effort and caring little for that ultimacy, I look at this captured frame:
…and derive that god is dead [->], at least in this image.
“nihilism is knowledge/power; in most cases, it can only be realized/actualized within capitalist institutions, thus materialism is the means towards idealism, towards the construction of contingent truths, towards a philosophical happiness that grants material happiness.”
I have so many problems with this paragraph. Let’s semi-formalize it:
“in most cases, nihilism can only be realized/actualized within capitalist institutions” Therefore “materialism is the means towards idealism, towards the construction of contingent truths, towards a philosophical happiness that grants material happiness.” Therefore “nihilism is knowledge/power”
So it goes like:
“A,
Therefore B,
Therefore C”
It should follow that A is true, but, it doesn’t seem very credible and no effort is spent towards justifying it. Even if A were true, the principle by which it generates B is no less nebulous. Ghostlightning pointed out the semantic problem of C, but that’s sparing the issue of B generating anything.
I was going to keep silent but Ghostlightning said he was being cruelly ignored. So I helped myself. Maybe this isn’t the best place, meh, it’s not my problem once I press the submit button. :D
I read the epigram this way:
A. Knowledge is power (as the cliche/idiom goes), nihilism – a concept which is knowable is power too. What lelangir didn’t say is that nihilism is an opportunity for idealism. It was I who said so in one of the comments in the referenced blog post, and in prior private conversations. I realize I should have made this clearer, and apologize.
B. Most of the time, you get knowledge in schools that you have to pay for and have been built by money (capitalism).
C. Materialism (I interpret as wanting to accumulate possessions, including a university degree) is the access to the idealism through the nihilism/knowledge.
Simplified:
Knowledge is power (power to be philosophically happy).
You get knowledge (possess knowledge) at universities.
You need money to get into a university.
Money is a critical function of capitalism and is distinctly capitalist.
Knowledge is material, purchased by money at universities. (assuming of course the intelligence of the ‘buyer’)
Does this make better sense? And thank you for initiating the discussion:3
yet, nihilism often comes about through self-question, and not accumulation of knowledge. Often, such ideas can be constructed with no prior knowledge of the matter, but with only an open mind.
Agreed, only that time and leisure for such is triggered often by the texts and people one meets in the university setting, or any setting with a high concentration of intellectuals or highly educated people exchanging ideas. At present most of these settings are sponsored by capital.
Then again, the whole raison d’etre of a university is to be a breeding ground for future leaders of the System, so at heart it is anti-Nihilist to the core (what government would support a university on a nihilist basis??). But, yeah, if you forget your classes for awhile and head down to the library, discuss with friends etc.., you can learn a lot in the ways of Nihilism. Deleuze and Guattari are all over these issues, it’s too bad they’re French, oops, I mean, it’s too bad they’re so poetic and difficult to understand, which is the bane of the postwar French.
First off, I agree with jp_zer0 as he formulates things, but I’m guessing the quote is leaving out a lot of info that would make the argument justifiable. Like, what is meant by materialism and idealism etc..
Anyway, let me discuss this “Nihilism is power”. I’m assuming this is NOT nihilism = power, but rather that it means Nihilism leads to power. And how I understand this second statement is that by knowing the ultimate emptiness of things I am free to act and create, thus maximizing my power, as ghostlightning says.
This works in theory, but I don’t think it works in practice. The pure Nihilist is never even close to being as powerful as the semi-Nihilist: the man who has an inkling of the truth of Nihilism but lies to himself in order to give himself some boundaries (and confidence) from which to bounce off and build up force/power. Napoleon over all of the Russian youth, basically. True Nihilism is likely to paralyze you. One must believe a lie in order to be truly powerful. Nietzsche saw this, and that’s why he tries to overcome Nihilism with the myth of the Superman. Nietzsche knows the most powerful will not be the Nihilists, but the post-Nihilists. And to go beyond Nihilism is in some creepy sense to go back to pre-Nihilism. It’s just that now we have more control..
There’s this rhetorical question that Lelangir threw in there too: “why on earth does racism persist to this day?” I’d love to hear what all of you think the answer to this is, although I realize it might be kinda off topic. It sounds like one of those great prize questions 18th century academies used to come up with “like “What has been the progress of philosophy, if any, since so and so…”
Absolute nihilism is a logical mess. I only mean that there is no absolute meaning, not that there is absolutely no meaning whatsoever.
