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.” It is, however, a brand of ethics that had been all but abandonedin the wake of Kant and rationalism and Mill and utilitarianism in ethics.It is this other brand of ethics, for which Nietzsche quite understandablyfailed to find a name (“master morality” is certainly misleading, “noble mo-rality” is not much better) that I would like to defend here.The idea of Nietzsche as an “affirmative” philosopher is blocked by thecommon association of Nietzsche’s name and “nihilism.” Nihilism, obvious etymology aside, does not mean simply “accepting nothing.” Like most philosophical terms raised to an isolated and artificial level of abstraction, thisone actually does its work in particular contexts, in specific perspectives.It often functions as a kind of accusation, a bit of abuse.Some traditionalbut much-in-the-news Christians use the term as a more or less crude syn-onym for “secular humanism,” on the (false) assumption that a personwithout God must be a person without Christian values as well.(The hys-terical argument by the increasingly mad Ivan Karamazov, “if there is noGod, then everything is permitted,” is often quoted in this context.) But notethat I say “Christian” values, for the accuser might well allow, indeed insist,that the nihilist does have values, subjective, self-serving and secularly nar-row-minded though they be.(Ivan’s no-account brother Mitya had values,something along the lines of money, wine, and women.Nevertheless a good Christian would say that Mitya was just as much a nihilist as his brotherIvan.) Similarly, an orthodox Jewish friend of mine calls “nihilists” any peo-ple without a self-conscious sense of tradition, assuming that others mustlack in their experience what he finds so essential in his own.Marxists usethe term (sometimes but not always along with “bourgeois individualism”)to indict those who do not share their class-conscious values.Aesthetes useit to knock the philistines, and my academic colleagues use it to chastiseanyone with “looser” standards and higher grading averages than them-selves.Stanley Rosen attacks nihilism at book length without ever sayingexactly what’s wrong with it, except that it falls far short of his search forHegelian absolute truth.The term itself was of recent origins when Nietzsche picked it up to-ward the end of the nineteenth century.The classic characterization ofthe spirit of nihilism comes from Ivan Turgenev, a contemporary and one-time ally of Dostoyevsky.Turgenev popularized the term “nihilist” in hisnovel Fathers and Sons ().There, young Arkady describes his friendBazarov as a “nihilist,” as a man who does not bow down before any au-thority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence thatprinciple is enshrined in.As it stands, this characterization captures thespirit of the entire Enlightenment from Descartes to Kant.We would take itas a statement of healthy skepticism.Nevertheless, when the novel waspublished in Russia it caused a furor, and Turgenev was forced to flee.So LIVING WITH NIETZSCHEby the time Nietzsche picks up the term, it already has a rich polemical past.Unlike Descartes or Kant, however, Nietzsche would turn to neither Godnor reason in his search for values, and so his rejection of “authority” isconsiderably more radical than theirs.But nihilism is not just a skepticalphilosophy.It is, as the term developed and became widely used, a culturalexperience, a profound sense of disappointment, not only, as some ethicistswould have it, in the failure of philosophy to justify moral principles, but inthe fabric of life as such, the “widespread sensibility of our age” sympatheti-cally described by Camus half a century later in his Myth of Sisyphus.It is also, Nietzsche keeps reminding us, a stance to be taken up as well as aphenomenon to be described.Zarathustra, in one of his more belligerentmoments, urges us to “push what is falling” and, in his notes, Nietzscheurges to promote “a complete nihilism,” in place of the incomplete nihilismin which we now live. Here again we note Nietzsche’s self-conscious “timeliness,” and, curiously, his devotion to a tradition dedicated to completeness(albeit perverse) in ethics.But Schopenhauer, in particular, was not somuch describing the world as projecting his own bleak vision upon it.But if Nietzsche has made us aware of anything in ethics, it is the impor-tance of perspectives, the need to see all concepts and values in context.(This has been the concern of all of the preceding chapters.) How odd, then,that many of the key concepts of Nietzsche’s own philosophy have been soroutinely blown up to absolute status, that is, nonperspectival, valid inde-pendently, and even devoid of context.Nihilism, in particular, is an accusa-tion always made in context, presupposing a perspective.Outside of all con-texts, it is nothing (which, of course, leads to some quaint and cuteParmenidean wordplay.) But as Maurice Blanchot has written, nihilism isa particular achievement of a particular sort of society. It becomes a world-hypothesis only at the expense of losing what is most urgent and cleansingin Nietzsche, the attack on the transcendental pretension of understandingthe world “in itself” on the basis of our own limited and limiting moral ex-perience.For Nietzsche, nihilism is a concrete cultural experience, not anabstract metaphysical hypothesis.In the pseudo-book of Nietzsche’s collected notes, The Will to Power, there are many indications about the scope and nature of the nihilism he describes.But perhaps the most important point is this one: for the most part,Nietzsche describes nihilism as a concrete cultural phenomenon rather thanendorsing it as a philosophy
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