The Poetics of Nothingness: Revaluing Nihilism

Abstract

The paper reconsiders the relationship between nihilism, the absence of transcendent foundations of ethical and political values, and the problem of the meaning or meaninglessness of life. What I will call life-valuable nihilism rejects divine, transcendent, and eschatological sources of value but not the existence of aesthetic, ethical, and political values that human beings discover and create. There were no values at the beginning of space-time and there will be no values after the end of space-time, but people have nonetheless found reasons for living within the limits that physical and human nature impose. Whereas earlier attempts to vindicate the value of life despite its cosmic purposelessness stressed this human existential freedom, I want to concentrate on the other side of existential freedom: existential responsibility to care for and improve the conditions of life expressed as political struggle against the social causes of avoidable damage to actually existing human beings. The more those causes are addressed, the more life-time can be spent in receptive openness to the beauty of the world, creative activities which contribute in valuable and valued ways to the common wealth upon which our lives depend, and mutualistic relationships with other people.

In Navigating the Polycrisis, Michael J. Albert examines the interlocking political, economic, social, and environmental challenges facing humanity. Albert argues that the polycrisis also has an irreducible ‘existential’ dimension involving the loss of ‘forms of collective meaning, identity, and belonging’ (Albert, 2024, 106). Albert argues that because human beings need to belong to a community of like-valuing subjects, they can be attracted to political movements that promise to restore lost forms of integral collective identity. He argues that the mobilizing power of right-wing populism and religious fundamentalism exploits this need to feel that one belongs to a unified cultural, religious, or political community. However, an overly strong attachment to a particular god, historical mission, or community often invests the true believers with a missionary zeal which, as Mary Kaldor has argued, manifests itself in ‘nihilistic acts of frustration and anger’ (Kaldor, 2007, 116). ¹

Kaldor picks up on the traditional definition of nihilism as the ‘troubling idea that nothing is ultimately valuable, including our own existence’ (Stewart, 2023, 2). This traditional association of nihilism with the destruction of value traces its history to ‘the late-18th century German speaking world … as a polemical marker within philosophy, theology, and aesthetics directed against far-reaching idealism, subjectivism, and radicalism’ (Petrov, 2019, 82). It was coined by F. H. Jacobi in response to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. As Robert Pippin explains, Jacobi worried that Kant’s conclusion that knowledge is limited to objects of possible experience ‘would not only end in a destructive scepticism but in an all destructive “nihilism” (F. H. Jacobi’s original coinage), leaving nothing of moral substance or objective status in its wake’ (Pippin, 2024, 146). The throughline uniting critics of nihilism from the eighteenth century to the present is the argument the value of earthly life must be understood in transcendent terms: material life is a reflection of an eternal structure of value towards which the mortal being strives.

My re-valuation of nihilism accepts that human beings need meaningful connections to others and to the world. However, I will argue that nihilism can be reinterpreted in a life-affirmative way that intensifies our attention to and care for the worlds of things, creatures, and other people. In my view, nihilism is not necessarily committed to the position that life has no value but only the claim that the values that we find and create in life do not require a transcendent foundation. Life can be meaningful and enjoyable even if death is the annihilation of the living subject. In fact, I will argue that life can be fully valued sensuously, morally, aesthetically, and politically, only if we accept its finitude. What I will call life-valuable nihilism concentrates attention on how receptive openness to the beauty of the world and creative interventions in it discovers and creates value. ² These experiences and interventions are the sources of the values of life on earth. They can only be properly recognized and savoured from within a life-valuable nihilistic frame that excludes the possibility of there being any higher, transcendent, eternal plane of value.

My argument will be developed in four sections. In the first, I will examine paradigmatic religious and philosophical critiques of the traditional interpretation of nihilism. Critics from Dostoyevsky, to Heidegger and Emmanuelle Severino, to Charles Taylor link the development of nihilism to the consolidation of scientific materialism as the dominant modern structure of thought. They worry that science cannot account for the existence of a morally meaningful universe: secular-humanist ethical theories can motivate care for others, but they cannot explain what makes life sacred, that is, intrinsically valuable.

Sections Two, Three, and Four will contest the critics’ core argument that life cannot be fully and coherently valued from within an atheistic-materialist framework. Section Two examines the philosophical principles of the Russian nihilists. While Dostoyevsky caricatured them as romantic murderers, I will argue that they were concerned with creating social space for life-affirmative creative activity. Section Three will further develop the idea of life-affirmative creative activity by turning to Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism. Nietzsche turns the religious critique of nihilism on its head, arguing that far from being the antidote to nihilism, religion is its cause. I will argue that since Nietzsche believes that life-values are self-grounding he should be read as the first life-affirmative nihilist. The final section will construct the basic principles of my re-valuation of nihilism from this alternative reading of Nietzsche.

The Religious-Philosophical Critique of Nihilism

Long before the term ‘nihilism’ had been coined, Greek philosophers grappled with the metaphysical and moral problems posed by the idea that the universe might have emerged from nothingness. The possibility of a creatio ex nihilo was condemned metaphysically as self-contradictory and the subject’s moral integrity was said to depend on properly orienting their mind to the eternal nature of Being. Parmenides argued that Being must be eternal because creation out of nothingness implied the existence of nothingness and the existence of the non-existent was a contradiction: ‘being ungenerated it is also imperishable, whole and of a single kind and unshaken and complete … it is now, all together, one, continuous. For what birth will you seek for it?’ (Parmenides, 1994, 153). ³ As Habermas has recently argued, Parmenides’s demonstration of the absurdity of creatio ex nihlio was as much a normative as a metaphysical conclusion. ‘It is clear … that the religious framing narrative is more than merely a matter of couching and argument in poetic language; rather, Parmenides exalts the correct path in theoretical knowledge as the path of salvation’ (Habermas, 2023, 293 italics in the original). From the beginning, Western philosophy has linked the True and the Good to the Eternal. That which is fully good is fully true, and that which is fully true has no beginning or end in time and does not change.

