SOURCE: “The Case Against Nihilism: Lessons and Refutations,” in The Specter of the Absurd: Sources and Criticisms of Modern Nihilism, State University of New York Press, 1988, pp. 352-79.

[In the following essay, Crosby outlines the major lessons of nihilism and refutes aspects of nihilist philosophy.]

Man is that paradoxical being, unique so far as we know, who strives for a perfection which, if attained, would altogether deprive him of his nature.

—Stanley Rosen (1969:214)

1. SUFFERING AND DEATH

A man and his wife were returning to their home in separate cars. The husband arrived first and waited for his spouse, who had been some distance behind him. When he had waited much longer than he thought it would have taken for her to arrive, he got back in his car and anxiously retraced his path. He had not gone very far when he saw the scene of an accident before him, with the flashing lights of a police car, the glint of scattered glass in his headlights, and two smashed automobiles skewed across the road. He learned from police that his wife's car had been broadsided by another car running a red light and that the driver of that car was believed to have been drinking. His wife died soon after in the hospital. When reporters later sought the man's reaction to the accident, he could only respond: “What can you say? It's part of life and death. I don't have any great things to expound on. It hurts so bad” (Robinson and Kirksey 1987).

This experience, routinely reported in an urban newspaper, as are so many other events of its kind, can help set the mood for our meditations on suffering and death as they relate to the philosophy of nihilism. Not only does the experience show a close connection between suffering and death: some of our most grievous suffering is produced by the death or pending death of someone we love; it also strikes the right note of humility. For I also am afraid that I have nothing especially profound to say about these two solemn themes. But I do want to make some observations, the intent of which is to show that the facts of suffering and death, pervasive and deeply troubling though they be, need not finally bring us to a nihilistic conclusion.

The first observation is that a sizable amount of the suffering in the world can be traced to the free actions of human beings, and therefore need not be attributed to an indifferent or malignant cosmos, nor be seen as inevitable. With freedom comes responsibility, a responsibility that can either be shouldered or ignored, for good or ill. It is not logically possible for us to have freedom of choice and yet be immune to destructive misuses of our freedom. The carelessness, indifference, or vindictiveness of some can bring about the pain of others, as in the event cited above. An individual could have sought help for his alcoholism but did not; he could have taken prior steps to ensure that he did not drive while intoxicated, but did not. The result was tragedy. Others allow their fellow humans to suffer through indifference or neglect, a callous “passing by on the other side.” Still others, letting themselves be driven by such motives as prejudice, resentment, greed, a passion for excitement, or a lust for power have trampled individuals or groups into the dust, willfully inflicting agony and death in order to gain their ends.

These and other abuses of freedom, although matters of utmost concern, need not reduce us to despair. For with the freedom to do evil there is also the freedom to do good. Although we cannot undo the tragedies of the past, we can work to find ways to motivate and assist one another toward more generous and caring relationships in the future. We can try to fashion and maintain institutions that procure greater protection and justice for the innocent against the guilty and that offer firm but constructive treatment for those who succumb—and not always simply through personal malice—to evil desires.

This is not to say that we can expect to eliminate altogether the perverse and destructive proclivities of the human spirit; these are a feature of our experience for which no one can convincingly claim to have adequate understanding or solutions. But we can strive to ameliorate these evil impulses in ourselves and others and to find ways to put more positive incentives in their place—through education, law, moral and religious influence, the transformative power of the arts, persistent psychological and social research, and institutional reforms. We are also free to work toward a more humane treatment of animals, toward creating a climate of concern in which we become more respectful of their needs and more sensitive to their capacity for pain. It is within our power as free beings, then, to reduce the amount of suffering in the world: this is a vision of hope, not of nihilistic despair. The obstacles are formidable and many, but the opportunities are genuine and far-ranging.

The second observation is that a considerable portion of human suffering is produced by the stable, predictable natural environment without which we could not implement our freedom. These orderly processes of the environment enable us to produce the automobiles that extend our freedom of movement, but that also constitute new sources of pain or death, as in the example above. The same can be said of many of the other technological inventions that enhance our freedom in today's world. But even without elaborate technologies, people can be hurt by the regularities of nature, as when someone tumbles from a cliff or is drowned in the sea. Where would we be without the pull of gravity or the properties of water, both of which usually sustain us but may on some occasions injure us or kill us? Could there be dependable regularities that work on our behalf and provide the necessary means for the expression of our freedom that would not also, in some circumstances, bring us to grief?

A nihilism that decries this ambiguity in an ordered universe appears to be demanding something that, in the very nature of the case, is impossible, at least if human freedom is to remain a reality. If there are alternatives to such ambiguity, they are by no means easy to conceive; furthermore, one would still have to show that they would be better overall. Here we are reminded of the critical discussions in Chapter Six of the seductive dream of a heavenly paradise. Despite the many elements of contingency and hazard in this world to which we all are consigned, the world also provides us with the protection and dependability necessary to life and freedom. Does it make any sense to demand the benefits and yet to expect to have none of the potential liabilities?

Third, our capacity for suffering is the necessary concomitant of our capacity for commitment, caring, and loving. Were we creatures of indifferent or dull sensibilities, our susceptibility to pain would be drastically reduced. But to be committed and to care and thus to feel deeply, is to be involved in relationships or ventures that do not always turn out in ways we hope for or expect. Such involvements can profoundly enrich our lives, but they also contain the seeds of disappointment and loss. To have persons and purposes for which to live and willingly to dedicate ourselves to them with intensity of concern, is also to run the risk of losing them or failing to attain them, or of getting hurt in the process of serving them. But only in this way can we hope to have things worth living for.¹

Sometimes, in order to serve those commitments and values that make life worthwhile, we must sacrifice our own personal happiness or even endanger our lives. The “readiness to make such sacrifice,” Mill asserts, “is the highest virtue which can be found in man.” He adds that “in this condition of the world, the conscious ability to do without happiness gives the best prospect of realizing such [general] happiness as is attainable” (1957:21). Some of the most exemplary and meaningful lives on record fit this description. One thinks, for example, of the life of Mohandas K. Gandhi. Millions of people have been profoundly affected for the good, and much evil has been averted by this one man's sufferings, willingly undergone for the sake of others. Gandhi was finally assassinated, and his loved ones, friends, and followers were grief stricken by the senselessness of his death. But can one seriously claim that his life was not worthwhile, or that his sufferings or theirs canceled the incalculable good that he was able to accomplish? This good effect continues to the present day, in the inspiring example of loving involvement and concern Gandhi has set for us all, and in the great nation he helped to found.

Fourth, it would be a mistake to regard suffering as something entirely negative or merely instrumental, something itself devoid of value that must be risked or undergone as the price of commitment and caring, or of continuing to live. Suffering can often contribute positively to the quality of existence by teaching courage, compassion, sensitivity to the deeper issues of life, and the ability to cope with life's contingencies. This may result when the path of suffering is consciously chosen, as was the case for Gandhi, whose ordeals helped to mold him into the person of extraordinary vision, endurance, and spirituality he became. But it can also result when suffering descends on one unexpectedly, through no personal act of will. This was true of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, afflicted with poliomyelitis in his mid-life.

Many who knew Roosevelt were convinced that his struggles with this disease, which left him unable to walk without aid for the rest of his years, gave him humility, patience, a reflective capacity, and profound sympathy for the problems of humankind: traits of character for which he had not been noted before. These struggles helped to equip him for the burden of leadership he bore so long and well while president of the United States, during the trying years of the Great Depression and on into the time of World War II. Hence, not only did Roosevelt gain immeasurably from his own suffering; countless others gained as well (see Morgan 1985:258-262).

The examples of Gandhi and Roosevelt demonstrate that we should not approach the problem of suffering merely from the standpoint of the individual, though even there suffering can have creative power. We need also to see it from the standpoint of humanity as a whole, because the individual's sufferings may prove redemptive for the group and turn out to have positive significance for that reason. To confine our analysis of suffering to the scale of the individual is to continue the fallacy of thinking of particular persons as isolated, self-contained units, a fallacy I have criticized in other contexts.

We should also note that groups can benefit from their own sufferings and struggles, not merely from the sacrifices of their leaders. Ted Morgan cites the example of the American people during the Great Depression, arguing that just as out of Roosevelt's “pain came personal renewal, greater understanding, and surprising reserves of strength,” so “[o]ut of the nation's pain” came “renewal, and the making of a more compassionate society” (1985:261). But we should not fail to note as well that while such corporate suffering can be a catalyst for renewal, this outcome is not automatic. It depends partly on how human beings, in their freedom, respond to their travails and opportunities. Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s also experienced large-scale economic deprivation, but the historical outcome was tyranny and degradation, not renewal.²

It is possible for us to live meaningful lives, then, but not without the risk of suffering (and sometimes only through facing up to the near certainty of suffering, depending on what we dedicate ourselves to; Gandhi's life is a case in point). No guarantee is given that everyone's life will be equally meaningful, or that a life that is currently meaningful will always continue to be so to the same degree. And it is unfortunately true that the experience of suffering can sometimes be so shattering or all-consuming as to destroy a person's will to live, or to seem to cancel any possibility of a meaningful life for that person. Such sufferings must also be admitted, at least in some cases, to have had mostly negative impacts on a person's family, friends, or larger social group. In addition, whole groups can be exposed to sufferings so acute and senseless as severely to threaten the life-affirmations of many members of that group, as with certain American Indian tribes in the late nineteenth century or the Jews of the Holocaust.

