2.102
The charge of ‘nihilist’ to my writing would be unfounded. The term would be an accusation: that I’m defiling the tradition and advocating for everything it’s tried to bolster against: chaos, superstition, evil, and so on. But this objection misses that its warnings are—as suggested above (§2.96)—shadows cast by our tradition’s own hands. Our tradition throws ‘nihilist’ out in front in anticipatory, defensive strategy (we anticipate experience by creating and curtailing our own).
It should be clear that I reject simple binaries such as rational/irrational, progressive/nihilistic, and culture/nature. There are many ways of reasoning and kinds of responsivity, there are many understandings of progress, and there are many contexts. The facile claim of ‘nihilist’ claims to know what the cube is and that outside that cube is nothingness.
Our usual ways of thinking are rooted in disenchantment. This comes from a long historico-theo-philosophical process involving the gradual withdrawal and chasing of spirits from immanence to transcendence. Disenchantment is this draining from the world, leaving mechanical laws, causal explanations, dead matter, and a world rent into fact/value. The divine is pushed to the world’s limits, or beyond: to the start of the Big Bang or the end that is to come, and the interiority of heart and soul.
Because spirits had to be banished to set this up—and we could point to various historical nexuses, Luther and the early Enlightenment, for one—its discourse is established through drawing outlines of what it opposes: for example, banishment is eased by encoding spirits as ghosts. This lets us speak of a ‘ghost of a ghost’: rational discourse is haunted by its own denials, negations, and projections. Like Rubin’s vase, rational thought is internally related to and marked by superstitious thought — the other it draws in drawing itself. Therefore, nihilism is always close, which rational thought sees just ‘beyond’ itself.
Our ways of thinking can’t be challenged by an embrace of chaos, superstition, nihilism, or overt authoritarianism such as fascism. These are projections or responses generated by disenchantment.