The Most Dangerous Idea in History | Nihilism

Source: The Most Dangerous Idea in History | Nihilism, Unsolicited advice, 23:25, uploaded 2024-04-07, Watch Later position 935.

The video opens with Albert Camus’s account of the absurd as the meeting between the human need for meaning and the apparent meaninglessness of the universe. That meeting gives nihilism its force. People ask what life means, then sometimes answer that nothing matters. The word also carries a large fear: it seems to promise civilisational decline, despair, and suicide. The video tries to make the idea precise enough to discuss.

The author presents the result as a practical sketch rather than a complete analysis. The route runs through three figures associated with nihilism. Each rejects value in a different domain, and each can be separated into a theoretical position and a practical one.

Total nihilism

The total nihilist holds that nothing has value. Every situation therefore has the same value, which means that the Earth exploding, world peace arriving, or a family disappearing would be equivalent. Losing a leg would have the same value as life-saving surgery. Human experience can distinguish these events whilst the total nihilist denies that any value statement is true.

The video defines value as an ultimate reason for action or preference. Happiness serves as value for a utilitarian, whilst serving God serves as value for many Christians. Sartre and Nietzsche reject objective values, yet they leave room for people to create values through free, ethical, authentic living or through the imaginative construction of new values. Total nihilism removes that option as well. It rejects subjective value along with objective value.

The theoretical and practical versions then pull apart. A theoretical total nihilist accepts that no value statement, including a subjective one, is true. That belief can remain idle whilst the person eats, works, and acts. A practical total nihilist would have no conscious reason to do anything. They would not wash because cleanliness has no value, and they would not eat because satiety has no value. Reflexes would remain. Throwing something at their face would still produce an evasive movement. Conscious action would stop.

The video treats this practical position as almost impossible to find. Suicide expresses a preference for death over continued life. Pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain express preferences as well. Even eating shows a practical belief in the value of avoiding hunger. The closest real condition may be severe depression, although the analogy has limits.

This account draws on the American pragmatist idea that a belief exists as a disposition to act. Charles Peirce gives the position its clearest form: a belief becomes a habit of action. The video leaves broader questions about belief open and uses practical belief as a narrower category for this discussion. A person could theoretically believe that human life has inherent value whilst an injury to the nervous system removed every source of motivation. That person would be a practical total nihilist without being a theoretical one.

The distinction matters because debates about nihilism often combine two questions. One asks whether values exist. The other asks whether anyone can act as if values have disappeared. The second question exposes why total practical nihilism rarely describes a living person.

Moral nihilism

The Marquis de Sade supplies the next figure. In The Philosophy of the Bedroom, the video says, he extends the French Revolution’s attack on the meaning of monarchy and the church into morality. His characters reject virtue and pursue pleasure regardless of the harm they cause. This position rejects value in the moral domain whilst leaving other sources of motivation available.

J. L. Mackie represents the theoretical form. When someone says that murder is wrong, Mackie asks where the property of wrongness can be found. A police investigation can establish that a murder happened. It cannot point to wrongness as a factual property in the scene. Mackie therefore treats moral statements as false. The video also notes that his life gives little evidence of practical moral nihilism. He lived as a polite Oxford academic, which suggests that a theory about moral facts can coexist with ordinary conduct.

The practical moral nihilist lacks motivation from moral considerations. Other motives can still guide their behaviour. They may care about another person’s feelings because they fear the consequences, because they dislike their own later feelings, or because empathy affects them at a descriptive and particular level. Their concern has no general claim about what is right for other people. They may pursue pleasure without limit, although pleasure is only one possible motive. Someone could remain law-abiding because they fear punishment whilst finding the moral principles behind the law unmotivating.

The position overlaps with egoistic hedonism, yet the two ideas come apart. A person can disregard moral reasons and still pursue art, even when art gives them no pleasure. The theoretical and practical versions also come apart in the other direction. Someone can believe that moral facts exist and regard them as valuable whilst failing to act from them. The video’s example is Satan in Paradise Lost, who knows the universe’s moral laws and remains unmoved by them.

Moral nihilism therefore covers a smaller field than total nihilism. Its practical form still sounds destructive because moral reasons have lost their force. Its theoretical form describes a claim about moral facts and leaves a person’s other motives untouched.

Conventional nihilism

Diogenes gives the clearest case of conventional nihilism. He treated much of ancient Athenian life as foolish or harmful. His contemporaries often saw work, family, and service to the city-state as duties. Diogenes lived on the street, urinated against walls, and begged for food. The video presents him as both a theoretical and practical nihilist about social convention.

This form is harder to define because people often reject individual conventions. A disagreement with one account of marriage remains too narrow for the label. Rejecting most of the conventions upheld by a community may justify it. Conventional nihilism concerns individual conventions one by one. Total nihilism and moral nihilism reject whole classes of statements.

