Martin Heidegger Argues That Nihilism Arises Largely from Two Metaphysical Commitments

1

Towards a Phenomenology of Intercultural Dialogue

By

Marc Lucht

Friedrich Nietzsche identifies nihilism as an overall feeling of the “valuelessness” of the world, such that “Existence has no goal or end; any comprehensive unity in the plurality of events is lacking [… and] the categories ‘aim,’ ‘unity,’ ‘being’ which we used to project some value into the world – we pull out again; so the world looks valueless.”[1] Writing in the wake of the triumph of Enlightenment secularism and its associated commitment to scientific rationality, Nietzsche argues that nihilism arises from a cultural disillusionment attending the collapse of our faith in the unconditionality of the rational (and ultimately utilitarian and anthropocentric) categories hitherto used to make sense of the world. Because one had expected meaning and measure to be anchored in and justified by an absolute foundation, discovering that foundation’s contingency or absence results in a disappointment with all meaning. “Now that the shabby origin of [traditional categories and] values is becoming clear,” Nietzsche says, “the universe seems to have lost value, seems ‘meaningless’ […]” and the question “’why?’ finds no answer.”[2] This sense of the arbitrariness of value leads to a kind of feeling of cosmic indifference, a feeling of the pointlessness of existence, and those normative measures and standards hitherto relied upon for orientation begin to dissolve, losing their authority. In his poem “The Second Coming,” W. B. Yeats provides a splendid expression of nihilism:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world […].[3]

In the first part of this paper, I sketch a picture of cultural and philosophical nihilism, and examine the manner in which nihilism’s subversion of meaning and value threatens intercultural dialogue and peace. My discussion of nihilism will be oriented primarily by the work of Martin Heidegger. In the paper’s second part, I explore the manner in which phenomenology can offer an alternative to a nihilistic vision of life, and point out some of the resources phenomenology has to offer reflection about intercultural dialogue.

I

Heidegger argues that nihilism arises largely from two metaphysical commitments orienting western thought: the sharp division between subject and object, and the distinction between fact and value together with the reduction of what counts as real to just one – the fact – side of that distinction. Especially the latter commitment, on which I shall focus in this essay, is tied closely to the authority of the natural sciences: the more scientific and technical modes of thinking are taken to be the sole legitimate modes of access to truths about being, the less it is that anything not subject either to quantitative representation or technological subjection to practical ends will be regarded as anything more than the correlate of mere subjective interpretation or preference. Indeed, Nietzsche shares Heidegger’s view of the link between nihilism and the authority of mathematical-technical modes of rationality:

A “scientific” interpretation of the world, as you understand it, might therefore still be one of the most stupid of all possible interpretations of the world, meaning that it would be one of the poorest in meaning […] But an essentially mechanical world would be an essentially meaningless world. Assuming that one estimated the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas: how absurd would such a “scientific” estimation of music be! What would one have comprehended, understood, grasped of it? Nothing, really nothing of what is “music” in it![4]

Whereas Nietzsche typically emphasizes the impossibility of appeal to transcendent normative measures given the demise of traditional metaphysics and the secularist rejection of religion, he recognizes as well the futility of the attempt to ground value in immanent measures in a mechanistic world as represented in the mathematized sciences. This latter point is Heidegger’s primary focus. In the following, I shall develop in more detail Heidegger’s view of the connection between the exclusive epistemological authority of the sciences and nihilism.

For modern theory since the 17th Century, Heidegger argues, the being of all beings is interpreted a priori as sheer material objectivity, or “the totality of material corporeality in its motion.”[5] Our conception of nature is conceived a priori as “the self-contained system of motion of units of mass related spatiotemporally.”[6] This conception makes possible the rigorous objectification of nature required for the precise results generated by modern scientific inquiry: the equivalence of the real with extended matter (and with determinate quanta of energy) makes possible the formulaic representation of nature in terms of quantitative magnitudes. Empirical research is conducted always presupposing this model of nature, and thus only those phenomena conforming to it are taken as legitimate objects of research, are taken to be at all: “whatever is comes to stand as object and in that way alone receives the seal of Being.”[7] In other words, Heidegger thinks that whereas the details of the particular laws governing the interaction of objects are subject to discovery in subsequent research, a conception of the essence of Being has always been decided upon in advance, and any research will be conducted presupposing and always confirming this decision. Only those beings that were stipulated in advance to count as real ones will be subject to investigation, and scientific research methods, as well as operative notions of justification and evidence, all will be designed appropriately for investigation solely into determinate quanta of matter and energy.