Nevertheless, human experience confirms the reality of change. At the highest level of abstraction, we can think of the difference between natural science and metaphysics as a difference in temporal perspective: natural science tries to understand processes of change causally, while traditional metaphysics insists that change is only coherent if there is an eternal being that functions as the origin and stabilizing ground of becoming. While it may be the case that expressed as an abstract proposition the emergence of something from nothing is self-contradictory, understood from the perspective of physical science the contradiction may just be an artefact of the meaning of terms. As Lawrence Krauss concludes in his provocative study of the origin of the universe, ‘that out of nothing, nothing comes has no foundation in science’. ⁴ If the inflationary theory of universal origins is correct, then matter and energy emerged from a state in which there was no matter or energy. ⁵

The pattern of density fluctuations that result after inflation – arising, I should stress, in otherwise empty space – turns out to be precisely in agreement with the observed pattern of cold spots and hot hotspots on large scales in the cosmic background radiation. While consistency is not proof, there is an increasing view amongst cosmologists that … if it walks like a duck … it is probably a duck. ‘And if inflation indeed is responsible for all the small fluctuations in the density of matter and radiation that would later result in the gravitational collapse of matter into galaxies and stars … then it can truly be said that we are all here today because of quantum fluctuations in what is essentially nothing’ (Krauss, 2012, 98).

Krauss’s conclusions are in some sense the culmination of the natural scientific erosion of the rational need to posit an eternal creator and conservator god. ⁶

Given the implications of natural science for traditional religious worldviews it is not surprising that the critique of nihilism emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, just as natural science was beginning to assemble the mathematical and empirical resources that it would need to constitute itself as a comprehensive and coherent alternative to metaphysical and religious cosmologies (Stewart, 2023, 20–31). However, there seemed to be one dimension of human experience that science could not understand: the feelings of deeper connection to the world and other people that forms the seedbed of morality. If life were merely the contingent outcome of random natural forces, then it seemed to lose all intrinsic value. Once we are dead there is no consciousness of the passage of time. If there is no hope of eternity then it neither matters how long our lives are nor what we did. If there no judgement and salvation then life is as meaningless as the physical elements from which it is composed. ⁷

Dostoyevskys’ unforgettable existential explorations of the consequences of nihilism are constructed using the meaninglessness of a materialist understanding of life as their foil. His critique of nihilism was prefigured by Turgenev’s milder examination in Fathers and Son’s. Dostoyevsky’s and Turgenev’s characters are caricatures of the youthful members of the Russian nihilist movement of the 1840s–1860s (Petrov, 2019, 76). Whereas Turgnev’s Bazarov is cynical and insouciant but otherwise harmless, Dostoevsky reveals the malevolent implications of nihilism. His critique is summed up in Ivan Karamazov’s famous exclamation that everything is permitted if there is no god or eternal life: ‘if you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up … nothing would then be immoral, everything would be lawful’ (Dostoyevsky, 1956, 71). Mere nature knows no such thing as murder, only birth and death. If death is final then life is ultimately meaningless and it cannot be a crime to destroy that which has no value.

Philosophically considered, Bazarov, Ivan Karamazov, Kirilov, Stavrogin, and Raskolnikov can be read as reductio ad absurdems of the attempt to ground truth and goodness in human experience alone. While he ultimately rejects the conclusion, Camus sums up the essence of the religious-conservative critique of nihilism that Dostoyevsky’s characters embody: ‘Awareness of the absurd, when we first claim to deduce a rule of behaviour from it, makes murder seem a matter of indifference … if we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning, and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance’ (Camus, 1956, 5). If everyone is headed to the grave and there is nothing beyond, no salvation, judgement, or eternal life, then how one lives appears to be a matter of indifference. Dostoyevsky mocks the nihilists’ willingness to kill with his character Kirilov who absurdly tries to prove the absolute freedom of human beings by killing himself (Dostoyevsky, 1966, 133).

In general, Dostoyevsky’s (and Turgenev’s) characters are intended to exemplify the destructive consequences of nihilism. The bitter ends that these characters meet or mete out invite the reader to consider the conclusion that the logical outcome of nihilism is at best cynical despair (Bazarov and Ivan Karamazov), suicide (Kirilov), and at worst murder (Raskolnikov and Stavrogin). Of all the protagonists, Raskolnikov stands out not only as the most multi-dimensional and richly drawn character, but the one whose step by step moral-psychological unravelling offers the strongest literary evidence for Dostoyevsky’s philosophical conclusion. Raskolnikov comes up with his plot to kill the pawnbroker after hearing some soldiers talk about a theory that person’s destined for greatness have the historical right to use other people as means. If that is true, Raskolnikov reasons coldly, he is entitled to kill the pawnbroker with whom he has entrusted some property because he can put her money to better use than she will (Dostoyevsky, 1992, 69). However, almost immediately after killing her/his conscience begins to torment him. If his cynical reasoning were true, he would not be tormented by his conscience. Therefore, there must be more to life than a rational understanding of material reality discloses, Dostoyevsky concludes. The conclusion follows if it is impossible to truly value life from within a nihilistic framework.

