Escaping Nihilism 101: Befriend the abyss

Jordan's Peterson's new book opens with him trying to make sense of the success of his previous book and associated speaking tours. He suspects that his works speak to something that is missing from people's lives, and he thinks that thing is meaning (and responsibility/purpose). I've been thinking about this issue of the contemporary normative vacuum for a very long time, and it's recently made a comeback into my everyday thoughts because I have a few close acquaintances for whom it seems to be quite raw. There is a tendency, particularly among men, particularly among those raised in 'rationalist' cultures or otherwise disposed to hyper-rationality, to hold off beginning their adulthood until they find a cause that is inherently good, true, and meaningful. The approach here is not to simply do something because it feels good or feels right, but instead to try to establish that the goodness of something is written into the firmament, and then on that basis dedicate your life to it. I tried this approach myself when I was maybe 16/17. The problem is that such objective value cannot be 'proven' (though some religious scholars seem to disagree). So these lost souls just keep digging, and digging, and digging, looking for that solid foundation, until eventually they find themselves in what Nietzsche called the abyss, which is also known as nihilism - the sense that the world is devoid of value and meaning. Nihilistic ethics finds its philosophical expression in Camus' notion of absurdism (evoking meaninglessness). The alternative is De Beauvoir's ambiguity, which argues that the meaning of the universe and the value of things in it is to be determined. Humans and other entities capable of valuing must bring value to the universe. This philosophical view lends itself to various therapies for nihilists, the first of which I would describe as sitting with and then befriending the abyss. 

Nihilism is quite unpleasant when you first experience it. Most of us are socialised into some kind of normative system that is reinforced through cultural practices. My main socialisation was mostly, I think, through superhero cartoons, comic books, and movies. At the time I reached late adolescent consciousness of the world and politics and such like, I basically thought the world was well-ordered and when it became disordered, due to 'villains' for examples, 'heroes' put it back together again. It was quite a shock to me to discover that most people are at best conditional cooperators and that most positions of power are actually held by venal, avaricious, cretins and it is only by the grace of slowly refined institutions that we able to stave off tyranny and the return of Darkseid. Naturally I thought I would put it all in order by getting loads of power. The problem, I quickly realised, is that I was just thinking of my own kind of tyranny. I got to liberalism pretty quick (pluralism goes hand in hand with ambiguity). If you can't determine what is morally good objectively, then people need to be free to define it for themselves and contest it with each other (something like Habermas' communicative rationality). By association, I became quite allergic to people who think they know what is good and are thus justified in legislating or violently coercing people to subscribe to their values. Anyway, this analysis of politics is all by the by; the point of the story is that nihilism doesn't feel good. 

Now I notice that a lot of nihilistic people are manic about getting out of it. They consume media (books, youtube, etc.) voraciously to find answers, and they also incessantly affirm whatever new values they come across. Their mind is desperate to believe something is firm and so when they get a sniff of something that seems solid they go to town on it. Of course it turns out not to be solid and so they're back in the abyss. Ironically, the more 'rational' you are the more likely this is to happen because your rationality eats away at the clothing you've dressed up your axioms in to convince yourself that they are properties of the universe rather than axioms you take on assumption. Such 'clothing' is what culture and ritual is: all the grand cathedrals of Europe, the conferences of the effective altruism movement, the national conventions of political parties. There's nothing wrong with such clothing - indeed, I think it's very important to build cultural practices and rituals around values so that they feel more palpable and are more likely to be inter-subjectively sustained. What's dangerous is when people mistake all these clothes for objective truth - "oh there's so much here it must be tapping into something profound". 

