Today when I was critisizing nihilism as immature, I was thinking back to Simone de Beauvoir and her ideas about freedom and nihilism. She was critical of nihilism because it's just another form of 'seriousness'. Instead of devoting themself to some sort of idol or outside cause, though, the nihilist just devotes themself to the idea that there's no meaning to anything and whatnot.
She's critical of it because when you compare her form of freedom, which is her value, I would say, to nihilism, it's a lot alike. I mean, "to exist is to make oneself a lack of being", that would seem pretty nihilistic. They're both saying that nothing in itself holds value and you have to let go of that illusion to really get anywhere. But the difference is the nihilist says that means, give up we don't exist, and after you get past the illusion there's really no where to go. But Beauvoir says, no to exist is to make oneself a lack of being. It's a positive, not a negative (it may be painful, but it's a positive).
I think that that gets confused a lot, the difference between nihilism and what Beauvoir calls freedom, and that's why it's hard to argue against nihilism. But you can recognize nothing holds value in itself without being a nihilist. The value isn't the value itself, but it's in letting everything go and then still choosing to be free. Nihilists can't answer to that, because they have to recognize the choice they made - to decide that everything is meaningless.
(I really wish we had stayed on that packet, it was so interesting....)
Also thought this was interesting -in a lot of eastern religions the whole goal is to disappear and become with anything - the world really doesn't mean anything. That's a lot like nihilism, but instead of being seen as this corrosive threat, it's a positive.
If my memory serves me correctly, Beauvoir avoids seemingly ambiguous judgments like "such and such is helpful"... which would lead me to wonder if she would consider "such and such is positive" to be an equally ambiguous claim?
Now you've got me running for that packet... Heck, I just need to give you the book :)
Hey… I found the passage in The Ethics of Ambiguity! It just so happens to follow the last quote I posted from p9— and it seems my memory confused “helpful” with “useful.” Nonetheless, it still seems relevant. I’ve bolded the lines I was thinking of, but of course context is critical:
“Well and good. But it is still necessary for the failure to be surmounted, and existentialist ontology does not allow this hope. Man’s passion is useless; he has no means for becoming the being that he is not. That too is true. And it is also true that in Being and Nothingness Sartre has insisted above all on the abortive aspect of the human adventure. It is only in the last pages that he opens up the perspective fore ethics. However, if we reflect upon his descriptions of existence, we perceive that they are far from condemning man without recourse. The failure described in Being and Nothingness is definitive, but it is also ambiguous. Man, Sartre tells us, is “a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being.” That means, first of all, that his passion is not inflicted upon him from without. He chooses it. It is his very being, and, as such, does not imply the idea of unhappiness. If this choice is considered as useless, it is because there exists no absolute value before the passion of man, outside of it, in relation to which one might distinguish the useless from the useful. The word “useful” has not yet received a meaning on the level of description where Being and Nothingness is situated. It can be defined only in the human world established by man’s projects and the ends he sets up. In the original helplessness from which man surges up, nothing is useful, nothing is useless. It must therefore be understood that the passion to which man has acquiesced finds no external justification. No outside appeal, no objective necessity permits of its being called useful. It has no reason to will itself. But this does not mean that it can not justify itself, that it can not give itself reasons for being that it does not have.”
Despite Beauvoir’s insistence that man can give himself a meaningful reason/purpose in life, it seems like she still admits (albeit implicitly) that the ‘act’ in which man gives himself what he is not born with is played out on the stage of nihilism, in an empty theater. CHQ… show me the bright pinpoint of existential ‘hope’ that I’m missing…
4 comments:
Today when I was critisizing nihilism as immature, I was thinking back to Simone de Beauvoir and her ideas about freedom and nihilism. She was critical of nihilism because it's just another form of 'seriousness'. Instead of devoting themself to some sort of idol or outside cause, though, the nihilist just devotes themself to the idea that there's no meaning to anything and whatnot.
She's critical of it because when you compare her form of freedom, which is her value, I would say, to nihilism, it's a lot alike. I mean, "to exist is to make oneself a lack of being", that would seem pretty nihilistic. They're both saying that nothing in itself holds value and you have to let go of that illusion to really get anywhere. But the difference is the nihilist says that means, give up we don't exist, and after you get past the illusion there's really no where to go. But Beauvoir says, no to exist is to make oneself a lack of being. It's a positive, not a negative (it may be painful, but it's a positive).
I think that that gets confused a lot, the difference between nihilism and what Beauvoir calls freedom, and that's why it's hard to argue against nihilism. But you can recognize nothing holds value in itself without being a nihilist. The value isn't the value itself, but it's in letting everything go and then still choosing to be free. Nihilists can't answer to that, because they have to recognize the choice they made - to decide that everything is meaningless.
(I really wish we had stayed on that packet, it was so interesting....)
Also thought this was interesting -in a lot of eastern religions the whole goal is to disappear and become with anything - the world really doesn't mean anything. That's a lot like nihilism, but instead of being seen as this corrosive threat, it's a positive.
Touché!! You've made some excellent points and connections; I'm humbled.
If my memory serves me correctly, Beauvoir avoids seemingly ambiguous judgments like "such and such is helpful"... which would lead me to wonder if she would consider "such and such is positive" to be an equally ambiguous claim?
Now you've got me running for that packet... Heck, I just need to give you the book :)
Hey… I found the passage in The Ethics of Ambiguity! It just so happens to follow the last quote I posted from p9— and it seems my memory confused “helpful” with “useful.” Nonetheless, it still seems relevant. I’ve bolded the lines I was thinking of, but of course context is critical:
“Well and good. But it is still necessary for the failure to be surmounted, and existentialist ontology does not allow this hope. Man’s passion is useless; he has no means for becoming the being that he is not. That too is true. And it is also true that in Being and Nothingness Sartre has insisted above all on the abortive aspect of the human adventure. It is only in the last pages that he opens up the perspective fore ethics. However, if we reflect upon his descriptions of existence, we perceive that they are far from condemning man without recourse.
The failure described in Being and Nothingness is definitive, but it is also ambiguous. Man, Sartre tells us, is “a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being.” That means, first of all, that his passion is not inflicted upon him from without. He chooses it. It is his very being, and, as such, does not imply the idea of unhappiness. If this choice is considered as useless, it is because there exists no absolute value before the passion of man, outside of it, in relation to which one might distinguish the useless from the useful. The word “useful” has not yet received a meaning on the level of description where Being and Nothingness is situated. It can be defined only in the human world established by man’s projects and the ends he sets up. In the original helplessness from which man surges up, nothing is useful, nothing is useless. It must therefore be understood that the passion to which man has acquiesced finds no external justification. No outside appeal, no objective necessity permits of its being called useful. It has no reason to will itself. But this does not mean that it can not justify itself, that it can not give itself reasons for being that it does not have.”
Despite Beauvoir’s insistence that man can give himself a meaningful reason/purpose in life, it seems like she still admits (albeit implicitly) that the ‘act’ in which man gives himself what he is not born with is played out on the stage of nihilism, in an empty theater. CHQ… show me the bright pinpoint of existential ‘hope’ that I’m missing…
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