Hubert Dreyfus
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| - | + | '''Hubert Lederer Dreyfus''' (born October 15, 1929) is an [[American philosopher]]. He is a professor of philosophy at the [[University of California, Berkeley]]. | |
| - | Kierkegaard, an advocate of a [[philosophy of life]], generally argued against levelling and its nihilist consequence, although he believed it would be "genuinely educative to live in the age of levelling [because] people will be forced to face the judgement of [levelling] alone." George Cotkin asserts Kierkegaard was against "the standardization and levelling of belief, both spiritual and political, in the nineteenth century [and he] opposed tendencies in mass culture to reduce the individual to a cipher of conformity and deference to the dominant opinion." In his day, [[tabloid (newspaper format)|tabloids]] (like the Danish magazine ''[[Corsaren]]'') and apostate [[Christianity]] were instruments of levelling and contributed to the "reflective [[apathy|apathetic]] age" of 19th century [[Europe]]. Kierkegaard argues that individuals who can overcome the levelling process are stronger for it and that it represents a step in the right direction towards "becoming a true self." [[Hubert Dreyfus]] and Jane Rubin argue that Kierkegaard's interest, "in an increasingly nihilistic age, is in '''''how''''' we can recover the sense that our lives are meaningful". | + | |
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| - | Note however that Kierkegaard's meaning of "nihilism" differs from the modern definition in the sense that, for Kierkegaard, levelling led to a life lacking meaning, purpose or value, whereas the modern interpretation of nihilism posits that there was never any meaning, purpose or value to begin with. | + | |
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| - | ===Nietzsche=== | + | |
| - | :''[[Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche]]'' | + | |
| - | Nihilism is often associated with the German philosopher [[Friedrich Nietzsche]], who provided a detailed diagnosis of nihilism as a widespread phenomenon of Western culture. Though the notion appears frequently throughout Nietzsche's work, he uses the term in a variety of ways, with different meanings and connotations, all negative. Karen Carr describes Nietzsche's characterization of nihilism "as a condition of tension, as a disproportion between what we want to value (or need) and how the world appears to operate." When we find out that the world does not possess the objective value or meaning that we want it to have or have long since believed it to have, we find ourselves in a crisis. Nietzsche asserts that with the decline of Christianity and the rise of physiological decadence, nihilism is in fact characteristic of the modern age, though he implies that the rise of nihilism is still incomplete and that it has yet to be overcome. Though the problem of nihilism becomes especially explicit in Nietzsche's [[Nachlass|notebooks]] (published posthumously), it is mentioned repeatedly in his published works and is closely connected to many of the problems mentioned there. | + | |
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| - | Nietzsche characterized nihilism as emptying the world and especially human existence of meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value. This observation stems in part from Nietzsche's [[perspectivism]], or his notion that "knowledge" is always by someone of some thing: it is always bound by perspective, and it is never mere fact. Rather, there are interpretations through which we understand the world and give it meaning. Interpreting is something we can not go without; in fact, it is something we ''need''. One way of interpreting the world is through morality, as one of the fundamental ways in which people make sense of the world, especially in regard to their own thoughts and actions. Nietzsche distinguishes a morality that is strong or healthy, meaning that the person in question is aware that he constructs it himself, from weak morality, where the interpretation is projected on to something external. Regardless of its strength, morality presents us with meaning, whether this is created or 'implanted,' which helps us get through life. | + | |
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| - | Nietzsche discusses Christianity, one of the major topics in his work, at length in the context of the problem of nihilism in his notebooks, in a chapter entitled "European Nihilism". Here he states that the Christian moral doctrine provides people with [[humanism|intrinsic value]], belief in God (which [[theodicee|justifies]] the evil in the world) and a basis for [[objectivity (philosophy)|objective knowledge]]. In this sense, in constructing a world where objective knowledge is possible, Christianity is an antidote against a primal form of nihilism, against the despair of meaninglessness. However, it is exactly the element of truthfulness in Christian doctrine that is its undoing: in its drive towards truth, Christianity eventually finds itself to be a construct, which leads to its own dissolution. It is therefore that Nietzsche states that we have outgrown Christianity "not because we lived too far from it, rather because we lived too close". As such, the self-dissolution of Christianity constitutes yet another form of nihilism. Because Christianity was an interpretation that posited itself as ''the'' interpretation, Nietzsche states that this dissolution leads beyond [[skepticism]] to a distrust of ''all'' meaning. | + | |
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| - | [[Stanley Rosen]] identifies Nietzsche's concept of nihilism with a situation of meaninglessness, in which "everything is permitted". According to him, the loss of higher metaphysical values which existed in contrast to the base reality of the world or merely human ideas give rise to the idea that all human ideas are therefore valueless. Rejection of idealism thus results in nihilism, because only similarly transcendent ideals would live up to the previous standards that the nihilist still implicitly holds. The inability for Christianity to serve as a source of valuating the world is reflected in Nietzsche's famous [[aphorism]] of the madman in ''[[The Gay Science]]''. The death of God, in particular the statement that "we killed him", is similar to the ''self''-dissolution of Christian doctrine: due to the advances of the sciences, which for Nietzsche show that man is the product of [[evolution]], that earth has no [[geocentrism|special place]] among the stars and that [[history]] is not [[progress (history)|progressive]], the Christian notion of God can no longer serve as a basis for a morality. | + | |
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Hubert Lederer Dreyfus (born October 15, 1929) is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.
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