In Our Time - Nihilism

Episode Date: November 16, 2000

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of Nihilism. The nineteenth-century philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, wrote, “There can be no doubt that morality will gradually perish: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe”. And, with chilling predictions like these, ‘Nihilism’ was born. The hard view that morals are pointless, loyalty is a weakness and ‘truths’ are illusory, has excited, confused and appalled western thinkers ever since. But what happened to Nietzsche’s revolutionary ideas about truth, morality and a life without meaning? Existentialism can claim lineage to Nietzsche, as can Post Modernism, but then so can Nazism. With so many interpretations, and claims of ownership from the left and the right, has anything positive come out of the great philosopher of ‘nothing’?With Rob Hopkins, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Birmingham; Professor Raymond Tallis, Doctor and Philosopher; Professor Catherine Belsey, University of Cardiff.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, U.K. forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, the 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, There can be no doubt that morality will gradually perish. This is the great spectacle in 100 acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe. And with chilling predictions like this, nihilism sped on its way.

The hard view that morals are pointless, loyalty is a weakness and truths are illusory. It's excited, confused and appalled Western thinkers ever since. But what happened to Nietzsche's revolutionary ideas about truth, morality and a life without meaning? Exessentialism can claim lineage to Nietzsche, as can post-modernism, but then so can Nazism. But so many interpretations and claims of ownership

from the left and the right has anything positive come out of the great philosopher of nothing. With me to discuss Nietzsche and nihilism are the philosopher Rob Hopkins from the University of Birmingham, Professor Raymond Talis, doctor, philosopher, and a critic of the post-modernists, and also with us is one of their staunch defenders, Professor Catherine Belzey from the University of Cardiff.

Let's talk first about Nietzsche and the Enlightenment. Nietzsche, the second half of the 19th century, German, Prussian, like his father, he died insane. Rob Hopkins, nihilism brings to mind despair and purposelessness and the love of destruction, How far are these central to Nietzsche's ideas? They're central, though, because not in the way that he supported those views in the end. He thought nihilism was a phenomenon of enormous cultural importance

that had come marked the development of Western civilization at a certain crucial point, but he thought it was a form of sickness, reflecting deep, powerful pressures within Western society, and he thought in the end this sickness had to be overcome. So his main goal was to try and understand what nihilism was, which was, as you say, the skepticism about morality having any justification, coupled to the thought that life itself has no meaning except any meaning we can give it, coupled to the idea that despair or some kind of abandonment of morality and values is the right reaction to have to those ideas,

Nietzsche accepted a lot of that, but thought in the end you had to do something better. You had to find some more positive response to the thoughts that nihism embodied. He's generally regarded as somebody almost entirely destructive. You've mentioned the word positive. Can you tell us why you're bringing that in this early on? Because Nietzsche thought of attitudes to big ideas of major cultural movements as essentially either life-affirming or life-denying. For him, Christianity was life-denying.

It valued another world, the world of the eternal, over this world. It valued asceticism, denial of the self, over letting the self run free. It tried to destroy the forces he thought were most natural and valuable in human life. So it was life-denying. Likewise, in the end, he thinks, science and the Enlightenment desire to know everything, is in a strange way, life denying. And he thought, if his philosophy has... Why did you think that was a desire to know everything was life denying?

Well, this is where things get a little complex. Ordinary people would think that was... Well, certainly our life denying. That's right. But Nietzsche thought... It's partly because science is the air of Christian rigor and honesty. And Nietzsche thinks that life is essentially deceitful so that those who seek truth at any price are going against the values that life embodies for Nietzsche.

I see. Raymond Tell us, in the will to power, Nietzsche wrote, quote, The highest values devalue themselves. The aim is lacking, and why finds no answer. What were these highest values he was talking about? And what does you mean by the highest values de-valued themselves? I think he's talking about two sorts of values.