Kaiserpingvin already remarked on this quite well.
To attempt to answer your question re: racism.
Racism is merely a symptom of the inherent conflict of creatures over limited resources. Biologically all creatures seek to survive and pass on its own genetic signature. Race, for better or worse is perceived to be a biological distinction that create an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’ In almost any conflict, we’d rather take care of ‘us,’ at the expense of them (given the zero-sum framing of the conflict).
Culture also comes into play, but I lack the energy to speak more about it at present.
I think racism still exists because people are stupid. If you see what I did there.
At least racism is declining along with the support of empirical science (and sheer logic).
In the past, science was quite explicitly modelled to explain why the Europeans (non-Slav non-Jew non-et cetera) were superior; what with race-biological institutes and so on. They did have some reason to assume this off the bat; the definite domination of the world by said hard-to-define group foremost among them. The world had been almost wholly subjugated to European rule, then surely the white race must be superior, they went. Not to mention the chauvinism they shewed to their own philosophy, art and culture. Still, the assumption was quite unscientific, but proper scientific epistemology had not arisen yet (note well that the Vienna circle, pivotal as they were in the foundation of modern scientific method, were all very progressive); there were insufficient intellectual tools to make a powerful enough judgment. Thus did nationalistic, racist policies proliferate well in the early 20th century. Even the intelligent could fall to the percieved solidity of the idea – for example, Churchill.
As time, knowledge and education progressed, it grew smaller. There just were fewer and fewer solid arguments in favour of it. But while certainly a large portion of today’s racists are just plain out dumb (here comes lacking logic into the picture – “because most A are B, if C is A, A is B” (since very few racists would say all blacks/jews/whatever ethnical group they disdain are stupid), which is of course a non sequitur), stupidity is probably not quite enough to explain the persistence of racism. I’d say a very important part is identity. Hardly a novel idea, of course, but a solid one imo. As ghostlightning said, we divide things into “us” and “them”. We need a group to define ourselves by, and definitions must be done towards what things are not. Psychological research has shown that even randomly and newly formed groups quickly establish a preference within contained individuals for their own group.
And yes I just spun off for no reason on that one. I don’t know why, ignore this comment. It just seemed fun to write.
The main reason Racism is dwindling today might have more to do with philosophical trends than with scientific development. I don’t think most Science Departments around the world today would be allowed to test for racial differences, like they used to do before 1945. In the prewar era many studies were done on craniology etc.. where some data was released which would at least need to be debated today. The fact is, though, now that we have the technology to explore these issues much better than before, there is an enormous censorship to prevent this research from going on.
Here’s an interesting case: the British overlords of India (18th-19th century) went and examined Indian culture and languages, and determined that an Aryan Invasion had brought India the Vedas and the best (or at least, more prevalent) of its cultural traditions. The Brahmin caste in India loved to be linked up with European (Aryan) blood so they accepted this interpretation.
In the post-1945 world, Indians and foreigners immediately rejected this Aryan theory on the grounds that it was racist and stupid, and argued that all of the traditions could be accounted for indigenously or through bits of peaceful migration, etc.
Now, about 5 years ago an extensive genetic study was done on India and what was the result?? Northern Indians have a strong genetic affinity to Mediterranean Europe. More importantly, upper caste Indians (whether in the North or the South) are much closer genetically than Europeans than the lower caste. The higher the caste, the more “European” blood. The geneticists concluded that at some point an invasion from the North of people related to Europeans swept down and took over the country, pushing the original inhabitants South.
This study made a bit of a splash in India, some Brahmins rejoiced, but all in all it’s died down and if I type “Aryan Invasion Theory” on google today I mostly get articles on how racist the theory is….
Hmm, it is true that the rejection of nazism has led to an all-around taboo regarding racial distinctions. A situation I find silly; if there are differences, there are and they won’t go away from ignoring them in our science, and if there are not, well, whoppee? Still, being the Enlightenment-happy chap I am, I place a bit of faith in the progress of science, the correlationship philosophy-culture-politics-science would be a substratum.