These kinds of suffering, then, seem incurably tragic or without redeeming value. To acknowledge this fact is realistic, but it is not nihilistic, because the latter denies even the possibility of a meaningful life, dismissing any claim to such a life as based on delusion. The presence and prospect of suffering, and the fact that no guarantees of exemption from its most devastating effects are given, does not entail that meaningful lives cannot be achieved. Human life, like all kinds of life, is undoubtedly precarious. But this does not mean that it is hopeless or without point.

This last statement brings me to my fifth observation. Schopenhauer, Cioran, and others, who claim that but two states of human life exist, either deadening boredom or excruciating pain, are plainly wrong. This is a false disjunction. Most lives are lived on a middle ground somewhere between these extremes, showing experientially that life can be so lived. Cioran and Schopenhauer are guilty of gross exaggeration; they have fallen into what Charles Frankel calls “an operatic posture” or a case of “cosmic hypochondria” (1965:10–11). While true of some lives, and perhaps of their own, their analysis falls patently short of accurately describing all human life. Thus, their examination of existence, one that purports to be starkly realistic and to have peeled away the veneer from our usual, less probing perceptions, is actually histrionic and overblown. A similar point can be made about Kafka's view (at least as interpreted by Ross) that because we find ourselves unable to live up entirely to our highest obligations and goals, we must forever be wracked by an anguish of self-loathing and guilt. Satisfaction can be gained from the relative attainment of high ideals, and our need continually to strive toward closer approximations to them can safeguard us against stultifying complacency and give sustained purpose to our lives. The fact that we fall short of these ideals need not, therefore, consign us to unremitting misery and frustration.

Having said all of the above, however, the fact remains that much suffering is a blight on existence that defies conceptual explanation or existential accommodation. While our lives are far from being entirely absurd, there are elements of the absurd in them, and inexplicable suffering is one of the most notable of these elements. We can account for it and give meaningful interpretations of it up to a certain point, as we have just tried to do. But Elie Wiesel is right in the last analysis when he says,

Evil is in the world. The question is why innocent people are punished. There are no answers. I won't accept comfortable answers. If anyone would say there is an answer, I wouldn't believe it

(Quoted Nellhaus 1985).

Rolston speaks similarly when he insists that much suffering is irremediably evil, and that to

explain evil rationally is a contradiction in terms; this would be a religious equivalent to giving a scientific explanation for random events. Some events do not have causes, not at the point of their randomness. Some events do not have meanings, not at the point of their evilness

(1987:287).

Suffering is part of the fabric of existence; it runs through the whole of human history and animal experience.³ Its threads are often crooked and grotesque, refusing to blend with other aspects of experience, defying all analysis or moral resolution. To pretend otherwise is to succumb to sentimentality and mere wishful thinking.

Still, suffering is not the unmitigated bane and disaster Schopenhauer, Ciroan, and other nihilists have taken it to be. Its significance is mixed, not resoundingly absurd. Just as it cannot be explained to our final satisfaction, so it cannot be said to be totally beyond explanation or to lead to but one outcome, that of nihilism. We can face up to its reality and acknowledge its threatening mystery without despairing of the meaning of human life or without denouncing the universe in which it occurs. In order to do so, however, powerful symbolizations of the ever-present fact and possibility of suffering must be present, effective reminders that it is an aspect of existence over which we often do not have control, an aspect for which we must be constantly trying to prepare ourselves. The story of the cross in Christianity is one such symbolization, as is the figure of Shiva-Kali in Hinduism.

Although my own consciousness has been deeply molded by the story of the cross, which locates suffering in the heart of the universe, in its ultimate Source and Principle, and not merely in human consciousness, there seems to me to be something lacking in this symbolism that can be compensated for by the complementary Hindu perspective. The Christian symbolism portrays God as unqualifiedly good, as the innocent victim of sufferings for which he himself cannot be held accountable, and yet as finally triumphant over the evil effects of all sufferings. There is a sense in which this portrayal, for all of its evocative depth and power, remains too one-sided or unqualified in its optimism. It fails adequately to symbolize the impenetrable enigma of suffering, and to that extent does not prepare us to confront that enigma, meaning that the extent of our own or of the world's suffering may continue to come to us as more of an existential shock or bolt out of the blue than it should.

The traditional theistic problem of evil is a symptom of what I am trying to get at here: its assumed view of God as all-good and all-powerful, and as having calmly created evil (or the possibility of evil) for his own sovereign uses, does not quite ready us psychologically for the threat and presence of inexplicable suffering. Hindu symbolism, by contrast, portrays the Source and Principle of the universe as radically ambiguous, as containing in itself a serenity and creative energy that holds out the promise of bliss and salvation, but as also embodying a horrible destructive activity and potency. Shiva the serene and yet dynamic creator is at one and the same time black Kali the destroyer, with blood-drenched fangs and a garland of skulls, the wanton devourer of humans and animals.

The image of Shiva-Kali is in part an indication that creation and destruction must often go hand-in-hand, because destruction of the old is the frequent prelude or accompaniment to creation of the new. But more fundamentally, it serves as a stark reminder that the universe has a black side like a dark side of the moon, a side of shadowy menance and pain that can descend upon us at any moment. This is part of the universe's ultimate character: its aspect of unfathomable mystery.

It is significant that Kali is the femine form of kala, a Sanskrit word for time, suggesting the radical uncertainty of the future and the setbacks and deprivations the passage of time may force into our lives, as well as the unexpected opportunities for accomplishment and renewal the future may bring. To live realistically is to be acutely aware of this ambiguity of our temporal existence. This ambiguity must be clearly recognized as such; it cannot be simply resolved either into bouyant optimism or gloomy nihilism. Such a recognition allows for confidence and hope, but only as tempered by compassionate awareness of the reality and extent of the sufferings of animals and human beings, and only as informed by a wary acknowledgment of the contingencies of all existence. These contingencies may bring suffering, but the same suffering will sometimes, although not always, have unforeseen transforming effects. Such an outlook, which can aptly be termed “the tragic sense of life,” can also help prepare us for the sacrifices that we may be called upon to make as the price of our involvement in those commitments and pursuits that make life worthwhile and contribute to the world's betterment.

I turn now from the problem of suffering to that of death. Does the fact of death, or perhaps at least of untimely death, support a nihilistic conclusion? In opposition to the arguments of Chapter Three, Section 4, I contend that it does not—despite the wrenching agony of loss that is the frequent companion of death (especially the death of the young and unfulfilled), and despite the shock of incomprehension that can stagger us when a close relation or friend dies, or when we are brought against the rock-hard inevitability of our own death and the deaths of those we cherish.

It will help us to put the fact of death in perspective if we try to imagine what the earth or human society would be like if nothing ever died. Not only would there be no such thing as ecosystems or food chains in nature: those elaborate webs of interconnection in which ascendingly complex forms of life are sustained by the deaths of descendingly simple ones. There also could be no such thing as a course of evolution allowing the higher forms, including that of human life itself, to have emerged. Just as entropy is the price paid for the exchanges of energy that enable life, mind, and the universe to exist, so the death of individuals, and sometimes of whole species, is the price of the startling diversity of life-forms and the creative ongoingness of evolution. Thus, in the natural order, diversity and creativity fit hand-in-glove with impermanence and death, the one being made possible only through the other. To have contempt for the presence of death in nature, and to regard that presence as an unqualified evil and absurdity, is also to reject the entwined dependencies of an ecological earth and the workings of temporal processes that must destroy in order to sustain and to create: the very conditions of life as we know it.

According to the Hebrew Bible, the primordial temptation of human beings is their wanting to “be like God” (Genesis 3:5). We can apply this teaching to the theme of death by noting the tendency of our species throughout its history to be tormented by the dream of finding some way to nullify its earthbound, finite state and to escape the limiting conditions of life in the world. A desperate yearning to be something we are not constantly hounds us, tempting us to deny all that is satisfying and good in what we are and have the capacity to become.