Not all religious critics of nihilism go as far as Dostoyevsky. Charles Taylor, for example, would agree that one can only account for conscience on the basis of the recognition of the intrinsic value of human life and that one can account for the intrinsic value of human life by appeal to a transcendent divine goodness. Nevertheless, he also acknowledges that there are coherent (but not complete) secular-humanist ethical systems that recognize that life is more than an arrangement of atoms. Taylor argues that secular ethical systems can acknowledge the reality of harm and suffering and respond to it with political struggles and institutional reforms. He does not doubt the sincerity of efforts to construct an ethics without divine foundation, but he worries that the effort to build good lives from exclusively historical sources are contradictory. On the one hand, they express a confidence in human beings to solve their own problems and create the conditions for fully realized lives without appeal to eternity, but on the other they are threatened by the very cynical despair that plagues Bazarov and Ivan Karamazov when they must confront the inevitable precarity of human historical achievements. ‘Philanthropy and solidarity driven by a lofty humanism … has a Janus face. On one side, in the abstract, one is inspired to act. On the other side, faced with the immense disappointments of actual human performance … one experiences a growing sense of anger and futility’ (Taylor, 2011, 183). Taylor cites Nietzsche as a paradigm case of this contradiction (Taylor, 2011, 179–180). Taylor concludes that a complete and ethically coherent concern for the goodness of life can only be constructed as a response to the feeling that there is something more that is not out there but beyond the universe of matter and energy. ‘I foresee another future … the opposite of the mainstream view. In our religious lives we are responding to a transcendent reality. We all have some sense of this, which emerges in our identifying and recognizing some mode of what I have called fullness… Modes of fullness recognized by exclusive humanisms … are therefore responding to a transcendent reality, but misrecognizing it’ (Taylor, 2007, 768). They misrecognize it because they confine their thinking to what can be catalogued, measured, and proven.

Taylor maintains, by contrast, that one can only access the transcendent and divine through symbols. ‘The highest things, things to do with the infinite, with God, with our deepest feelings, can only be made objects of thought … through expression in symbols’ (Taylor, 2007, 756). While he does not make the link here, Taylor echoes the late Heidegger’s affirmation of poetic thought as the way in which the world discloses itself to us. Although not Catholic or in any orthodox sense Christian, Heidegger’s critique of nihilism is a reflection on the costs of a purely scientific understanding of being as the totality of things interconnected by mathematically modelled casual laws. For Heidegger mathematical modelling and predictive science tries to fill the void left by the death of God, ‘but for Heidegger, attempting to fill it at all, especially by some human self-assertion, is itself an expression of nihilism’ (Pippin, 2013, 184).

Heidegger does not treat nihilism directly as a moral problem but rather a social and aesthetic problem of being closed off to any dimension of reality that is not measurable. His position is encapsulated by his understanding of technology as a system of framing and delimiting the world. ‘The essence of technology lies in enframing. Its holding sway belongs within destining. Since destining at any given time starts man on a way of revealing, man, thus under way, is continually approaching the brink of possibility of pursuing and pushing forward nothing but what is revealed in ordering’ (Heidegger, 1977, 26). Once the world has been enframed as a system of mathematically expressible causal relationships, everything which does not fit within that frame ceases to exist for thought. ‘Through this [enframing], the other possibility is blocked, that man might be admitted … ever more primally to the essence of that which is unconcealed and to its unconcealement, in order that he might experience as his essence his needed belonging to revealing’ (Heidegger, 1977, 26). When there is nothing left to wonder about, to question, and to interpret, human thought will have completed its philosophical-scientific mission, but at the cost of eliminating all meaning from our experience of the world and all sense of ourselves as interpreting, meaning-receptive beings. ‘Heidegger’s lifelong claim is that forgetfulness of the question of the meaning of being is a catastrophe in the history of mankind, that it leads to nihilism, and a predatory, self-destructive technical manipulation of the earth’ (Pippin, 2024, 34). The conceit of total knowledge drives efforts to achieve total mastery of the world. Nihilism is the absolute closure of human experience to any facet or dimension of the world that cannot be explained in quantifiable terms.

The only way to free modern society from nihilism is to free philosophical thought from totalizing systems. The first step is to remember that categorization presupposes a world to be categorized and that closed systems of knowledge presuppose a prior openness. What Heidegger calls forgetfulness of the question of the meaning of Being is a forgetfulness of the receptive capacities of human beings. Openness to the unfolding world is more important than quantified answers to scientific questions. Natural science inherited from the tradition of idealist metaphysics an abhorrence of openness and an equation of knowledge with control. Heidegger credits Nietzsche with being the first to grasp the nihilistic implications of totalized systems of knowledge. ‘Because the mastery of chaos … is brought under the law of totality … every human role in establishing the new order must in itself bear the mark of distinction of totality. Historically, therefore, the dominance of the “total” makes its appearance with nihilism’ (Heidegger, 1982, 205). Since the dynamic material world never conforms to the purity of their conceptual totalities, metaphysicians and scientists reject the self-revealing polysemic world as mere appearance of a true world of their own conceptual or mathematical construction. Despite its demonstrated power, the scientific demand for causal laws that enable predictive control does not negate the evocative dimensions of reality. As Pippin explains, ‘our asking of the fundamental metaphysical questions is historical because it opens up the happening of human Dasein in its essential relations – that is, its relations to beings as such and as a whole – opens it up to possibilities not yet asked about, futures to come’ (Pippin, 2024, 15). Eventually Heidegger would associate the interpretative disposition towards the unfolding of the world required to recover from nihilism with poetry. The poet’s world arises from their receptive openness to the evocative, meaning-laden horizons within which things appear. ‘The more poetic a poet is – the freer (that is, the more open and ready for the unforeseen) his saying – the greater the purity with which he submits what he says to an ever more painstaking listening, and the further what he says is from the propositional statement that is dealt with solely in regard to correctness or incorrectness’ (Heidegger, 1971, 216). The poet expresses the world’s value in ways not already thought, through metaphors never before heard, in verses whose meanings are not obvious.

