Nihilism/Meaning Critique #2: The Irony of Nihilism
Nihilism as its own form of meaning
This is the third instalment in a series of critical ponderings on Nihilism and “meaning”. It’s the second of four posts that were written in December (which at the time I tentatively titled “Searching for Solid Ground”) but I never got around to publishing. For an introduction and index of all posts in the critique check out the Intro. I envision this critique (much like the Metamodern Critique) as being aphoristic — with all the pieces standing alone yet connected.
Also I’ve decided to make these posts free going forward. Posts will still go behind the paywall after a couple of weeks but I always find the collision with a paywall in a newsletter frustrating and so this seems the best way to balance the free/paid dilemma for now.
Hope you enjoy it,
James
As I was making my morning cup of tea I had a thought: Nihilism is ironic. At least, “Nihilism” is ironic. All this spilt ink over the “death of God”, “the Absurd” and the “Meaning Crisis” is, funnily enough, a rather effective salve against Nihilism.
It reminds me of Foucault’s opening to The History of Sexuality where he talks about all this hoo-hah about sexual repression. Foucault flips the story on its head: we’re not sexually repressed, maybe there never was sexual repression — just look at this mountain of words lasciviously pouring over the subject. So far from being taboo, it’s all anyone can talk about.
It seems to me that Nihilist discourse is cut from the same cloth. So much talk about meaninglessness yet the chatter is dripping with passionate meaning. There’s so much earnest seeking in your bog-standard Nihilist — such a sense that now, more than any time in the past, we are facing an unparalleled crisis of meaning (something I tried to dispel with the first aphorism way back). What’s more meaningful than this sense of living at the end of the world (something we explored in Secular Eschatology)?
Nihilist discourse is self-negating. For all its pulpit yelping about the death of God and the crisis of the ages, its arteries are dilated with the passion of meaning.
The crisis of meaninglessness becomes the Nihilist-fearer’s meaning.
Previous:
Next:
At the moment, I'm writing a thesis on Heidegger's Questions Concerning Technology and The Word of Nietzsche and have found his critique of Nihilism as, specifically, a metaphysical argument (which of course Heidegger would take issue with it). As in, it isn't as concerned with meaning, and to Heidegger, existentialism as one might think on the face of it because it doesn't deal with ontology. That said, he goes in to show that technology, in it's essence, may be realizing a nihilistic paradigm/reality in virtue of what it is. That is, meaningless, attributed with meaning by the human.
Anyways, I'm still working my way through it but a very thought provoking read if you have not read before.