The “curse” of this response of ingratitude and pride is perhaps not death itself, as in the more customary reading of Genesis 3:19, but rather an overweening anxiety about death, and unwillingness to come to terms with its necessary inclusion in limited, interdependent existence. Nihilism is symptomatic of this hubris in its unqualified rejection of the gift of a bounded life, based on the assumption that life cannot be meaningful unless it is everlasting. But the assumption itself seems absurd, as irrational as a child's stubborn refusal of a father's invitation to go to the circus simply because the child knows that it will last only for an evening and thus that its delights will not be experienced forever. Marcus Aurelius's contrasting outlook on death is appropriately sober but also eminently sane. He writes in his Meditations that he considers it “consistent with the character of a reflecting man” that he “be neither careless nor impatient nor contemptuous with respect to death,” but that he “wait for it as one of the operations of nature” (1965:IX,3; quoted Meilaender 1986:11).

A similar conclusion can be drawn from an attempt to imagine what human society would be like if no human being ever died. First, a population problem would exist of such monumental proportions and madly accelerating pace as to make the present one seem trivial by comparison. In fact, the human race might well already have become extinct on account of its grossly outstripping the carrying capacity of the earth. Second, a massive inhibition of constructive change in society without death would probably be evidenced, a heavy weight of conservatism represented by all those who have already lived for hundreds or even thousands of years. The young, with their impulsively fresh approaches and ideas, would, in all likelihood, not even be given a chance. Their endeavors towards change would be squelched by an overpowering number of elders thoroughly set in their ways, firmly convinced that certain things can be accomplished only in the tried-and-true manner and that other things need not even be attempted because they simply “cannot be done.” The delicate balance and tension between conservation and innovation that the cycles of birth and death now help to maintain in human society would be radically imperiled. The scales would be tipped toward deadening conformity and ever-increasing discouragement and alienation of the young. It is difficult to see how a society strained at every point with such unreconcilable polarization and conflict, and one rendered so intrinsically maladaptive to changes that would nevertheless be demanded by the passage of time, could long survive.

The mere fact that individuals die does not by itself guarantee a flourishing, adaptive society. But I am arguing that it makes its own kind of essential contribution to this end. In contrast to a purely individualistic outlook that deplores the passing of the particular person as something irremediably unjust and meaningless, the death of the individual can be seen as his gift to the future, his making way for others to transform his and his generation's contributions with their own fresh visions and enthusiasms. Seen in this light, the value of life does not depend fundamentally on its quantity but on its quality; not on what we each might hope to experience or receive for ourselves for all time, but on what we each can give to the world and to culture and society in the limited time allotted to us.

It can even be argued that we live fuller and more meaningful lives to the extent that we continue to remember that we are going to die. Our loves and friendships can be deepened and made more intense precisely through our being aware that they must someday be brought to an end. We can live with a zest to absorb and enjoy all that life has to offer, and with a focused effort to make our best contributions while there is still time to do so. Amos Wilder compares living with awareness of the boundary condition of death to the waves of the ocean crashing against a reef in the open sea. “It is against the cruel and adamant ledge” that these ocean currents “disclose their phosphorescence or break into iridescent foam and spray” (Wilder, in Scott 1967:25-26). Similarly, a peculiar iridescence and precious quality is imparted to our days by the knowledge that no life will last forever, that each must come to its limit at last on the “adamant ledge” of death. But this need not be a calamitous “shipwreck,” as Schopenhauer claimed; it can be the fitting climax and fulfilment of a life well-lived.

But, of course, not all lives are well lived. Some are wasted. Tolstoy's title character in the short story, The Death of Ivan Ilych (1960:95-156) realized that his life had been squandered only when he learned that he was soon to die from what had at first appeared to be a minor injury. The central point of the story seems to be that this life did not have to be wasted, that it was wasted through a whole series of wrong choices and a kind of deliberate, prolonged insensitivity toward numerous opportunities to move in the direction of a meaningful life. Would living forever have changed the situation? There is no assurance that it would have, because the habits of insensitivity and neglect toward the deeper significance of life might well have been steadily reinforced as Ivan Ilych's life continued. The sheer length of life had nothing to do with its intrinsic meaning or lack of meaning in this case, as it has not in the case of so many others. It was only when he was forced to face his pending death that Ivan was brought to the realizations that his life could have been, and should have been, different—within the finite span of time that was his to live. He finally saw that life is made meaningful only when one learns to care for others and to give of oneself for others, rather than living solely for oneself. This lesson was embodied for him in the compassion of the servant-boy Gerasim, who tirelessly tended to Ivan's needs and talked frankly with him about his death (as no one of his family or friends had been willing to do) before he passed away.

Other lives, however, are neither wasted nor fulfilled, but interrupted by untimely death. Here there is no opportunity for a life well lived, at least not in the sense of having sufficient time to pursue one's own path and to find ways to make one's own distinctive contributions. Such lives are tragic in their lack of fulfilment and in the opportunities missed through no fault of the persons themselves. It would be callous in the extreme to speak of the deaths of such persons as “fitting.” Here, as with some kinds of suffering, we must simply say that there is little or no redeeming significance, no kind of justification possible. There is even some sense … in which the end of any productive and creative life, no matter what its length, is untimely: the cases of Picasso and Gandhi come again to mind.⁴ But this is not the same as a life snuffed out in youth, a life whose particular course and contribution have yet to be formed.

The fact that premature deaths do occur is a matter of profound regret, both for the individuals who die and for those who love them. But it is not sufficient reason to deny the meaning of life in general. Life can be meaningful; it contains this possibility. It is not a possibility that is actualized in every particular person's life, and it sometimes fails to be actualized because of deaths that occur before the fulness of time. This is a tragic truth, but it does not entail a sweeping indictment of life itself. Nevertheless, this truth should impart a somber urgency and sense of responsibility to all of us who are given a more normal length of life in which to find our way. This is one highly significant contribution that even those who die untimely deaths can make to those they leave behind.

It is sometimes claimed that because there is no way in which I can conceive of my own death, or that because my life must end in death and thus cease to have purposes and prospects lying before it, the whole of life is made absurd.⁵ But there is a way in which I can conceive my own death. I find no great difficulty in contemplating or accepting the existence of the world prior to my birth. Is my death that much different? Will the world not continue to go on then as well? As Shakespeare writes, our lives do not merely end in oblivion but are “rounded with a sleep.” We are for a period conscious participants in the world and can generally be grateful for being so, for being given the privilege to experience, even if only for a brief time, the world's inexhaustible fascination and mystery—its ineliminable, but at times still unaccountable, interlacings of joy and pain. The projects and relationships our lives afford need not continue forever for them to be worthwhile. They can be transitory but meaningful, assessed as such in terms of their particular character and donation, rather than being dismissed as absurd by a petulant demand for their infinite duration.

Finally, we need to recognize that there is a sense in which it is pointless to argue for or against the meaning of life in the presence of death. Most of us simply cannot help wanting to live, despite the uncertainties, perplexities, sorrows, and tragedies that confront us in life, including the ever-present fact and threat of unexpected deaths. The will to live is in the final analysis a wondrous gift. It cannot be created or destroyed by even the most sophisticated intellectual arguments. Something akin to this is true for all living creatures in whom, as Boethius remarks, “the desire to live comes not from the wishes of the will but from the principles of nature” (1962:68).

This ability in human beings to affirm life against all odds testifies, as Christians say, to the workings of a grace for which no one can claim credit and which no one is competent to explain.⁶ Its absence in some is, by this same recognition, occasion not for moralizing blame but empathetic concern, for whatever encouragement and help the more fortunate might be able to provide, so as possibly to become conduits for the life-affirming power they unaccountably find within themselves. William James says of the paradoxes of Zeno that these are problems to be “solved livingly,” ones that “ask no leave of logic.” We resolve them by doing what Zeno claimed to be impossible, namely, by simply proceeding to move about in space (1967:II, 261, 255). In similar manner, the problem of the nay-sayings of nihilism is “solved livingly” in most of us: practically or existentially nullified by instinctive affirmations of our existence. There is something in us that justifies life in the face of suffering and death, something that insistently negates nihilism's negations, regardless of what even the most forceful nihilistic arguments may conclude.

2. LESSONS OF NIHILISM

I have devoted a considerable portion of [The Specter of the Absurd] to arguing against particular aspects of the nihilistic philosophy, and some further general observations and summary comments on the case against nihilism. … We should be careful not to dismiss this philosophy altogether, however, because it can teach us a great deal. Six important lessons of nihilism will be stressed in this [essay], thereby putting the arguments against it in more balanced perspective.

