Whenever my present immersion involves the most recent issue of Philosophy Now arriving in the mail, I tend to find an article I want to focus on (a study point (and fumble around with it until it hopefully produces a around 400 word letter to the editor –that is since letters to the editor are about the only opportunity time and my process afford me to engage in the tinker, tweak, and tighten process of a more finished piece. And I generally choose it based on the extent it elicits my empathy while leaving me room for departure: that which I can use because of the common ground I share with them while still being able to assert and further my own process.
And the lucky winner (or unfortunate victim (this time is John Marmysz and the article ‘In Defense of Humorous Nihilism’. I would start with my main issue (his description of nihilism:
“God is dead. Nothing matters. All is meaningless. Nothing is true. These are the sorts of laments often associated with nihilism, a philosophical perspective premised on the belief that the world is incurably imperfect, flawed, defective. According to the nihilist, the way that the world actually exists is not the way it ought to be. We hope for Truth, but we never seem to grasp it in its entirety. We desire Beauty, but find only blemished examples of it in the concrete world. We want things to have value, but nothing seems ultimately all that important. We want the world to be perfect, but it always disappoints us with its flawed nature. This might not be so bad if only the nihilist had faith in our potential to somehow improve things. However, nihilists reject this sort of optimism, instead claiming that it is beyond humanity to mend the eternal rift between our real state of existence and the way we ideally desire things to be. For the nihilist, the real and the ideal are in everlasting conflict with one another, and there is nothing that can be done to alter this condition.”
Now I realize this is the popular understanding of Nihilism. And I would also note that this understanding of it is shared by Simone de Beauvoir:
“In her book The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), the existentialist Simone de Beauvoir characterizes nihilists as frustrated idealists, condemning them as exemplars of ‘bad faith’. That is, instead of grabbing hold of their imperfect situation like good existentialists, she claims nihilists resign themselves to a sort of impotent fatalism in which all worldly undertakings are doomed to failure since they must inevitably fall short of perfection. If perfection is the criterion of success, then nothing that we accomplish in the real world could ever measure up. The greatest of human achievements are still disappointments, and all worldly activity amounts to a vain struggle toward impossible goals.”
And I bring this up so as to point out how hasty it would be to dismiss Marmysz’s understanding of it. To make things worse, those who embrace nihilism tend to compound this understanding of nihilism (or what I call the nihilistic perspective (through what I consider a rather shallow understanding of the implications of nihilism: that which the Oxford Dictionary describes as being tapped into the underlying nothingness of reality, the fact that we are when we could not be as we are as compared to the 6.5 million other people we could be. Ultimately, what it comes down is authentically trying to understand the implications of that underlying nothingness, that implied in Leibniz’s question:
“Why all this rather than nothing?”
And let’s be clear on this: it’s not something that can be approached so directly as the so-called nihilists act as if it can. For instance, one of the implications that come from the nihilistic perspective is that all arguments break down to assumptions. And if we really look at those assumptions (really scrutinize them (they ultimately float on thin air. The so-called nihilist takes this as license to act like an a-hole. But nothing could be further from an authentic attempt at understanding the implications of the underlying nothingness than assuming that it has the fixed trajectory of negativity. Once again: all assumptions float on thin air. Nothingness, by definition, can have no fixed trajectory.
To finish with a more concrete example: from the nihilistic perspective, while there is no real solid foundation for embracing a god or a religion, there is equally no solid foundation for (even if it was proven wrong or nonexistent beyond doubt (for not embracing a god or a religion. Likewise, while there is no solid foundation for embracing a given ethical position, there is equally no solid foundation for not embracing that ethical position.