I don’t see how that theory in question is racist though, it’s not racist saying that the Spaniards conquered the Inka and then ruled them, which is an analogue. But that is speaking from a social-context-free vantage point.
Well, this is the thing: if the historical situation were hazier and so some scholars supported the Spanish invasion theory and others opposed it, gradually most people in South America would consider the pro-invasion theory racist (except maybe upper class Peruvians that wanted to be associated with Europe, just like the Brahmins in my example). The Inca case is too much in the light of history to suffer revision, but you bringing it up is awesome: it rankles many liberally minded people that under a 1000 ruthless Spanish soldiers could wipe out the Inca and the Aztec Empire. If it had happened 2-3,000 years earlier, they’d be denying it!!
I’m gonna object to AK’s reading of Nietzsche here. The escape from nihilism is not a consideration of power inasmuch as it is a necessary one. He found that we always see the world in terms of value, but that things were not valuable in themselves. He saw that we could create value by just sitting there and thinking about it. Considering that we can create new value, the nihilist project makes no sense. His objection to nihilism would be that it is “On the receding path of life” because it is so uncreative and unfulfilling. The ubermensch is the one who constantly creates new, excellent values that overcome man. This process of overcoming man is extremely lonely, consuming, desolating and difficult. The consideration of power makes no sense in the doctrine of the ubermensch.
All these things might not be present so tightly together when reading Nietzsche but my main contention is that power is never a primary concern with him. I have a perfectionist reading of Nietzsche rather than a megalomaniac reading, if you allow me that term.
Your reading of Nietzsche agrees very nicely with the general French reading of Nietzsche, or the so-called Left Nietzsche: superman is about self-overcoming and not at all about domination or exercise of power over the Other. But you’re focusing on some areas of his thought at the expense of others. Somewhere in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche basically reveals a project to create a master breed in Europe (to include Jewish strains as well as others) that will create a brave new world. If you look at his notebooks, which are full of his daily thought, Power is on every other page. I think you can make a great Left Nietzsche, but it won’t be the total Nietzsche.
Let me say the one thing that Nietzschephiles never say out of embarrassment or respect for the man: Uncle Fred was chock-full of the ressentiment that he so berated. The truth is his life sucked very hard in many different ways, and this obviously affected his thinking. Try as he might not to to feel hatred and vengeful feelings, he did feel them. So your view of his philosophy probably comes out of a healthier. more normal understanding of the world than he ever had.
Yes, power occupies some place in Nietzsche but for the overman, it is the exercise of will that is more important. I think the will occupies the place you ascribe to power. The will to power and the quest for power is more of psychological observation while his doctrines and aesthetic considerations take a certain step back from that.
The unbridled exercise of power and sheer physical domination of barbarians does not constitute an overcoming of man. I think this is an interpretation that would be incomplete. They have exceptional strength, but they do not have exceptional intelligence, knowledge, art or sentimentality. Like the nazis were so powerful in the political sense but Nietzsche would hate because they are so base and self-contemptuous.
The point where I agree is that the overman cannot arise while in a state of slavery. There always needs some generous degree of power for self-determination and overcoming. But think of Zarathustra when he was preaching an escape from the marketplace. Think of Nietzsche as a man. There is a great degree of loneliness and not necessarily of constant domination over others. I think this sense of domination is much too political and centered on others. Nietzsche was someone who practiced the craft of philosophy, music, story writing and dancing if you can allow me this last point. This is the sort of mastery which is above all important and not a political mastery.
Well I think my reading is more influenced by american/british readers. I haven’t read much French secondary literature. I don’t consider myself a Nietzschephile inasmuch as a general academic philosopher but I do have tremendous respect for the man and that very well may make me give him more credit than he is due as a person. I study in a very analytic University so I don’t get much opportunity to talk about Nietzsche so I really enjoy our discourse right here. Thanks and I hope it’s the same for you.
So really what it comes down to is that there are two sides to Nietzsche, some people stress the external domination aspect (Right Nietzsche) like the Nazis did, and other stress the internal self-overcoming aspect (Left Nietzsche) like the postwar French do. Now, I think you might be ultimately correct in this sense: Nietzsche on a good day, when his mind was clear and more importantly his heart was clear, focused more on the aspects you are talking about. It’s just that there were other days when he went into political control and basically whipping all of those philistines’ asses. And yes, these discussions are loads of fun.