Poetry takes the measure of the world not according to a quantitative metric but through resonant meaning. Commenting on the Holderlin poem which is the subject of the essay ‘Poetically Man Dwells’, Heidegger asks ‘What is the measure for human measuring?’ He answers that ‘the measure consists in the way in which the god who remains unknown is revealed as such by the sky. God’s appearance through the sky consists in a disclosing that let us see what conceals itself, but let us see it not by seeking to wrest what is concealed out of its concealedness, but only be guarding the concealed in its self-concealment’ (Heidegger, 1975, 223). Metaphysics and natural science lead to nihilism because they declare the non-predictable non-existent. Poetic thinking, by contrast is, in Pippin’s words, ‘the authentic sort of contemplative activity, expressed in suitable language, rightly attuned to the disclosure of meaningfulness’ (Pippin, 2024, 207). Heidegger’s poetic thinking restores meaning by drawing attention to the inexhaustible richness of the world when approached from an open, receptive, disposition.

Heidegger’s main concern is that a nihilistic-scientistic understanding of the universe closes us off to the very world that it tries to master. Emmanuelle Severino’s critique of scientistic thinking goes further than Heidegger’s to argue that the essence of nihilism is not technocratic control of material reality but its destruction. Severino acknowledges a debt to Heidegger (and Nietzsche), but he claims that their critiques of nihilism are compromised because they both accept the reality of change (Severino, 2016, 280). However, the belief in the reality of change (becoming) is the heart of the problem. The essence of nihilism, according to Severino, is the principle that ‘Being is a product of Time’ (Severino, 2016, viii). Any system which allows things to come into and pass out of being essentially commits itself to the existence of nothing as the is-not from which beings come to be and into which they return when they die or are destroyed. ‘For European civilization, the thing is that which issues from and returns to nothingness. Being and Nothing establish the meaning of the birth and death, the production and destruction of things. For this civilization, the supreme evidence is that there is a time, the past, when things became nothing, and a time, the future, in which things will be nothing once more’ (Severino, 2016, 15). If there is no eternal substance underlying changing things they have no true value save whatever purpose they might momentarily serve. When things are valuable only when they are useful to some purpose, they are not valuable in themselves. As soon as they are no longer useful, they are just trash.

Severino identifies Plato’s dualism as the origin of nihilistic metaphysics and culture. Plato, grappling with the problems of Parmenidean monism, proposed a division of reality into the realm of eternal Ideas and the realm of changing material things. By accepting the reality of becoming, Plato unwittingly opened the door to the dominance of techne over theoria. As human powers expanded after the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions the realm of eternal Ideas was forgotten and all that remained was the world of instrumental production and destruction. ‘The controlled production and destruction of reality are the fundamental categories of technological civilization. Plato was the first to expressly set them forth’ (Severino, 2016, 151). If human needs and desires are the ultimate cause of the existence of things, then it follows that things are, in themselves, of no value once no one has any use for them. ‘We think and live as if things were nothing. For European civilization things are nothing: the meaning of the thing, which guides Western history, is the nothingness of things. Nihilism is the essence of European civilization, since the fundamental meaning of nihilism is the nihilation of things, that is, the belief that being is a Nothing; nihilism is the action guided by and shaped by this confusion’ (Severino, 2016, 16).

Modern European civilization is a cult of destruction. ‘For success, power, and domination and exploitation of being is the destiny of whomever dwells in time. To dwell in time is to dominate, and domination demands the destruction of every form of domination that proves to be powerless. Science and modern technology have shown the impotence of the domination of being through union with the sacred and with God’ (Severino, 2016, 29). For those who live in time what matters is what can be done right now. Accomplishing one’s goals requires power, and power is the capacity to decide what exists and what is destroyed. What lacks the power to resist lacks the right to exist and is ruthlessly eliminated. Older forms of life, both European and non-European, that embraced the sacred and the divine are eradicated: returned to nothingness. If everything lacks value, then nothing of value is lost when things and peoples are destroyed.

Through a series of almost Scholastic arguments Severino contends that if the implications of a metaphysical position are self-contradictory then the material reality to which they apply must be opposite to what they assert. Hence, if change is self-contradictory, then it cannot exist: reality must be eternal and unchanging. ‘Since becoming other is actually the impossible, becoming other is not and cannot be something manifest, it is not and cannot be something that appears and shows itself’ (Severino, 2011, 115). If in the past things were nothing, and in the future things will be nothing again, then it follows that the metaphysics of becoming treats nothing as something existent. He gives the example of burning wood: ‘It cannot be manifest that the wood is ash: the identity of the different, namely, the becoming ash on the part of the wood, cannot be manifest’ (Severino, 2011, 115). Instead of a process of change from one form to an opposite form, Severnio argues that what we observe as change is just the successive appearance of discrete states of being which are in themselves eternal. ‘First appears the unlit wood, then the glowing wood, then the ash’ (Severino, 2011, 115). Change is only apparent; in truth, every state of the apparent world is eternal. ‘Each stage, each instant the world is necessarily true itself, and does not emerge from self to become … other than itself, which is nothingness’ (Severino, 2011, 115). Not only everything, but every state of everything has an eternal analogue. ‘Take this feeling of contentment: It has just appeared. Yet, it always was and always will be. It is just that it has not always appeared, and it was not always included in this moment of the immutable which is the abstract consciousness of the immutable’ (Severino, 2016, 138). And even more stridently: ‘Everything that enters and leaves the circle of Appearing is eternal’ (Severino, 2016, 139). Severino returns philosophy to Parmenides: the temporal must be grounded in the eternal if change is to be coherently explained and things appropriately valued.

One might ask Severino, and, by extension the other critics of nihilism why, if what matters transcends time, anyone should worry about the quality of life in time. If every changing thing has an eternal analogue somewhere then the essence of European civilization cannot be destruction, since by Severino’s own argument everything is actually eternal. That which is eternal is invulnerable, and to care about the invulnerable seems to be a category mistake. One cares about those things that can be damaged. The critics of nihilism that I have examined undoubtedly care about the quality of life. But why should anyone care about people that will 1 day ascend to some higher and eternal plane of existence? The point of caring is to make life better right now. Why lament losses, savour enriching experiences, or make collective or individual efforts to steer events in one direction rather than another? The next three sections will build my case for the claim that temporality, not eternity, is the only coherent framework for caring about things and working to protect them from damage. I will begin by examining the underlying principles of the actual nihilists that Turgenev and Dostoyevsky caricatured.