Perhaps the most important lesson of nihilism, or at any rate the one that has been given greatest emphasis in this book, is that it serves as a revealing reductio ad absurdum of certain basic assumptions that, despite their destructive and untenable character, have profoundly influenced modern thought. The nihilistic philosophies of this and the past century have pushed these root assumptions relentlessly toward their logical outcomes (although usually not with full awareness of doing so), thus enabling us to become more conscious of them and where they lead, and alerting us to the urgent need for their reappraisal.⁷ …

One especially striking fact about the assumptional framework of the modern Western mind is its strong tendency to think in terms of false dichotomies, binary options that commit us to one extreme position or the other with no recognition of alternatives that might lie in between. We have encountered in various places many examples of such dichotomies, but it might be clarifying to list here some important ones we have discussed: faith in God or existential despair, a human-centered world or a meaningless world, externality of value or no value, absolutism or relativism, complete certitude or total skepticism, personal immortality or futility, correspondence truth or no truth, the Christian worldview or the scientific worldview (scientism), objectivism or subjectivism, quantity or quality, reductionism or dualism, causal determinism or radical voluntarism, individualism or collectivism, fact or value, reason or sentiment, reason or will, boredom or suffering, unattainable ideals or no ideals.

This sad parade of bogus alternatives is enough to make one sometimes wish that Aristotle had never formulated the Law of the Excluded Middle or labelled it a fundamental law of reason! Nihilistic arguments can often be seen to rest, at least in significant measure, on the supposition that if one of these extreme alternatives is rejected, the only recourse is to opt for the other one. This fact instructs us about certain persistent thought-patterns of modern Western civilization and warns of the necessity to break the spell of these uncritical and highly restrictive habits of thinking. For that we owe the philosophy of nihilism a debt of gratitude, even while having to admit the backhanded character of the compliment.

Frankel claims that “nihilism as it is experienced—the actual ‘existential’ sense of the meaninglessness and futility of life—is not the product of an intellectual theory, and it does not take a new theology or metaphysics to overcome it.” Instead, it is the result of such things as “broken hopes, lost friends, impermanent commitments, and declining standards; and it may even be the symptom of a loss of intestinal fortitude” (1965:9). There is considerable truth in this assertion. It is the other side of what was said in the previous section about our instinctive overriding affirmations of life in the face of countervailing intellectual arguments. It also ties in with the distinction … between theoretical and existential forms of certitude or doubt.

Nevertheless, Frankel's claim goes too far. It too cleanly divides experience from thought, existential response from theoretical commitment, the contingencies of personal life from the pervasive commonalities of our intellectual heritage. The contention of this book is that not only much of the recent nihilistic philosophy, itself indisputably a movement of thought, but much of the nihilistic mood of contemporary life has been informed by certain long-held and too infrequently recognized (or challenged) intellectual assumptions.

These historically inherited, questionable assumptions have helped to mold our experience and to give added impetus to aspects of it that may already incline us in the direction of negation and despair. Trying to explain all the nihilistic susceptibilities of either the human spirit or modern culture on a purely intellectual basis would certainly be too facile. Nihilism has rootage in ineradicable facts of the human condition that sages of the world have brooded upon for thousands of years, and not merely in developments of Western intellectual history over the past few centuries. And we noted earlier that we cannot hope to gain comprehensive understanding of nihilism as a phenomenon of recent times without giving concerted attention to its social, in contrast to its more conceptual or theoretical, sources. When all of this has been acknowledged, however, we still have to give the intellectual sources their due, and we can be grateful to the philosophy of nihilism for casting them in bold relief and in that way exposing them to critical analysis. Alperowitz succinctly makes the point of this first lesson of nihilism when he states, in another connection, that “[h]onest pessimism has great value; it can be the first stage to a more fundamental reappraisal” (1986:64).

The second lesson is suggested by Tillich's statement that “the threat of nonbeing … opens up the mystery of being” (1953:67). By calling our attention to this threat in its many guises, the philosophy of nihilism can more deeply attune us to the stubborn ambiguities of our existence, to its myriad shadings of dark and light. In this way it can help us to understand and come to terms with life as it is, rather than overlaying it with naive delusions, oversimple interpretations, and unrealistic expectations. Heidegger rightly asserts that “the first and only fruitful step toward a transcending of nihilism” is to acknowledge its negations instead of blithely dismissing them, “to press inquiry into being explicitly to limits of nothingness,” thus drawing “nothingness into the question of being” (1961:170). To refuse to draw the threat of nothingness into our outlook on life is to refuse to recognize that tentativeness and insecurity are marks of our natural human state. It is to seek to live in a world of dreams, a world in which we pretend that our condition is something other than what it is.

However, nihilists are mistaken in thinking that the only alternative to such pretense is to conclude that life can have no value or meaning. To be fully aware of the precariousness of life need not doom us to the loneliness of despair. Such awareness can promote meaningful community, for example, by making us more responsive to the vulnerabilities and needs of others and more cognizant of our reciprocal dependencies on them, because no one individual can lay convincing claim to self-sufficiency or final wisdom when recognizing what Michael Novak terms the “emptiness, terror, and formlessness at the center of human consciousness.” Honest recognition of our insecure state can also create heightened sensitivity to life's challenges and joys, and to the “obscure coherences and often veiled beauty” (Novak 1971:115) that can be found to lie in, with, and under its elements of disruption and pain. This power of discernment not only opens up the mystery of being; it can also contribute powerfully to the courage to be. It affords a measure of understanding and strength that persons currently too sheltered against threats of finitude, fate, and death, or those marked by a shallow unquestioning optimism are in no position to attain.

I made observations similar to these in [other chapters of The Specter of the Absurd], although in the different context of arguing against the one-sidedness of the nihilistic outlook. There are, of course, depths of life that no mere philosophy can be expected to plumb. But the philosophy of nihilism goes farther than most in probing the menace of nothingness in its many forms, laying bare essential dimensions of experience that it would be foolish to try to minimize or ignore. This is the second important thing it has to teach us.

The third lesson of nihilism is its recognition of the perspectival nature of all knowledge, value, and meaning. It is not that nihilism makes a virtue out of this; rather, it tends to regard our inescapable situatedness in space and time and our consequent confinement to limited perspectives as a disaster. The reason for its conclusion is that nihilism tends to assume, with the thinkers of the Enlightenment, that the sole alternative to absolutes that utterly transcend the conditioning factors of tradition, or of social and personal outlook and experience, is a stultifying relativism that reveals epistemological, moral, and existential commitments to be glaringly arbitrary and therefore totally absurd.

But we have already seen that there is no reason to draw this extreme conclusion. To be finite and time-bound is no disaster but simply the character of our life in the world. The philosophy of nihilism can help us to acknowledge and accept our finite state by forcing us to give up the age-old dream of attaining a God's-eye view of things. But as against this nihilism, we must also cease assuming that the only alternative to this soaring dream is the fetid quicksands of relativism, with no place to stand and no place to build. To the contrary, the arguments of nihilism unwittingly show the way out of precipitous despair by making us realize that we need no longer aspire to the impossible. We can finally be free, for example, from such Cartesian requirements as those of infallible method; pure beginnings; indubitable foundations; a pristine, detached self unsullied by mundane social and historical biases; and a radically separate, in-itself world to which veridical beliefs must somehow exactly correspond.

We are not gods. We are born into particular families and communities and share in a particular heritage, as well as living at a specific time in the unfolding history of this heritage and the people it sustains. It is within such concrete contexts that we stand and on their basis that we learn to question, reflect, experiment, conclude, communicate, debate, choose, and build. What is so bad about that? We can take a positive view of such contingencies just because they cannot purport to provide us with anything absolute or unequivocal. By virtue of this fact, they give us room to breathe and latitude to find ways to make our own distinctive discoveries and contributions. Beyond our own culture and time there are others whose singular traits empower them to give creative stimulus to our imagination. Finally, in the life of each person there are experiences and realizations from which other persons have much to learn; these give further range for mutual testing and enlarging of finite points of view.

These historical, cultural, and personal perspectives are not completely sealed off from each other, as some would have us believe. Despite their sometimes substantial differences, these conditioned outlooks contain important points of intersection and commonality. Precisely because it is possible for us to “identify our presuppositions and thereby distinguish them from other presuppositions,” as Rosen explains, “there must be a common environment of intelligibility within which this determination takes place” (1969:226). To become aware of our presuppositions and to be willing to expose them to the risk of dialogue with outlooks informed by different assumptions is not to settle for a bland, indifferent relativism but to engage in the type of objective, open-minded inquiry appropriate to finite beings. Through such process of inquiry, areas of overlap among finite perspectives can be explored and possibly expanded, and the perspectives themselves may be mutually challenged and transformed.

Still, we must recognize that different perspectives are not wholly commensurable either; so we should not expect to be able to reduce them to some single, more inclusive framework. This fact can serve as a constant reminder that there are ways of organizing and interpreting experience other than our own, and that the complexities of existence cannot be encompassed by any single perspective, including the one a particular society or individual finds most compelling. This can be a liberating and endlessly evocative realization, one that greatly enhances our sense of the glory and wonder of the world. Moreover, what the student in our first chapter, Camus, Cioran, and others have viewed as the bankruptcy of human thought—its failure to discover final, all-encompassing answers to ultimate questions and its tendency to crystallize into alternative points of view—can be seen in a quite different way: as proof of its irrepressible fecundity and power.

