Does nihilism represent a true threat to humankind?

nihilism
Hello, folks. That's nice, don't fight.
I've only recently discovered this thread and decided it would continue to be nasty. Nastiness seems to follow Perception around, not that it's always his or her fault. I also noted some reference to my earlier statements in other threads. I couldn't understand the references, but so long as you spell my name right, that's o.k..
I don't want to discuss whether or not Nietzsche was or wasn't a nihilist. It's an unresolved debate among professional philosophers, and therefore to my mind not likely to be resolved by us. For a look at the debate, see, for example, Richard Schacht's Making Sense of Nietzsche. Schacht denies that Nietzsche is a nihilist, by whatever kind of definition of the term, while Arthur Danto (the philosopher and art critic) asserts that he is.
One thing is certain: Nietzsche is no absolutist. He is what we call today an anti-foundationalist, arguing that there are no absolute principles of extra-human creation upon which to rest our policies, values, cosmologies, and social organizations. We must cease to seek an absolute authority, whether it be from the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, or the Encyclopedia Britannica. He goes beyond all foundations to argue that human experience, creations, societies, knowledge, etc. are HUMAN CREATIONS. Creations for which we may take credit and responsibility. Nietzsche's famous pronouncement that God is Dead, is not to be taken as a confession that he killed God, or that God was really mortal. He was announcing an historical-sociological perception that, at least in the Western world, political power no longer needs religious authority to provide it with legitimacy, as do Muslim theocracies today and medieval monarchies of the past. Power in non-theocratic secular societies is based either on labile raw force (e.g. Saddam Hussein) or Constitutional Law (the legal social contract we see in modern democracies/republics today). Nietzsche's much maligned notion of the ubermench, the overman (or woman--not to be termed uberwench), the truly mature individual who can live responsibly in a world of his/her own making, not dependent on mythical foundations or an imagined father figure to ground him in an otherwise dark and purposeless universe. For the ubermench ethical behavior is done for its own sake, truth statements are no more than claims which may be wrong or only temporarily valid. The ubermench's world is a world he (and his fellow men) create, like a painter paints his painting with no need to invoke some spiritual guiding hand to validate it (like Luke's divine inspiration). He takes responsibility (credit and blame) for it. I personally find cultural relativism to be a statement of the greatness of mankind, a testimony to our creativity and ability to invent ways of life that far surpass those of other species dependent in their hyperadaptation to specific environments. Absolutism is the way of infants; relativism the way of adults.
Nihilism is not such a dreadful thing to me. I accept that I am living in a purposeless universe (and I feel that "purpose" is a human invention that has no validity as a reference to the universe), but that I AM AN ASPECT/EXPRESSION OF THAT UNIVERSE, so there is nothing about it that is foreign to, or frightening to, me.

jlN;
Wow; why couldn't I have said it with such didactic clarity
Most excellently put!
And, I might add, we seem to see the universe in a startlingly similar way!

life
BGW, I take that as a compliment

JINoboy-- i am amazed by your coherent and well-organized relation of Nietzsche's philosophical thinking. you said,

"Nietzsche is no absolutist. He is what we call today an anti-foundationalist, arguing that there are no absolute principles of extra-human creation upon which to rest our policies, values, cosmologies, and social organizations."

the negation of the existence of absolute principles is not self-supporting. let's say, that nothing is absolute is a statement. then is this statement itself absolute? it is true, in the same sense, that the statement holding that human beings are irrational cannot be justified only if the person who makes this statement is in the first place excluded from consideration. so this is a counter-argument to show relativism is illogical.

there are absolute principles.

then i guess that you will challenge me by asking what is logical and what is not. and what Nietzsche tries to do is to divest human beings of their past which has forged the way of people's living and most of all, thinking. and probably logics is dumped because it belongs to the past and has to be exposed to open charge. okay, if this is the way as it is, what are we going to use as a tool to challenge the way we think, whilst--ironically--the process in which we challenge something is itself a part of our thinking.