Nineteenth Century Russian Civilization and Its Discontents

I noted above that the possibility of conscientious care for life implies either that there must be more to reality than a rational understanding of nature discloses, or that there is more to a rational understanding of nature than quantified causal laws. Having raised questions about the coherence of the religious-philosophical answer that there must be more to existence than material reality, I will now build the case that there is more to material reality than quantifiable causal relationships between objects.

I will begin my case with a brief examination of the political movement whose members Turgenev and Dostoyevsky caricatured. While it is true that some of the historical Russian nihilists were willing to kill and die for their principles, it is not true that they had no principles aside from the belief that life had no meaning. The very fact that they were willing to fight and die in the struggle against Tsarism is proof that they did believe in something: a future free of authoritarian and repressive rule. The philosophical-political progenitors of the nihilist movement, Bakunin and Herzen, were not motivated by an urge to destroy for the sake of destruction or because they regarded life as without value. They argued that life under Tsarism was not valuable. The existing institutions therefore needed to be destroyed to create social space for the construction of new institutions within which the creative capacities of human beings could freely develop. While the activists of the 1860s were materialists, the philosophical roots of Russian nihilism extend back to Fichte’s conception of ‘radical autonomy’ (Petrov, 2019, 92). Defenders of Christian tradition like Dostoyevsky focussed only on the moment of negation and ignored the positive program.

Petrov’s careful history brings to light the constructive moment of the nihilist movement ignored by conservative critics like Dostoyevsky. He explains that ‘Russian nihilism did not imply, as one might expect from a purely semantic viewpoint, a universal “negation” of ethical normativity, the foundations of knowledge, or the meaningfulness of human life’ (Petrov, 2019, 74). On the contrary, they acted from the principle that the essential value in human life is self-creativity. Everything that stands in the way of its full flowering – authoritarian rule, the secular power of the Church, and the repression of women – must be destroyed so that meaningful lives can be created. Not life itself, but life dominated by stale traditions and autocratic monarchs is meaningless and not worth living. The real Russian nihilists were not trying to destroy themselves to prove a philosophical point. They were willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of creating a blank slate on which a new social scene could be painted. One can debate the merits of their tactics but the positive principles they served are not in doubt. ‘Although the term “nihilism” … eventually became associated with terrorism, it was initially associated with the student movement that had been seeking to advance personal autonomy, sexual liberation, and solidarity with the poor masses’ (Petrov, 2019, 76). Dostoyevsky also acknowledges these roots in the student movement but only to dismiss the young radicals (in a hilarious scene) as factional fools who cannot even get through their own agenda at a meeting, much less revolutionize society (Dostoyevsky, 1966, 406–411). But the nihilists themselves did not believe that a new world could be built overnight. Their goal, beyond immediate reforms that would enfranchise workers and emancipate serfs and women was to enable long oppressed people to become self-creative subjects. As Herzen argued in a proto-Nietzschean metaphor, ‘modern man only builds a bridge’ (Petrov, 2019, 83). Future generations will build new structures and institutions once the old order has been toppled.

Russian nihilism prefigures Nietzsche’s critique in two ways. The first, evident from Herzen’s argument above, is that they saw themselves as heralds of a world that they would not build. The second is more philosophical: meaning is constructed in this world and not found in an eternal, transcendent realm. They thus suggest that nihilism might not be a problem to find one’s way out of but a solution to the conservative's worry that if human life has no given meaning it has no meaning, and if it has no meaning it is without value. Traditionalists seek salvation in custom and religion, but the Russian nihilists argued (and Nietzsche in his own way agreed, as we will see), that salvation is not necessary if we choose to build meaningful lives on the terms offered by the universe. Meaning can be found in the sensuous, cognitive, and social relationships to the world and others that human beings can discover when they are open to it and created when they are freed from political, social, and economic constraints on their self-realizing and world-building activities. Nihilism can therefore be understood as a simultaneous rejection of the religious connection between eternity and life-value and acceptance of the connection between finitude and care for life.

Even the nihilist characters that Turgenev and Dostoyevsky sketched as reductio ad absurdems of nihilism betray this other possibility. It was their greatness as artists rather than their consistency as moralists that forced them to paint their characters as all rounded, contradictory human beings. Despite the abstract philosophical principles they are supposed to exemplify (cynical contempt for social convention and the rejection of the binding force of law and moral principle) Bazarov, Kirilov, and Ivan Karamazov all value some aspects of life: the women, family, and friends that they love; the simple exuberance of unfolding life. Bazarov antagonizes his friend Arkady’s aristocratic uncle Pavel with his rejection of the sanctity of traditional mores, but he falls in love in a very conventional way with Anna and dies as a result of a heroic effort to treat peasants for typhus (Turgenev, 1972, 52–53, 210). Kirilov commits suicide to prove to his fellow human beings that because humans can choose death we are absolutely free, but before he does so he mourns his school friend murdered in Stavrogin’s plot (Dostoyevsky, 1966, 628). Moreover, his absurd experiment is intended as one-off demonstration to inspire everyone else to enjoy life more fully (Dostoyevsky, 1966, 133). In The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha the devout younger brother tells Ivan the atheist that Ivan ‘loves life more than the meaning of it’ (Dostoyevsky, 1956, 252). Ivan confirms his brother’s interpretation with an unforgettable diatribe against the sacrifice of innocent human life to the divine harmony that Alyosha worships. ‘I have a longing for life’, he insists, ‘and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky leaves as they grow in the spring’ (Dostoyevsky, 1956, 252). The value of life is a function of attention and response to the sensuous textures of the living world. Ivan rejects the higher harmony that motivates Alyosha, but more coherently affirms the irreducible value of individual human life: ‘If all should suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children got to do with it? It is beyond comprehension why they should suffer. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future?’ (Dostoyevsky, 1956, 268). There is no contradiction between renouncing belief in divine purposes and celebrating the value of human life. As Ivan’s testimony suggests, our care and concern for each life, each sticky leaf, each child, increases when we are open to their vulnerabilities, their needs, their unique shapes, and their potentialities. ‘I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It is not worth the tears of that one tortured child’ (Dostoyevsky, 1956, 268). Ivan inverts the Christian argument against nihilism: if the divine plan involves the torture of children, then it lacks all value measured in earthly terms. If those earthly terms are the only ones available to human beings as social self-conscious bio-social agents, then they have a duty to renounce the ‘higher harmony’ in favour of nihilism attentive care to the conditions of mortal life.