Heidegger claims that this interpretation of Being, which he entitles metaphysical, has come to be decisive even for our common sense ideas about and ordinary perception of the world. Increasingly, theory orients our common sense views of the nature of reality. (Indeed, it is striking how well Heidegger’s claim about scientific rationality’s conditioning common sense bears out. I frequently ask my students, for instance, whom they would turn to in order to find out about what sort of thing something real is. Inevitably they refer to physicists and chemists.) As for Descartes, for whom colors do not inhere as real properties in the thing that appears colored, so for us phenomena that do not appear initially to be either matter or energy are either subject to the attempt to be reduced to and understood in terms of quantitatively measurable primary qualities, or else are passed over as something “merely subjective.” We tend increasingly to think that phenomena such as hope and humor are reducible to the disposition of neurons in brains, and phenomena such as the frightening, the good, the proper, and the vile are conceived not as real properties of things, but as mere artifacts of judgments we make and feelings we have about things. In education, we see increasing emphasis placed on quantitative assessments of student learning, as if even the learning of Socratically inspired philosophy (with its emphases on one’s recognition of one’s own ignorance, on wonder, on intellectual liberty and the critique of convention, on openness to new perspectives, on tenacity, and on virtue), is reducible to determinate bits of data and measurable “outputs.” What is real in learning, or real learning, must, it seems, be measurable quantitatively. Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics provides a classic example of the consequences of such a metaphysical interpretation of Being. Kant understands the world of phenomenal nature essentially in Newtonian and mechanistic terms. Thus when he performs his analysis of aesthetic judgment in the Critique of Judgment, it turns out that judgments of taste are not strictly about the “beautiful object” at all, for beauty and ugliness are not properties that can be assessed in a determinate judgment. Taste, for Kant, is nothing like a perspicacious ability to discern in an object some property that constitutes its beauty. Thus judgments of taste refer not to the judged object, but back to the judging subject and to the way in which the subject is affected by its encounter with the object. We assert that something is beautiful merely because our apprehension of it arouses within us certain kinds of pleasure. The judgment that something is beautiful therefore is subjective, cannot be either true or false, and teaches us more about the person making the judgment than about the thing judged.[8] As Heidegger observes, with modernity our understanding of the significance of art is relegated therefore to the discipline of aesthetics, and the “art work becomes the object of mere subjective experience […]”.[9] Everyone has his or her own taste, and, as neither objective nor real, beauty cannot be isolated or measured. Instead, qualities such as beauty and ugliness are relative to each person’s sensibility.

Now, the equivalence of the real with the quantitatively representable renders nature appropriate not only for the goal of precise, objective knowledge of it, but thereby also for technological manipulation. A world of objects is a world subject to intervention and manipulation. As Descartes already knew, the objectivity of a being allows for the measurability presupposed by the project of acquiring mastery over that being.[10] Heidegger holds that beings are interpreted as material objectivity ultimately so that they become appropriate material for technological control. His point is that theoretical reflection, which in its commitment to neutral objectivity so often seems and presents itself as normatively neutral, as disinterested or unbiased, actually aims at dominion. If he is right, then from its very inception modern ontology has presupposed a normative bias, for it contains within it the express orientation towards subjugating the natural world. (The point would hold for the human sciences as well as for the natural sciences, as thinkers such as Michel Foucault have argued, for psychological and sociological theory is oriented towards the control and normalization of human behavior.) Theoretical representation is finally in the service of the will to power, and, as such, in the modern age the “earth itself can show itself only as the object of assault, an assault that, in human willing, establishes itself as unconditional objectification. Nature appears everywhere […] as the object of technology.”[11] Theory’s aim, Heidegger says, has been to convert nature into a “gigantic gasoline station.”[12] Heidegger thinks that this systematic subjugation affects the way in which we take the world, the manner in which we even see it. One of his most thought-provoking claims, then, is that technology consists not merely in devices, but is connected with a way of revealing or representing. Increasingly, he thinks, we attend, even in our ordinary lives, to nothing but objects and resources, and it is more and more the case that even objective properties recede behind function.[13] Ever more we experience culture as distinct from nature, we experience ourselves as separate from the world, and we encounter the world always and exclusively in terms of its capacity to contribute to the satisfaction of our goals. Attending primarily to those features of the things which bear upon our projects, we allow ourselves to be responsive to the world merely in its possible instrumentality.

