The spectre of nihilism. How to explain 17 October in France

On 24 October, the American essayist and novelist Lionel Shriver published an article in the conservative British weekly The Spectator on the urban riots that took place on 17 October: ‘Is it any wonder that France has sunk into nihilism?’ writes Nicolas Tenaillon in Philosophie Magazine. “In the article, she argues that if young people go so far as to destroy the city’s shops and institutions, it is because ‘expecting nothing but collapse, flames and injustice fuels nihilism’. But does nihilism really stem from a desperate relationship with the future? First appearing in the 18th century in the writings of theologians to denounce both the heretics of the past (in their eyes, the ‘nihilists’ claimed that Christ was nothing) and those of the present (such as the Freemasons), nihilism was claimed by the revolutionaries of the Reign of Terror to reject the entire Ancien Régime. But it was only with the German thinker Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi that the term acquired a philosophical significance. In his 1799 Letter to Fichte, Jacobi reproached Kant’s disciple for absolutising subjective idealism, for destroying the totality of the world and God himself by reducing all possible knowledge to the subject alone, since nothing would exist outside his own constructs. Nihilism subsequently developed in the nineteenth century with the advent of individualism and, later, anarchism – two movements which another German philosopher, Max Stirner, synthesised when he stated in his book The Ego and Its Own (1844): ‘There is nothing above me’, and when he maintains that he has not based his cause ‘on anything’. Yet Stirner does not directly incite violence, but only resistance in the face of a state which he deems necessarily despotic. Conversely, this is not the case with Russian anarchism, which reached its zenith with Sergei Nechayev, author of The Revolutionary’s Catechism (1868). His aim was not merely to overthrow the powers that be, but to annihilate the world order: “Our work is a terrible, total, general and implacable destruction,” he wrote. The anarchist thinker Bakunin, who was once close to Nechayev, analyses this incendiary project dialectically in his Principles of the Revolution (1869). Bakunin considers a ‘period of destruction of existing social forms’ necessary in order to establish ‘entirely new forms’. From being doctrinal and speculative, nihilism becomes doctrinaire and militant. Beyond the revolutionary political project it espouses, the figure of the nihilist both puzzles and fascinates: what psychological motivation drives one whose sole purpose seems to be the destruction of everything? It is to another Russian, the writer Ivan Turgenev, that we owe the current meaning of the term ‘nihilism’, understood as the denial of all reality and all values. In his novel Father and Son (1860), the character of Bazarov embodies this stance, turning rejection into a way of life. Claiming to possess the ‘barren awareness of understanding the barrenness of all that is’, everything appears futile to him. At the end of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche analysed this drift philosophically, distinguishing first and foremost between passive nihilism and active nihilism. Passive nihilism, inspired by Schopenhauer’s pessimism, consists of looking with pity upon a world that is crumbling because it is devoid of meaning. Active nihilism, on the other hand, consists of fighting against this collapse. However – and here is a further distinction – active nihilism is itself divided into two currents. The first is that advocated by the Russian anarchists, whose destructive madness is based on the idea that it is better to will nothing than to will nothing at all.

These nihilists represent ‘the most unhealthy species of mankind in Europe’, writes Nietzsche in "The Will to Power" (published posthumously in 1901), because they use their own resentment to bring about the decline of civilisation, draining it of life. The second strand is active and creative nihilism, that espoused by the man who no longer regards the world with either pity or disgust, because he simply knows that the world, this ‘shadow of God’, is nothing but a fiction. Nihilism thus becomes an opportunity to assert one’s own values (…). Nietzsche seeks to restore a moral value to nihilism, championing individualism as the capacity to transcend oneself in order to become a ‘superman’. But what became of this project in the twentieth century? It is undoubtedly Martin Heidegger who best understood why Nietzsche’s project to transmute all values was bound to fail. Why? Because, as he explains in the seminar devoted to him from 1936 to 1940, Nietzsche remained a prisoner of Western metaphysics. Admittedly, Heidegger acknowledges, ‘Nietzsche is the first thinker who, faced with world history, poses the decisive question of nihilism’, that is, of the collapse of values and their possible replacement. But, by asserting that reality must now depend on the will to power, he legitimised – unwittingly – the technical transformation of the world and the oblivion of what constitutes our humanity: the capacity to embrace and interrogate Being, and not that of transforming our surroundings and ourselves into a reservoir of energy, a permanent stock (Bestand) that would derive its meaning from itself, since it would be calculable and organisable. For Heidegger, nihilism is therefore not so much a will to destroy as a will to reduce every search for meaning to its technical expression. Continuing this analysis, the American philosopher Nolen Gertz, a professor at the University of Twente (Netherlands), argues in Nihilism (2019) that young people’s mass embrace of new technologies allows us to redefine nihilism as a means of escaping the world’s adversities – ‘Nihilism consists in evading reality rather than confronting it’, he writes – with the effect of generating a sense of indifference in place of the indignation that characterised the emotional landscape of earlier forms of nihilism. But it is perhaps the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk who best captures the essence of contemporary nihilism. Starting from an analysis of modern cynicism (understood as ‘enlightened false consciousness’), his work highlights how, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the education of individuals is no longer based on the transmission of humanistic values. This rejection of a centuries-old cultural heritage creates a void that no new ideology has been able to fill following the failure of those that defined themselves as progressive. As demonstrated by Après nous le déluge (2014) – an eloquent title that echoes the famous phrase attributed to Madame de Pompadour in 1757, during a festive evening, after she learnt of the defeat of the French troops at the Battle of Rossbach – it is ‘presentism’ that dominates today. The nihilist is the advocate of the ‘permanent deluge’ who knows only the immediacy of action, being unable to project themselves into a world capable of recognising in its own past the resources needed to shape its future. But let us return to the urban violence of 17 October. Is it the result of nihilism, as Lionel Shriver argues? And if so, of what kind? Is it the anarchic kind that destroys everything to build a new world, as Bakunin intended? Is it the ‘technical’ kind that, more or less consciously, the looters of smartphone and video game shops dream of? Or is it the ‘presentist’ kind of those who, out of ignorance or disillusionment, no longer believe in the future? Perhaps a bit of all of the above, if nihilism really is, as one might fear, a symbol of chaos. A symbol whose motto would be Mephistopheles’s terrible line in Goethe’s Faust (1832): ‘It would be better if nothing existed, for everything that exists deserves to be destroyed’.