The fact of the matter is that is the inherent meaninglessness of the universe is in some sense inescapable once you've perceived it (because it's true), so the only thing to be done is, first, to sit with it. Obviously you can't do this if your nihilism comes with a debilitating dose of depression, and you especially can't do it if you're suicidal. I describe this as the 'acute' phase. It typically requires some medication in the short term, and then patience (lots of it), especially from people around you while you work out what it is you want to do. You might need to spend some time depressed; there's no way around that. The affective system is a signalling device. Narcotically interfering with those signals might feel better in the short term but it undermines the resolution of deep issues as this requires an honest dialogue between the conscious mind (seat of reason) and the unconscious mind (the seat of intuition). Patiently and compassionately sitting with your nihilism at this time is important because it helps you to discover that life with nihilism isn't so bad. You still laugh at stuff. You still find some things beautiful. You still enjoy some activities, even if they feel a bit pointless. There are people whose company you find stimulating, pleasant, exciting, or whatever. Of course the nature of depression is that it makes the world tasteless, so much of the time you won't have these phenomenological experiences. It will all just be a bit beige. But they'll creep back in. And you should pay attention when they do because these faint signals point the way to your intrinsic motivations: values, behaviours, and people whose pursuit you enjoy for its own sake. The way out of nihilism is simply to find motivation. This is the old trope of getting out of bed. It's worth pondering, at such times, what things you enjoyed in the simpler, more unconscious days of your childhood. What were your early hobbies, what were the qualities of your best friends, what were your dreams and why? Stirring nostalgia with such questions can also help to unearth intrinsic motivations, and things go from there.  

A quick sidebar: some rationalist fools dismiss nihilism as 'stupid' for precisely this reason - that we are never devoid of motivation for things, so obviously it's not all meaningless. This is a flippant and shallow attitude. There is a big difference between persisting with something despite being nihilistic - this is Sisyphus rolling the boulder uphill - and persisting with something because you see it as an opportunity to bring meaning to the world. These rationalists typically cling to some uninvestigated source of objective value, often utilitarianism, and so nihilism is really just around the corner for them.


The next step on the path out of nihilism is to make friends with the abyss. As it turns out, the nihilistic qualities of the universe are a good thing. Objective good makes you a slave. You must do the right thing. It would be irrational to do otherwise, because to do so would be to commit evil. The only reason to do evil would be to affirm your free will, which seems rather juvenile, though I do have some respect for Satan. If the meaning of the universe, the value of the things in it, and your purpose in life are all ambiguous, if they are all to be determined, then you have normative free will: you can decide what is valuable. This is profoundly liberating and, in my experience, joyous. We are free to choose and to do so is a genuinely courageous and burdensome act because we bear sole responsibility for our values and behaviours. We cannot blame them on some objective moral standard that we cannot help but obey. This is important to adulthood: you must take responsibility. This is the essence of Peterson's advice to lost boys. The problem with his philosophy is that it is a bit too simple about what responsibility. He needs some notion of intrinsic motivation and he needs to talk a bit more explicitly about self-concordance (though in his defence, Peterson is heavily influenced by Jung and these are central themes of Jung's writings).        

The last step out of nihilism is really a change in the conscious experience of nihilism, which is that you realise that you are floating in the abyss. If all around you is blackness and there is no firm ground, then you're not falling. You're not in a hole. You are suspended. And if the world is normatively ambiguous and you can generate your own values and imbue the world with them then you can build your own little world in that empty sandbox. Nietzsche said this most elegantly in The Gay Science s.34:

One could conceive of such a pleasure and power of self-determination, such a freedom of the will that the spirit would take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being practised in maintaining itself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing ever near abysses. Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence. 

The "pleasure and power of self-determination" is what nihilism helps you to discover. It is in many ways a gift, albeit one that is a bit hard to stomach at first, like the super soldier serum. It allows you to let go of the juvenile need for certainty and learn to dance with life's ups and downs. Nietzsche has so much to teach on these things, but I'll leave them for other posts. 
 

Postscript: I love Miyazaki's depiction of materialism in Spirited Away:

If you try to feed the nihilistic vacuum in your life with stuff it will just grow hungrier and your life with feel ever emptier. Materialistic values - money, power, status, fame - are extrinsic pursuits that are introjected in motivation. They are not inherent to activities themselves but only instrumental to them. As such, whatever it is that you are doing will always feel unsatisfying and your life unfulfilled.  

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