therefore, an attempt to divest ourselves of the institutions constructed in the past and to forge a new future which proclaims to be "of our own" is to lead human beings into a state of stagnation. for nothing is reliable such that nothing can be used to achieve the purpose Nietzsche is deeply involved in.

absolutism
Acepoly, I'm in the process of leaving town and cannot give the response you deserve. I will state, however, that my assertion that there are no absolute truths is not an absolute itself; it is merely an assertion that I have never received from anyone convincing grounds for me to believe in absolutes. My experience convinces me that we are the creators of all our thoughts about the world and that our statements are imprisoned for the most part in the grammar of our language. Please consider this til my return this coming Friday. Thank you for your very challenging post.

Wow, thank the dead God I didn't have to explain that....I couldn't have done nearly as well as JL....

Just wanted to post this article regarding the influence of Nietszche and the Existentialists who followed him, on cognitive behavioural therapy. Perhaps a little nihilism can be good for the soul after all.

http://www.garyblatch.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/existential.html

Acepoly wrote:

<for nothing is reliable such that nothing can be used to achieve the purpose Nietzsche is deeply involved in>

Attempting to make some sense out of the above statement makes me realize the extent to which we are prisoners of our inability to communicate our exact intent. Acepoly, as I am not in the rarified stratus of you intellectuals please explain your meaning.

Perception--i am sorry to have confused you by that sentence. so here, i'll offer something more concrete for you to better understand.

since JLNobdy wrote "it (Nietzsche being Nihilist ) is not resolved between philosphy" , i then mainly focused on some particular points of Nietzsche philosophy. yes, i tend to agree that Nietzsche is not a Nihilist since, in stead of rejecting the existence of moral values as a Nihilist usually does, he seeks for a new set of moral values which are superior to those people accepted in his day. what Nietzsche holds is that all moral values should be reinvestigated. and this is the goal Nietzsche hopes to accomplish. very well so far. but how? Nietzsche does not offer an answer with completeness as he only suggests that all moral values are to be exposed to open charge in the process of which come up new and superior moral values. the tool necessary to do the reassessment is, however, not mentioned. and undeniably, as i'll show you, no workable way can be found to carry out the reassessment of moral values.

for one thing, Nietzsche rejects any logical deduction of moral values. he sees this way as merely sophistic rhetoric which only breeds falsehood and deceptions. hence we have to do without logical thinking when reassessing moral values. for another and even worse (this is the point which i add) no languages stand the ghost of chance of escaping being moral-loaded. the work of reassessment, if carried on the basis of languages either verbal or written, is likely to comprise the superior moral values we pursue with the ones we accept previously. to invoke an extreme case, what human actions are not moral-related? if you cannot point out even one or two, how can we assume that the tools of the reassessment is clear of any moral values?

the failure of the reassessing work is doomed for we have no guarantee that the tools we use to slice into the moral reassessment are moral free. we have none, have we?

In terms of morals, and I think this was said earlier, what Nietzshe was really proposing was that codified morality, i.e., the Church, (let us remember what time in history he was writing in), blindly accepted, prevents humankind from expanding themselves beyond what is preached to them. Kill God, and you free the soul and the mind to actually strive for what they are capable of, i.e., the pursuit of intellectual and physical perfection. I will site an example from Psychology, again....Freudian vs. Cognitve: Freudian seeks solutions from the past, wraps people up for expensive years of therapy analyzing and analyzing, ad nauseum....Cognitive says "What is the problem today, in the present, and what can you do about it? Let's kill Freud and deal with your problems in the here and now, and get you the heck off my couch." It isn't that Nietzsche rejects logical thought, it is simply that his sense of logic was different from the common thought of the time. Nietzsche believed in a collective consciousness, ergo, morality is born in us, and should be natural to all humans. Taught morality is fraught with politics, and I think that is why he was against it. The fact that you, according to your last post, are asking Nietzsche to provide answers to the questions he raises shows you really don't understand him at all. The whole point of his philosophy is to free the individual to act on their own, "be a man", so to speak, and personally, we need more "rugged individualism" in today's world.

