Ch 5 What is to be done? How to respond to Nihilism Flashcards
(12 cards)
So what at its core is the problem that Kant has bequeathed to his successors and which he grapples with in the third critique and which is at the core of Jacobi’s criticism of Kant and Fichte?
The problem might now be put in the following way: the Kantian critique of metaphysics, if justified, achieves the remarkable feat of showing both the cognitive meaninglessness of the traditional claims of speculative, dogmatic metaphysics, while establishing the regulative moral necessity for the primacy of practical reason (that is, the concept of freedom). This raises the following question: how is freedom to be instantiated or to take effect in the world of nature, if the latter is governed by causality and mechanistically determined by the laws of nature? How is the causality of the natural world reconcilable with what Kant calls ‘the causality of freedom’?
How does the author allude to Emerson alluding to Kanye third critique?
How is genius to be turned into practical power?
What does the legacy of Kant invoke?
individual freedom reduced to an abstraction in the face of an indifferent world of objects that are available to one – at a price – as commodities? Ie nihilism - a concept that is absolutely decisive for a whole range of 20th-century Continental thinkers: Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva. Namely that the recognition of the subject’s freedom goes hand in hand with the collapse of moral certainty in the world.
Who gives fullest philosophical statement of nihilism
Nietzsche
What is difference between Russian and German nihilism?
in the German version nihilism is largely a metaphysical or epistemological issue, whereas in the Russian it has a more obviously socio-political dimension. Russian nihilism is the expression of a radically sceptical, anti-aesthetic, utilitarian, and scientistic world-view. Ie art is not beauty but expression of tastes of particular class at particular point.
Nietzsche’s conception the highest values devalue themselves ie god is dead we killed him
namely that the Christian-Moral interpretation of the world is driven by a will to truthfulness, but that this very will to truth eventually turns against the Christian interpretation of the world by finding it untrue. That is to say, Christian metaphysics turns on the belief in a true world that is opposed to the false world of becoming that we inhabit here below. Thus, and this is the paradox, the will for a moral interpretation or valuation of the world now appears to be a will to untruth. But seriously, the essential point to grasp here is that nihilism is not simply the negation of the Christian-Moral interpretation of the world, but its consequence.
What is moral revaluation?
Nietzsche’s solution. His solution to the nihilism which is itself a consequence of the kantian critique of metaphysics. Nihilism is a consequence of moral valuation. My values no longer have a place in this world. Nietzsche resists nihilism.
What is Nietzsche’s doctrine addressing the problem?
Eternal return.
What is the double failure that must be recognised if we are to understand the historical and social condition of which nihilism is the diagnosis.
- The values of modernity or Enlightenment do not connect with the fabric of moral and social relations, with the stuff of everyday life. That is, they fail to produce a new mythic or rational totality, what the authors of ‘System-Programme’ (see pp. 129–31) view as the need for a mythology of reason. In other words, Kant leaves us with a series of unreconciled dualisms. The moral values of Enlightenment (and this is the core of Hamann’s and Hegel’s critique of Kant which is inherited by the young Marx – where Enlightenment values becomes bourgeois values) lack any effectiveness, any connection to social praxis.
- However, not only do the moral values of Enlightenment fail to connect with the fabric of moral and social relations, but – worse still – they lead instead to the progressive degradation of those relations through processes that we might call, with Max Weber, rationalization, with Marx, capitalization, with Adorno and Horkheimer, instrumental rationality, and with Heidegger, the forgetfulness of Being. Such is Enlightenment’s fateful and paradoxical dialectic. As I see it, this is Jacobi’s key insight and we have seen it unravelling through the story I have been telling.
How do philosophers respond to nihilism?
Responding to nihilism in one form or another is to the author the thread running through continental. For some philosophy itself has conspired Nietzsche. So there is a lot of looking at non-philosophical discourses and practices that might respond to crisis of modern times. Nietzsche finds resources in the tragic thinking of the Attic Greeks, Heidegger finds it in the meditative thoughtfulness of poetic creation, Adorno finds it in the autonomy of high modernist art, Marx finds it in political economy, Freud finds it on the couch in the practice of psychoanalysis.
What are the two ways that thinkers have responded to nihilism?
after Hegel thinkers like Marx have progressive approach to modernity. Blends into approach of people like Weber and idc habermass. Philosophy and sociology talking to each other. Reactionary approach modernity like Heidegger, Spengler just direct download into social critique without mediation of sociology. So Heidegger takes his Phil approach to being into realm of culture ie technology and modernity bad. But both approaches responding to nihilism in different ways.
