Mr Zapffe must have been fun at parties. I'm always cautious of the tendancy of nihilism to collapse into pessimism. As a purview, nihilism has this one disadvantage - it possesses few resources for the provision of consolation. Any major religion (including the various rationalisms) is far better equipped to assuage, conceal, disguise or otherwise mitigate the carnage of our mortality, whereas nihilism finds itself obliged to rather brutally confess to it in the starkest term available. Nihilism you might concede is somehow faithful to the truth in this, but I can't see what good it would do to someone who's world has just lost its meaning. Nihilism, after all, is not the idea that there is no meaning to life, but that there is no essential, universal meaning. For me this means that meaning is born as much as it dies, it mutates and glows, it turns and curdles, it dawns and sets and explodes and freezes and rots and blooms and communicates in all the illicit metaphors of nature. If we happen to need meaning, then that is our nature... the only thing that has changed lately is our means of manufacturing that meaning.
Reply
Leave a comment