The Covid pandemic has led to lockdown around the world: stay at home, avoid crowds, don’t travel, etc. So here’s a question: has lockdown drained the meaning from your life? Or has your life always been meaningless, just like everybody else’s, so lockdown hasn’t made any difference in that regard?
The latter is what a nihilist would say, and it’s generally regarded as deeply pessimistic, perhaps even immoral. But is that right? Maybe the nihilist is just trying to state a fact, akin to the fact that life evolved on Earth. In that case it isn’t an evaluation of life, whether negative or positive. If I tell you that human life evolved on Earth, or that it’s carbon-based, then I’m not evaluating life, just relating a fact about it; I’m only evaluating it if I tell you that life is wonderful or terrible, for example. When the nihilist tells you that human life isn’t guided by a cosmic purpose called ‘the meaning of life’, they’re just trying to state a fact about the kind of reality we live in, namely one which isn’t a meaningful context that provides a goal or destiny for the human race. We’re not playing cosmic-chess, trying to achieve cosmic-checkmate, since life isn’t a game – that’s all the nihilist thinks. So why does nihilism have such a bad reputation?
The short answer is that it’s become mixed up with other ideas and it’s been misunderstood. Having a meaningless life sounds pretty bad, right? Well, it does if you use ‘meaningless’ as an evaluation. That’s because you’ve set up a scale of evaluation in which a meaningful life is a good life and a meaningless life is a bad one. The dominant religious traditions of our world do exactly that and we’ve now learned to do the same without the religious backdrop. So if you want an example of a meaningful life these days, it’s natural to look to the great achievers of this world, such as Einstein, Picasso, or Mandela – they all led exceptionally meaningful lives, you might say.
If, on the other hand, you wanted to condemn somebody for spending most of their waking hours playing video games, then you might say that their life is meaningless. But the nihilist isn’t evaluating at all – what they’re doing is rejecting this kind of evaluation, namely an evaluation of life as a whole, or of a particular person’s life, in terms of ‘meaning’. To think they’re being negative about life is like thinking that someone who tells you water is odourless is really saying it has a bad smell. The nihilist is saying that life doesn’t have either a good or a bad meaning, just as water doesn’t have either a good or a bad smell.
James Tartaglia and Tracy Llanera (2021): A Defence of Nihilism. (Routledge Focus on Philosophy). The author of this article, Prof James Tartaglia, has just published a book-length study of Nihilism. Click on the image to get it directly from Amazon!
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Read the full article which is published on Daily Philosophy (external link)
