Nihilism

                                              Mephisto

There are no more answers to the question Why?

                                  - Nietzsche

. . .

Peter (a writer): Is there anything more terrifying than the destruction of the world?

 Lloyd (a physicist): Yes. The knowledge that it doesn't matter one way or the other. It's all random, resonating aimlessly out of nothing and eventually vanishing forever. I'm not talking about the world, I'm talking about the universe, all space, all time, just temporary convulsion. And I got paid to prove it.

 Peter: You feel so sure of that when you look out on a clear night like tonight and see all those millions of stars, that none of it matters? 

Lloyd: I think it's just as beautiful as you do, and vaguely evocative of some deep truth that always just keeps slipping away, but then my professional perspective overcomes me; I just wish for a more penetrating view of it, and I understand it for what it truly is. Haphazard. Morally neutral, and unimaginably violent.

                                                                                                                             Woody Allen, September

 . . .

Mephistopheles:

I am the spirit that negates. 

And rightly so, for all that comes to be

Deserves to perish wretchedly;

‘Twere better nothing would begin.

Thus everything that your terms, sin,

Destruction, evil represent—

That is my proper element. 

                                                                                       Goethe, Faust, translation Walter Kaufmann

 

. . .

 Human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. It's a sick joke that the closer we get to truth, the further we get from meaning. The rational thing to do is to stop breeding and die out, or blow out our brains, but we're all too scared of the unknown. – a good friend

  Well, that's the darkest possibility. It has haunted me for a long time. True, when you have children it seems about as possible as Descartes' evil spirit making the external world an illusion. In the armchair, you can imagine it but when you go out into life you just can't live as though it were true. Of course, that is no argument. Could be an illusion required by evolution or some other explanation.

   The spirit whispering this dark possibility to me is my ultimate dialog partner. The core of my thinking is a dialog with him. Call him Mephisto. We’re discussing what the world is, what life is, and whether anything makes it worth living. I used to watch Woody Allen movies as therapy against this dark but possibly true thought. He believed it true. I think he used his movies to work through it, in his crazy way. It might have destroyed his soul somewhere along the way, I don’t know. I think I combat the dark view in some way every day. I either write to Mephisto, or at least he is in the room with me when I write.

    “I am the spirit that negates, and rightly so, since all that comes to be deserves to perish wretchedly.” Mephisto can’t prove that. Thus, what my friend movingly wrote – “the closer we get to truth, the further we get from meaning” – is true only within one world version, the dark one. Mephisto can prove that within that world version, this is true. But he can’t prove the world version as a whole.

    I disagree with Kant about many things. I think limited but valid metaphysical knowledge is possible. It is a metaphysical fact that human beings are radically finite and fallible, for example. If human beings are fallible, then there is an Idea (a criterion) built into things that allows us to distinguish between fallibility and infallibility. Such knowledge is limited because it presupposes a world version in which it makes sense for it does not make sense in Mephisto’s world version. And here I agree with Kant: We can't know in any scientific or logical sense which world version is true as we can know what is true (partly) within a world version; we'd have to get out of the world and our consciousness of it to compare each metaphysical representation of the whole with the whole of the world as it is unrepresented. We'd have to see the world as God would, from no location within it. Kant wanted to deny Reason to make conceptual space for hope, and I think that understood in this sense, he succeeded. So Hume was also right after all when he wrote: “Tis not unreasonable for me to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger” – if you add: “depending on your world version.”

     World versions become more or less intelligible as they make sense of people’s actual lives. You can’t just go shopping for an interesting world version. And nihilism does make sense of our world, even for those of us that oppose it. The sociological and historical reasons for this would require a book to elucidate.

      I think this battle is fought out in the human heart – not in philosophy class. There have been times in my life when I couldn't defend myself very well against it. Not because it was so intellectually persuasive but because I was in something like despair. We all experience moods of despair when the philosophy of Mephisto starts sounding persuasive. With luck, the mood of despair, however, does not become a permanent condition. When we love a person or a place or a book we leave the mood, at least temporarily. Love is the negation of nihilism. Love is the conviction that something real is good; that the existence of the beloved is good. The conviction – not an argument.

      If reason could establish that Mephisto’s world version were the true world version, then despair would be the spiritual state most in harmony with the world. To despair would be the most authentic way to be. Thus, the comparison to Descartes’ thought experience questioning whether anything outside my stream of consciousness is real misses something. No one can live as though nothing were real outside of his own mind. But people can and do live as though the world were meaningless, violent, absurd. Many draw the logical conclusion and blow their brains out. But I would submit – agreeing for once with Hume – that suicide is ultimately no more rational than scratching an itch. That's why I don't think that the closer you get to truth, the farther away you get from meaning. That would be true only if reality as a whole were as the dark possibility - a real one - imagines it. That can become a conviction - despair is just the conviction that the world is meaningless, absurd, violent - that it would be better if it did not exist. But a conviction is not an argument. It is enough to live by, for better and for worse.