The Most Dangerous Idea in History | Nihilism

0:00 the Absurd is born of the encounter between two opposed Concepts the human need for meaning and the apparent meaninglessness of the universe this quote sums up what many people take to be one of the key questions in philosophy what is the meaning of life and if there's no meaning how do we cope with it anecdotally it seems like an increasing number of people are giving up on this search entirely it is a common refrain to hear people say that nothing really matters and to proudly declare that they are nihilists this word nihilism it sets philosophers teeth on edge it is often thought to Herald the end of civilizations the decline of mankind into hopelessness and despair and to drive Ordinary People to take their own lives but for all of these predictions of Doom and Gloom I very

0:46 rarely see people analyze what nihilism means or give a theory of what it constitutes because doing so is far from easy and as we will see it is a complex and multi-dimensional Beast wrapped in deceptively simple clothing but delving a little deeper can reveal greater insights into existential philosophy and the issue of meaning itself get ready to learn why there are no total nihilists how we might need a touch of nihilism for a happy life and so much more before we get started I want to emphasize that this is just a sketch of a system that I hope that others can build upon and develop I'm not claiming that this is a comprehensive analysis of nihilism but rather a practical way of looking at the philosophy that I find generally helpful I'm going to begin by examining a few different figures we normally associate

1:32 with the term nihilism before looking at their shared properties to see if we can extract a helpful practical definition to use in our discussions but with that out of the way let's get stuck in one the total nihilist let's start by examining what I take to be the most extreme form of nihilism conceivable the belief that nothing yes nothing actually matters that is that every situation is equivalent to any other if tomorrow the Earth exploded or World Peace was established or your whole family vanished in a puff of smoke the total nihilist says that these all have equivalent value here there would be no reason to do one thing over another or prefer one thing or another having your leg chopped off would be just as good as life-saving surgery put simply the total nihilist believes that all value

2:18 statements are false and thus that everything that exists has exactly the same value namely none this is skepticism about value itself of course value is also a notoriously difficult term to pin down but for the purposes of this discussion I will Define it as an ultimate reason for action or preference so for a utilitarian happiness is valuable and for most Christians serving God is valuable now I want to draw the distinction here between disbelief in objective value and disbelief in value full stop someone like Jean Paul satra or n held that if you examined the world for Value facts you simply wouldn't find any but they would both hate to be described as nihilists they said we could provide life or the world with value ourselves in sra's case this could be done through a combination of living

3:04 freely ethically and authentically and for n it was achieved through the philosophically creative act of envisioning new values but as I see it the most extreme form of nihilism would reject even this I also want to touch upon a distinction here that will become very important later there are key differences between what I would call a theoretical total nihilist and a practical total nihilist the theoretical total nihilist is someone who would affirm the proposition that no value statements even subjective value statements are true but nonetheless this is not manifested in their actions they live breathe eat and act just like the rest of us to that extent their belief in total nihilism would be mostly idle they may internally believe that there are no ultimate reasons for acting but they do in fact act on some accounts of

3:49 belief this means that they don't really believe in total nihilism at all but are essentially pretending or deceiving themselves in much the same way that if I repeatedly told you that my camera was broken and yet Contin to record videos you would suspect that I did not actually believe that my camera was broken but was pretending for some reason or was mistaken about the contents of my belief on the other hand the Practical total nihilist would be someone who just does not act in any conscious fashion they would rot away unable to bring themselves to do anything at all they would not wash because they wouldn't value the state of being clean even subjectively they would not eat because they would not see the value in being satiated they would still have unconscious reflexes if you Chuck something at their face I'm sure that they would move out of the way before it hit them but anything that involved conscious decision- making would be

4:35 totally inert the closest thing I can think of to this state would be someone with truly debilitating depression but on the whole the total practical nihilist doesn't really exist for instance even actions that we associate with extreme nihilism such as suicide manifest a particular practical value judgment that it is better for them to die than to live likewise if you consciously pursue pleasure and avoid pain that too is an enacted value new judgment your actions manifest that pleasure is better than pain in your subjective experience this idea of practical belief I'm drawing on stems from the American pragmatist tradition and it probably has its neatest summation in the words of Charles Pierce every natural or inbred belief manifests itself in natural or inbred ways of acting which in fact constitute it as a belief habit that is for pier a belief

5:22 is a disposition for action for the pragmatists this made a lot of sense from a linguistic perspective what would be the point of having a word that referred to something essentially private unverifiable and inactive so for the pragmatist if you're not a practical total nihilist then you're not a total nihilist at all it's worth noting there are numerous objections to this as a full account of belief but I want to adopt it here as at least referring to a specific sub types of belief which I will refer to as practical beliefs and I think that on a practical level most people have something that compels them to act in some way even if they're not conscious of exactly what that is or how to articulate it otherwise we would just be reduced to two reflexes even if we get up and eat that would manifest a practical belief in the value of not being hungry I'm not suggesting that in eating we would be covertly asserting

