Nihilism is a common mental state of modern people today, and people often leave messages to me in the live broadcast room and privately, saying that they have fallen into nihilism, value nihilism, work nihilism, life nihilism, and feeling that everything is worthless and meaningless.
In Nietzsche's view, the essence of nihilism is to use thought to determine life, and to use abstract meaning to deny real life, and nihilism is the self-depreciation of the highest value, and the highest value is the value of life.
So, how do we get out of nihilism? Is it like Nietzsche who bravely faces reality on his own? For most people, this is not an easy path to follow, because not everyone has such perseverance and courage.
More importantly, nihilism is not only a problem of individual psychology, but a social problem, and nihilism has a lot to do with the increasing individualism in today's society. The philosophers, Beauvoir and Arendt, point out that to avoid nihilism, the ideal of self-dependent, self-overcoming individualism is precisely what is to be overcome.
In 1974 Beauvoir wrote an essay on American individualism, in which he argued that in America the individual is nothingness, and that he was placed in an abstract object of worship and stifled the collective spirit within himself by convincing himself of his personal worth.
Beauvoir points out that individualism leads to the individual's attention to himself and his indifference to others, which is blind and unconscious. She said that the gap between rich and poor, racism and oppression in American society makes political change necessary, but when they realize that they are powerless to influence change, the only thing they can do is to make themselves indifferent and heartless, and this is their only response.
Therefore, Beauvoir believes that nihilism is not a problem of individual psychology, but a problem of social politics, and it is a problem that we need to face together. Regarding the relationship between individualism and nihilism, the philosopher Hannah Arendt told a "desert metaphor" to illustrate the relationship between individualism and nihilism.
Arendt says in "Introduction to Political Science" that Nietzsche and his followers believed that we lived in a desert, and that they were the first to awaken and the worst victims of the desert.
Arendt pointed out that modern psychology is desert psychology, and they think that it is problematic that we cannot live in the desert. So psychology will help people to adapt to these conditions, thus depriving them of the only hope, that is, although we are in the desert, we actually forget that we do not belong here, and we can transform it into a human world.
Arendt uses such metaphors to wake us up and make us soberly aware that our lives have become lifeless. Living in the desert, so we have to adapt to the desert, we can only focus on survival, only about the inevitability of animals, but the latter prevents us from experiencing human freedom, but the "desert metaphor" itself is wrong.
Many people in today's society actually have such a mentality, society is a place full of power games and deceit, whether it is in the field of business, public life, or even family life, such a mentality spreads, marriage is the exchange of values, and social interaction is the exchange of interests. We don't trust everyone, and the only thing we can do, or the best strategy, is to remain indifferent to everyone, which is a form of self-preservation and a way of adapting to the status quo.
Like people who are assumed to live in the desert, we cope with the sense of powerlessness of the individual by making ourselves apathetic, and by adapting to desert life, we cope with the pain of finding ourselves in the desert.
Arendt, on the other hand, seeks to adapt because we idealize individualism and support the social politics of self-consistency as the key, and this environment leads us to think that we can only achieve the happiness we deserve through our own efforts. At the same time, any misfortune is seen as a sign of error, but this error is only related to the individual, not to the system or the environment. Thus, individualism and self-consistency make us obsessed with the pursuit of personal happiness, and make us think that our own misfortune will make us an outlier that must be eliminated.
But we ignore that this individualism and self-consistency is destructive. For, instead of motivating us to discover the misfortunes of others, the rationality of personal happiness makes us fear our own misfortunes without being exposed to others, so we pretend to be happy so as not to be seen as outliers. Thus, a system based on the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness can give rise to nihilism by treating lifelessness, oppression, and misfortune as personal feelings, as a pathological inability to attain happiness. As a result, we respond to our own suffering with a nihilistic desire to change ourselves.
Individualism leads to nihilism, and the philosopher Han Byung-chul has made an in-depth analysis of this social phenomenon and the general mental state of modern people in "The Burnout Society", "The Death of Love", and "The Disappearance of the Other".
Han Byung-chul, Hannah Arendt, and Beauvoir all pointed out that excessive attention and affirmation of self is an important cause of nihilism and burnout, and today we live in a society that pursues affirmation, we long to be recognized, praised, and accepted, and disgusted to be denied, preached, and disciplined, and pursue our own lives But the strange thing is that when we gain independence, life does not seem to be positive and energetic because of this, but becomes tired and burnout, today loneliness, anxiety, depression, exhaustion and other mental internal friction often confuse us, nihilism and burnout are two very similar mental status quo, a sense of emptiness and powerlessness after over-affirmation, over-positivity, and over-passion.
According to Han Byung-chul's analysis, today we have shifted from a society of discipline to a society of merit, in which individuals pursue self-affirmation, freedom and happiness, and we regard individual success and happiness as our own unshirkable responsibility, and blame ourselves for any failures and setbacks. Because in today's society that generally advocates independence and autonomy, we cannot blame society and others for our failures, we can only bear and face them alone, but this kind of self-affirmation and self-motivation, with strong self-exploitation and self-aggression, makes the self fragile and falls into deep burnout and extreme nothingness.
So how do you get rid of nothingness and burnout? Han Byung-chul and Arendt seem to have the same answer, which is to get out of individualism, regain love, and focus on the other. Returning to Arendt's "desert metaphor", she said: Nietzsche and his followers believe that we live in a desert, which is a false metaphor, he makes us mistakenly think that we originally belong to the desert, and the desert is reality, so the scarcity, competition and survival pressure of the desert make us become more and more self-conscious and indifferent, but we forget that the desert may not be the real reality, we do not belong to the desert in the first place, and the oasis outside the desert is the real reality. What we need to do is to walk out of the desert hand in hand, not face pain and mutual indifference in the desert.
Well, this nihilistic series will introduce you here, for more exciting content, I recommend you to read Geertz in "Nihilism", as well as Hannah Arendt and Han Byung-chul's related works, hoping to get out and move towards an oasis beyond the desert.