Resisting Nihilism's Arrogance and Abandoning Understanding

So, recently I finished a book that I pretty much loved. I wrote about it before in a blog post. It was The Trouble With Being Born by E.M. Cioran. 212 pages of fantastic aphorisms. He is primarily a nihilistic philosopher.

The main thing I want to write about here is the relationship between nihilism and arrogance. I think a nihilistic worldview lends itself well to arrogance. It is easy to use it as a way to write people off, or to criticize them I am gonna talk about how this has been a somewhat consistent theme in my life. Then I am gonna talk about how Cioran and others give me a way to use nihilism as a path to compassion rather than arrogance.

So, nihilism and arrogance. What is that all about? Well, first I will lay out how it seems easy to use nihilism to lapse into a dismissive or arrogant world view. Second, I'll talk about how I think the conclusions of nihilism should lead you to a more compassionate view.

Nihilism and an arrogant world view:

Basic ideas of nihilism as I understand them. The world is without objective meaning. Human existence is one big accident. System's of meaning are socially constructed. Life is essentially pain. Ummm, I am having a hard time coming up with an in depth discussion of nihilism as a view. I suppose I have read a number of nihilist books but not really enough. But, regardless, it is a view that posits that their is a lack of meaning in everything, that everything is random and accidental, that life is defined by pain, and we may not even be able to access real truth or knowledge.

Sure, thats all good and fine. I suppose my knowledge of nihilism comes from Nietzsche, John Gray, Cioran, and Schopenhauer.

Now, how could this create an arrogant world view? Well, I guess I will start by saying that the nihilistic world view is in stark contrast to most of life within society. Mainly when it comes to the idea of meaning. Society seems to thrive on meaning. We need to assign meaning to things so that we can function. We have developed extremely elaborate religious institutions that have been explaining and assigning meaning to the world for millennia. We have legal and political institutions that have given meaning to our behavior and our interactions with others, given us a sense of morality. We also have scientific studies that have given nature meaning down to the smallest increment. Everything means something, or is a certain way.

And I guess nihilism is dangerous to these ideas because it asks: what if none of this means anything? And what if it isn't that way, but I have been indoctrinated into thinking about things in that way? In short, nihilism problematizes all of the meanings assigned by religion, law, politics, and science.

So how does this give rise to an arrogant world view? Well, seeing as how most of the world depends on at least one of these systems of meaning, it makes it easy to write people off, to attribute stupidity to them. When we see someone coming out of a church it is easy for us, being informed on nihilism, to say 'don't you know that religion is a historically constructed system of meaning? don't you see that it has nothing to do with your life and merely offers you a way of making sense of life's pain? why don't you just face the facts and stop living a lie?' So, since nihilism embraces the idea that life is an illusion, it, if misused, gives us liberty to attack other people's world view. Any system of meaning that guides someone, like politics, law, religion, or science, can be dismantled and shown to be incredulous. You can claim, almost universally, that any system of meaning is flawed and should be abandoned. I can see how It sorta gives you license to be critical of whoever you want whenever you want.

Religion is the most easily attacked, I think. But politics, law, and science, too, can be attacked by nihilism. Side thought: nihilism and historical study. Nietzsche was very historically informed, as is Cioran. John Gray frequently invokes history, and I believe Schopenhauer was too. So, what is up with the relationship between history and nihilism? Well, if you look at the historical record, more than anything else you find war, disease, general suffering, etc.. Things are okay for lots of people, life is good, but history definitely turns up more pain than anything else. Further, it is really easy to tie violence and pain to religion, just because religion has played such a role in human life for much longer than politics or science. So, I guess that is why religion was the first system of meaning to come under heavy scrutiny from the historically informed nihilists.

Later, other nihilists would made explicit claims about the systems of meaning that have been opened up by politics and law, science and technology. John Gray, for example, has some very interesting thoughts on science and technology. He argues that the Christian project of universal salvation has been taken up, in a modified form, by contemporary liberal humanists. Christianity, he claims, was the first belief system to offer salvation for all. Pagan religions never saw life as a process of salvation, but as a constant, something that would always involve discomfort. Buddhism saw things similarly, suffering is inevitable Buddha said. Gray claims that liberal humanists have placed their faith in science and technology to create panaceas for human pain, taking up the Christian project of universal salvation without even recognizing its origins. This isn't about abandoning science and technology. It is about finding its limitations, and recognizing the centrality of pain and irrationality. One quote from Gray's Straw Dogs, it demonstrates all of the above very concisely: "Today the good life means making full use of science and technology – without succumbing to the illusion that they can make us free, reasonable or even sane. It means seeking peace – without hoping for a world without war.... The good life is not found in dreams of progress, but in coping with tragic contingencies."