6:08 value in some objective sense just that our belief habit would not be that of the Practical total nihilist we may still be theoretical total nihilists but I think the distinction is really important for instance I could imagine someone suffering from a neurological injury which prevented them from being motivated by anything without altering their theoretical belief in the inherent value of human life in that case they would be a practical total nihilist without being a theoretical total nihilist they would think that there are things worth being motivated by but they wouldn't in practice be motivated by them I think this theoretical practical distinction can be very helpful when talking about nihilism because often the two conversations of where the values exist and can you act like there are no values are sort of rolled into one however the total nihilist is not often what people mean when they talk about

6:54 nihilism the cultural image many of us have of a nihilist looks less like someone who struggles to act and more like someone who acts only for their own pleasure and this is just what we're going to look at next if you want to help me make more videos like this then consider subscribing to either my email list or my patreon the links are in the description two the moral nihilist in one of his lesser known works the philosophy of the budoir the marqui dard inserts a mock political pamphlet that called for the principles of the French Revolution to be extended to morality itself he praised the French revolutionaries for having seen through the meaninglessness of of the monarchy in the church but he urged them to go one step further and become moral nihilists as well and we get a good picture of what Dad thought this entailed in his other novels he portrays

7:40 people who refuse to bow down to the idea of virtue pursuing their own pleasure no matter who they hurt this is the second figure many people associate with the term nihilist someone that rejects any ethical meaning and instead pursues their own ends however this is a very different sort of nihilism from the type we looked at in the last section whereas before we looked at those who rejected the value of anything that is held that there were no facts about value here we see people simply reject values in the moral domain that is there are no valuable moral facts once more I think looking at the theoretical and practical dimensions of this position will be very helpful a theoretical moral nihilist might be someone like JL macki who argued that any moral statement is false he said that when I say murder is wrong I am ascribing a property of

8:26 wrongness to a certain act murder but then how would I verify this if I tagged along with the police to investigate the scene of a murder where would I find the wrongness in it macki says there's basically no evidence that moral properties exist in any factual sense so he holds all moral ascriptions as simply not true so the statement murder is wrong is strictly false meaning most people would not consider it a reason for action or preference having said that there is no evidence that macki actually lived like this for all intents and purposes he behaved like any other 20th century Oxford academic with many remarking on his politeness and charm this is in stark contrast to the Practical moral nihilist much like how the Practical total nihilist is not motivated by any fact the Practical

9:12 moral nihilist would not be motivated by any moral consideration they would see no particular value in being told that something was morally wrong and would not be swayed by anything we normally take to be an ethical concern if the feelings of others are taken into account it is not because they are considered valuable in an ethical sense but rather for some other reason maybe the nihilist is concerned about how they will feel after the fact or what the consequences for their actions will be they may have empathy but it would be empathy at the purely particular descriptive level rather than a general consideration about what is right for other people of course your definition of the Practical moral nihilist is going to depend on what you take to be a moral motivation for Action so if you disagree with the particulars of my characterization here that could be one reason why importantly this does not imply that the Practical moral nihilist

9:58 will not be motivated by many other factors stereotypically they might be concerned with their own pleasure and so pursue that indiscriminately as s suggested and to a certain extent enacted someone could be a practical nihilist in this sense and still be a totally law-abiding citizen it's just that it would be the fear of punishment keeping them in check rather than an agreement with the moral principles behind the law as you can see there is a large crossover between this position and egoistic Hedonism just because higher ethical principles are no longer motivating that doesn't mean that pleasure and pain won't have their compelling effects but equally the two positions are not equivalent someone could be entirely unmotivated by moral concerns yet still be extremely motivated by the pursuit of art for instance even if they didn't in turn find that art pleasurable again while

10:44 theoretical and practical moral nihilism can come together they are very much separable positions I would wager there are far more theoretical moral nihilist than there are practical moral nihilists and in theory someone could believe in moral facts and view those facts as valuable without finding them motivating in practice the character of Satan in Paradise Lost would be one such example he knows the moral laws of the universe but in practice he's not at all motivated to follow them in fact quite the opposite this separation can occur because of what on reflection is quite an obvious fact just because I think I have good reason to be motivated by something doesn't mean that I will be motivated by it as we can see this is a less extreme version of nihilism than the total nihilist I'm sure many would agree it is still a troubling philosophy to adopt at least in its practical form however now I want to examine a position