This same realization can also be a potent antidote to the fanatical close-mindedness that has been the bane of history and that afflicts or continually threatens present societies. To pretend that oneself or one's group or culture does not inhabit a finite perspective, that one's beliefs constitute absolute and final truth, is to preclude the possibility of learning from, or of having creative interactions with, any but a narrow coterie of “true believers.” It is to settle for static reinforcement of existing attitude and conviction over the challenge of interacting with those who see things differently. This kind of ingrown mentality can have the psychological effect of tempting individuals and groups to become so haughty or protective about what they regard as the only possible point of view as to want to force everyone and everything into it. Such an attitude can give rise to radical evil, as the pages of history so plainly show, with their dolorous tales of ideological wars, inquisitions, crusades, pogroms, forced “conversions,” colonial arrogance and repression, heavy-handed censorship and thought-control, and even genocide.

It is true that nihilism goes to the other extreme of asserting a debilitating relativism that, if followed through to its logical conclusion, would make all inquiry pointless and leave us with nothing to learn. It would also leave us with no binding moral standards. But at least nihilism's lucid exposure of the perspectival character of beliefs and commitments can have the good effect of warning against the fanatical delusion of thinking that individuals or groups can possess unconditioned and unquestionable truth. The positive moral significance of perspectivism is made explicit by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s insistence that the beginning of an adequate state morality lies in “the assumption that other nations have legitimate traditions, interests, values and rights of their own” (The Cycles of American History, Houghton Mifflin; quoted Kennan 1986:4). This insightful comment about morality among nations also applies to morality among other kinds of institutions or social groups and among individuals. It points to a crucial aspect of nihilism's third lesson.⁸

The fourth lesson of nihilism is found in the insistence of thinkers such as Stirner, Nietzsche, and Sartre on the reality and critical importance of human freedom. Stirner pushes this theme to a ridiculous extreme, of course, as does Sartre. We have been highly critical of both for doing so. We have also seen that Nietzsche sometimes presents his concept of the will to power as an endorsement of tyranny of the strong over the weak, or as a wholly capricious willfulness, rather than as a recognition of a capacity of human beings to respond creatively to the concrete circumstances in which they find themselves—even though he also often assigns this commendable third meaning to that concept. In addition, Nietzsche is given to rhapsodies over the idea of eternal recurrence, an idea that if interpreted literally would make all human actions and the whole of human history instrumentalities of an irresistible cosmic will that moves everything in the universe, lap upon lap, over an immense circular course of time.⁹

Despite the exaggerations, inconsistencies, or questionable morality we may come across in the outlooks of Stirner, Nietzsche, or Sartre, something of great value is implicit in their common stress on the transformative power of human freedom. Each asserts that the social-historical settings into which we are born do not foredoom us to think and act only in certain set ways, because we have the freedom to alter those situations. Their position contains an urgently needed critique of the fatalistic attitude about such alarming current trends as an unchecked march of technology and its potentially disastrous effects, including devastation of the natural environment and global nuclear war—an attitude I earlier labelled “historical nihilism”. This attitude, should it become widespread and deeply engrained among the peoples of the world, could easily take on the character of a self-fulfilling prophecy. People might simply resign themselves to destructive technological and other social-historical forces they have concluded to be wholly beyond their control or beyond any kind of human constraint.

While we do not have the limitless freedom that Stirner and Sartre often seem to think we have, the bold overstatements of their philosophies can help to jolt us into realizing that we have much more freedom than we usually credit ourselves with and hence, that our common future is significantly open, not fixed or foreordained. We should certainly not underestimate the accelerating momentum of sometimes mindless technological developments and applications, or the extent to which that momentum and other deleterious social trends are abetted by firmly entrenched and generally uncriticized beliefs and practices. We cannot exercise our freedom in a vacuum; to exercise it responsibly may require us to take arms against formidable odds. But we also should not underestimate our collective ability to reassess and redirect the intertial tendencies of our time.

What we have just said about social, political, and world-historical events also holds for the life of the individual. A surprising element of hope is found in the nihilistic philosophy, as long as we focus on its motif of freedom without going to the extreme of denying context or constraint to that freedom. “To refuse to acknowledge that I must discover meaning,” writes Keen, “is to deny that my destiny is shaped by incarnation in a body and a historical situation,” but “to refuse to accept responsibility for creating meaning is to deny my ability to transcend the givenness of my life” (1969:85). Stirner, Nietzsche, and Sartre, each in his own way, calls attention to this capacity for self-transcendence, meaning that we do not have to settle for what we already have become, give up because of past disappointments or failures, allow our self-estimation to be dictated by the responses of others, unthinkingly endorse the beliefs or values of our peers, or acquiesce in those psychological or sociological theories that would deny the considerable scope of personal freedom. This motif of nihilism also warns us against the dishonesty of simply blaming other people for our personal shortcomings or attributing them to circumstances we too facilely claim to be beyond our control.

We are not isolated individuals or totally free, and some are less free than others, but we are not totally determined either. We are appreciably free and to that extent responsible for how we deal with the given circumstances of our present lives, including those created by our own past choices. This is an optimistic message in which each of us can find challenge and inspiration, and it is an especially pertinent message for the world of today. Catalano states the fourth lesson of nihilism when he says of Sartre that “perhaps the most important aspect of [his] thought for our generation is its ability to unveil our self-deceptions and to oblige us to accept the free molding of our selfhood and our environment” (1980:xiii).¹⁰ His statement has application to Stirner's and Nietzsche's views as well.

The fifth lesson of nihilism lies in its insistence on the uniqueness of the individual. Stirner, Mauthner, and Sartre are right to give crucial importance to the outlook and experience of the individual, as they are in their adamant refusal to swallow the concrete existence of free individuals into abstractions such as so-called principles of human nature or scientific laws of behavior. They are wrong, however (as we have seen), in their tendency to isolate individuals from one another; to assume them to be inevitably locked in conflict with one another; to abstract them from their historical, cultural, and natural surroundings; to conceive of them as the only important reality; and to make each individual a law or universe of meaning unto himself.

Bearing these qualifications in mind, profound truth is contained in the concentration on the particular person that is such a salient trait of nihilistic philosophy. We can gain fuller comprehension of this truth and its implications by approaching it from several different angles. First, we should remind ourselves in more explicit detail that each individual's life is irreducibly particular and unique. Nihilism is right in forcefully calling our attention to this fact. It errs, however, when it goes on to assume that uniqueness of personal outlook and experience precludes community with other human beings or having shared standards of meaning, truth, or value.

Bernard Loomer corrects this misconception when he asserts that the uniqueness of the individual human being consists not in its radical separateness or self-centeredness, but in its “self-creative subjective response to what it has relationally received from others.” Thus, contrary to Stirner and Mauthner, no inconsistency exists in seeing the unique individual as a “communal individual … largely composed of its relations with the world” (Loomer, in Sibley and Gunter 1978:519). Despite having the same historical and cultural backgrounds, no two individuals have, or are capable of having, precisely the same perspective on things. People are intimately related to one another from birth by their joint inheritance of a common culture and common world, and each is shaped in profoundly similar ways by this inheritance. But people also differ from one another by ineliminable peculiarities of makeup, background, and experience, and thus in their specific modes of response to their culture and world. Each person is through and through social, but the perspective of each on the complex network of social relations is nevertheless unique. The distinctive character of their responses to the common environment is further enhanced to the extent that individuals become acutely conscious of their personal freedom, a theme of the nihilistic philosophy stressed above.

The legitimate emphasis of this philosophy on the distinctive character of personal experience also alerts us to a second truth, one that ought to be obvious, but one that is routinely ignored. This is the fact that no one else can live my life for me. I must live it at firsthand and discover its meaning, if any, for myself. There is no meaning of life in general, nor can the meaning of life be gathered up into a compendium of abstract instructions, rules, or norms. As Robert Ornstein expresses it, “There is no text in which the meaning of life is to be found” (1977:162). We can hope to discover it only through our own personal reflections and experiences, although this is not to deny that we may derive much insight from the experience and counsel of others.¹¹

Existential nihilism rejects the possibility of a meaningful life, but this judgment itself is a glaringly abstract overgeneralization that fails to jibe with nihilism's insistence on the concreteness of individual existence. Countless individuals find their lives to be meaningful, and they do so without succumbing to self-delusion or bad faith. But the finding must be each person's own; it cannot be conferred upon, dictated to, or demanded of individuals from the outside. While the search for life's meaning will best be carried out in community and through conversation with others, it will be brought to satisfactory conclusion only at the deepest levels of each person's own being, in a manner suited to the irreducible particularities of each person's life. One's convictions about the meaning of life lie at the core of one's personal perspective on the world. There will, no doubt, be numerous intersections of this personal perspective with the standpoints of others, but no two such standpoints are ever exactly the same. It would be foolish to expect that they ever could be, or should be.¹²

