|
July 08, 2004
Here is a restatement of Nietzsche's understanding of nihilism:
"In the interim, things are not quite right–who does not sense it? Wherever we turn there is a cacophony of voices. Everything seems adrift yet strangely unchanging. We decry the absence of leadership, but who can lead without a specifiable goal? We experience simultaneously the concrete intensification of modern principles and their theoretical disintegration. Intensification, fragmentation, cacophony of voices, and the monotony of constant, circling, changeless change. Who does not see it? But who has not grown weary of the endless, occasionally hyperbolic, restatements of the problem?"
(see G.B. Smith, Nietzsche, Heidegger and the Transition to Postmodernity. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1966, pp.5-6).
This is the world in which we now dwell. Nihilism, vaguely associated with the meaninglessness of the quest for meaning, and once confined to Europe, has now spread with increasing efficiency, through the power/knowledge matrices of globalization. Our reaction to this nihilism---emptying out of meaning in the public world----is to retreat into our private world of individual experience. It is here that we endeavour to find significance and meaning. Many seek peak experiences (highs) in drugs or thrill seeking.
Nietszche advocates the idea of a philosopher as a cultural physician who cures through knowledge experiments on the body to affirm life. The physician-philosopher speaks on behalf of an art of life cultivated through philosophy, a sickness cured through the physicians work on himself.
previous next
|
