Sunday, March 20, 2022

Nihilism by Nolen Gertz. 2019.

Nihilism 

Nolen Gertz

2019
MIT Press


For a better view, click on the photo (the stamp) or click here.


“It is thus only by returning political activity to the public realm, by reclaiming public spaces as spaces for freedom, by seeking consensus rather than seeking votes, by acting as humans rather than surviving as animals, that we can begin to overcome nihilism together rather than continue to suicidally adapt to it alone” (p.159, emphases in origin).

-------------

The book’s ideas are represented in the illustrative stamp above. Because nihilism is a difficult and elusive concept to explain, I will elaborate on it by writing anecdotes, which are built upon real events, real individuals, and real thoughts that I have encountered during research I do.

During one winter in Istanbul, I was walking with a young woman, in her early 20s, in a beautiful neighbourhood. We entered a famous café holding the name of a Turkish communist, novelist and poet, Nazim Hikmet, to have hot tea. “He, Hikmet, would not like this scene we see now; people are gathering, laughing, drinking, and not caring about the hell outside in the world,” I said. Alexandra disagreed, “you do not know. He might be happy. Also, people are free to do what makes them happy.” She added firmly and clearly, “people do not need to care about the world, the whole world, because we cannot change it and because we do not need to do.”

-       Do you think that the life, the world, has meanings in itself? I asked.

-       No. Not at all.

-       So, the life is meaning-free?

-       Yes.

-       So, you do not have meanings in your life?

-       No, I do have meanings in my life. My meaning. But the life does not, she concluded the short conversation.  

This conversation was the strangest and the dearest to my heart for years. Firstly, the woman is vigilant, she is smart, her mind is sharp, and her ability to seclude thin phenomena in the everyday life was something to respect. Her self-awareness, for a woman in her age, surprised me. Nevertheless, I could not understand (before I read this book) how she has her meanings, whereas no meaning is there in the world. In academic words, this woman individual has a meaning-system, but she believes that the reality is void of meanings. The conversation between us revealed her nihilism. She is nihilist or nihilistic.

 For her the reality has no truth, whatsoever this might be. It is worthless to dig into the reality to discover or construct meanings. To know is something indistinguishable from smoking weed, copulating, drinking tea with a capitalist style in a communist-named café. So, there is no-real-thing to know (see the left-wing of the stamp above); you know, of course, but what you know? Emptiness, nothingness because the reality is not worthy to know, to dig, to confront, to discover, or to construct meaning. Alexandra avoids the Reality by divesting it from sincere meanings. She knows things. She was thinking, before we revealed her nihilism in this conversation, that these things are the reality, are real. She is wrong. She knew nothing (i.e., unreal things, shadows only). This is nihilism. Nihilists prefer a simple meaning-system, white and black. The Reality is much, much richer in meanings and much more complex. White-and-black type of meaning is not real meaning; it is an illusion; it is a shadow.


"Black-and-white labels make life easier, but they do so by making life lifeless" (p.87).


a-     Alexandra has her meaning-system, so she knows.

b-    But, for her, the world is void of meanings.

c-     What does she know then?

d-    Not real things. She knows nothing.

e-     A person who does not know is not nihilist, necessarily. 

 

Moreover (see the right wing of the stamp), Alexandra believes that people should not really care about the world outside; they only have to pursue their happiness. “Is this what you think of?” I asked. “No. This is what all people from all generations think of,” she said. We cannot change the reality and we do not have the responsibility to do so. It is not our job, she believes. The technology and the recent lifestyle have been improved radically to enable us to enjoy and to be free, she said. “Are we really free?” I asked again. “Much more than before,” she replied.

Alexandra commutes to her job every day, she works behind her desk, and at the end of each month she gets her stipend. She spends some money to buy new phones, clothes, shoes, to drink and eat, and to spend happy moments with friends. “This is life,” she remarked, “and we do not need to do more.” All of these things Alexandra does, what are they? What is the difference between, on the one hand, Alexandra finding herself able (free!) to buy a phone and spend Saturdays and Sundays in cafes and in streets with friends, and finding herself enforced to work (luckily and happily!) the rest of the weekdays, and, on the other hand, a farmer in the 3rd Century BCE selling his vegetables in a market? We have a farmer who, exactly like Alexandra, has the ability to ride his donkey, to find a safe market, to sell his vegetables, and who, exactly like Alexandra, is enforced (happily and luckily!) to work in a small field every day. What is the difference? She is happy and free because the Job Centre found a place for her to work. She is not jobless anymore. She is happy. She is free. He is happy because the city ruler gave him a good share of the river’s water to cultivate his field. He is happy, he is lucky. No difference. Both of them do things that they found in the social system; they are “good” parts of their status quo; they feel they are free; and both of them believe that they do not need to create the world, to expand the world, to change the life-system, to create things. Then these things they produce (through work) have the exact nature of what animals, trees, and the sun produce. Things that are not making us question, confront, and uncover the Reality. If the things we do are only for survival (as happy and free persons), they are things suitable for animals, trees, and mountains, not for human beings. 

 Alexandra is making nothing (i.e., she is making/doing things that are unreal, although they seem real, but they are not. They are shadows). Alexandra is a nihilist exactly as the farmer of the 3rd Century BCE.

This is nihilism. 

“Nihilism is about evading reality rather than confronting it” (p.73).