The values of renunciation that Rob has just referred to, the Christian values, and also the value of the pursuit of disinterested truth, which have been characteristically the philosophical value or the value that had informed philosophical inquiry over the years. I think Rob's made a very good attempt to try and show Nietzsche as coherent, or indeed consistent, but actually

most of Nietzsche's views are profoundly incoherent. The thing is, why has he been so attractive, and why has he attracted so many different people? It's interesting that his incoherence is reflected in the very disparate sorts of people to whom he's appealed. I mean, what philosopher could be cited as an influence on George Bernard Shaw, Michel Foucault, Jack Kerouac, and so on, clearly somebody whose views are very difficult to pin down.

I mean, my own feeling about Nietzsche is that he's a bit like a Rorschach inkblot. You can read out of him what you put into him. But return to the theme of his incoherence, his whole attitude to the revaluation of all values. It was profoundly incoherent, because he wasn't just throwing away highest values or extreme values. He was also throwing away bourgeois values, the ordinary values of decency and so on. And he'd hoped that having created a sort of post-atomic wasteland, that he would create a brand new set of values. And the question is, where are those values going to come from? Well, alas, all they can come from is from basic appetites and instincts. And that is really where

Nietzsche has been a great inspiration to some of the most appalling things that happened in the century after his death. Well, I'm sure Rob Hopkins want to come back to that, but at the moment, Catherine Balsy, and nihilism as a term was first used in 1862 in the Russian novel Fathers and Sons. Do you think it belongs more to fiction than to philosophy? I think it, It might. It's hard to imagine that there could really be somebody who subscribe to no values, no convictions, no commitments at all. It's hard to imagine the psychology of such a person, let alone the philosophical position. What would you have to say? The extraordinary thing is that in fathers and sons, the self-proclaimed nihilists are the sons who are reacting against the authority of their parents. And the sympathy is with the nihilists, but the nihilists turn out to be good in line. Enlightenment figures. They're committed to science and knowledge. The hero is a medic who, in fact, dies on account of contracting typhoid from doing a post-mortem in order to advance his knowledge of medicine. So they're not, in fact, nihilists in the way that the word has come to be used. What happened, I think, was that when the notion had been created in fiction, then small groups of people in Russia began to call themselves nihilists for real. Do you think that Nietzsche tried to live without illusions? And if he did, do you admire that?

I think I admire the refusal of dogma. I think you could see it in terms of a long tradition of a difference within Western philosophy, which would go right back to Plato and Socrates. Nietzsche's resistance to Platonism, to the systematicity and dogmaticity of Platonism, could be aligned with Socrates. Plato was the great systematiser. He had theories about how things were. He knew about the ideas in the mind of God,

and he also imagined a republic in which he knew how things ought to be arranged in a utopian state. Socrates, on the other hand, skeptical, doubtful, questioning, always interrogating people's certainties and convictions, pushing them further back. And I think you could see the whole history

of Western philosophy in terms of that opposition between those two. figures. The ironic thing is that it was Socrates who was executed, not Plato. And you might say that if we'd got things the other way around, less damage would have been done. To that degree, I'd be with Nietzsche. Rob, you've been sitting very quietly after the full frontal attack by Raymond Talas on Nietzsche. You've been saving very well, and not much of it has been pulled out. But would you like to respond to what he was saying? Yeah, well, there are lots of things in what Raymond said. It's true that there are many conflicting strands in Nietzsche. It's true that he revels in the Easter Summit. extent. It's possible that he thought that he was deliberately setting out to present conflicting strands to stress one of his own views, which is that if you just try and go for a nice, clean system, you end up with illusion. But I think anyway, there are central strands in his

thinking that be reconciled one with another, and if you allow a bit for hyperbole and his devastating poetical twists and turns at various times and don't take them too literally, you get some kind of coherent body of thought. Is there a sense, Catherine Belsier, that Nietzsche tried to kill off the Enlightenment and the other. idea of progress which the Enlightenment carried? I think the Enlightenment itself, curiously, was a form of skepticism. But once that had settled down and been accepted for 200 years, it needed a new challenge. This is, in a way, how philosophy works, isn't it, that it constantly challenges existing dogma.