Yeah, I’ve been told not to focus on his unpublished works. I haven’t read “the will to power” et al. There’s a lot of stuff that you have to take with a grain of salt the size of Texas, it makes me think of his physical proof for Cyclical time instead of Linear. Like anybody he had some pretty shitty ideas from time to time.
oh, ok. The notebooks are definitely treacherous. On the one hand, you can argue that if he didn’t publish it he wasn’t sure of it so you shouldn’t pay attention to it(many people argue like this!!). On the other hand, Nietzsche didn’t just die of old age and ask his family to burn his notebooks: quite the contrary, he became insane at the peak of his powers and there’s plenty of evidence he was thinking of using a lot of these notebooks to publish his future masterworks. So at some point or another it’d be good for you to read them, but I’d read everything he actually published first, yeah.
As a general note though, I think knowledge these days is extremely cheap and it does not come that we need so much money to become nihilist. All the philosophy until 1910 or something is available for free online and all. The university is not at all necessary. A library is all you need. Not that communism doesn’t have universities and libraries.
I have some questions as to how Nihilism is causally connected to gaining knowledge but that’s bigger than what I am prepared to tackle.
I should say that nihilism isn’t exclusively acquirable from universities. I would say that the university system is the best distribution channel of advanced concepts that provides reasonable probabilities of its market comprehending them.
Communist states are totalitarian (as far as I know) and exercise censorship over education and media so I can’t be sure if a potentially anarchic concept such as nihilism will be widely available.
The causal link I see is that nihilism is a form of knowledge – and can be gained as a unit of knowledge, caused by participating in a university system.
Well in the Marxian tradition, there is ultimately no state in pure communism. Bolshevism is mostly what we’ve been accustomed to but it’s in no way necessary. The USSR probably had Marx spinning in his grave. A bit like the nazis to Nietzsche.
I guess there’s a lot that goes into the “digital divide”, things money-related. However, the larger point is that secondary schools in lower class communities suck the big one. They do not provide the reading skills required to read philosophy. People argue about “literacy” and “intelligence”, and it’s bad education policy which creates conditions for horrible teaching and horrible learning. I’m sure you’ve heard at least a bit of how college kids these days can’t write for shit – and that’s even privileged kids. Knowledge is inaccessible – money aside – if you can’t even understand it in the first place. But your point that knowledge is cheap is a good one too in its own right.
I’m not at all versed in nihilism, which is why I didn’t comment on the Twitter philosophy post, and why I have nothing of value to offer here. I will say, though, that I went out and bought Eco’s On Literature and Baudolino because I like this post.
If you go on and enjoy ‘On Literature’ I have a number of post ideas that will benefit from your participation and wholly for Superfani.
Baudolino is a big inspiration for the experimental formats I’ve been using here and elsewhere. The audacity is so delicious in that novel.
Sure, I’d be willing. I can’t say when I’ll actually read On Literature, though. It’s in the queue, that vague shelf of books I plan to read “soon,” but so are maybe 20 other books.
I picked Baudolino because it seemed like the most fun of Eco’s novels in that audacious way. I have a thing for audacity, probably thanks in large part to Joyce.
‘On Literature’ is easily consumed in parts, given that it’s a collection of at times very short essays and lectures. Each one, or parts of one can be appropriated into certain blog formats. Will give you a proper proposal soon. Joyce is someone I should be reading soon.
preliminary comment: I read the post, not the entire comment section yet.
I don’t want to get called out for flipflopping, but perhaps I need to clarify what I meant by “nihilism” in the first place. It stems from a specific situation, a real situation.
I do fieldwork at a local high school in the poorest part of the city. Last year, a handful of graduating seniors went to college. This year, after an education professor at my uni started up a class with an art and english teacher at the high school, a much larger percentage of the graduating class will go to college. The education professor which crafted this high school senior class called this class a sociology class, and it used this methodology called PAR – participant action research. Now, this involved college kids (yeah, the rich spoiled ass trope) collaborating with these underprivileged high schoolers. These high schoolers read Foucault and Gramsci as part of a curriculum which followed the PAR methodology which was, namely, to do research which challenged institutional norms. The students held presentations, and I attended these.