Nihilism “severs freedom from responsibility and so severs freedom from anxiety” (p.100, emphases added). Alexandra and the ancient farmer are free, but they are irresponsible; they absolved themselves from the responsibility towards the Earth, the world, realms, and eventually the Reality. They are free only because they lived within external authorities (Job Centre, Taxes System, Irrigation System, etc.) which enabled them to be free but only to sustain the status quo. They had to relinquish their responsibility towards the Reality, the real things, the real life, to keep their happiness and freedom.  This is, indeed, a good deal: Freedom is not easy, it hurts, it engenders anxiety. So, to enjoy freedom (not REAL FREEDOM) I relinquish my responsibility, so I test freedom without anxiety. This type of freedom is nihilistic: “Nihilism is therefore the ability to enjoy a glass of wine while watching the world burn” (p.107, emphasis added).


Nihilism is therefore the ability to enjoy a glass of wine while watching the world burn


 Nihilism is not a case, is not a state, is not a thing; thus, its discovery and understanding are difficult. Is “nothing” a thing to be seen, touched, or recognized? No. Nihilism is all about doing really nothing and knowing really nothing. Nihilism is only revealed. The following anecdote can clarify what I mean. Read this anecdote and interpret it in the way you like.  

I met a 75 years old man, years ago. George is his name. He is, and he was, a very successful man; having good job, respected social status; he is a middle class’s member, with a good and healthy family. “So, please tell me more about your life?” I asked him after a long conversation. “It is not worth mentioning,” he firmly said. He ended the conversation.

 George has been nihilist, he has lived a nihilistic life for years when – ironically - he was thinking that his life is worthy. After the long conversation, the nihilism of this life was revealed to him (he was so similar to the farmer and to Alexandra, although less radical). He concluded the talk: “My life is not worthy.” His apathy, his pessimism, are signs of awakening from nihilism and weakness to face it. He is nihilist no more. This is more real, more painful.

 Philosophical Tour

1.     Socrates was roaming in the market, asking people about the meaning of their lives. For him, “The unexamined life is not worth living” (p.17). Those who do not confront the reality, its complexity, its hidden and un-easy meanings to discover are nihilist. They are similar to people born in a prison, in which they see only shadows of real things. By debate, they should know that what they see are only shadows. They have to reveal the real things, not stay confined to the shadows, the no-thing.

2.     Descartes was trying to know the real things. He lost his happiness that he had tested before his endeavour. He concluded that we have to choose between our happiness (but staying confined to the shadows) and our knowledge of the real things (but suffering). (From this point of view, his duality of Intellect vs. Will emerged: Our will to know is bigger than our ability to know).

3.     Kant questioned the reality: How can we know that we know? How can we know that this reality is real? He suggested that we have two worlds. The first is the noumenal world which exists by its own, independently from us. On this world we lend and exist. The second is the phenomenal world, which is the world, the reality, that we perceive mentally. His question, how we know that we know, is an endeavour to fight nihilism.

4.     Nietzsche argued that morality, the common morality we have, is lifeless; i.e., it is not real. It prevents us from being real. It makes us accept the status quo; it ignites us to be stagnant. We must not be stagnant because the reality is real as we act, gain power, and grow. We have to grow, to create, to change the world  to be real. If we are concerned only with survival, then we are immersed in nihilism. 

We avoid pain by drinking, sleeping, and watching YouTube. We are nihilistic.

We submit ourselves to the routine, to our bosses. We are nihilistic.


We avoid making decisions, we avoid holding responsibility, we throw ourselves in riots or in an outburst of emotions. We are nihilistic.

Postmodernism struggles to show that meanings are not concrete; they are continuously created. This is against nihilism. Nihilism instructs us to believe that essence precedes our existence, so we can only obey this essence, either it is God, DNA, or a meaning in a text. We have no responsibility to change this essence. We have nothing to do but to worship and obey this essence. Postmodernism says NO! We “worship” the foundations, the reality, the real things, the real existence, only when we are free and responsible to create, challenge, and change. 


Nihilism Today

Pop culture is a site of nihilism, we listen to this song


or this shit 



 in order to feel less-suffering, to enjoy, to absolve ourselves from questioning the Reality.

They teach us in schools to obey not to critically question the Reality. So, we are prepared to be nihilists. We are prepared to forget about the Reality and to enjoy listening to these songs. We listen, we enjoy, we have sex, we drink wine when we lose our beloved ones, and we go to psychoanalysts to reduce the pain. We are reared to change ourselves (to be happier, to be lucky, to obey the status quo), but not the system, the world. We are prepared to follow blinding paths with this song 



 to feel angry, to submit ourselves to outburst anger, to a collective action. We are not reared to discover the Reality.

 It is our reality that we should act together, as political actors, caring about the world, the real world, with awareness, to find meanings in our lives and to meet our potentials as humans and create the world and recreate it. The Reality itself is this: It invokes us, begs us, implores us to create it.

“It is thus only by returning political activity to the public realm, by reclaiming public spaces as spaces for freedom, by seeking consensus rather than seeking votes, by acting as humans rather than surviving as animals, that we can begin to overcome nihilism together rather than continue to suicidally adapt to it alone” (p.159, emphasis in origin).

Finally, as I covered nihilists more than a non-nihilist, a Real, human being, it is necessary to mention that the latter is represented by philosophical questioning, by the desire to know, the will to act, to be responsible, and free. Every time you discuss yourself, you happily accept pain and anxiety outsourced from digging deeper in both your Self and the world around you, you seriously play the role of philosopher, and you become a Real, the Real. The core of the stamp at the top of this post shows what the Real is and what its elements are. We have two choices: either to be Real or accept to be dust. 


No comments:

Post a Comment

Book: Refugia: Radical solutions to mass displacement (Robin Cohen and Nicholas Van Hear), 2020

  Refugia This book utilizes a novel methodology, utopianism, to discuss and analyze the problem of refugees. It is, therefore, critically e...