So whereas, for example, Locke had challenged the, had secularised, I suppose, philosophy, had challenged the theeocentric, universe. So at the end of the 19th century, the time had come, perhaps, to query the idea that there were foundations, grounds that you could appeal to, which would deliver truth. So what the Enlightenment had offered in place of God was various secular foundations, the moral law or reason, or the law of nature, laws of nature. And it seems to me that this will to truth that Nietzsche describes and deplores had maybe run its course in a way that made it necessary to rethink

the basic questions again. And to that extent, it seems to me that what he's doing is far from sick but is positively healthy. Can I say something here? The will to truth in a way, if you just say the will to truth has run its course, it sounds mad.

Truth is the obvious goal of all inquiry. You can't just jettison it while continuing to inquire. So whatever Nietzsche meant by attacking the will to truth. It can't have just been the thought that there is something out there called truth which we might or might not want. If we're going to inquire at all, as the Enlightenment and anything post-the-enlightenment suggests, you must aim your inquiries at something. The name for that thing is truth. It's not an optional extra in this respect.

One of the problems is Nietzsche undermined the will to truth by seeing behind it the will to power. And in fact, he was very influential in the 20th century suspicion towards the whole idea of disinterested inquiry. And the reason for this lies in another of his metaphysical world pictures, which is written down in a small fragment, which I don't think he published in his life called On Truth and Lie in an Extra Moral Sense. And the office is a fable.

He says on a remote planet, there was once a clever animal that invented knowledge. The remote planet is Earth, the clever animal is human beings. But of course, that knowledge wasn't about how things really were. That knowledge was a way of organizing, understanding of the universe to support the continuing life of that animal. The knowledge, if you like, was a form of adaptation

to ensure biological survival. This knowledge wasn't about truth. Truth, what seems to be truth, is actually all about survival and indeed the will to power. And that, again, is a very fundamental, very influential aspect of Nietzsche, which is incoherent,

because, of course, he's offered us a model of the relationship between the world to truth and the will to power, which we are expected to accept is objectively true, or we reject it. Taking up the will to power, in the world to power, Nietzsche wrote, quote, every belief considering something true is necessarily false because there's simply no true world. Rob Hopkins, what's your reaction to that? When we talk about truth, we need to distinguish different things. We might be saying when we're saying that truth is, there's no truth who might be saying there is no thing of a certain kind. There's no independent world.

It's quite separate from our beliefs. which it can conform to, and in that sense there's no truth. We might be saying that there is such a thing, but we can never grasp it. Or we might be saying there is such a thing, and we could grasp it, but that shouldn't be the main dominant goal of our lives. I think Nietzsche was interested in all three of these ideas. I think Raymond's right that he did attack truth under the first respect. But notice that if you think there isn't truth in this sense

of correspondence with a quite independently-specifiable reality, it's still open to you to think that there is truth in another sense. Maybe it's the richness of the idea of truth that's the problem here, not the idea of truth itself. Except that he wove truth in power when he said that truth is a mobile army of metaphors. And truth is the customary metaphor. And the metaphor becomes customary when it is adhered to by the most powerful group in society. So he was very much an ancestor of Fuka and people like that in disrespect. So although I entirely accept your differentiation of different aspects or strata of truth,

I think Nietzsche undermined the foundations of all of those three. presented his ideas themselves as truths and thus was incoherent. Catherine Valati... Rob says that the project of philosophy must be the pursuit of truth. Any project of inquiry? I'm very doubtful about whether we can have truth in any sense of the term that would be understood in ordinary language is meaning truth.