Foucault's work also challenged the systems of meaning, the 'games of truth,' he calls them, that were enabled by politics, law, science, and religion. While Foucault was a professed Nietzschean, it isn't really appropriate to call him a nihilist philosopher. There are hints of nihilism, certainly. But he is doing something quite different. But his work still applies because it resembles nihilist philosophy in two ways. 1. He seems to believe that there is no objective meaning to the world, and treats science, religion, and law as competing forms of hypothetical knowledge. For Foucault, there is no difference between what a scientist says and a priest says, both are analyzed as forms of knowledge that facilitate certain forms of power relations, and certain forms of ethics. 2. Foucault uses a particularly historical method to show that these institutions are historically constituted and thus do not hold universal or objective knowledge. So, this resembles nihilism in that it uses history to problematize systems of meaning. It uses history to show that the world has an essentially constructed meaning, and most importantly, that politics and science, as well as religion can come under the scrutiny of nihilistic ideas. Again, Foucault should not be thought of as a nihilist. I am afraid this characterization isn't quite fair. More so, I do not think this is most important thing Foucault has to say. I'll have to write a post on him.

So, anyways, what I am trying to say is that all forms of knowledge, religious, political, legal, scientific etc., can come under the scrutiny of nihilist philosophy. It uses history to break down their claims to absolute truth. So, it is easy to see how it would lend itself to a view point that is arrogant. Nihilism has the potential to look like an all out assault on modern life, an attack on all meaning. By questioning the meaning of these seemingly universal institutions, it comes off as simple criticism, or as hopeless rejection of life. But I think that is missing a really important conclusion about the lack of meaning in the world.

Basically, if nihilism means to show that the world has no real meaning, and that all our forms of understanding are historically and socially constructed, then nihilism has to recognize itself as an equally historically and socially constructed point of view that has the potential to merely replace other forms of knowledge rather than enabling us to transcend them. Every form of knowledge just enables meaning. And while nihilism can let us ascribe meaning to the world that differs from religion or science, it would be better used as a way to escape meaning in itself. If we can learn to look at the world without words, if we can, even for moments, escape the constant labeling, the constant inner articulation of everything, then we might experience the real benefits of nihilism. If all we can do with it is shred other forms of knowledge with our jabber about the lack of meaning we are contradicting ourselves. We are using analysis to discredit the idea of meaning as a whole: we are producing meaning to discredit meaning. And this is necessary. It has to be done, you have to talk about it to get around it at all. But the real trick is not stopping with the analysis, but using it to find wordless space. Meaning is not produced just to discredit meaning, it is produced to transcend meaning. We shouldn't talk about the lack of meaning just to wallow in the pain of those revelations, but to realize that we can enjoy an existence that doesn't need meaning.

Two quotations to back this up.

E.M. Cioran said: "'For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened....' No sooner are they open than the drama begins. To look without understanding–that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much...."

Looking without understanding is the ultimate goal of nihilism. A very Buddhist idea. When we recognize the world as a game of truth, as a collision of systems of meaning, we allow ourselves to escape meaning altogether.

John Gray, on the last page of Straw Dogs, says 'why can't the purpose of life be just to see?'

Same idea. Why do we need meaning? Why do we need words to classify and govern our existence? Why do we need to talk about what we see and feel? Because it is fun, and satisfying, and helps facilitate understanding. But we shouldn't get lost in our production of meaning, we shouldn't take nihilism as a conclusion that provides understanding, but as a conclusion that helps us escape understanding.

So, then, I think nihilism presents us with two challenges, with two new ways of looking at the world: It challenges us to recognize that our ethics, our institutions, and our lives are historically and socially constructed, and in essence, devoid of objective meaning. And second, it challenges us to try and transcend meaning, it challenges us to exist without it, to exist without words.

