Faces of Nihilism

We've been writing of how the essence of modernity turns out to be nihilism. As Hart makes clear, the assumptions are nihilistic. It's just a matter of following them through to their "ineluctable nihilistic terminus." 

If you harbor those assumptions without reaching the terminus, then you are leading a life of bad faith, duplicity, and intellectual dishonesty. Most likely you're drawing on an implicit reservoir of Judeo-Christianity to provide what meaning subsists in such a sophicating worldview. 

Now, I'm a simple man:

Either God or chance; all other terms are disguises for one or the other.

But chance produces nothing and explains nothing. I read the book a few months ago, so I'll let an amazon reviewer refresh my memory:

Chance is merely the probability of something happening. If we flip a coin, the chances of it landing on heads is fifty percent. But chance doesn’t cause it to land on heads. Chance isn’t an entity and has no power to cause anything to happen.

The problem is that many scientists are claiming the universe came by chance. If chance has no power, how could it create a universe?  

If I flip a coin 100 times, there's a chance it will come up heads each time. But what are the chances that such an unlikely outcome is a result of chance? 

chance has no power to do anything. It is cosmically, totally, consummately impotent.... It has no power because it has no being.

So, there's no chance that chance is a sufficient explanation of being, mind, life, or anything else, for it's really just another word for ignorance -- "ignorance of real causes." 

Yes, but isn't God too just another name for our ignorance?

No, I think God is the very principle, ground, and possibility of intellect, intelligibility, meaning, and truth.

God is not an inane compensation for lost reality, but the horizon surrounding the summits of conquered reality.

That would be the transcendent horizon of total intelligibility toward which we are ordered. Conversely, 

If God does not exist we should not conclude that everything is permissible, but that nothing matters. 

"Nothing matters" is the very content of nihilism. 

Come to think of it, also of clinical depression, and I'm sure there is considerable overlap between the two. Why are there more affective disorders than ever? Perhaps for the same reason there is more nihilism than ever. The condition is grave but not serious though, because

If it is not of God that we are speaking, it is not sensible to speak of anything seriously. 

If life is meaningless, then so too is your depression. Indeed, your depression is a murmurandom from below informing you of this absence of meaning.

The preluminary ramblings above were inspired by a review of an intellectual biography of Roger Scruton, calling him "the anti-nihilist par excellence." Which, if you recall the previous 25 posts on All Things Are Full of Gods, was one of the themes that emerged. i.e., the possibility of a post-disenchantment alternative to modern nihilism. 

For again, it's easy enough to debunk reductive and scientistic materialism, but with what exactly do we replace it? It can't be another ideology, because that would be just another iteration of the problem. A couple of aphorisms come to mind:

Reality cannot be represented in a philosophical system.

That's true. Gödel would be the first to endorse that proposition. He also said that it was "to be expected that sooner or later my proof will be made useful for religion, since that is doubtless also justified in a certain sense." 

But before jumping to any conclusions, the second aphorism reminds us that  

An adequate theology would be unintelligible to us.

Well, great. Philosophy can't map reality, and a theology that could would be beyond our comprehension. No wonder people flee into nihilism. 

But I can't have been the first to say that nothingness is just the shadow of God. At any rate, 

God is the transcendental condition of the absurdity of the universe.

In this regard "absurdity" is much like chance, i.e., a privation of something more substantive and intelligible.

Back to Scruton, he

found intimations of transcendence, of the “sacred,” as he called it, manifested in those places and moments where time mysteriously intersects with eternity. 

I call that a bingo, i.e., the nonlocal vertical realm that is always at a right angle to horizontality and immanence. Nor can such encounters be reduced to a system per se; indeed,

Everything that can be reduced to a system ends up in the hands of fools. 

Scruton's philosophy was "a repudiation of repudiation," which reminds me of another aphorism:

Man's moment of greatest lucidity is that in which he doubts his doubt.

Scruton eventually came to doubt his own doubt and be skeptical of his skepticism. He

“served a full apprenticeship in atheism,” but... having pondered his loss of faith against the backdrop of advancing secularism, steadily regained it.

 Same. Similar to what Hart says,

The inexorable “laws of nature” articulated by modern science cannot explain away the “I” that “is the defining feature of the human being.” Various forms of scientism and reductive materialism (including vulgarized neuroscience or “neurobabble” as Scruton sometimes contemptuously called it) try to “de-personalize or deface the world” as the revolutionary mindset of Communism did with murderous intent.

Why confine oneself to a nihilistic system that can't account for the most interesting phenomenon in all of existence? Again, we are ordered to that transcendent horizon that can never be reduced to some immanent system:

scientific materialism cannot account for the erotic quest of the knower, of the person who searches for the truth about the nature of things and the nature of the soul. It obscures the self or the soul and thus the quest for self-knowledge.

 But what is science without self-knowledge, without a serious and sustained effort to grasp human interiority... 

Just nihilism by another name.