It seems to me that there simply can be no certainty that the language in which we formulate truth matches the world about which we would tell the truth. And it seems to me that whereas I don't think Nietzsche theorizes that, a great deal of philosophy in the 20th century has been concerned with problematizing that notion that we can have the truth. So if that is the goal of all inquiry, it seems to me that it might be doomed. And I'd like to suggest that we might put our goals somewhere else,

somewhere that we could hope to get to. But Nietzsche, in a way, I mean, he undermined even empirical truth, the famous response to the empiricists who said there are only facts. He said there are no such things as facts. There's only interpretations. And that could almost be a motto on cultural studies departments in many of the newer universities. But it seems to me that he, by this means,

he put himself in a very awkward position. I mean, I do believe in one or two empirical truths. I confess at this moment, I believe, for example, that I'm in London. I believe, for example, that the sun is 93 million miles. away from the earth, I believe there are some major scientific truths. So I have no trouble with empirical truth. Nietzsche did. Obviously there are certain world picture type truths which are relativisable,

but there are many non-relativisable empirical truths, and Nietzsche didn't allow for that. It does depend, though, what we mean by truth, just to return to a traditional philosophical theme and a point I've made before. I needn't disagree with Catherine's last comment, I think, but I hear her saying, if you make the notion of truth too substantial, then it becomes something unattainable.

But there are other things we might mean by truth, For instance, philosophers have thought that what it is for a belief to be true might be just for it to cohere with the other beliefs in as large as possible a set of beliefs. Now, I'm not sure, Catherine, whether you're attacking that idea or not. In that sense of truth, do you think truth is unattainable? I would have thought, if that's what those philosophers mean, it would help, in a sense, not to call it truth.

Because what most people understand by the term truth is correspondence. But is that true? Between what you say in the world. That's a particular metaphysical view. There's a world independent of our beliefs, there are beliefs, and the one corresponds to the other, and that's what it is for them to be true. That's already quite philosophically sophisticated. Now, it's not that everyday people aren't able to grasp those things, but they just don't ever have any thoughts about them. So why is that picture of truth into our everyday truth talk? I think my problem is the word truth, and the meaning in ordinary language of that term, if you're saying the goal of philosophical inquiry is something different, like coherence between ideas. Let's call it that. Let's not call it. Truth because to call it truth is to mislead.

I mean, there's clearly two modes of truth very crudely, and this has come out of the conversation. There's coherence theory's truth and correspondent-type truths and coherent-type truths. Correspondent truth is, for example, an assertion that really is true because it corresponds some state of affairs out there. A coherent form of truth is one that appears to be true because it coheres with other statements.

The trouble with Nietzsche was that his idea of truth and lying, the extra moral sense, in a way, made all truths vulnerable in the way that coherent truths are. That is to say, he didn't believe that there was any margin for realistic or correspondent types of truths. Can I take it just not necessarily further, but in another direction, Suscio was, again, someone we assume was influenced by Nietzsche. and he talked about all of us being trapped within language. Catherine Belsie, what did he mean by that? And do you agree with it?

What I think, Sussure argues, is precisely that there is no evidence whatever, that the language we use, the language we think in and philosophize in, of course, bears any relation to the world outside. Any relation. Any relation. What he argues is that meaning depends not on correspondence to something out there, a thing, in the world, or an idea in our heads, meaning depends purely on difference. And he argues from the point of view of translation

that if there were things in the world which language named or if there were ideas in our heads which language named, there would be no problem of translation because the ideas would be similarly named in all languages and you could translate easily from one to another. Now, we know anybody who's ever tried to translate anything knows very well, that it's extremely difficult because different languages name the world differently. They divide it into different parts.

They differentiate differently. The British Empire could cope wonderfully with that. It just thought the natives had got it wrong and we'd got it right and we must tell them the truth. But I think multiculturalism has now taught us that it's not as simple as that. And therefore, we have a sense that different cultures perceive the world differently, name the world differently, and therefore we can't be certain what it is.

that's out there. And take us that far that quickly. I mean, the differences aren't all great between English and French and Italian. That's the crucial point, and we could even say what it is they don't have a word for. Yeah. We're talking about relativity of truth, in this case, to language. And I have to say that the misuse of Sassure was inspired

by Nietzsche, in the sense that people were dying to find evidences of relativity of truth, or the way in which truth are relative. And the common idea nowadays is truths are relative to communities of discourse. Your language, in a sense, determined to some extent the kinds of truth that you're inclined to express.

