Connection and departure: the criteria by which I choose the victim of my focus in any given issue of Philosophy Now (philosophynow.org/issues/111/In … s_Nihilism, the very criteria by which I chose Marmysz’s article -hard name to remember the spelling of BTW. That said, I think it is time to get to the f-ing point:
“It is precisely because of the nihilist’s logically-irreconcilable incongruity between aspirations and the actual state of the world that many philosophers who have encountered it have either fallen into despair or chosen to ‘overcome’ nihilism by changing their fundamental beliefs about reality. But there is a third option, and that is to adopt an attitude of humorous amusement toward the world’s absurd nature.”
While Marmysz seems to be approaching my sense of it, it is as if his attachment to the historical understanding of nihilism excludes him from seeing what I see as the true relationship between incongruity and the nihilistic perspective. And, once again, I consider the so-called nihilists the most egregious offenders at work here in that they are the ones who fail to articulate the implication of the underlying nothingness while being committed to it and make the self contradictory assumption that nothingness must have a necessary trajectory into the negative, that which results in the outsider assumption (Marmysz’s for instance (that nihilism must lead to despair. In this sense, Marmyyz’s appeal to the common understanding of nihilism seems more empathetic and less nocuous in that, language being an agreement, he is simply working from the understanding given him by the given symbolic order he is attached to -that is while the so-called nihilist fails to truly address the implications of the aspect of the symbolic order they have chosen to embrace. I mean why, for instance, must an embrace of the underlying nothing necessarily lead to despair and negativity? That is when such openness can lead to the joy of deciding one’s own values: values that can be destructive or constructive?
Where I part from Marmysz is that by embracing the pop understanding of nihilism, he, first of all, denies himself the intellectual productivity of a consideration of the nihilistic perspective as it actually is, that is given the ubiquitous nature of it that he actually approaches:
“Despite the efforts of these great intellects, by some accounts nihilism is a more urgent philosophical syndrome today than it ever has been. It certainly continues to be a challenge not to be taken lightly, and certainly not something most people feel inclined to laugh at.”
By taking the historical route of seeing philosophy as acting against the nihilistic perspective, Marmysz falls short of seeing the intimate relationship between incongruity and the nihilistic perspective. He makes it seem as if nihilistic humor is just some kind of antidote to incongruity when it could very well be an expression of that intimate relationship between the two and the joy that results. I’m just not sure humor needs to be thought of as a “third option”.
Think, for instance, of the movie Trainspotting which I consider to be a nihilistic anthem.