Nihilism's stress on the uniqueness of persons, when properly qualified and when combined with its insistence on the reality and central importance of freedom, gives sanction, in the third place, to what Loomer terms “the virtues of an open society with its diversity, contrasts, and mobility” (Sibley and Gunter 1978:529). A society which has respect for the uniqueness and freedom of individuals will, at least in that important regard, be a just society, in contrast to one that tries to impose a deadening sameness of perspective on everyone, heeding the counsel of only a powerful few. It will also be a creative society, made so by its recognition and encouragement of individual uniqueness as a source of novel ideas and innovative energy of immense potential value for all.¹³

From its creativeness, such a society will gain adaptability to changing times and circumstances and have a better chance of moving with confidence into the future. By contrast, a conformist society will barely be able to hold its own in a constantly changing and increasingly complex world, because it is cast in the mold of a single static point of view. Furthermore, a society in the habit of seriously taking into account the diverse perspectives of its citizens, and of working continually to develop grounds of mutual understanding and enrichment among them, is also more likely to interact constructively with the different viewpoints of other societies. Thus, far from making other-directed morality or effective communication impossible, as Stirner and Mauthner believed, a stress on the uniqueness of individuals can give scope and flexibility to a society's moral consciousness and impart an ever-expanding subtlety and power to its modes of thought and means of expression. The two philosophers justifiably attend to the uniqueness of individuals, but the conclusions they draw from this important recognition are too narrowly conceived.

A last instructive aspect of nihilism's stress on the uniqueness of the individual is contained in Sartre's claim that there is no such thing as a fixed human nature,¹⁴ and in his contention that we all, through our personal acts of freedom, contribute to a historically emerging conception of what it means to be a human being. Sartre erroneously deduces from this idea that no objective norms of human freedom can exist, and that moral values simply amount to whatever an individual happens to choose. These are mistaken inferences because they rest on a distorted notion of human individuals as isolated centers of unrestricted freedom rather than as relational or communal beings, intimately tied to, constrained by, and even to a large extent defined by, their cultural settings. I have already developed this line of criticism of Sartre, and of the subjectivistic and individualistic orientation of modern thought in general. But now I want to concentrate on an element of truth in Sartre's view.

He is surely correct in saying that, in choosing for ourselves, we choose for all humankind (although it is not clear why, on the basis of his own atomistic and purely voluntaristic analysis, any individual need be concerned for the implications of his actions for all humankind, should he freely choose not to be). Sartre is also justified in holding that there is no such thing as a timeless human nature that determines, once and for all, what we are or have the capacity or responsibility to become. We can even go so far as to say that if anything is “essential” about us as human beings, it is the indeterminate character of our potentiality, as is vividly shown by our species' richly variegated lines of historical development and cultural achievement, to say nothing of the manifold forms of personal existence. Cobb speaks to the truth highlighted by Sartre when he notes that “almost any act regarded as right in one culture may be regarded as wrong in another. It is idle to appeal to human nature to settle disputes about matters of this kind” (1965:62). Cobb elsewhere observes: “There is little common human nature other than the uniquely human capacity to be shaped in history into a wide variety of structures of existence.” He adds, “Here the pluralistic spirit is at work at the deepest level” (1975:136).

This pluralistic spirit is also manifested in the fact that individuals continue to shape, as well as to be shaped by, their social-historical environments. In this way they make their own distinctive contributions to an evolving process of defining humankind (or more accurately, of giving instantiations to various possible definitions of humankind), not only because they themselves are unique and genuinely free, but also because the concrete situations in which they must act always have inescapably unique traits. No two situations are ever precisely the same, even within the same cultural context, any more than any two acting individuals are the same. This does not mean that established patterns of experience or general norms for decision have no relevance to present choices; it simply means that these patterns and norms are likely to undergo constant revision as they are applied by particular persons in particular circumstances.

Thus, we learn an important lesson about ourselves from nihilism's stress on the free actions of specific persons in specific contexts and from its consequent vision of human nature as open-ended potentiality rather than as unchanging essence. This lesson remains important even though we have to balance it by continuing to acknowledge the structure and guidance given to particular decisions by the general characteristics of shared cultural environments. Because the general and the particular, the stable and the changing, work always in concert, we have no warrant for setting them in opposition to each other. This balanced picture has plenty of room for recognizing the great variety of actual and potential modes of self-formation.

We can in this way do justice to the insistence of Sartre and others that human nature is not something that can be defined in advance or in the abstract, i.e., apart from the emerging novelties of historical experience—novelties that each unique person has a hand in helping to bring into being. What the human species may at any given time appear to be, both descriptively and normatively, is subject to redefinition through what humans individually and collectively have the capacity to become. And this is not a capacity whose details admit of precise prediction; they will be made known only by the passage of time.

Once again, in yet another manner, we are reminded of a central theme of this book, a theme concisely formulated by Cobb when he writes that the “decisive characteristic of human nature is historicality, man's potentiality for being formed by history” (1965:63). I do not mean to imply with my emphasis on the historicality of human life anything like a doctrine of inevitable progress. Events of the present century show that humans have an incalculable capacity for destructiveness and evil, as well as for creativeness and good. Our potentialities do not point only in one direction but are rife with ambiguity. What I do mean to stress is the conviction that the outlooks and activities of concrete persons existing in time do not admit of reduction to some static universal or single, all-encompassing essence. This is a final, highly significant aspect of what I term the fifth lesson of nihilism: its focus on the uniqueness of the individual.

Just as there is no fixed human nature but a complex, open-ended potentiality, some of whose aspects are continually being actualized in the course of history, so there is no such thing in human experience as a static, ready-made, in-itself world. The world of our experience is not a world set against us or foreign to us. It is a world in relation to us and one always in the making. This is the sixth lesson of nihilism.

It is true that thinkers such as Sartre and Camus are deeply distressed by their conclusion that the in-itself world is not accessible to human consciousness or experience. They bemoan our inability to be at one with that world, seeing it as something ineluctably remote and strange, a standing mockery of our puny attempts to comprehend it or to enter into meaningful relationship with it. In their view, we drift beyond the world in jerry-built capsules of our own feeble invention, distanced from it by arbitrary constructs of human imagination. Our situation is thus one of unrelievable frustration and tragicomical absurdity. Their position takes for granted (despite the protestations of Sartre to the contrary) a radical separation of subject and object. The human subject is envisioned as futilely groping within its egocentric shell for an objective reality that is assumed to have nothing of the human in it and therefore to be forever beyond our grasp. Alternatively, when the objective world is thought to be within the reach at least of scientific reason, as with Russell, its true character is believed to be merely what physics describes: a system of barren facts and indifferent laws having no connection with distinctively human sensibilities, cares, or needs.

However, each of these portrayals rests on the highly dubious assumption that there is, or could be, such a thing as an in-itself, nonperspectival world, a world out of relation. There is nothing tragic or depressing about the inaccessibility of such a world, because it is inaccessible by definition. Even Russell's world of physical science is far from being an in-itself reality. Instead, it rests heavily upon particular kinds of human questions, projects, valuations, and beliefs, as we have already seen. The researches of Kuhn (1971) and others have also shown that the world of scientific description is anything but static or ready-made. It has varied over time with changes in scientific theories, and these changes have on a few occasions been markedly discontinuous in character. Because they have been so in the past, it is likely that they will be so in the future, and probably in ways that we cannot now predict. Science, like everything else human, is characterized by an inevitable historicality. As Sartre remarks, in a pungent aphorism that aptly demonstrates this inevitability of temporal situatedness, even “the historian is himself historical … he historicizes himself by illuminating ‘history’ in the light of his projects and of those of his society” (1966:613).

All this being the case, it follows that there is no world radically sundered from human experience that must in consequence forever elude us; no “out there,” unlived nature solely describable by steadily mounting, brick-upon-brick results of purely objective scientific research; and no such thing as a wholly independent, irrevocable past. Everything real exists in relation. This is a stunningly significant realization, one that the philosophy of nihilism brings home to us with compelling force.

Gregory's claim that “the most striking contribution made by existentialism is the proposition that we can and do make our own ontological world” (Brock and Harward 1984:26) applies to the nihilistic philosophy as well. In endorsing this view, I do not mean to suggest that the world is nothing but a human construct or invention. That would be to place exaggerated emphasis on one side of the relation.¹⁵ What I mean to say is that drawing a neat line of demarcation between what we contribute to the relationship and what the world provides is impossible. Human culture and the natural order are aspects of a single fabric of experience. While it is no doubt an overstatement to speak of the ontological world as simply a human artifact, there is important truth in such an assertion that the philosophy of nihilism helps us to understand.

