Corrado Gnerre
Dear friends of the magazine, I recently read an article on nihilism and it intrigued me a lot. I understood that this is a typical mistake of our times. But I would like to have a simple, concise and clear idea on this subject. I would like, for example, to understand what it is, how to fight it, why it originated and to understand its effects …
Dear friend, first of all I’ll explain what nihilism is. It is a theory that affirms the primacy of absolute Nothingness, and therefore consequently the negation of all truth. If we wanted to be more precise and “philosophical” we could say that nihilism is a sort of disease of the intellect, as it is first an anti-metaphysics (denial and theoretical rejection of being) and then an antirealism (refusal of the possibility of knowing the truth of being).
We now come to the second question you asked: how can nihilism be combated? This must be done by re-proposing a philosophy that is based both on being and on the real ability of the cognitive faculties to reach the truth. Dear …, you must know that true philosophy is first of all metaphysics (philosophy of being) and then gnoseology (philosophy of knowing). Just as action must follow being, so too knowing must follow being. In short, we must proclaim the logical primacy of Truth! It is no coincidence that the good Aristotle called the study of the foundation of being “filosofia prima (first)”, precisely to make it clear that the first problem of philosophy is knowing the truth of things. If the truth is not reached, any subsequent philosophical speculation becomes completely useless.
Where does nihilism originate? In fact, in ancient times various forms of nihilism already existed, famous being that of the sophist Gorgias who said: “Nothing exists. And even if it existed, it would not be knowable. And even if it were knowable, it would not be expressible.” It is also true, however, that modernity will conceive the embryo of that nihilism that will later become the essence of postmodern philosophy. The thinker from whom this type of nihilism begins is Descartes (1596-1650), who overturns the relationship between intellect and objective reality, giving primacy to knowledge and not to reality: it is not the intellect that must conform to the real object, but it is reality that becomes a product of the human intellect (idealism): it is the famous cogito ergo sum.
After this Cartesian turn (which will find a wide following in modern philosophy) it will be postmodernity that will make nihilism triumph. Modernity, in fact, albeit weakly and contradictorily, still preserves the concept of certainty and therefore the possibility that human thought would have of being able to reach certainties; with postmodernity, however, the very concept of certainty disappears.
What are the consequences of nihilism? There are at least three. 1) The denial of any reality founded on Being, therefore the death of God, or the subsistent Being that gives foundation to everything. 2) The denial of any ultimate goal of man, which inevitably causes demotivation and despair, or the loss of the meaning of life. 3) Relativism: all judgments – even contradictory ones – would have equal value.
Dear …, in short, everything in logic: since the truth does not exist, the error disappears, and so you can say everything and the opposite of everything; but the Meaning of everything also disappears. It is total dissolution. It is the dissolution of our times!
(From La buona battaglia. Apologetica cattolica in domande e risposte, 2019©Chorabooks. Translated by Aurelio Porfiri. Used with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved)
Follow