The interesting part is that before this sociology class was founded, the professors and teachers note that most of the high schoolers were “nihilistic”, meaning they had little hope for their future, as well as the future of the working class. They thought that structure would always dominate over agency, that, Marx be damned, revolution would never form. Yet this class – and the collaboration with college students – instilled a great deal of hope. We discussed Gramsci’s notion of the organic intellect, the person that rises from the working class, becomes educated in the dominant discourse, and returns to the working class to educate and do social change.
This is primarily the context I am speaking about. I guess, unfortunately, this context of nihilism has nothing to do with meaning than it does hope. Oops…..
But anyway, material conditions (capitalism), affect, well, everything, and I think that just goes back into my original nebulous statement.
Okay, only that hope is an illusion. It actually can prevent acting on possibility (hope involves too much unsubstantiated probability).
Possibility: something can happen, it is possible.
Hope: something will happen, it is probable. (i.e. everything’s going to work out fine)
There is a nihilism that rejects hope, as well as all notions of history/inherited tropes – reduces them to nothings (i.e. possessing no absolute meaning), which allows people to treat their future as an empty canvas where they can create possibility.
Otherwise, their future is cluttered with notions of inherited history (all the failures they’ve witnessed in their own lives and in others), nothing is possible. And here comes the social workers or religious workers talking to them about hope.
But it may work, what do I know? After all the philosophical hair-splitting I just did here may perhaps be acquired only as a skill in a capitalist enabled educational structure. Hope may be the correct spin to apply to working with these ‘hopeless’ kids in the short term (they can split hairs when they’ve gone to college later when they’re full of hope).
I guess I might also tangentially add that analytic meaning can be based upon experiential meaning, and I have seen this notion in action: “why do I have to read this book? It’s pointless.” Oh boy we’ve all heard that one…
On that note, I tell people, especially young people, to avoid reading stuff like Nietzsche if they can. (Hell, for most people out there it’d be better for them if they never read that stuff). Lelangir, the use of the word “nihilism” for those kids is appropriate, in fact, I think historically “nihilists” are nothing more and nothing less than the “chronically disaffected”. It’s only philosophical types that have refined that and come up with the Nihilism with a capital N that ghostlightning and I like to throw about so much. Those kids sound like they could use some hope. And maybe then years and years down the road, if they’re so inclined, they can actually start learning about the vast void that surrounds them and that would have swallowed them whole if they had but stared at it for one second!!
So, and I apologize for not being clear at all, there’s a large difference between experiential meaning and analytic meaning. “What does my life mean?” vs. “what does this text mean?” I referred to the former.
That last bit made me laugh, then think.
Perhaps in an anime context “god is truly dead” in the Nietszchean sense… after all, evidence for a second season of Haruhi from Kyoto Animation grows less and less compelling; yet most people refuse to acknowledge this death out of inner fear and angst. Yet if we overcome this restraint, let go of the dying remnants of Haruuhism opens our eyes to the myriad other possibilities surrounding us…
Damnit, I really should never have done a second major in philosophy. It’s infecting everything. But you do raise an interesting point about “where the action is” in terms of intellectual discussion. I’m fairly sure this can go for many different types of pop-cultural topics as well. I know for certain that some of my professors have started “class blogs” rather than use typical class websites in an effort to keep students engaged. Generally though academia still operates at a fairly glacial pace…
LOL. delicious.
Regretting philosophy? I only minored in it, majoring in literature. I must say I share some of my own professors’ views that the best philosophy is expressed in literary forms other than oratory and essays (the novel comes to mind). i like philosophical content but I find it ridiculously hard to read ‘career’ philosophers. Perhaps this is why I like Camus best too.
The problem with highly stylized and anecdotal philosophy (It is my contention that all philosophy is also literature) is that it doesn’t make a very attackable text. Harder to dissect, analyze and refute. It’s also very heavy for something that should be dynamic, economical and liquid.