11:31 that used to uncontroversially be called nihilism but probably wouldn't be anymore because we have far more respect for this philosophy than people used to three the conventional nihilist the famous ancient Greek philosopher diogenes was perhaps the harshest cultural critic in history he held that almost all of the conventions of ancient Athens were either foolish or harmful or both where most mainstream philosophers thought it was an Athenian duty to get a job build a family and serve their city state diogenes rejected all of these he chose to live on the street urinate against walls and beg for food he was in the purest sense both a practical and theoretical conventional nihilist and if you want to learn more about him I've got a video right here or here I don't know what side it is on YouTube

12:17 conventional nihilism is a bit more difficult to clarify than the previous positions we've looked at because now we're in the realm of stances that are relatively popular at least in minor forms if someone accepts all the mores of their societ but takes issue with a particular definition of marriage are they a conventional nihilist probably not but if they rejected almost all of the social conventions that their Community upheld this might become an appropriate label this is because whereas the total nihilist or the moral nihilist reject whole classes of statements as meaningful or valuable the conventional nihilist is not rejecting propositions by type but rather individual conventions one by one in some ways the historical movement of Russian nihilism is actually a very good example of this this was a loose Congregation of social reformists political activists and radical

13:03 terrorists who wanted to overthrow the Zar and change large swayes of Russian Society many of these nihilists were not moral nihilists in any practical sense and seemed motivated by the belief that the hardship undergone by the Russian lower classes was wrong however they rejected a large proportion of Russian social conventions decrying them as either arbitrary or immoral thus seeing them as having no real value as a result we could call them nihilists about the conventions of Russian society and the theoretical practical distinction holds here as well on the one hand someone could say that societal conventions have no theoretical value and are largely arbitrary but still choose to take part in them because they personally find them enjoyable in a purely hedonistic fashion famously The avowed Atheist Richard Dawkins really enjoys the

13:48 Anglican Convention of Evenson even though he doesn't view the act of worshiping God through song as valuable there can also be practical conventional nihilists who like diogenes or the Russian nihilists refuse to play by societal rules who actively reject conventions in their behavior and as I touched upon at the beginning of this section you can have more extreme and moderate versions of this position while diynes rejected all social conventions in principle many Russian nihilists did not and in theory someone can be a nihilist about some conventions but hold others as motivating and or theoretically valuable there is a huge Gulf between I disagree with some of the social conventions around dinner parties and I want to destroy this entire civilization burn it all to the ground there is also some potential crossover between the conventional nihilist and the moral nihilist some thinkers hold a

14:35 metaethical position whereby moral facts are a form of conventional fact so saying murder is wrong would be a form of saying that murder is conventionally frowned upon if you hold this view morality and Convention would be subsumed within one category as would their corresponding types of nihilism it's worth noting that at this stage nihilism is robbed of some of its Terror whereas the total or moral nihilists seem inherently destructive to most people some conventional nihilists are seen in hindsight as Visionaries provided that their suggested conventional alterations are adopted and celebrated however as I said there is a big difference between someone who rejects the value of particular social conventions and someone who rejects the value of social convention altogether the first might be arguing for some progress within the current principles

15:21 of a given Society whereas the second is calling for the total dissolution of the society they target lastly this form of nihilism is clearly relative to a set of societal conventions so I could be considered a conventional nihilist regarding many societies I am not a part of yet I would almost certainly not be considered a conventional nihilist in the UK where I actually live but now let's move to pulling these threads together and coming up with a more precise way to think about this classic philosophy four the dimensions of nihilism now that we have a few case studies we can start to get a picture of what nihilism in general consists of and how we can make this concept a little bit more specific than it often appears in conversation the first thing I want to note is the plurality of nihilism nihilism does not so much seem like one

16:06 philosophy but a whole set of ideas which differ from one another in key ways the total nihilist believes and behaves very differently from the moral nihilist and the moral nihilist is also distinct from the conventional nihilist so what is it that links these disperate thoughts together well the first is historical context as is cantly argued in John Stewart's history nihilism as we know it today stem from a series of existential questions arising from the Enlightenment with the extreme growth of scientific knowledge came the first sensible proposition of atheism for thousands of years and with this in turn came urgent philosophical problems how should humans live without a Creator how do we make sense of the value of life without immortality how should we ground our moral system in secular ways many of the ideas people took value in and

16:52 motivated their behavior on a practical level were now being called into question and this spawned a whole series of intellectual movements we group Under The Heading nihilism but I am no historian I want to look at the logical and philosophical similarities between these ideas the first of which is that they all involve the rejection of value in some way the total nihilist rejects the very existence of value the moral nihilist rejects the value of morality and so on they do not find these to be compelling intellectual reasons for acting then the other side of this coin is nihilism practical Dimension where someone is simply not motivated by a given idea or consider as we've seen these positions are clearly closely linked but they also do come apart because our rational cognitive side is not always in the driver's seat for instance I could