Enjoying a Back Deck Without Words

This will be brief. I am house sitting for my parents. I was sitting on their back deck not doing anything. The sun was going down and I was looking at things and listening to outdoor sounds.

I have been doing some reading and a little writing about Buddhism and mindfulness. About letting sensations and thoughts come and go without pursuing them with words. It is difficult. Words come so naturally. I see a tree, I see something moving in the tree, I identify it as a squirrel. As soon as I put the words to it I resent myself for so automatically producing the words. Words come naturally. So I guess the idea would be to let them pass, acknowledge them and let them go. They fade away after a bit. Words are the anomaly. But wordless space is still hard to find.

Three quotations from E.M. Cioran on perception and language.

"If only we could reach back before the concept, could write on a level with the senses, record the infinitesimal variations of what we touch, do what a reptile would do if it were to set about writing!"

"Suddenly feeling that you know as much as God about anything and everything and quite as suddenly seeing this sensation vanish..."

"When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment's thought to the 'meaning' of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not in abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness"

Basically, all three of these lines get at the same issue: how the articulation of sensation and perception moves us away from the direct experience we are having. When I sit down and just look at things it is easy to look at them with words. Look at the concepts. But looking without words, that is the thing. John Gray and Cioran and Buddhism, all this stuff about just seeing, I guess that means being able to see without concepts immediately presenting themselves to you. To look at a tree without thinking about its status as a tree. Seeing a ball roll across a floor without thinking about what a ball is or what a floor is. Seeing like a child.

E.M. Cioran and Hopeful Nihilism, Non-Action and Worrying, Choice and Time: Incoherent Ideas

So, I was raised by someone who identifies with nihilism, and so it has almost always been a part of my life since I started thinking about it. I would say my relationship with nihilism is complicated. Recently, though, I have been getting into a fair amount of nihilistic philosophy. Anyways, I am currently reading a book that I wanted to write about. It is pretty exciting at this point, and I wanted to throw a few things around. Mainly connections I see between Nihilism and Eastern philosophies of identity, action, and choice.

So, first things first, the book. It is The Trouble With Being Born by E.M. Cioran. Cioran was born in Romania in 1911 and moved to Paris in 1937 and lived there until he died in 1995, so says the back of the book. I find interesting that he moved out of Romania in 37, only a few years before some bad things started happening with WWII, all of which would eventually lead to Romania being a part of the USSR. So, fortunate that he moved when he did, cause he never would have been able to have the same career in the East.

As for the writing, he writes aphoristically. All lines/sections separated by the same symbol, divided into 12 unnamed sections. I haven't read a lot of things that are presented in this fashion. John Gray's Straw Dogs is organized in a very similar way, except he has chapter names, and subheadings for each small section. Gray actually quoted Cioran a lot. So that is why I ended up getting this book, because I liked Straw Dogs a lot.

So what is he saying? What is going on in this book? I am still sorta confused as to how to think about it, how to summarize or paraphrase it. But I guess the thing that interests me the most right now is the way in which he presents a hopeful nihilism. The universality of pain, the illusory nature of the self, the deterministic weight of history and chance, the need to transform yourself to attain understanding, and the ultimate futility of intellectual work, all of these things come glaring through in a way that makes me feel good. John Gray did a very similar thing for me. When you put these really central ideas to the test, things like the self, choice, knowledge, hard work, they start to shake a little; they don't hold as much water as I would have suspected.

I would like to use one quotation. Because I think this one highlights a lot of the ways that these nihilistic views can be seen as akin to Buddhist ideas, or Hindu ideas. Cioran and Gray both talk a lot about the Buddha and about other eastern philosophies.

Anyways, quotation: "X insults me. I am about to him him. Thinking it over, I refrain. Who am I? which is my real self: the self of the retort or that of the refraining? My first reaction is always energetic; the second one, flabby. What is known as 'wisdom' is ultimately only a perpetual 'thinking it over,' i.e., non-action as first impulse."

