Worldly Nihilism and Theological Nihilism — A Possible Definition

Abstract

What is nihilism? Nihilism is a feeling. Nihilism is a fact. Both things concern existence, human dasein, or as Sartre says, taking up a fundamental concept from Heidegger¹, “Man is the being through whom nothingness comes to the world” [3]. Which, furthermore, means that the “world” in reality has no knowledge of nothingness. Presence as such — “being” — does not know, nor can it know nihilism, a problem regarding nothingness, as its absence having been thought of, in general, as thought, is a presence, and declares that in our “we are,” being as such always goes on, and surpasses us. On the pathway of truth — i.e., of the manifestation that takes form in thought — nothingness does not exist, it cannot be investigated, it cannot be found:

Come now, I will tell you — and bring away my story safely when you have heard it — the only ways of inquiry there are to think: the one, that it is and that it is not possible for it not to be, is the path of Persuasion (for it attends upon Truth), the other, that it is not and that it is necessary for it not to be, this I point out to you to be a path completely unlearnable, for neither may you know that which is not (for it is not to be accomplished) nor may you declare it [4]².

“Das Seiende wird doch durch die Angst nicht vernichtet, um so das nichts übrigzulassen. Wie soll es das auch, wo sich doch die Angst gerade in der völligen Ohnmacht gegenüber dem Seienden im Ganzen befindet. Vielmehr bekundet sich das Nichts eigens mit und an dem Seienden als einementgleitenden imGanzen [...] wir kämen auch mit einer solchen Verneinung, die das Nichts ergeben sollte, jederzeit zu spät. Das Nichts begegnet vordem schon [...] es begegne “in eins mit” dem entgleitenden Seienden im Ganzen,” [1], pp. 113–114. Bergson in Creative Evolution had already contested the idea of absolute nothingness: “The idea of the absolute nought, in the sense of the annihilation of everything, is a self-destructive idea, a pseudo-idea, a mere word. If suppressing a thing consists of replacing it by another, if thinking an absence of one thing is only possible by the more or less explicit representation of the presence of some other thing, if, in short, annihilation signifies before anything else substitution, the idea of an “annihilation of everything” is as absurd as that of a square circle [...] there is more, and not less, in the idea of an object conceived as “not existing” than in the idea of this same object conceived as “existing”; for the idea of the object “not existing” is necessarily the idea of the object “existing” with, in addition, the representation of an exclusion of this object by the actual reality taken in block” [2], p. 308 and p. 311. Nothingness, as long as there is a reason around which lives and thinks — and if it were the Reason of God as the good will that creates — is always and only a being of the reason. Nothing is more loosened, absolutus, from reason than nothingness, and vice versa: we hang from nothingness like the horizon of nothing, of the nothing-making of our being, and this horizon is the other face — like a source — of the way, as we know and see, of possible ways of being, of our ways of being; and nothingness hangs from, depends on our reason which opens our eyes to life and so it becomes reason.

p. 152. As for the Platonic “parricide” of this Parmenidean idea, it is necessary to weaken the meaning of alternative in the sense of an opposition as the principle between the two conceptions of nothingness which have appeared in the history of philosophy — Nothingness as not-being, i.e., nothingness as otherness or negation, one headed by Parmenides, the other by Plato. The Platonic idea expressed in the Sophist where the being of the not-being is admitted, defining nothingness in the relational sense as othemess: “Then it unquestionably follows that not-being is, throughout all our kinds, no less than in the case of motion. Throughout the whole series, the character of otherness makes each of them other thon being, and consequently not-being. Hence by parity of reason we may correctly call them one and all, in this sense, nonentity, though we may also speak of all, by participating in being, as being and entities” [5], pp. 163–164. “Parricide” (Soph. 242 d) — whereby with this standpoint Plato would seem to have decided — and upon closer observation, he is far less parricidal than he appears, as Plato does none other than arrive at the logical consequence of the truth expressed by Parmenides. Precisely because not-being cannot be predicated or thought of in the sense, to subtract it from the flatus vocis to which it is condemned, and rightly so, by Parmenides’ thesis, it is necessary to place it within the context of a relationship with otherness. Nothingness is the fruit of the fact that every positive reality produces a negation, i.e., it is really no-thing, but this negativization in being (as a power of the negative which pro-duces the world of appearance in its multiplicity), which opens the world — to conscience — as the kingdom of Opinion, is possible only on the basis of the original “position” of being, as its being always placed, whose truth as an original and originating manifestation, kept in thought by Persuasion.