Just a little ado about nothing
- Chris
- Oct 27, 2024
- 12 min read
Updated: Oct 29, 2024
"We call dialectic the higher movement of reason in which utterly separate terms pass over into each other spontaneously."
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic (1812)
“[God] be not far from every one of us:
For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.”
St. Luke, Acts 17
“God is dead.”
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
[This essay has its origins in comments originally published on the book of the faces, where I was originally concerned to persuade a Christian audience that they may have things to learn from nihilism. I have here made those comments into a single, hopefully coherent, train of thought. And I have tried to make myself a bit clearer on certain points of background on dialect.]
Let me begin by noting that nihilism, by some Hegelian logic of historical spirit, seems impossible outside of a culture grounded in a now-dead belief in a Creator ex nihilo. That is to say, as in the quote from Hegel above, the ominous consciousness of nothingness is impossible to fathom as a cultural event without there previously being a nearly ubiquitous belief in a Being that suffuses all and creates all things from nothingness (this is what I meant just now by creation 'ex nihilo'). So, first, the culture must steep itself in the religious ecstasy of being in existence, called out of nothingness, each and every one (the Acts quote). Then, when this belief turns against itself, when existence becomes the enemy, only then does the 'nothing' possibly swallow a person up (cf. Nietzsche).
To continue with the Hegelian mode of analysis, I think this inversion of belief in creation ex nihilo has three modes, which can be unfolded in a sort of logical progression. As a way to highlight the prominence of these modalities in the culture, I'll be using musical references that exhibit the essential characteristics under discussion. The songs I list are not necessarily the best or only examples anyone could ever find, but they're my current favorites. Fight me about this in the comments, if you like!
Satanic Nihilism: small beer, but goes down infernally well
The first and most nascent stage of nihilism is the worship of anti-God. It retains the outward trappings of religion and the dependence on numinous powers, and merely casts the spiritual domain in binary terms, as a super-cosmic power struggle. In this conception, God's side is just the side of abusive power, law of the victor, and these people opt for Satan as the underdog, the revenge for victims, and the fitting leader of earth's misfits, weirdos, and downtrodden. (I want to make clear that this depiction of the satanic element in nihilism is actually totally different from the organized religion that calls itself the Church of Satan. What I'm describing is a real thing, but it isn't what the Church of Satan folks are up to.)
Something crucial I would observe about the turn to satanism is that it is an honest recognition of the hidden satanic element in some Christian theologies. That is, satanists who opt for worshiping the leader of hell are merely paying homage to the supposedly divine power of eternal damnation. If the God of Christianity is supposed to create, and if double-predestination is true, then the power that rules hell is actually the same as God. (For those not privy to Christian theological debates--God love you--double-predestination is the view that since God is omnipotent and omniscient, all created souls are from eternity pre-determined to rest in blissful heaven or writhe in burning hell.) Satanists may repulse Christians by preferring diabolic power to divine, but the theology of some Christians teaches that God is actually the diabolic power all along. Satanists' true error, from a Christian conception, is in its Manichean understanding of good and evil (dividing all spiritual power into two separate domains, that of God and that of the devil), whereas no Christian theology has anything but a unitary theory of absolute power.
For a musical reference to illustrate what I am talking about, and to show I'm not just making up this brand of satanism, I can't think of anything more edifying than '10 more dead' by Morbid Angel. And if that's not enough, then I have to say that this remake is possibly my favorite death metal/satanic track.
Why would a Christian, or anyone, want to reflect on such things? Well, I think it's like C. S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters for your contemporary imagination. And it quite impossible to understand one's own religion fully unless one can see its shadow.
That's ultimately why I think this satanism is only nihilism lite. It's still too dependent upon the culture of belief, and merely flips the mythology on its head. In my cheekier moments, I have thought things like: It's cute that you want to do a black mass, but that's not nearly as blasphemous as pretending to practice Christianity, taking actual communion, and then devoting your life to the pursuit of money, power, and oppression of other humans and the environment.
Speaking of Satan and Christian mythology, I should maybe just add here that I think it is significant that the most ancient text in the Bible (Job) depicts a fully-formed character of Satan in contest with humanity against God. Unlike other ancient Hebrew texts, I can't think of a character quite like Satan in the broader Mesopotamian context that this would be modeled on. It's as though the Hebrews conceived of an infinite divine creator, and that thought instantly turned to: but then, how did we get from such a Being to a world like this? And thus: Satan and his retinue have their first appearance (sin, holy murder, winning at any cost). Outside the Hebrew theology, I can't find an ancient analogue to something truly satanic. Saturn/Chronos/Baal Hammon come close. But the Greco-Roman version of this story has the gods coming back in the end, so it isn't really satanic. Baal Hammon may be the only plausible candidate here, but it is also a semitic deity and may actually be inspired by the Satan character anyway (or have the same roots).
Unhappy Nihilism: Everything is nothing and nothing is everything
Let me now turn to the second mode of nihilism.