This is based, at least in part, on a very profound misreading of Sussure. What Sosier did was point out the fact that words don't have meaning in isolation. They have meanings only as a part of a system of meanings. Catherine mentioned differences. Words have meanings only in their opposition to other words. Like cat? Does that only have an opposition to the dog? Well, exactly. That's a good point. And, I mean, I can come to that and say...

Yes, this was not a dog. Not so. Or horse. But perhaps we can... Can I... I think a cat is a cat without there being a dog around. Ah. But supposing,

supposing there were to be a language which didn't have a word for cat, there are, in fact, languages that don't have a word for dog. If you ask, I think Japanese, the student will respond, what kind of dog do you mean when you ask what is the word in Japanese for dog? Do you mean the kind of dog you exhibit at a show for prizes?

We can say that too, but we still know that. But we have one word. They have one word. Let me give you another example. If I said to people who really know dogs, that's a dog, they'd say, that is not a dog. That's a car goes banal. Let me give you an example for real, Melvin. The Japanese translator of my book at the moment has emailed me to say,

what kind of valley is the Romney Valley that you refer to? Because I have to know which word I'm to use to translate this word valley. Is it a steep-sided valley with a river at the bottom, or is it a broad... Well, it's easy to answer, and I suggest this is slightly marginally. In terms of expression, in terms of the basic of speech being expression, if anybody puts their hand into a fire all over the world, they say sort of, ouch. What we're talking about is marginal things, and so you could even ask intelligent questions about translation. If there was community discourse, there were sealed off from each other,

you couldn't even ask those kind of questions about translation. The misinterpreted as a sewer was to say that because words exist as part of a system, those words are sealed off from the outside world. They do not mean things outside the system. And that to me is as daft as saying, if I use a language of pointing, and I point to objects, I use a special convention of pointing, then everything that I point to is a pointee.

It doesn't belong to the real world. There's a perfectly sensible point here, embodied in Catherine's thinking, not that she's failing to make it herself, which is this, that given that languages differ, given they carve up the world in different ways, we have to ask the following question. Is there a way the world comes carved up already,

or is the division just done by languages? So that our concepts, the way we distort, do we divide things and categorize, them are artifacts of language. If that's right, as it does seem right, then differences between language suggests there is no one way the world comes divided up.

So you can still have the idea of a reality out there, but it begins to do increasingly little work in your philosophical picture of what's going on. And in particular, this is a useful strand, I think, in the attack on the correspondence theory of truth, which we're both sympathetic. If you can't begin to get a handle on this reality

to which things must correspond, then what role is it doing in your philosophical count of what truth is. Catherine Balsie, Baudhierre famously claimed that the Gulf War did not take place. Now, what point was he making there, and how do you see that as part of this argument about skepticism and truth? The title of that book is extraordinarily provocative, of course, because we all know that the Gulf War, or think we know that the Gulf War did take place.

The point he's making is that we none of us have access to what that war really consisted of. That's to say, we who were not involved in it, depend on the means. media to tell us. We depend on reports, which are in language, which might or might not be accurate. We depend on television pictures, which equally might or might not be trustworthy. Not that people who hold cameras are lying deliberately, but pictures, stories are edited, they're told in a particular way according to a particular genre. Alternatively, you could have been there. But if you were there, you didn't see

the whole thing. You saw your bit of the thing. Yeah, but couldn't you have called the book, nobody knows everything about the Gulf War, and that would be fine. It wouldn't have been so provocative. Yeah, nobody wanted to be provocative. if you've explained what we did it, but actually you've taken the pith of it away. Because he said that because he wanted to say something about truth. Now, what in your opinion was he saying about truth by using that title?

I can explain it away, you can explain it away. But he didn't explain it away. He put that title down. He put it down as a gauntlet. Now we have to pick it up. Yes. I think what he's saying is that we don't have, we imagine, because we see it on television, that we have access to the truth.

And actually what we see on television is always constructed, is always produced by somebody. and from a point of view. Well, I think they do know that, and maybe the book is not the most important thing that happened, but there are uses to querying the notion that we know how things are. And maybe I could say why I think this skepticism is important.