17:38 intellectually reject the value of eating asking what's the point if I'm going to die one day anyway and saying it may as well be sooner rather than later but when I get hungry I'm still very likely to have a snack because my instinctive hunger drive just does not care whether I see the reasoned value in eating but since this rejection of value can be applied to many different types of consideration another aspect of nihilism reveals itself the proposition relativity of nihilism it seems strictly speaking calling someone a nihilist only makes sense if you specify what they are a nihilist about unless they are a total nihilist and not many people are it makes sense to specify which particular values they are objecting to someone may be an nihilist about God either believing that he doesn't exist or if he does that he doesn't provide a reason

18:24 for our actions but that does not necessarily mean that they will be annihilist about morality for instance Christopher Hitchens was famously an atheist but he would also talk at length about the historical evils he saw religious groups as enacting so he can't be a nihilist about morality otherwise this would cease to make sense likewise someone could be a genuine nihilist about morality disbelieving in moral facts entirely while for this very reason valuing social Convention as the fragile war that separates us from chaos this analysis also gives us a new perspective on the existential crisis it seems like in this case something that previously provided value or motivation has now gone and it's left a philosophical hole in its wake so someone losing their faith might have an existential crisis in response to this newfound nihilism about God and if

19:11 someone's whole family dies in a car crash then that's likely to give them an existential crisis because a huge source of meaning in their life has now vanished and they would not know what to do so we can make the concept of an existential crisis a bit more precise by saying it is a situation where the supply for Value in life does not meet the demand some philosophies react to this problem by raising the supply like when kard suggests that we find new value in faith or when Nicha says we should construct new values to replace the old ones left in the wake of the death of God but others respond by lowering the demand like when kamu asks that we move past the search for meaning entirely either way the shortfall in value is dispensed with and the existential crisis is resolved then we could describe a lot of existential crisis as nihilism about an area of life

19:58 in which someone wants to take value again I'm not suggesting that this is an airtight analysis of an existential crisis but I think it is another way of looking at it and one that brings a normally quite nebulous concept a bit more down to earth additionally since someone can value something to a greater or lesser extent nism becomes gradable say that you and I both take some value in the role of family in our lives but for you it is the center of your entire existence everything you do is in service to your family and you would be willing to endure great hardship if only it was for their benefit on the other hand in this scenario I might take a lot of value in my family but still hold some things as even higher than that say an ethical system or loyalty to my Society it would make sense to describe me as more nihilistic about the value of

20:43 my family than you are about yours since nihilism on our analysis essentially fills the Gap where value is not found of course a much more natural way of expressing this same thought is that you value your family more this also highlights a fact that is upon reflection quite obvious but is rarely brought up in existential discussions it is often very helpful to be nihilistic about certain things when satra says that we should not imbue societal roles with undue value and instead recognize our radical Freedom he is essentially advocating a form of nihilism about societal roles he is saying they are worth less than we normally think they are likewise when a stoic philosopher like Marcus arelius advises that we should not value the opinions of others he is saying we should be a nihilist about those facts and this slightly more atic view of nihilism can be very

21:30 helpful in philosophical discussions about the topic when someone like dovi says that atheism will lead to nihilism which will lead to people rejecting any sort of moral value which will lead to societal chaos we can interpret him as saying that a theoretical nihilism about God will lead to a theoretical nihilism about morals which will lead to a practical nihilism about morals which will lead to societal breakdown since we now have specific definitions for the nihilism involved it becomes much easier to evaluate the argument rather than end up lost in a debate about terminology to be even more precise on our analysis of nihilism for any given proposition or set of propositions we can CHS the nihilism value on a two-dimensional Matrix kind of like the political Compass if you've ever come across one of those we can have the x-axis representing practical nihilism and the

22:15 y-axis representing theoretical nihilism so in the top right hand corner would be extreme practical and theoretical nalism about a given proposition or set of propositions where they are both practically unmotivating and also Al theoretically devalued whereas in the top left we would have propositions that are theoretically devalued but are still found motivating on a practical level of course you could use the same diagram to chart value by just flipping the Matrix around on its Left Right diagonal as I said at the beginning I'm not suggesting this is some foolproof analysis of the concept of nihilism what I am hoping is that we as a philosophical Community can use and improve on analyses like this in order to bring what is normally a vague and slightly illd defined concept back into the realm of specific conversation and thus make our discussions about it

23:02 considerably easier and hopefully this will mean that coming up with solutions to the genuine problems that nihilism poses both at the individual and the social level will become that bit more likely if you want more of this analytic philosophy applied to Everyday Concepts then click here where we apply it to human Free Will and stick around for more on thinking to improve your life