My re-valuation of nihilism will now turn to Nietzsche’s celebration of life’s sensuous pleasures and the power of self-creation. While Nietzsche develops his positive argument against what he calls nihilism, I will argue that his real target is the devaluation of life in comparison to divine, transcendent ideals. His affirmation of the temporal and earthly against transcendent abstract can thus be read in my terms as a life-valuable conception of nihilism, since his argument concludes that life must be valued in its own terms and not abstract eternal standards.

Nietzsche’s Joyful Wisdom

Nietzsche turns the religious-conservative argument on its head. He believes that what he calls nihilism systematically de-values earthly life, but he accuses the religious critic of being the cause of nihilistic disdain for living. For Nietzsche, belief in transcendent, divine, and eternal foundations of value causes nihilism because actual life seems impoverished when compared to an imagined perfection. He defines nihilism as ‘the conviction of an absolute untenability of existence when it comes to the highest values … plus the realization that we lack the least right to posit a beyond or an in-itself of things that might be “divine” or morality incarnate’ (Nietzsche, 1968, 9). Having been schooled in the religious argument that morality requires a divine foundation, mid-nineteenth European society was plunged into crisis by the growing conviction that God did not exist. If God did not exist, then the foundation of morality would collapse. Lacking any alternative source that would prove as convincing as the divine-origin story, European society itself became nihilistic: devoid of commitment to any binding set of values and steered by vapid platitudes. ‘The supreme values in whose service man should live, especially when these are very hard on him and exacted a high price, these social values were erected over man … as if they were commands of God, as “reality,” as the “true” world, as a hope for a future world. Now that the shabby origin of these values is becoming clear, the universe seems to have lost value, seems meaningless’ (Nietzsche, 1968, 10–11). Nietzsche’s point is that a culture of nihilism is the necessary consequence of the collapse of belief in extra-mundane foundations for value and meaning.

For Nietzsche, nihilism manifests itself in a cultural crisis of decadence and irresponsibility. Pippin explains that ‘Nietzsche … often treats the phenomenon of nihilism … as some sort of pathology of desire, a collapse of desire altogether’ (Pippin, 2013, 174). This pathology of desire brings to a close a two millennia long religious-metaphysical conviction that life as a feeling, striving, creative human being is not enough. Since, however, there is only this life, with its emotional valences and contingent goals, if it is not enough, there is nothing else available. Once the spiritual-ideal other-world of the religious-metaphysical tradition is rejected as fantasy-projection, there is nothing left to take its place and a nihilistic culture takes hold. ‘Nihilism as a psychological state will have to be reached, first, when we have sought a “meaning” in all events that is not there, so the seeker eventually becomes discouraged’ (Nietzsche, 1968, 12). Human beings become incapable of finding and creating meaning and value. A barren scientism tries to replace religion and idealist metaphysics, but since science actively separates ‘fact’ from ‘value’, it cannot replace what religion and idealist metaphysics provided. ‘What has happened, at bottom? The feeling of valuelessness was reached with the realization that the overall character of existence may not be interpreted by means of the concept of “aim,” the concept of “unity,” or the concept of “truth.” Existence has no goal or end … one simply lacks any reason for convincing oneself that there is a true world’ (Nietzsche, 1968, 13) There is just this world of world of becoming, birth, and death. But this world is essentially the world of life.

Nietzsche’s intervention against nihilism begins from his affirmation of life. Whereas Heidegger argued that a naturalistic understanding of reality devalued everything to that status of mere things for use, for Nietzsche, it frees the human mind and senses from religious illusion (which Heidegger in his own way falls victim to) so that they can becomes receptors and creators of meaning and value in life. ‘Here one has to eradicate, annihilate, wage war; everywhere the Christian-nihilist value-standard still has to be pulled up and fought under every mask’ (Nietzsche, 1968, 32). Those with the intellectual strength and creative power must fight through the nihilistic implications of other-world religion and prove to themselves and others that life as such is the only value. Life is valuable precisely because it serves no higher purpose than whatever purposes living beings create within it: the believers in other worlds are responsible for negating the value of this one.

