The gleeful nihilists

Mind you, these assertions are made by people who say they cling to rationality as the only way to truth. But what could be more irrational than the conclusion they arrive at?

It is obvious that rationality has nothing to do with this argument, there is something quite irrational going on here. Doubtless there is present all kinds of resentment, some justified, about the authority of the Church and quite a bit of anticlericalism. Nihilism does away with all of the theological guff, all the arguments about the existence or non-existence of God, all ethical systems that we had to worry ourselves with. Surely it sets us free! What a relief to be done with all of that superstitious rubbish! Cunningham puts it well:"Those that celebrate scientism and ontological (restrictive) naturalism do so because they have set out to achieve the banishment of the divine, no matter what the cost."

The cost is that we can no longer understand the difference between lovemaking and rape or see the holocaust for what it was or distinguish between a good and a bad work of art. The cost is that the humanities are done away with and all is reduced to the utilitarian.

As is usual, the Greeks have gotten there before us, particularly the Pyrrhonians, named after Pyrrho (365/60-275/70BCE) who developed a radical scepticism that left him completely immune to feeling. He arrived at this by asserting that it is within our nature to know nothing and hence there is no need to think about anything. His object was to achieve a state of tranquillity in which nothing mattered. The suspension of judgment brings peace of mind. One can walk past a person drowning in a river and not act. One can be untouched by the death of millions. This comes about because we believe that we cannot decide between good or evil or about anything at all.

Nihilism lets us off the hook of human existence. While it looks like ultimate freedom it is actually spiritual death.

Why would one want to pursue such a course and do so gleefully with wonky rationality about the consequences of materiality? I have detected a perverse superiority in people who hold this view, mostly fellow scientists. There is arrogance here, the thought that it is brave and true to rise above the masses and exist in the upper regions of rationality. There is a certain chutzpah in reducing everything to dust, like a magician making the rabbit of Being disappear.

I can see how we needed the turn to phenomenology because the philosophy of the Enlightenment, so much in suspicion of personal experience, so beholden to scepticism and the use of reason, disallowed the experience of everyday life. The view of such philosophy is that the primary human relationship to the world is theoretical or cognitive.

This is how Heidegger can famously pronounce that Being "today has been forgotten." We of course still experience all the richness of being human but a question mark has been placed upon it by radical scepticism even though we interact with the world in very precise ways.

This has produced the emptying out of the human who can only see herself as the product of accidental mutations, a species among the species, living in the heat of a dying star. It has been thought that the great religious tradition that produced the West cannot stand against the universal solvent of scepticism.

But, of course, it is impossible to live thus. Those who would reduce everything to the material do not live out their faith. If they had actually internalised their denial of the existence of the human then the only question that remains is about why suicide is not the obvious concluding act. But no, these people go home to their husbands, wives and children and act in ways that show their ideas to be mere brave window dressing.

Nihilism is the end result of our total trust in reason alone, of Cartesian and Kantian philosophy that seeks ultimate foundations for knowledge. While it looked like they were freeing us from religious delusions it has actually released us into a vacuum in which life is impossible.

To be involved in the human, and what person is not so involved, is to be involved in a journey into God that is also a journey into the human. When the human is denied, as it is in ontological materialism, this journey is abolished, the danger being, that we become inhuman.