The Russian nihilist movement shows how the position can combine social and political resistance with moral commitment. Its reformers, activists, and radical terrorists wanted to overthrow the Tsar and change Russian society. Many of them treated the suffering of the lower classes as wrong, so they retained moral motivation. Their nihilism concerned the conventions they saw as arbitrary or immoral.

The theoretical and practical versions appear here as well. Someone may regard social conventions as arbitrary whilst taking part in them because they enjoy them. The video gives Richard Dawkins’s pleasure in Anglican evensong as an example. An atheist can reject worship as a source of religious value and still enjoy the convention of singing in church. A practical conventional nihilist rejects the rules in conduct, as Diogenes and some Russian nihilists did.

The position also has degrees. Diogenes rejects social convention in principle. A person can reject a small group of conventions whilst holding others as valuable. The difference between disliking dinner-party manners and wanting to burn down a civilisation belongs to the scale of the rejection. Conventional nihilism can support reform when it targets particular rules. It can call for social dissolution when it treats convention as a whole as worthless.

The label remains relative to a society. Someone can reject the conventions of communities they do not belong to and still fit comfortably within the conventions of their own society. The video uses its author’s life in the UK as the example. The same person might count as a conventional nihilist when discussing another society and lose that description at home.

Moral and conventional nihilism can also overlap when moral facts are understood as conventional facts. On that view, saying that murder is wrong means that a community conventionally condemns murder. Moral value and social convention then belong to one category. This overlap makes clear why the object of nihilism must always be named.

The dimensions of nihilism

The three cases suggest that nihilism is a group of related positions rather than one philosophy. The video places its modern form in the intellectual changes that followed the Enlightenment. The growth of scientific knowledge made atheism a defensible position for the first time in European intellectual history, which raised questions about life without a creator, value without immortality, and secular grounds for morality. The video gestures toward a history by John Stewart here, without giving a title or full reference. It presents the historical claim as context, then turns to the logical relations between the positions.

Each type rejects value in some area. The total nihilist rejects value itself. The moral nihilist rejects moral value. The conventional nihilist rejects the value of particular social conventions. Each type also has a practical dimension that concerns motivation. Theoretical rejection and practical motivation often travel together, yet they can separate because reflective reasoning does not always control instinct.

The video illustrates this with hunger. Someone can reason that eating has no value because death will arrive eventually and even conclude that an earlier death would make equal sense. Hunger can still lead that person to eat. The body supplies a motive that survives the intellectual rejection of food’s value.

This makes nihilism relative to a proposition. Calling someone a nihilist requires an object. A person may be a nihilist about God whilst retaining moral commitments. Christopher Hitchens serves as the example: his atheism sits alongside his sustained criticism of the harm caused by religious groups. Someone can reject moral facts and still value social convention because they see it as a fragile barrier against chaos.

The same structure gives existential crisis a more precise meaning. A crisis begins when the supply of value in a person’s life falls below the demand for it. Losing religious faith can remove a source of value. The death of an entire family can remove another. The video describes three broad responses. Kierkegaard raises the supply through faith. Nietzsche asks people to create new values after the death of God. Camus lowers the demand by releasing the search for a final meaning.

Nihilism is also gradable. Two people can value family whilst assigning it different weight. For one person, family may organise every decision and justify any hardship. Another person may value family greatly whilst placing an ethical system or loyalty to society above it. The video calls the second person more nihilistic about family because the gap between family and the highest value is larger. In ordinary language, the same point would mean that the first person values family more.

This partial nihilism can help with philosophical life. Sartre’s call to avoid giving social roles more value than they deserve becomes a form of nihilism about those roles. Marcus Aurelius’s advice about other people’s opinions becomes a form of nihilism about those opinions. The term becomes useful when it specifies what has lost value and by how much.

The video applies the distinction to the familiar warning that atheism produces nihilism, which produces moral rejection, which produces social chaos. In its precise form, the claim would involve theoretical nihilism about God, theoretical nihilism about morality, and practical nihilism about moral reasons. Each step could then receive separate examination. The debate gains an object at every stage.

The final proposal is a two-dimensional matrix for any proposition or group of propositions. The horizontal axis represents practical nihilism and the vertical axis represents theoretical nihilism. The upper-right corner contains positions that treat a proposition as theoretically devalued and practically unmotivating. The upper-left contains positions that reject its theoretical value whilst still finding it motivating in practice. The same diagram can represent value by reversing its direction across the diagonal.

The author leaves the system open to revision. Its purpose is to turn a vague word into a set of specific questions, which may make the personal and social problems associated with nihilism easier to address. The proposed map remains a sketch. Its value depends on whether the distinctions help people argue about the thing they actually reject.