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March 18, 2005
I came across these perspective on nihilism by Peter G. Epps over at Comment Me No Comments courtesy of Enowning. Peter is critical of what he calls modernism, and he works from a Christian (fundamentalist) perspective that highlights both the Christian influence in Anglo-American culture and the depredations of modernism.
Peter says:
An important dissonance within modernism...has arisen from the side of worldly philosophy...That dissonance is most strikingly evident in Nietzsche, is followed up in Heidegger, and eventuates in the post-structuralism of Derrida.
Pepps then spells this out in a way that accords with this weblog, though his interest is more with Derrida than Heidegger. Derrida is interpreted as saying that nihilism extends to everything. Hence the abyss. This provides an opening for the return of a fundamentalist Chrtistianity.
Peter says:
The fundamental reality grasped by Nietzsche, and explored at length in later Continental philosophy, is that the modernist lives in "the default of God" (Heidegger), or if he is honest, asserts that "God is dead" (Nietzsche's fictional prophet Zarathustra).....Modernism means standing in a relation to God such that He is declared to be dead, and in fact to have been "killed" by the growth of modern knowledge; He is now believed to have been a past human mistake, "real" in the subjectivity of the past (for the pragmatic merging of the idealist and skeptical strains is to say "It's 'real' if believing it had real effects") but no longer "real" by virtue of superior human knowledge and social development.
Nietzsche also grasped, though, that the modernist for whom "God is dead" is nihilistic; the same pragmatic evasion of reality that "kills" God also "kills" all distinctively human sources of meaning, all measures of value beyond personal preference (as pragmatically modified by social conformity). Heidegger discusses the "default of God" as becoming most desperate when the "default" is no longer sensed as such; when there is no longer any destitution-of to remark that of which we are destitute, our destitution has become so absolute as to erase itself entirely from our consciousness.
Nietzsche's response is to expect and announce the emergence of great souls who can "transvalue values," who can go beyond the negation of old systems of valuation to create their own-ultimate self-asserting selves. Heidegger's response is to attempt the destruction of the Western metaphysical tradition and the consideration of the basic questions whose "answers" formed the now-dead systems...
Peter than goes onto to spell out Derrida in terms of the inevitablity of the self-destruction of modernism. On this account Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida take modernism thoughts to its ultimate end. They discovered the destruction inherent within modernism and then set about to furhter the destruction.
On this Christian account Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida are destroyers they leave a vacum for the return fo a fundamentalist Christianity. What is forgotten, ignored or pushed to one side is the way these philosophers develp alternative values to counter those of the technological democratic civilization.
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Thanks for the link and the look at my piece. As you can probably tell from the beginning, it is more than half back-of-envelope notes, so I appreciate your being gracious in your critique.
Regarding the constructive/alternative agendas of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida: obviously, I believe these don't pan out so well. :-)