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February 19, 2005
I'm too tired to do a long post. So have a look at this article by John Carroll's, 'Nihilistic consequences of humanism', in The Griffith Review. It is an insight into how an Australian conservative understands nihilism. Humanism is the fall guy.
Carroll says that the various religious fundamentalisms are a reaction against western modernity, by which he means capitalist industrialisation and its humanist culture. He says that this humanist culture has nihilistic consequences because this human centred view of existence fails to answer the questions: where do I come from, what should I do with my life and what happens to me after after death. He then mentions Nietzsche's Death of God thesis and life now becoming absurd or horrible. Carroll understands nihilism to be the belief that there is nothing, which is the inevitable end point of humanism.
Now, I acknowlege that there are a lot of competing interpretations of Nietzsche's understanding of nihlism. However it is commonly accepted that Nietzsche undertood nihilism as the process of devaluing of our highest values that lead to a void of meaning. By our highest values he meant the traditional Christian ones which had provided our moral codes about good and bad.When applied to humanism, nihilism would be the process of the devaluation of the highest values of humanism.
Nietzsceh combats a negative nihilism as a sort of inaction and his philosophy points away from nihilism, not to it. The will to power is nothing if not a doctrine of action. For Nietzsche, a turn from nihilism requires not only that values serve life, but also that we actually believe them.
So let us say that the claim that 'humanism in modernity is nihilism' is Carrolls. He argues that fundamentalism is a pathology of western humanism, as nothingess gives rise to an adherence to a body of doctrine that is deemed to be absolute and universal. Fundamentalism is a reaction to modernity: it provides the certainity that is the antidote to the poison of the nothingness of a humanist modernity.
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