Kuhnian Nihilism vs. Nietzschean Nihilism

A tale of two Nihilisms

This is the fourth instalment in a series of critical ponderings on Nihilism and “meaning”. For an introduction and index of all posts in the critique check out the Intro. Much like the Metamodern Critique this series is aphoristic with all the pieces standing alone yet connected.

Enjoy,
James

I’ve changed how I think about Nihilism. It’s now less Nietzsche than Kuhn. Nihilism is the lack of an orientation. In his Madman’s Death of God speech in The Gay Science (1883), Nietzsche talks about the crisis of Nihilism as being a lack of an up or down — a loss of all sense of direction and orientation.

Of course, that became Nietzsche’s orientation. The old values were dead; we need a new tablet of values. In his remaining five years of sanity he plays with Zarathustra, the Eternal Recurrence, the Dionysian and the Will to Power as solutions to this crisis.

But notice: Nietzsche had a paradigm. He’s not “plunging continually…Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions…straying as if through an infinite nothing”. Nietzsche has a well-defined problem. He has a nice neat narrative in which all of history fits and which tells us what the future looks like. It offers him a clear orientation towards what the problem is (meaninglessness) and what the solution looks like (new values). That’s not particularly Nihilistic.

The same has often been remarked of Camus’s Absurd — once you have this idea of rebelling against meaninglessness, you all of a sudden have a meaningful orientation.

The true struggle against Nihilism is the lack of an orientation. I don’t buy Nietzsche’s framing of the death of God. I don’t even buy the exceptionalism of our time (once again: see first aphorism).

This is where the personal element comes in here: I don’t know how to orient myself. Towards the political? Towards the philosophical quest for meaning? Towards the psychological? Towards dreams? Towards history? Towards art? Towards…what?

Hence: Kuhn. Kuhn tells us that every mature science has a paradigm. This paradigm serves as a canonical orientation for the scientific community working within it. It serves as an exemplar: here are the things we are oriented towards (ontology); here is the type of problems we are struggling with; here is what a good solution looks like (methodology); here are the unsolved problems remaining.

Normal science takes place within such paradigms; it takes certain assumptions for granted. It takes the importance of certain problems and types of solutions for granted and it is oriented towards finding said solution types for said problems.

In the pesky gaps between paradigms with their Normal Science, we have Revolutionary Science. The map has come up short; we need a new one. A few folk go out there and try to create new maps; one of them takes off and onwards we go.

Nietzsche had a paradigm. I guess he was the founder of the paradigm. He recognised a problem and offered exemplary solutions. Much of Existentialism, Postmodernism, Depth Psychology and online edgelordery took up residence in this paradigm.

Ken Wilber founded his own paradigm which the Metamodernists have for the most part inherited. But for some reason, none of these have a grip on me anymore. Too much disenchantment.

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Nihilism/Meaning Critique #2: The Irony of Nihilism