Is Nihilism  Self-Destructive?

Some university students are attracted to philosophical nihilism for various reasons, some personal, some from an academic trail they are presently pursuing. It feels cool. I once met a young passionate student who was reading everything he could find written by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the godfather of contemporary ‘Postmodern’ thought. For him, this resonated with his reality; it was a revelation. But he didn’t realize that there are costs to this outlook or stance. It has social, political and personal consequences.

Viennese Psychologist Victor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 152) once wrote:  “The existential vacuum which is the mass neurosis of the present time can be described as a private and personal form of nihilism; for nihilism can be defined as the contention that being has no meaning.” Nihilists pride themselves in their realism (dispelling fantasy and cutting through the hype), but we want to examine the consequences of nihilism which are often not fully comprehended. They can catch up with you in unusual ways.

Perhaps there is a nihilist hidden deep down in all of us at some level? There is little doubt that we will encounter a nihilist in our journey. Some see it as a logical extension of philosophical naturalism (that we are an empty bubble on the sea of nothingness–Jean Paul Sartre). Is our university education today leading us to be relativists and ultimately cynics–soft ontological antirealists and epistemological skeptics? Have we lost faith in even the possibility of truth itself? Is it partly due to the failure of Modernity to deliver on its promises? The cost of this outlook can be high and even grave. Many disappointed, disenchanted  people turn to nihilism.

Shakespeare’s Insight in the tragedy Hamlet: The tragedy of the bright young Danish prince, Hamlet, is that he never found his calling in life. He was constantly tortured with inner and interpersonal conflicts, with lies, resentment towards his step-father, disappointment in his mother and self-hatred. His self-hatred was combined with self-righteousness; even Ophilia couldn’t awake him from despair. He could have been a reformer for his world, a social justice warrior, but instead the kingdom imploded around him. After he imploded personally, it all ended in nihilism, death and more death. Immorality, intrigue and corruption lead to collapse of meaning and the end of loyalty, even of his beloved Ophilia and close friends Rosencrantz and Gildenstern. Something is profoundly rotten in Denmark. He felt so deeply and painfully cynical and alone in the world, riddled with angst. Mel Gibson’s portrayal of the distraught young Hamlet is spellbinding in my opinion.

William Shakespeare

Why do we so love this play today and resonate with its classic lines such as “To be or not to be? That is the Question.” Perhaps to some degree Hamlet is us, the late modern self. We are lost and cannot find our way home, cannot reckon with reality, cannot find our purpose and calling. We are trapped and alone, stuck in some kind of limbo. As postmoderns, we don’t know who or what to trust. We are possessed by uncertainty. Here are three points to get us thinking and perhaps re-evaluating our position. Perhaps there is a path to be found on the journey home, a recovery of meaning.

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Connection of the Good with the Christian Faith

Throughout his work Sources of the Self, philosopher Charles Taylor (1989) makes the irenic suggestion that there is no good reason to exclude agape love of the Judeo-Christian heritage as a viable hypergood for the moral self. He sees it as the highest form of human relationship. Taylor (1989) writes, “Nothing prevents a priori our coming to see God or the Good as essential to our best account of the human world” (p. 73). As a significant percentage of the world population holds to be true, “God is also one of those contemporary sources of the good in the West, the love of which has empowered people to do and be good” (1989, p. 34).

Michael Morgan (1994, p. 53), in commenting on his ethics for late modernity, claims that Taylor’s account in Sources of the Self re- establishes the plausibility of the divine-human relationship for moral experience: “God is one of those entities that has figured in our moral ontology, has provided a standard or ground of value, and has given our beliefs and actions meaning and significance”. This relationship is generally occluded in contemporary Western culture and philosophical ethics, and so it remains significant that Taylor clarifies it through his language of articulation and that he illuminates its possibilities for ethical discourse.

Taylor attempts to recover a jewel lost in Western moral consciousness in his language of moral sources. From his perspective, moral sources are not about highest principles; they are all about the quality of the will, a concept which has been largely absent in moral philosophy for over a century. For instance, the primary question for Taylor’s moral ontology is: What or whom do I love? (motivation), not What am I obliged to do? (right action). He wants to broaden and deepen the domain of moral discourse. The latter, to him, is the last question to ask, even though it is often the main concern of the contemporary ethics debates. The second question is What do I want to be? (character), a question that is in recovery in the late twentieth century through Virtue Ethics, heralded by such luminaries as Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue, 1984). Read More…

Constitutive Good Continued

According to Taylor, sources of the good tend to vary from (a) those solely external to the self, to (b) those both internal and external, to (c) those totally internal. As he notes, at one time, the good was wholly external to the self as it was perceived in Plato’s moral ontology; the good was endemic to the structure of reality. The Stoics also saw things this way. Taylor notes the big transition in moral sources in the last four centuries:

Moving from an epoch in which people could find it plausible to see the order of the cosmos as a moral source, to one in which a very common view presents us a universe which is very neutral, and finds the moral sources in human capacities. (1994, p. 215)

He takes Plato as his representative of the first. “The cosmos, ordered by the good, set standards of goodness for human beings, and is properly the object of moral awe and admiration, inspiring us to act rightly” (Taylor, 1994). This is, however, an important distinction: Taylor himself is a moral realist, but not a neo-Platonist: the view that the good is part of the metaphysical structure of the world. Platonic moral realism has been discredited because it leans too heavily on the idea of an ontic logos, a meaningful order. Nor is Taylor, on the other hand, a radical subjectivist. His view of realism lies somewhere between the Romantic subjectivist Rilke, and the Platonic objectivist. He wants to champion both the subjective and objective dimensions of the moral self, and maintain that there are sources outside as well as inside the self. Read More…

Moral Sources: the Vital Constitutive Good

One vital dimension of the quality of the will in Taylor’s moral ontology is the constitutive good (Taylor, 1989, pp. 91-107). I had to grapple with this concept for years before I grasped it. This breakthrough insight has powerful cultural  impact. The moral framework operates at two levels. At one level, there are the general life goods, those that are valued by the individual self. The life goods are things that make life worth living or the virtues they advocate: such as reason, piety, courage, freedom, moderation, respect, all features of human life that possess intrinsic worth. At another, motivational level, Taylor reveals the important category of the constitutive good; this good he also calls the moral source. With this emphasis, Taylor wants to recover the category of moral motivation for the self.  Read More…