sorry, friends, i had a typing mistake in the previous posting, which will probably cause some misunderstandings. so correct it here:

the work of reassessment, if carried on the basis of languages either verbal or written, is likely to comprise the superior moral values we pursue with the ones we accept previously.

it is not "comprise" but "compromise"

thank you for your attention:)

Cavfancier:
"The whole point of his philosophy is to free the individual to act on their own, "be a man", so to speak, and personally, we need more "rugged individualism" in today's world."

the whole point of this sentence in your last post shows that you are interpretating Nietzsche in modern sense. you did not put Nietzsche in the historical context, as you proclaimed. what he does intend to do is to reverse the moral distortion by Socrates and Chistianity and re-establish the moral value in the pre-christianity era.

Acepoly

Thank you for your clarification but can it have quantitative relevance to the subject of this thread: Does nihilism represent a real threat to humankind?

Nietzsche apparently was convinced of it and that being the case with his warning it proves that he was not a nihilist but was deeply concerned about the potential destructive force it represented for the future of mankind. I repost some his warning for your perusal and the link that provides a more complete definition of nihilism:

<The caustic strength of nihilism is absolute, Nietzsche argues, and under its withering scrutiny "the highest values devalue themselves. The aim is lacking, and 'Why' finds no answer" (Will to Power). Inevitably, nihilism will expose all cherished beliefs and sacrosanct truths as symptoms of a defective Western mythos. This collapse of meaning, relevance, and purpose will be the most destructive force in history, constituting a total assault on reality and nothing less than the greatest crisis of humanity:

What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. . . . For some time now our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end. . . . (Will to Power)
Since Nietzsche's compelling critique, nihilistic themes--epistemological failure, value destruction, and cosmic purposelessness--have preoccupied artists, social critics, and philosophers. Convinced that Nietzsche's analysis was accurate, for example, Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West (1926) studied several cultures to confirm that patterns of nihilism were indeed a conspicuous feature of collapsing civilizations. In each of the failed cultures he examines, Spengler noticed that centuries-old religious, artistic, and political traditions were weakened and finally toppled by the insidious workings of several distinct nihilistic postures: the Faustian nihilist "shatters the ideals"; the Apollinian nihilist "watches them crumble before his eyes"; and the Indian nihilist "withdraws from their presence into himself." Withdrawal, for instance, often identified with the negation of reality and ......

http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/n/nihilism.htm

Perception

thanks for your information and the helpful link.

the clarification in my last post is also a response to JLNbody's viewpoint, as he wrote,

"I personally find cultural relativism to be a statement of the greatness of mankind, a testimony to our creativity and ability to invent ways of life that far surpass those of other species dependent in their hyperadaptation to specific environments."

my argument carried in that clarification is exactly opposed to this, that is, Nihilism is incapable of reconstructing cultures after the previous ones are devalued and negated. Nihilism only deals with the destructive work, say devaluation of moral values, negation of the cultural and social institution but it does not offer any solution to reconstruct and reorganize the culture and social institution on the battlefield where everything has been wiped out. what nihilism leaves for us is a void without anything else to replenish it. therefore, in this sene, nihilism does represent a threat to humankind.

Aceploy

Your acknowledgement of the danger posed by Neitzsche's warning is gratifying. Neitzsche's thoughts and writings are so revered by the majority that it is not surprising to see most participants on this thread launch into a defense of his warning about nihilism. It is however disturbing to see some completely ignore his warning and sidestep the issue by reexamining his more progressive ideas.

nietzsche
As I recall, Nietzsche thought that nihilism was a necessary process for mankind to pass through on his way to the creation of a world of ubermenches, of people who could create their world of cultural ideas and values without recourse to absolutism. A clean sweep was needed, but the destruction of absolutism (brought about by a temporary nihilism) is not the creation of a world without intellectual and axiological foundations, but the foundations are man-made not "given" by supernatural donors. A relativism of values and knowledge is an "anti-foundationalist" world in which people live like grown ups, taking pride in and responsibility for their cultural creations. I must leave til Friday. HOpe you keep up this interesting discussion.