Once the delirium of religion wears off, a culture arrives at unhappy secular nihilism, which is where I think most folks land by default when they find themselves outside of any religious community but retain the belief that modern culture is neutral ground for spirituality, which is to say that non-belief is actually not taking any stance on anything significant. I call this 'unhappy' nihilism as an echo of Hegel's unhappy consciousness from the Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel calls the unhappy consciousness "one which knows that it is the dual consciousness of itself, as self-liberating, unchangeable, and self-identical, and as self-bewildering and self-perverting, and it is the awareness of this self-contradictory nature of itself."
Unhappy nihilists have turned from belief to self-consciously face the void of unbelief. They know what is behind them and what is before them: nothing. Their very existence is experienced as a contradiction of the ultimate truth of the universe, that nothing gets the final word.
You can see this sentiment creeping into pop culture prominently with the Rolling Stones' 'Paint it Black':
"I look inside myself and see my heart is black
I see my red door, I must have it painted black
Maybe then I'll fade away and not have to face the facts
It's not easy facing up when your whole world is black."
But in my opinion, this form of nihilism didn't really come of age until Trent Reznor penned, and Johnny Cash recorded/published, 'Hurt':
"What have I become,
My sweetest friend,
Everyone I know goes away
In the end
And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt."
That right there is the perfect hymn to the void. What else can one do with the realization of existence being nothing? Give it away with the warning label that it isn't anything but pain and disappointment.
What may come as a surprise to some is that unhappy nihilism, while a recent cultural accretion from broader secularism, is not a stranger to people of faith and has ancient roots. Theologians throughout the middle ages discuss the experience of 'Deus absconditus', or the silence of God, with much the same attitude as unhappy nihilists. The difference is that their anguished cries of pain and betrayal, like Christ's, are still addressed to God. The unhappy nihilist just screams in an abyss.
I am loath to question anyone else's faith (or lack thereof), but I daresay that I find it hard to believe that an adult can retain belief in anything like the God of the Bible while not confronting the darkness of this void. The stories of the Bible would seem like so much nursery room fairy-tale talk, if not for the very real-world experience of being held over an infinite chasm and not knowing if it got the final word. What is the significance of salvation to people who haven't ever tried to fathom what the opposite of salvation feels like?
So, unhappy nihilism is an attitude that I think people of faith have a lot to learn from, as it is a true expression of reality and lived experience without direction or meaning from God. In the end, this is also why it's not complete nihilism, but only a second mode of it. The self-contradiction, I am a being but nothing is everything, is too honest with itself to endure. Truth is held too highly, and this veridicality tragically defeats the unhappy nihilist. They have yet to let go of the value of honesty, you see...
Replete Nihilism: f*ck it
And so arises the third and final mode of nihilism: I'll call it 'f*ck it'.
These nihilists are perfectly fitted, entirely and unselfconsciously absorbed, in the death machine of late capitalist culture. And I know he's been dragged through it a lot recently with his beef with Kendrick Lamar, but the best exemplar of replete nihilism I can recall is Drake's track from a few years ago, 'The Motto':
"You only live once, that's the motto, n****, YOLO
And we bout it every day, every day, every day
Like we sittin' on the bench, n****, we don't really play
Every day, every day, fuck what anybody say
Can't see 'em 'cause the money in the way, real n****, what's up?"
Christians may hear rumblings of this nihilism in the line from Ecclestiastes 8:15: "So I commend the enjoyment of life, because there is nothing better for a person under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad."
Or Isaiah 22:13: "“Let us eat and drink,” you say,
“for tomorrow we die!”
Cheerful nihilism is spiritual suicide, as it denies the reality of anything besides 'now'. It doesn't even really do that, because a cheerful nihilist can't even face reality enough to deny the existence of anything beyond what is immediately present. The expressions of this existence often sound eerily similar to actual desires for death: "Live fast, die young," says m.i.a. "Let's make the most of the night like we're gonna die young," agrees Kesha. And thus, in pursuit of whatever enjoyment one can have in a meaningless life, this mode of nihilism quickly sucks the joy right out of the room. Death becomes the ultimate adventure. The infinite party is unmasked as a cult of death, and you already drank the Kool-Aid.
Thanks for nothing: My thoughts on nihilism
I'm tempted to end there, with just my analysis of these modes of nihilism. It would give my essay a very nihilistic feel, indeed, to omit any of my own commentary in wrapping up. Nevertheless, I'm convinced that for many the grip of nihilism is not a mere trifle, and joking won't help here. So for anyone reading who feels a deep but unsettling resonance with nihilism and who cannot seriously entertain adopting the beliefs and practices of a faith that would stand opposed to nihilism, I am going to ponder over the question: what else is there?