To me, philosophy can help meat up a novel like Dostoevsky did wonderfully. Or it can come from a long and established philosophical career, where it’s certain that your ideas will still be there for a while and that your stylized text will not go to waste.
All philosophy is literature – yes. I merely acknowledge my own preferences and perhaps my limitations in studying the source texts of the notable philosophers – even those inclined to produce literary forms beyond the essay such as Sartre. Being and Nothingness destroyed me and discouraged me from reading anything beyond Existentialism is a Humanism, for example.
In terms of reading, French and German philosophers are both hard but for completely different reasons. 1) The French love style trope allusion illusion, so they’ll say in 100 pages what could take them 5. 2) The Germans don’t want to be misunderstood, so it takes them 95 pages to flesh out and delimit and categorize what in essence is a 5 page text.
I actually looked at a few of Eco’s essay collections last month, in an effort to find a few in-roads to teaching literature. I didn’t buy anything, choosing libraries instead. Right now I’m mulling over Booth’s How to Read and Why, which is simultaneously great and insulting — so, it’s Booth. : D
Another cause of leveling is media consumption, by the way. It’s had a marked and demonstrable effect on dialects of varied languages; people all around a country hear one particular dialect and, even if it’s only slightly, adopt it. Mass media has done even more, of course — without extensive travel, hard-to-find translations, and so on, it would have been once very difficult for a budding intellectual to be exposed to other cultures, but it’s much easier now.
Also, while you’re basically right about universities and their central role to the kind of thought you’re discussing, also remember they’re meant to educate more than the next generation of professors. So in having passed through college and keeping up the habits and contacts of such a life, you’re in that sphere as well, even though you aren’t directly attached to a university.
I had some thoughts on this when I came across the original comment chain, but emboldened by jpmeyer’s critique, I’ll post this here. There is a bewildering lack of first principles in this discussion, which I think jpmeyer only barely touched on above. That is, not only is it not clear what statement A stems from, it is not clear what is and is not supported because it is not clear which assumptions are and are not accepted. In short, it’s not clear what anything stems from.
An example may be warranted. Supposing a theist world, for example, we may accept nihilism as itself an illusion, but one that arises from the problem of individual perception of the universe. The problems of nihilism, then, are strictly matters of perception rather than underlying substance. But if there is no creator, no external agency to imbue overlying purpose, then we are left with individual determination of purpose. Nihilism is then an essentially and fundamentally valid view that is much harder to rebut: you may construct complicated structures of purpose, reasoning, and affirmation, but I may always respond with the argument that in 50,000 years, all you were and did will be dust, forgotten, insignificant, and this is not even the batting of an eyelash on the cosmic scale.
Solipsism, of course, would be similarly stark, but work on entirely different mechanics. The point is that there is never any agreement on these first principles, and so we are simply hand-waving. As a postmodernist, I recognize the legitimacy of interpretation and subjective experience, so my assertion of a need for discussion of first principles is not dogmatic but rather practical in nature. What are we taking as given and what are we not taking as given?
This entire conversation is a collision between the hermeneutics of faith and the hermeneutics of suspicion: ghostlightning reaches a point with the former, and then deliberately undercuts himself with the latter.
“After all the philosophical hair-splitting I just did here may perhaps be acquired only as a skill in a capitalist enabled educational structure. Hope may be the correct spin to apply to working with these ‘hopeless’ kids in the short term (they can split hairs when they’ve gone to college later when they’re full of hope).”
I imagine, that recourse to first principles may well overshadow the actual issue – it turns into a debate about the first principle instead of a statement made past the first principle. As a primarily analytic person, first principles/basic premises and the subdivision of a thought into it’s constituents ought to be the normal procedure, but in practice, one should probably skip them whenever not important, and instead try to expand one’s philosophy – otherwise no one ever gets anywhere. Subsequent debate is more, “how should we handle this thought, despite it stemming from probably quite different foundations, and how do they look at my conclusions”, than “let’s convince him he’s wrong!”
Or well. That’s how I see it. I do not think convincing people they are wrong from your own viewpoint is very possible, many basic premises are pure axioms. The only way to do it is to show at inconsistencies inside their system.
Also, the 50,000-years argument: I plead transhumanism! :o