Amerika

The insightful Bruce Charlton writes about nihilism as if it were a pathology of idealizing emptiness:

Modern Western people are strikingly lacking in powerful motivators, compared with earlier generations – and this is the reason why we are so lacking in courage, so cowardly.

The deep reason is obvious enough – our atheism, materialism, our systematically built-in cultural assumption that there is neither purpose nor meaning to life.

In a word: our nihilism.

This misunderstands nihilism. Nihilism — which declines to accept the human projection of a shared space of universal, absolute, and objective forms of truths, values, and communications — is an extreme form of realism that accepts human inequality and therefore, understands relativism and esotericism in our understanding.

What Mr Charlton refers to, fatalism, is an offshoot of individualism. If your self is the most important and interesting thing in the world, your conception of it becomes binary: either everything is well and the illusion continues, or something has gone wrong and the illusion is under threat.

Maintaining the illusion replaces the process of life itself. Instead of thinking toward positive, creative, and affirmative activities the self dedicates itself to maintaining the illusion, which like a symbol or category is a psychological container used to create a little diorama of life and encapsulate it in a comforting judgment.

Nihilism denies the need for the illusion.

Instead one connects with life itself, the part outside the human ego and the social judgments that come with it. Instead the nihilist aspires to understand reality and adapt to it, including discovering what lies beyond the veil of the visible.

What afflicts the modern time, individualism, always ends in fatalism because the individual is not infinite nor is all that interesting (even the most interesting of us). This demoralizes people and produces empty shells wandering around consuming all that they see in order to fill the void.

Tags: bruce charlton, fatalism, nihilism