Nietzsche’s understanding of life-value tends to look towards the future and the emergence of new types of people. The fool that announces the death of God realizes that contemporary people are not ready to understand his message (Nietzsche, 2020, 104). However, Nietzsche also celebrates simply being present amidst the great swirl of life-enjoyment that sometimes breaks through the gloom. ‘It gives me melancholy happiness to live in the midst of this confusion of streets, of necessities, of voices; how much enjoyment, impatience and desire, how much thirsty life and drunkenness of life comes to light every moment. And yet it will soon be so still for all these shouting, lively, life-loving people’ (Nietzsche, 2020, 140). This aspect of his philosophy proves most valuable for my re-valuation of nihilism. This passage asserts the intensity of lived experience as proof that the finitude of life does not destroy the possibility of enjoyment. His celebration reminds me of Baudeliare’s injunction to get drunk on the love of finite life: ‘And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking … ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you’: ‘It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, be drunk, be perpetually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you please’ (Baudelaire, 1970, 74). Drunk with delight at the fact of being alive, we can laugh at our ultimate fate. ‘There is nothing that does so much good as the fool’s cap and bells’ says Nietzsche. ‘We need them in presence of ourselves – we need all arrogant, soaring, dancing, mocking, childish and blessed Art in order not to lose the free dominion over things which our ideal demands of us’ (Nietzsche, 2020, 92). Heidegger argued that Nietzsche did not fully break free from the hold of the metaphysical tradition, but passages like these suggest that it was Heidegger that could not ultimately let go of the eternal. Nietzsche, on the other hand, rejected the need for eternal justifications for mortal life. Life is indeed, short, but once we accept its brevity, we free ourselves to savour each moment in good cheer.

Nihilism and Life-Value

Nietzsche’s insouciance is a welcome antidote to moralistic scolds who urge us to store up our treasure in a non-existent heaven. Just as Nietzsche turned the religious critique of nihilism upside down to argue that belief in eternal values was the cause of nihilism, so I will turn Nietzsche critique of nihilism upside down and argue that his celebration of life-experience and activity is the basis for a life-valuable nihilism. Life-valuable nihilism does not derive values from a naturalistic understanding of the origins of the universe and the evolution of life but treats them as a necessary framework within which human beings must ‘face squarely [our] real conditions of life’ (Marx and Engels, 1976, 487). But life-valuable nihilism does not reduce values to mere facts; it argues that the fact that there is no cosmic purpose to human existence frees people from all purported eternal foundations, hierarchies, and imposed values ‘to choose their own goals’ (Tartaglia, 2016, 42). Camus and other mid-twentieth century existentialists stressed this human existential freedom, my re-valuation of nihilism will concentrate on the existential responsibility to care for and improve the conditions of life. The more the social causes of harm are addressed, the more life-time can be spent in receptive openness to the beauty of the world, creative activities which contribute in valuable and valued ways to the common wealth upon which our lives depend, and mutualistic relationships with other people.

The real conditions of human life are not only social and political, as Marx thought, but extend backwards in time to include the total set of emergent physical conditions from which the life evolved. The fact that those conditions of life followed no divine plan or steering Idea means that the evolution of life in general, and any one particular person’s being alive, are breathtakingly improbable. In a recent work, Ray Kurzweil tries to calculate that probability. The calculation estimates not only the odds of your parents having met and reproducing, but the odds of every event in the whole history of the universe which led up to their meeting, your being born, and surviving to adulthood. He estimates that the probability of any person’s being born is ‘1 followed by vastly more than a googolplex [1 followed by 100 zeroes] zeros. Yet here you are. It is a miracle, is it not?’ (Kurzweil, 2024, 95) Kurzweil is being ironic – he knows that it is not a miracle and that the calculation inspires joyful fear and trembling because we are confronted with the mathematical reality that a universe in which we did not exist is almost immeasurably more probable than the one in which we do exist. The statistical improbability of anyone’s being alive gives everyone all the more reason to understand their – and other’s – lives, as of infinite existential value.

Rare things increase in value because there are few substitutes for them; irreplaceable things are therefore of infinite existential value. Human beings are composed of very ordinary elements – mostly hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon, but living individuals are not reducible to the chemical compounds of which they are composed. Scientific understanding explains the real material conditions of life but it does not determine life’s value. Instead, the value of life is a function of our sentience and social self-conscious agency. Our senses are open to the world not as a set of forces but as an object of wonder and our minds not only map causal pathways but are moved by the awesome spectacle of reality and imagine projects for our hands to create. All persons at the moment of their birth are framed by the bio-chemical processes on which its organic functions depend and enters into a world that they did not create, but they have powers of self-development and active intervention into its natural and social environment that ensure that their future cannot be predicted, no matter how clearly the physical forces and social contexts that act on them are understood. Once a being comes into being that can imagine different futures and struggle to bring them about, self-conscious self-creation becomes part of the universe of matter and energy.

The uniqueness of each human being is a function of our capacities to experience the world as a set of possibilities and not fixed constraints. We change ourselves in the course of changing the world. I conclude that since the existence of any particular human life is exceedingly improbable, and that every human being, even if doing nothing more than struggling for raw survival, makes itself into a unique being that cannot be replaced, all human beings have infinite existential value. Infinite existential value does not mean that the lived value of everyone’s life is identical or that everyone is at heart morally good. The claim means that no person is, to echo Kant, born to be a mere means to someone else’s ends, or cannon fodder in someone’s war, or a target of demonizing ideology and abuse (Kant, 1969, 54). Existentially infinite value is the baseline of social criticism of all forms of life in which, as Marx said, human beings are debased (Marx, 1975a, 182). Contra Severino, who argued that temporality was the negation of all value, life-valuable nihilism asserts that mortality and irreplaceability are the grounds of the infinite value of human life.

Camus’s ‘absurdist reasoning’ anticipates this conclusion. ‘The final conclusion of absurdist reasoning is … the repudiation of suicide and acceptance of the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe. Suicide would mean the end of this encounter, and absurdist reasoning considers that it could not consent to this without negating its own premises … But it is obvious that that absurdism hereby admits that human life is the only necessary good in the universe since it is precisely life that makes this encounter possible’ (Camus, 1956, 6). Death is the ultimate negation of life-value, but the person who lives for the sake of the values available to be found and created within the frame of earthly life does not lament life’s brevity but embraces it to live all the more intensely, in full knowledge that the universe will erase every trace of our having been eventually. But the inevitability of the empty future of empty space expanding into empty space that Mack warned about in no way prevents us from living, working, and creating. ‘To work and create “for nothing,” to sculpt in clay, to know that one’s creation has no future … this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions’ (Camus, 1956, 84). The wisdom is difficult because the thought of annihilation is terrifying, but it is also joyful, as Nietzsche taught, because it concentrates attention on the need to live fully each moment and change whatever structures impede anyone from doing so.