This realization will seem dismal as long as we cling to the notion of reality as something that must lie at one extreme of an assumed polarity of subject and object, something that must possess unalterable, entirely self-contained traits that automatically sanction certain statements or beliefs as forever true, and others as forever false. But we ought to understand instead that this rigid polarity itself is an abstract, distorted way of regarding a world that in its very nature can exist only perspectively or in relation. William James gives us an admirable rendering of the sixth lesson of nihilism (which happens also to be a statement of his own pragmatic theory of truth) when he says, “Knowledge of sensible realities … comes to life inside the tissue of experience. It is made; and made by relations that unroll themselves in time” (1967:I, 57). This theme is nihilistic only to the extent that we continue to hold to the correspondence theory of truth, to nurse the idle daydream of attaining a God's-eye view of reality, or to pine for a way of somehow extricating ourselves from the grasp of time. Otherwise, it is a valuable lesson about the conditioned character of our life in the world, and about the dependence of conceptions of that world on the subtle interweavings of experience, culture, and history.

3. THE CASE AGAINST NIHILISM

Despite these six important lessons of the nihilistic philosophy, it does not stand up as a whole under critical scrutiny and must therefore be rejected. It must be rejected for three primary reasons. I conclude this study with a review of these reasons, presenting them to the jury of my readers as a summation of the case against nihilism developed in this book.

The first reason for rejecting the nihilistic outlook is that it is grounded on certain basic assumptions that we have shown to be indefensible or at least highly questionable. When these assumptions are brought into the light of day and examined critically, the philosophy of nihilism loses most of its power to persuade. Nihilistic thinkers can therefore be faulted for not probing deeply enough and even for being guilty of a kind of intellectual laziness. Cochran's indictment of ancient skepticism holds for nihilism as well; it tends to be “an anaesthetic for those … wearied of thought” (1944:167).

This aspect of the nihilistic philosophy recalls an experience I had a year or so ago with one of nature's most exquisit creatures: the Western Tanager. One of these multicolored birds had flown into our garage in late evening and, unnoticed, had become trapped there when I pressed the button to bring the garage door down before retiring for the night. The next morning when I went to put our dog into his run behind the garage, I noticed the Tanager perched on my workbench, at the end of the garage opposite its main door. When I pushed the button to raise the door, the bird flew around the ceiling of the garage in panic. He then darted above the door, which was folded in against the ceiling, and not finding sufficient room to get out there, returned in a frenzy of feathers to the other end of the garage. He repeated this pattern again and again, never seeming to notice the gaping space beneath the door from which he could have escaped with ease. In similar fashion, nihilistic philosophers thrash around within the restrictive assumptions structuring their dismal view of the world, not seeming to realize that a way out might be found by questioning those assumptions or trying to conceive and assess alternatives to them.

A second reason for rejecting nihilism is that it presents a one-sided picture of human life, lavishing attention on its negative aspects but failing to take fairly into account its counterbalancing positive traits and possibilities. The nihilistic philosophy is a sustained exercise in special pleading for what turns out to be a distorted, fragmentary view of existence. Hick's rumination about “some of the existentialist writers” is especially appropriate to the nihilists:

[T]hese writers have usually been concerned to bring out the more strained and hectic aspects of human experience, presenting it often as a vivid nightmare of metaphysical anxieties and perils. They are undoubtedly painting from real life, particularly in this anguished age, but I venture to think they are depicting it in a partial and one-sided manner

(Hick, in Yandell 1973:534-535).

This attribute of nihilism helps to explain why we have so much to learn from it: a well-executed caricature often enables us to notice things that we might otherwise overlook or not sufficiently emphasize. But we should not confuse the caricature with the reality, and this is what nihilists do. There is as little faithfulness to the complexities and ambiguities of experience in their squinting cynicism, on the one side, as there is in the wide-eyed assurances of utopian dreamers, on the other.

The third reason for rejecting nihilism is stated in this [essay's] epigraph, taken from Rosen's book on nihilism. This philosophy is surprisingly and ironically akin to utopianism in its anguished yearning for a perfection that, if realized, would deprive us of our humanity. To resolve all of the problems about which nihilists endlessly complain—fallible knowledge, susceptibility to pain, situatedness in time, etc.—would require the complete annulment of the conditions of our life in the world. This is not only an unreasonable demand, it also overlooks the fact that such a phantom state of “perfection” would hardly be ideal.

I have already spoken to this point in my critical discussion of the idea of heaven; I also referred to it earlier in this [essay] when discussing the stable factors in the universe that make life and freedom possible, but that can also cause suffering. David Hall gets at this third criticism of nihilism when he notes the irony of wishing for a world of such complete uniformity as to be wholly intelligible. There would be an absence of significant questions in this kind of a world, just as much so as there would be in one that was wholly contingent and thus incapable of being brought under any kind of systematic interpretation. A completely uniform world would be a world without challenge or surprise. It would lack the alluring mystery that gives interest and delight to our inquiries. Physicists may sometimes complain of the complexity of the world that “greatly complicates the physicist's task” (see the quotation from D. W. Sciama, in Hall 1982:124). But Hall sees such a complaint as deliciously ironic, because did the world not possess such elusive complexity, there would be no task for physics and, hence, no such thing as physicists!

He rightly asks,

Would the scientist truly like to rid himself and his enterprise of all significant problems? Would the astrophysicist like to solve, once and for all, the problem of the origin of the universe? Does the philosopher really desire the solution to the problem of the One and the Many? The end-state entailed by the solution of all problems is that wherein no intelligence could exist. The activity of knowing begins and ends in ignorance

(1982:126).

Hall's conclusion is that “[w]e do not really want to be omniscient. Intellectual excitement results from the presumption that the answer to one question raises, in geometric progression, other equally profound questions ad infinitum” (1982:126).

Philosophers such as Sartre and Camus sometimes bewail our inability to attain certain and comprehensive knowledge of the world, implying an assumption of this kind of “perfection” as an ideal. But would we not be more likely to despair if we were able to attain this ideal? The flat tedium of knowing everything would make life intolerable, given life as we now experience it or are able to conceive it. There would be no intellectual adventure and little excitement of existence in the kind of simply ordered world that permitted us easily to know its every last detail—which would have to include knowing in advance all its future outcomes and thus every impending event of our own personal futures. Aristotle is right in claiming that human beings characteristically desire to know, but we should not overlook the fundamental sense in which we also take great delight in not knowing. As Locke shrewdly says of his own field of philosophy, “Its searches after truth are a sort of hawking and hunting, wherein the very pursuit makes a great part of the pleasure” (1959:I,7).

The price of great complexity and mystery in the experienced universe is frequent frustration and perplexity, and the impossibility of arriving at, or ever being able to know that we have arrived at, absolute solutions. But the price of living in a world that we could easily understand would be much higher. For, once that understanding was achieved, as Hall says, “no intelligence could exist.” Thus, while no absolutes or final certainties are available to us, there is also no crying need that there be. While our lives are no doubt imperfect in many ways, there is no requirement that they be perfect in order to be worthwhile. In fact, a life perfect in some respects would have to be imperfect in others, so that no form of life could be perfect overall. Awareness of this necessary trade-off or tension is strikingly absent from the nihilistic philosophy. This is one of its basic flaws, a flaw that reveals a certain glaring superficiality in its outlook. It is an outlook informed by uncritical beliefs about what would constitute an ideal human situation.

These, then, are the three principal objections to nihilism with which I summarize my general case against it. I have not pretended here to be able to tell anyone precisely what the meaning of life is. Nor shall I be so presumptuous as to try to do so now, for the question admits of no single answer but of many different answers. In light of this book's analyses, we can conclude that a meaningful life is possible, even though it is not guaranteed.¹⁶ We can assert with justification that moral obligation can be binding and real, even though its norms are not timelessly absolute. We can state with assurance that claims to knowledge can be meaningfully communicated, defended, and criticized, in spite of the lack of certain foundations and the unattainability of final consensus on all disputed questions, including some of the most basic ones. And we can confidently affirm that the world as it is, “rough edges” and all, is a suitable home for the human spirit.

Notes

1. In his recent book Science and Religion, Rolston makes the point that the possibility of suffering comes with the gift of sentience, even in animal life. He observes that

   sentience, with its counterpart, suffering, is an incipient form of love and freedom. A neural animal can love something in its world and is free to seek this, a capacity greatly advanced over anything known in immobile, insentient plants. … The appearance of sentience is the appearance of caring, when the organism is united with or torn from its loves

   (1987:288).

   To be torn from one's loves is to suffer, a possibility that must be accepted if love is to exist at all.

2. Other factors were also at work in Germany's case, of course, such as humiliating defeat in war and the famous “War Guilt Clause” of the Treaty of Versailles, to say nothing of heavy reparations and extensive takeovers of territory.