All the people who've perpetrated those atrocities in the 20th century, and I think of Stalinism and National Socialism and Maoism, all the people who've been responsible, for those atrocities have known that they possessed the truth. They were certain that they knew what was best and what was right. It's hard to imagine sending anybody to a gas chamber in the name of skepticism. Can we return to Boutreale and the Gulf War that's not supposed to have happened? I mean, his claim was more radical than the one that you were making,

that's why he sold his books. And basically he was saying that the Gulf War consisted solely of its media representations. There wasn't anything out there corresponding to the sum total of media representations. and that was sickening because one knew how much suffering was associated with the Gulf War. And that's when your colleague, for example, Christopher Norris, suddenly realized the kind of nonsense that postmodernism was leading him to, and he wrote a book called Uncritical Theory, which was precisely directed at Bodria, for denying the existence of something that was really a matter of human suffering. Well, I think...

And there's a difference between the Gulf War not taking place, and let's say the Siberian War of 1999, which certainly didn't take place. I think what you're doing, and probably what, Chris, is doing too is taking the title for the book. But if you read the book closely, it is a highly intelligent book, and it's making a point that I would take seriously. I think it's very easy to travesty the arguments of sceptics, but when we look at them closely, they very often have a case which is worth attending to.

Skeptics assume we're dafter than we are. I mean, all the points of moments just made is that we don't have the sum total of truth about events, but we can certainly get a fix on important truths about events. We all know that. actually, there are very few people who don't know that. And as I say, Boudriar made his reputation and has many postmodernists by making much more radical claims than the sensible skepticism about the way things are represented.

It seems to me that you're resisting actually saying how deeply this has bitten into disciplines, deeply this idea of being no sort of truth, all truth sort of relative. A skepticism in a sense has an honourable pedigree. I don't think that postmodernism has quite that sort of unassailable pedigree. You're making it seem as if it's just a straightforward continuation, from Socrates to post-modernists, not a join. No, I don't want to suggest that at all. That would be crude.

But it does seem to me that it is time to query yet again the foundations that Nietzsche was querying. It's a good idea to repeat that question in every generation. Which particular question? Because we've had quite a lot of questions. The question about whether there are absolute moral grounds or grounds for belief in God or grounds for belief in the laws of nature

or any of those foundational, metaphysical things that people turn to to justify the truths that they subscribe to. Those are the grounds of the truths that they believe in. And I think we do need to query those because when we ask the question, what if we take those away, what am I left with? Then we have to work it out for ourselves. We no longer have authorities telling us what we ought to do

and what we ought to think. We have to think it out from the basics ourselves. Raymond Tullis, why do you call the postmodernists enemies of hope? Because they really undermine the two planks of the Enlightenment. One is the commitment to reason and the human agent as a major force in human affairs and the other is the commitment to objective knowledge arising out of dissensioned inquiry. Both those things are undermined by postmodernism. And without those two things, we have no model of any.

kind of progress. And so that's why I think see them as enemies of hope. Do you think having no model of any kind of progress, Canembles, is in itself a bad thing? I think it's a good thing. Because it seems to me we then have to ask the question, do we want things to be different? If so, how? And if we do want them to be different,

how do we bring that about? We have precisely, no models to turn to. We have to work it out. And that seems to me healthy in any culture. Do you find anything Rob Coppin, do you find anything in Nietzsche which gives grounds for the sort of optimism that Roman Talas and idea of progress, which he holds onto very strongly in his writings.

Yes, I think there are grounds for that. Nietzsche was keen to live without illusion, above all else, and surely any project of improvement through insight has to begin by stripping away falsehoods. So to that extent, Nietzsche was very much the heir of the Enlightenment rather than its opposition. Certainly he's been a major influence amongst non-disciplines. In that sense, his influence, whether it's his fault or not, has been largely corrosive. and he's been contributed to the collapse of scholarship to some extent that's taken place in humanities in the last quarter of the 20th century.

Well, that's our last programme for the 20th year 2000. So a good ending. Thank you all very much, and thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.