While every human being’s existence is unrepeatable and therefore the supreme object of care, the facts of social, political, and economic life impose dramatically different living conditions on different people. The concrete life-value of different lives varies according to the material conditions and experiential content of different people’s lives. McMurtry offers us a test by which the concrete life-value of any life can be determined. ‘all life whatever’, he argues, has intrinsic value insofar as it itself moves, feels, or thinks. The measure of its value is … ‘the extent to which it expresses or enables vertical-depth and horizontal-breadth of life-range on these parameters’ (McMurtry, 2011, 213). This test requires no transcendent foundation. It starts from the facts of human needs as the material condition of the development of the sentient and creative capacities through which we experience and create value. If life were without meaning then the inequalities, structures of oppression, and violence that prevent their victims from satisfying their needs would be matters of indifference. Life-valuable nihilism is not indifferent to the real conditions of life. It finds its motivation to care about life (and not just one’s own life) from the fact that everyone is born an infinitely valuable centre of social self-conscious agency with the potential to discover and create value if their needs are met.

If we knew as a matter of fact that some god would save the innocents and redeem their lives in heaven then there is no reason to work to save, secure, and improve life on earth. But if our focus is the quality of this one life that we have, then there is reason to work to change social conditions when they fail to satisfy fundamental human needs. Our needs link us to the natural world (if we destroy it, there is no other source of the resources that our lives require) and other people (if we destroy social relations through violent conflict, then we undermine the integral forms of organization required to satisfy our needs). Recognition of these truths does not on its own resolve social problems, but it can motivate us to care about the conditions of life, conditions which necessarily extend beyond our own ego into the natural and social world.

Moral duties link human beings in webs of mutual obligation because we need each other. Once mutual need is recognized there is no further philosophical need to anchor moral duties in a transcendent plane of eternal Being. If religious critics of nihilism are concerned with the quality of life, then the moral obligations they rightly insist upon must bind real people in humanly relevant stretches of time: hours, days, months, and years. If, for example, murder is wrong, then it is wrong not because the cost to the murderer is eternal damnation, but because the act ends, permanently, the possibility of another human being experiencing and enjoying anything else at all for the years or decades they would otherwise have enjoyed living. Therefore, the principle that murder is wrong can be derived from the life-valuable nihilist principle that life is a contingent and highly improbably emergence without cosmic significance.

The imperative to organize social life for the sake of ensuring the satisfaction of the needs of each and all follows from the one-way direction of life time that moves from birth to death. People cannot be re-animated at a later point to enjoy the satisfaction of needs they could not satisfy while they were alive. Hence, care and concern for the maximization of life-value for each and all puts an ethical premium on the present and particular people. The ‘care burdened, starving man in need’ not only has no sense for the finest play, as Marx said, they also cannot wait until doomsday or The Revolution to eat (Marx, 1975b, 302). Caring for them is not an abstract philosophical imperative but a call to action that can be executed in plans that solve the problems that reduce the concrete value of the lives. The struggle against social conditions that deprive and demean some groups of people is rooted in care for them as unrepeatable singularities of social self-conscious experience and activity. ‘Care burdened’ people in need cry out to have their needs satisfied right now, not in a transcendent heaven at the end of time or a utopia at the end of history.

Religious conservatives and dogmatic revolutionaries make the same mistake: they focus on absolute salvation and not the needs of the person lying at their feet suffering. Camus laid bare the morally self-undermining logic of the sacrifice of the individual for the future good of the whole. ‘What … does the sacrifice of individual men matter as long as it contributes to the salvation of all mankind?’ (Camus, 1956, 204–205). ‘All mankind’ has no reality apart from the living individuals who are the members of the class. ‘All mankind’, therefore, cannot be saved by the sacrifice of particular living people, because each is an infinitely valuable member of the whole to be saved. Sacrificing even one destroys part of what the executioner is supposed to be saving. Ironically, the character of Father Zossima, in The Brother’s Karamazov exemplifies this life-valuable ethic. As he lays dying, he tells Alyosha and the other members of the monastery in which he served as the Elder of the path that led him to the priesthood. As a young man, Father Zossima discovered that his professed love for humanity in the abstract was contradicted by his failure to love real, living individuals (Dostoyevsky, 1956, 57). He recognized this contradiction between the abstract and the concrete he abandoned his hedonistic ways and devoted himself to the service of actual people.

The details of concrete political struggles against the systems and structures that destroy the experienced life-value of some human beings must be worked out in practice. I am interested here in a value deeper than political systems. From the perspective of the life-valuable nihilism I have defended, social, political, and economic organization is an instrumental value in service to the joyous savouring of life as an open matric of experience, activity, and relationship. The end returns us to the beginning, of this paper and recorded philosophical thought, the Rig Veda, and its ‘darkness folded upon the darkness’. Without divine intervention, the light of creative evolution irrupted, and the universe of things and people was born. A universe that comes from nothing and returns to nothing is nihilistic in an absolute and material sense. The facts of physical cosmology do not negate the value of life but impose a frame within which it can be properly understood. As Terence Deacon argues, even though life evolved from non-living stuff and could well not have evolved, once it does, ‘there is more here than stuff. There is how this stuff is organized and related to other stuff. And there is more than what is actual. There is what could be, what should be, what can’t be, and what is impossible’ (Deacon, 2013, 544–545). What is not impossible is valuing the magnificent contingency of what we are, opening ourselves to the sensuous richness of the universe, other living things, and each other, and working together to understand and solve the problems that impede even one person from fully enjoying the short time that they have under the stars.