Now, I think this quotation is great. The way the self evaporates when we realize how multiplicitous and inconsistent our feelings are, how much we are capable of doubting and problematizing our own minds at every second. This last portion I italicized, non-action as first impulse. Along with the idea that the self does not exist, the idea of non-action is very important in a number of eastern religions. In Buddhism the idea of mindfulness amounts to an observant non-action, in Taoism the idea of Wu Wei means non-action and is associated with letting things take their natural course. Another Buddhist idea that I like a lot, and believe I read in John Gray: 'do nothing and your Will will be done.' This idea, non-action as the key to facilitating personal growth, or progress, or movement, or action, or whatever it is. But it means letting your inclinations manifest themselves spontaneously. I suppose sometimes you need to force yourself to go a little further, or to work a little harder. But I think the idea here is to let your unconscious mind run the show and trust that it will alert you to whatever things need to be done.

Think about worrying. Sitting around, worrying, feeling concerned that things aren't gonna happen, that you need to make them happen. I have thought about this before, when people say 'don't worry it will get taken care of.' And then there is the feeling, well, I have to make them happen. And sure, you will make them happen. But why is it that in that particular moment you are worrying about it and not simply taking care of it? Why are you thinking and not doing?

Well, this brings me to an interesting idea about the relationship between choice/action and time. Choice, and the action chosen, are always located at a specific point in time. It is impossible to make a choice unless we have arrived at that specific moment in time in which that choice can be enacted. In other words, choice is temporally confined.

I suppose a colloquial phrase communicates this in a way that I find useful: 'You'll have to cross that bridge when you come to it.' So, what does this mean and how do we relate this to non-action and worrying? First of all, again, this idea of crossing a bridge when you come to it recognizes that choices can only be made in specific moments in which those choices can be converted to action (i.e. choice and action, and thus time, are inseparable). Second, this can be seen as encouraging the idea of waiting, i.e. non-action. It tells you that you can't decide yet. It is not time to act, you have to wait until you can act, and trust that you are going to do the right thing at the time. Third, worrying, then, is an early and nervous anticipation of a bridge, so to speak. We know the moment in time in which we can take action is approaching, but the uncertain nature of that impending moment is disconcerting. It is hard to trust that we are going to get things done. Because when we think about it, it seems daunting. I dunno, this all feels very incomplete and sketchy to me. But, one thing I can say for sure, thinking about doing things is way harder than actually doing things. Worrying is harder than doing. Waiting is harder than arriving at moments of action.

Jeez, very related idea. When Cioran says that wisdom is 'non-action as first impulse' I think that is important. To have a frame of mind that doesn't worry, that is okay with uncertainty, that trusts itself to move from moment to moment knowing that it will handle whatever comes up; I think that is what this means. That we need to cultivate a frame of mind in which we don't lash out physically, but we take things as they are and we do what we will. Having plans can hinder things. Having a strategy seems deluded and unnecessary. The unfolding of moments always changes our plans. Better to rely on your ability to act on the fly. Better to just let things come and trust yourself to do what you need to do.

So let me try to wrap up somehow... I think a lot of the nihilistic stuff I have been reading lately has many parallels with Buddhism, Taoism, etc. Mainly in their emphasis on the non-existence of the self, the importance of waiting (non-action), and especially the relationship between waiting and choice, non-action and action.

Essentially, action flows from non-action. We can only make choices when the moment to choose comes. And we can only get to that moment of choice by waiting for that moment to come. So when we are up late at night worrying about what job to apply to, or where to move to, or what to do next, it is probably better to go to sleep and wait for a moment in which you are capable of taking action. Sure, you could apply for a job at 3 AM. Or you could make the moment for choice come sooner. But I bet there are many situations in which worrying is nothing but trying to force a choice that hasn't reached its proper moment in time.

So it comes back to waiting, being okay with uncertainty, and trusting that you will do the right thing when the moment comes.

One closing quotation that I read after writing all this that demonstrates the importance of waiting and choice etc.: "Time, fertile in resources, more inventive and more charitable than we think, possesses a remarkable capacity to help us out, to afford us at any hour of the day some new humiliation."

Time solves more problems than man ever will. Someone said that, too. I won't look it up now. But, time, waiting, choice, acting, all these things are wrapped up. They can't be separated.

Time and choice, acting and not acting, thinking and doing.

I like waiting. I like not reading. I like not thinking. I like not speaking. I like not writing.

They always bring me back to doing, reading, thinking, speaking, writing.