What is the connection between scientific and technical modes of representation, on the one hand, and nihilism on the other? Heidegger claims that the triumph of technical rationality results in a nihilistic “darkening of the world,” in which phenomena such as beauty and moral categories are no longer thought of as real, as part of the world.[14] For him, the metaphysical interpretation of nature is reductive, for being is much richer than mere objects and resources, and the delivering over of beings to a universal objectification and the homogenization of all significance into instrumental value correspond to a loss of meaning. The reduction of a being to an object results in a divorce of thing and (its) meaning. In other words, the process of objectification fractures or disaggregates the thing into separate meaning and object components, and, for modern theory, it is only the object side of that distinction that is considered real. If the real consists in nothing but physical objects and the forces that move them, then phenomena such as meaning, significance, and value come to be relegated to the sphere of the merely subjective or unreal. They are not properties of the world, but are taken to be functions of the ways in which creatures with language and culture interpret the world. Values are not factual, they are not to be found within material nature, so increasingly they appear less than fully real and seem subjective and arbitrary. As I mentioned above, the distinction between fact and value combined with the reduction of the real to the former side of that distinction threatens to result in the senselessness of all value. Thus Heidegger understands nihilism to be something like the pervasive and global loss of any mattering – and this loss is a direct consequence of modern metaphysics.

For the thinking that is grounded on modern metaphysics and its reduction of the real first to material objectivity and then to mere resource, ontology is performed by the natural sciences, and must be distinguished from disciplines such as ethics. In education, as I mentioned above, one sees the consequences of nihilism in the expectation that quantitative tools for assessment will reveal the ways in which teaching is or fails to be successful. In philosophy, one sees the consequences of such nihilism in the devolution of the attempt to understand the human encounter with the beautiful into the modern discipline of aesthetics, and in the slide of ethics into emotivism, theories of ideology, or one of the numerous currently popular “naturalistic” descendants of psychologism and sociobiology. Aesthetics and ethics, as dealing with values, meaning, and imperatives, threaten to become merely subjective – their subject matters come to be seen as functions of contingent human preferences or conventions or interests, or perhaps, the accident of our biological constitution. In any case, since the imperatives that obligate us are not to be found within the catalogue of material objects or resources, they are not subject to empirical measurement or technological manipulation, and thus are taken to be less than fully real. Ethics therefore risks sacrificing its connection to truth, and as such risks losing its authoritative capacity to obligate or forbid conduct. As Heidegger puts it, for modern metaphysics, “Because [material] nature is what-is, freedom and the ought are not thought as Being. The opposition of Being and the ought, Being and value, remains.”[15] Put differently, more existentially, when nothing is seen as inherently valuable, we find ourselves adrift in an alien and indifferent world. Once this recognition takes hold, the beliefs about value that provided many of our endeavors with their significance and justification seem to evaporate as ungrounded. One threat attendant upon belief in the subjectivity of value and the arbitrariness of moral categories is that either human motivation devolves into mere hedonism and the culturally conditioned pursuit of self-interest, or human endeavor itself comes to be seen as irrelevant.[16]

Now, how does nihilism threaten intercultural dialogue? Nihilism threatens dialogue because it refuses to acknowledge the existence of firm standards on the basis of which disputes about norms can be adjudicated. If values such as “oughts” and aesthetic properties are taken to be merely conventional, or simply as matters of ideology, cultural heritage, or individual preference, then disagreements about them are not resolvable either by rational argument or through appeal to the disclosure of objective norms. There seems to be no justification for the expectation of rational harmonization of differing views through the disclosure of commonly recognized criteria or standards. One threat this view poses is that normative disagreements then seem capable of being resolved only through means such as propaganda, bribery, or the threat of force. As Alasdair MacIntyre puts this point in a discussion of emotivism:

The generalizations of the sociology and psychology of persuasion are what I shall need to guide me, not the standards of normative rationality. If emotivism is true, this distinction is illusory. For evaluative utterance can in the end have no point or use but the expression of my own feelings or attitudes and the transformation of the feelings and attitudes of others […] The sole reality of distinctively moral discourse is the attempt of one will to align the attitudes, feelings, preferences and choices of another with its own. Others are always means, never ends.[17]

Alternately, disagreements about the propriety of conduct may perhaps be defused through bland appeals to “tolerance,” itself a value difficult if not impossible to justify given a commitment to the conventionality of norms. However, appeals to the “live and let live” attitude of tolerance also seem inadequate morally. A broad commitment merely to tolerance leaves undetermined what sorts of conduct are finally intolerable, if any, and if tolerance is indeed to have limits, it is unclear how one might establish the intolerability of some particular kind of conduct in the absence of some other objective norm. More seriously, such appeals risk our resting satisfied with what D. Sperber refers to as a kind of cognitive and cultural apartheid.[18] A commitment to tolerance might have the unintended consequence of our cutting ourselves off from each other. For one thing, appeals to tolerance might originate in my own attempt to render myself immune from moral criticism or censure.[19] They also risk our relieving ourselves of the burdensome yet vitally important task of working together to correct or improve our moral commitments through mutual criticism and the joint pursuit of what is best.