JLNbody


I used to think the sweep required by nihilism will preempt any possibility to rebuild the world. For the reassessment is confronted with difficulty in clarifying the moral values embedded in the tools we use. As I have written in the last several postings, almost nothing concerned with humans is free from moral. The human is in any case a moral animal. If we choose to undertake the "sweeping" work, how can we figure out a workable tactic free of moral bounds in achieving the goal?

The chance of our grasping a feasible tactic, elusive however it is, does not shadow the value of nihilism which proposes a suspicious and innovative attitude toward our inheritted morality. Since JLNbody said "a clean sweep is needed [before] the creation of a world [on] the foundations [that] are man-made [and] not "given" by supernatural donors", here we are encouraged to complement the idealistic notion of nihilism with some workable strategies.

The freedom of speech put forward by John Stuart Mill, I think, will fit in the requirement. People are only confined to the harm principle which prohibits speeches bearing "severe" psychological hurts. Of courese, some elaborate work is needed to clarify the term "severe pychological hurts", but anyway the freedom of speech does serve as a way to do the "sweep" work. People are allowed, if they are granted the freedom od speech, to challenge the inheritted morality. Undeniably, in this process, inherited morals still work because people are unable to steer clear of morals which are inculcated all through the upbringing. But in the course of time, the freedom of speech will accomplish most of the reassessment of our inheritted morality.

Nietzche.... I agreed with his ideas before I even heard of him.
You say that nihilism is dangerous. That it is a threat to mankind. But the implications in your affirmation is that you have a precise definition of mankind, as well as a precise definition of a threat. I can only guess that a threat, to you, is something bad happening to humanity. Now, having strived to free myself from subjectivism and moral bonds, I can only ask you this : how is destruction bad ? People often consider that the act of destruction is bad, but they do it all the time, only they never realize that what they destroy can easily be put on the same level as them by anybody who doesn't put a special value in mind and consciousness. So if we destroy, why are we so revolted about being destroyed ?

I agree that nihilism is a threat in the sense that it will, if left to spread, lead to the annihilation of every moral bonds, of every law, every hierarchical order. It will probably leads to some of the most frightening horrors we have ever seen. But it will end. Nihilism will end up wiped out of the human consciousness. At that point, I think we'll have learned a valuable lesson about ourselves, and about what consequence means.

From the first paragraph, you probably deduced I was a nihilist. Think again. I am probably less nihilistic than any of you. I experienced firsthand the destruction nihilism brings. It destroyed each and everyone of my feelings and value. But now I came back from that, stronger than ever. And much less nihilistic.

reality
The fear of nihilism is the fear of chaos. Is it not? Yet, when we look at our situation we see that we inhabit a world full of meaning. Even our fear of nihilism rests on a zillion meanings, most of them tacit and taken for granted. There is no world without foundations; it is only that the foundations are, as I've emphasized, OUR creations, RELATIVE to us, our psychology, our culture, our history, etc. As you've noted, we are moral animals. We create morals like trees create leaves; it IS in our nature to do so. Even the notion of a God or Gods that GIVE US our morals in burning bushes or a hundred other ways, if we look at the anthropological record worldwide, IS OUR CREATION.
We provide our own foundations. They simply are not "absolute," meaning they do not come from elsewhere; only from us.

jlN; wow!

I hope you realize that in your last two posts (in reverse order) you have defined the state of our current existence, and given an outline of the main tenets of a utopian society!

Not bad for a couple of posts, eh?

utopia
BoGoWo, thanks, but I'm afraid that even after the clean sweep and the new society based on realism we'd still have problems. Eu-topia (or good place) must be seen as a place which is good but not perfect.