In a word, the antidote to nihilism is: existence. But this bare fact doesn't dim the allure of self-annihiliation or offer a practical alternative. Philosophers like Satre and de Beauvoir have proposed an approach that in western thinking is called existentialism, which emphasizes individual responsibility for enacting self-justification and meaning via human freedom. Much could be said about their project, but I will merely note that I think its success at thwarting nihilism is doomed to be scarce because it effectively takes the old notion of godlike power, kills God, and puts each individual in place of the deity in their own life story. Humans, by and large, require a philosophy of a more humble and limited scale.
Where I have personally found solid footing in the retreat from the abyss is from the ancient Chinese writing called Tao Te Ching. Here I will quote a section in full (as interpreted by the inimitable Ursula LeGuin), which I find particularly effective against today's nihilism: THE EMPTY HEART
The greatest power is the gift of following the Way alone.
How the Way does things is hard to grasp, elusive.
Elusive, yes, hard to grasp, yet there are thoughts in it.
Hard to grasp, yes, elusive, yet there are things in it.
Hard to make out, yes, and obscure, yet there is spirit in it, veritable spirit.
There is certainty in it.
From long, long ago till now it has kept its name.
So it saw the beginning of everything.
How do I know anything about the beginning?
By this.
The clarity and simplicity of this concluding line strikes me like a cold water plunge. Nihilism gains its strength from a world of artifice and simulacra. The gnawing emptiness of the soul, the yawning chasm of exterior meaninglessness, these are consequences--not absolute facts--of a culture that actively divorces us from genuine, life-giving connections. We mediate all value and meaning via the fiction of money, and we experience this charade as a diabolical cackle echoing in every corner of our interior lives.
The Taoist master, in the passage above, invites us to remove ourselves from this hurly burly of human-constructed society: religion, ethical systems, financial schemes, social hierarchies, set them aside and be alone. What remains are the real things in the universe and ones thoughts, two interdependent sides of the same ultimate reality in which all being is woven together, aka, 'spirit'. In the quiet of this solitary moment, in giving oneself over to the consciousness of spirit, how can one forge a lasting connection to what is unknowable, unnameable, outside the contingencies and necessities of time and space? "How do I know anything about the beginning, the Source?" By remembering that the Source isn't elsewhere, isn't distant, isn't beyond some gaping expanse of cause-effect or hierarchy of being. What creates and connects and completes all things is present in "this." Let go of illusions and pretenders. Touch something real. That is the first step on the Way, and every step thereafter.
Want to end nihilism in your heart? Let go of everything. Learn to care again for the tiniest beings in your vicinity, humans and more-than-humans alike. Love all but love loosely, not possessively. Transform yourself into a connective tissue that binds all the goodness you can find together for as long as you can. When you are gone, your absence will be grieved by a multitude but it won't be a loss, for the community you cobbled together will be better and stronger in the spirit you inculcated, whether you exist physically or not.
That nihilism you feel in your heart is true in this sense: it is the life within you mourning the loss of the Way, a disconnection from what gives us nourishment and pleasure and accomplishment, a forgetfulness of soil, water, air, fungi, roots, and all the messy unmentionables that we are destroying in pursuit of a sterile and successful career, or eternity in a white-washed marble heaven. So if you ache with nihilism, the flame of truth is still alive in you. You can follow its light back to the Way.
What might that eventually look like? I want to conclude with what I find, as an American with Christian religious roots, to be a satisfying counter-vision to the nihilism-inducing picture of heaven on which I was raised. This comes from Josh Ritter's 'Thin Blue Flame': "I woke beneath a clear blue sky
The sun a shout, the breeze a sigh
My old hometown and the streets I knew
Were wrapped up in a royal blue
I heard my friends laughing out across the fields
The girls in the gloaming and the birds on the wheel
The raw smell of horses and the warm smell of hay
Cicadas electric in the heat of the day
A run of Three Sisters and the flush of the land
And the lake was a diamond in the valley's hand
The straight of the highway and the scattered out hearts
They were coming together they pulling apart
And angels everywhere were in my midst
In the ones that I loved in the ones that I kissed
I wondered what it was I'd been looking for up above
Heaven is so big there ain't no need to look up
So I stopped looking for royal cities in the air
Only a full house gonna have a prayer."
Post script: I should credit my sources/inspiration for this essay on nihilism. Obviously I had in mind what I have read of Nietzsche, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. My conclusion comes from meditating on Lao Tzu and Chiang Tzu, but also years of reading Rainer Maria Rilke. Finally, I would be remiss to omit to mention the influence of Terry Eagleton’s excellent study on what it meant for Europe to lose faith in God: Culture and the Death of God. I am fairly illiterate when it comes to German Idealism and Romanticism. Eagleton’s account is a masterwork of historical analysis and insightful criticism. Unlike many (most?) scholars, he does not present belief in God as a caricature; he has truly done the work of putting himself imaginatively and intellectually, among the throng of believers. By the end of the book, he’s actually rebuking present-day believers for having a diminished notion of God, not really worth restoring to cultural prominence anyway.
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