3. For a balanced discussion of animal suffering that contrasts with the sweeping denunciations of Schopenhauer on this theme, see Rolston 1987:133-146, 286-293. Rolston warns us against undue anthropomorphizing in our responses to animal pain, noting that “[a]nimals and birds typically have fewer nerve endings per surface area unit of skin. …” This suggests that “the level of consciousness, self-awareness, or experience, or whatever is the proper name for their experiential state, is very different from, more subdued than, less intense and coherent than our own” (139). He also notes that, although the evolutionary process involves struggle and pain, especially for some individual organisms, it subserves the good of species as a whole and is basically “prolife” in its results, Thus, “for all its borrowing and spending, little is wasted in biomass and energy” overall. Although “the element of suffering and tragedy is always there” in animal life, “especially as seen from the perspective of the local self,” this element is “muted and transmuted in the systematic whole.” And “for all the struggle, violence, and transition, there is abiding value” (136-137).

   A third basic point Rolston makes about animal suffering is that animals with sentience and mobility “can suffer, but have more control over their circumstances. Indeed, the capacity to suffer is generally accompanied by possibilities of avoiding suffering, and some freedom and self-assertion” (136). His intent is not to explain away or minimize the problem of animal suffering, but to remind us of its positive aspects. The tragedy is there and resists glib justifications, but it is not a mere surd or an unqualified evil, as Schopenhauer believed.

   Rolston also asserts that when belief in God disappears, the evil of inexplicable suffering remains, “and sometimes grows the more urgent and bleak” (187). I am inclined to take issue with the second part of this claim, because I think we may be better enabled to learn to live with and respond appropriately to the fact of suffering in the world when we do not attribute its creation to an all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful God. For then we are not constantly tormented by the question of why such a God did not create the world differently, with far less pervasive suffering. As a result, we may be better equipped to deal with the experienced world as it is, the world as the given context of our experience for which there may be no more ultimate explanation, especially one in terms of deliberate intention and design. See again in this connection my third criticism of the Christian hope of a perfect afterlife, in Chapter Six, Section 3.

4. One does not have to be a genius or famous to live a creative and productive life. The great majority of such lives make their contributions quietly and without fanfare, and yet with powerful effect on those around them.

5. The second claim is Hocking's, as we saw in Chapter Three, Section 4.

6. Tillich links this affirmation of life, which he calls “the courage to be,” to both nature and grace. By the “biological argument,” he says, the courage to be originates “in the vital power which is a natural gift, a matter of biological fate.” But “[r]eligiously speaking, it is a matter of grace.” In any event, “courage is a possibility dependent not on will power or insight but on a gift which precedes action” (1953:84-85).

7. MacIntyre makes this point in discussing the historical roots of existentialism. See Warnock 1971:56-58.

8. The pluralistic outlook implicit in my discussion of this third lesson of nihilism and that I explicitly defended in Chapter Nine is itself one perspective among others, one with which exponents of different perspectives, i.e., the various brands of absolutism or relativism, would vigorously disagree. Thus, to take the position of pluralism does not mean having naively to believe that pluralism is not itself a perspective, or that the pluralist can somehow transcend and neutrally assess all perspectives. There is also another possible misconception of pluralism that I should warn against. To be a consistent advocate of pluralism, one's own philosophical stance does not have to be bland and noncommittal, and thus devoid of specific content. To cite my own case, many of my personal convictions stand out plainly in the approaches, assertions, and arguments that run through this book, and it should be obvious to the reader that I am deeply committed to them. These convictions are part of my general perspective on the world, and they are in no way inconsistent with my pluralistic attitude toward other perspectives.

   Perhaps “convictional openness” would be a useful complementary term to designate the position I am arguing for, because it might help to correct a tendency to interpret the term pluralism as connoting a kind of vague, wishy-washy, “anything goes” outlook with no positive or firmly held commitments of its own, or criticisms of the viewpoints of others. Bernard Loomer wisely remarks that “tenativity and openness are not only compatible with deep commitment, but they are essential qualities of it” (1978:529). These two traits of mind are essential because they keep deep commitment from degenerating into intellectual arrogance. The latter might be defined as the muddled notion that intensity of belief or felt obviousness of assumption are by themselves sufficient guarantees of truth, and thus that the person or group marked by strong conviction has no need for further inquiry and nothing to learn from those who adhere to other points of view. Pluralism or convictional openness has a growing edge that intellectual arrogance lacks; the latter is smugly content with what it has already attained.

9. Not all thinkers I have associated with nihilistic themes stress the importance of human freedom. Schopenhauer, for example, is a strong defender of cosmic determinism and more consistent on this subject than is Nietzsche. But we are interested at present only in one strain of nihilistic philosophy, namely, that which gives expression to what I am calling the fourth lesson of nihilism.

10. It is of crucial importance, however, that we not make Sartre's mistake of overestimating the extent of our individual freedom. Bernard Loomer emphasizes that

    we are not only free. We are also driven by irrational impulses and destructive compulsions. We are sometimes held fast in the vise of emotional and intellectual fixations. We are subject to the inertial power of unresponsiveness. In our insecurity and anxiety we often cling to the good that we have rather than risk it all for something greater. If we are cornered in one of life's dark alleys we may see with our own horrified eyes the rise of the furies within us. In our felt entrapment we may have the depressing feeling that our civilized attitudes are a veneer that camouflage the hidden demons that mock at our pretensions

    (Loomer, in Sibley and Gunter 1978:533).

    He also notes that the “demons who swell within each of us may not be solely of our own creation. They may also have a communal origin. There are socialized demons or communal shadows” (533; see also 534-535).

11. Such experience and counsel is often, of course, contained in texts.

12. Wolterstorff makes this point about those who share in the Christian commitment, showing that it would be a mistake to expect that all Christians should (or could) think and act always in the same ways.

    What I ought to be doing today by way of following Christ differs from what you ought to be doing, and from what I ought to have been doing when I was younger. Likewise, what I am obliged to believe as a follower of Christ differs from what someone else is obliged to believe, and differs from what I as a child was obliged to believe. So authentic Christian commitment as a whole, but also the belief-content thereof, is relative to persons and times

    (1984:74-75).

    Another interpreter of Christianity, Søren Kierkegaard, perhaps has something similar to this in mind when he proclaims that “[i]t is subjectivity that Christianity is concerned with, and it is only in subjectivity that its truth exists, if it exists at all; objectively, Christianity has absolutely no existence.” Or again, “The passion of the infinite is precisely subjectivity, and thus subjectivity becomes the truth” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in Kierkegaard 1951:208, 214). In other words, the truth of Christianity is realized, in Kierkegaard's view, only when it is appropriated into the concrete life of the individual and becomes for that individual, not abstract doctrines generally conceived, but the specific truth of that individual's personal existence, in all its stubborn particularity.

13. Because I am assuming here the concept of communal or relational individuals, and thus of uniquely personal ways of responding and contributing to a shared environment, it should be obvious that I am not commending a purely inward-directed, relativistic, narcissistic type of “values clarification” or “personal self-fulfillment.” I am talking about encouraging persons to develop their unique potentialities and perspectives on the whole for the sake of contributing most effectively to the whole. In order for them to do this, they must be urged to learn as much about the different aspects of their own culture as they can and, in particular, to understand as fully as they can its valuative dimensions. Persons with a highly informed cultural awareness are in a much better position to contribute creatively to the evolution of culture than are those relatively ignorant of their complex cultural heritage. It also helps immeasurably to this end to be schooled in the history, beliefs, norms, and practices of other cultures, because one may then become more conscious of creative possibilities in one's own culture.

    Seen in this light, “value-free education” is an oxymoron. As a university professor, for example, I have the responsibility not only to teach my students about fundamental cultural values but also to embody those values. My embodiment of cultural values should not be slavish, because I also have the obligation to show in what I profess and how I behave that it is entirely proper for individuals to respond to these values, and to their cultural heritage as a whole, in ways that reflect their own firsthand processes of thought and backgrounds of experience. But it is not enough that a student's responses be developed in isolation. Students must also be encouraged to share their thoughts and conclusions with others, continually putting them to the test of public discussion and criticism. The classroom can be one arena for this kind of shared inquiry, but it also needs to be instilled as a habit of life.

14. The denial of a universal human nature is also a dominant theme of Stirner's philosophy, as we have seen. Hence, much of what I say here about Sartre applies to Stirner as well.

15. From the claim that the only world we can know is one in relation to us, it does not follow that this relational world must center on us. As I emphasized in Chapter Five, Section 2, the experienced world exhibits and sustains an extraordinary variety of forms of existence beyond the existence of human beings. The world as seen from the perspective of our current thought and experience is a world of which we perceive ourselves to be only a small part.

16. This is the central thesis of Britton's admirable book Philosophy and the Meaning of Life. Britton also develops four important criteria of a meaningful life that I have endorsed and drawn upon in earlier parts of this book. Thus, even though the forms of meaningful life are diverse, it does not follow that a life is made meaningful simply because one asserts that it is so or believes it to be so. Such an assertion or belief can be mistaken.