hi

nihilism is highly relevant as manifest in unsustainable de-valuing realities and Globanalisations...

I reommend Ritzer's revisted discussion of McDonaldization, ...and Global Capitalism and Nihilism by Mehmet Zafer Demir

Values in Sustainable Development edited by Jack Appleton offer some links to nihilism and unsustainable realities...

Don't we see all those many last men, blinking in our late-modern worlds...?!

looking forward to responses....

Wendelin

At a sub-philosophical level, I would say that nihilism is quite present in nowadays society, namely in some libertarian tendencies. I would see -for instance- the German journal "Eigentümlich frei" as nihilist in a Stirnerian sense.

Nihilism exists, but in a asymetric and abstracted form, especially that globalization by electronic aggrevates the sense of being interested to "nothing or everything". Usually, the reaching to closer and transparency motivates positivity and bright- hope, in which the global internet web is taking it from many intermitantly in daily life, psychologically.   

Slavoj Zizek argues that life is a catastrophe and love a disaster (in a popular video on Youtube). It is a way of beginning to get a sense of the Lacanian abject real, the world where everything is meaningless in symbolic terms and cannot be imagined. At the same moment there is some realization (haha) of the world of Baudrillard's simulacra. That which we once had complete faith in thus becomes a ceremony with no purpose, a belief with no connection to real resources, capital wealth as the world becomes uninhabitable. (Hey, when the Pope changes the church's stance to homosexuality this much, it must be the end times.) Meaning itself begins to collapse into violence. It would be nice to know, under these circumstances, that the violence didn't mean anything, which is to say, wasn't personal.

@Wendelin: Thank you for the reading suggestions--I found Demir's masters thesis online and will read it over this week.

Definitions, yes...I'm not (yet) working with a specific definition of nihilism in mind, e.g., Nietzsche or Sartre. The workshop itself is primarily oriented towards doing a genealogy of nihilism over an extended period of time. See description at link below.

Some preliminary thoughts...

I think it has become more difficult to argue for certain universals post-postmodernism vis-a-vis pluralism and localism (or recognition thereof), various particulars. From John Rawls (Political Liberalism): "Now the serious problem is this. A modern democratic society is characterized not simply by a pluralism of comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines but by a pluralism of incompatible yet reasonable comprehensive doctrines. No one of these doctrines is affirmed by citizens generally. Nor should one expect that in the foreseeable future one of them, or some other reasonable doctrine, will ever be affirmed by all, or nearly all, citizens." Value incommensurability arises as an ineradicable fact of how democratic societies have evolved, historically speaking.

I don't see nihilism explicitly manifesting itself in its epistemological, moral, or political forms at the institutional, academic, and many social levels of the University of Pennsylvania, for example. (I use a university, as an example, as a dominant socio-political space in American culture and society and as a place of "knowledge production.") On the contrary, the institutional ethos is predominantly liberal progressive: pro-science / gay marriage rights (and marriage in general) / constitutionalism and a two-party political system / recognition of a class structure and system...How would the sciences function if they extended the skepticism inherent in the scientific method to the radical position that no real knowledge is possible to attain? For one thing, they wouldn't receive funding from the defense department. How would the law school function if there was no communal consensus and basis for recognizing rights and duties? 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/313250848880987/

Peter,

Concerning our post-postmodernist condition I think that it is important to emphasize that postmodernism did not eliminate universals but rather, demonstrated that universals do not have the metaphysical supports that many thought or assumed that that they had.  This is less a discovery and more of an observation concerning the status of universals in our shared lives.  It is analogous to the story of the "Emperor's New Clothes," an embarrassing observation when most would prefer to maintain certain pretensions.  But it does not follow that there are no universals; what follows is that universals have never had metaphysical foundations. 

Thus it is not necessarily a logical confusion to make the universal claim that torturing a child is a heinously immoral act. 

On this view, then, nihilism as a philosophically sustainable movement should be on the wane, since it is the other side of the coin of metaphysics, insisting that religion and morality (and reality itself) must have metaphysical foundations if we are to take them as real.  But if, following the observations of postmodernism, religion and morality have never had metaphysical foundations, then it makes as little sense to claim their lack of reality on this basis as it would to claim their reality on this basis (i.e., metaphysical foundations).  Their reality lies elsewhere, namely, our shared lives.

Ray Brassier's 'Nihil Unbound' might be relevant here?

Nihilism, as a doctrine, not as an attitude, is only a joke within a club of human, not equine, headshaking's fans.

Based on some of the above responses it would seem nihilism should be considered a topic of historical interest, not a doctrine with any contemporary validity or viability.

Dear Doctor Schwarz,

I just wish to observe the following:

Nihilism was born, for Nietzsche, when man began to 'say no' to life in the name of rational criteria to which subject it, in the name of 'values' opposed to the reality. Plato, Kant, Hegel's historicism, positivism, materialism and hedonistic and utilitarian materialism, democracy, socialism are merely historical forms through which grows and consumes the nihilistic experience of European civilization. However, the announcement of nihilism is, for Nietzsche, already a sign of a possible overcoming or, more accurately, one must distinguish between a negative and an active nihilism. The nihilism is not only a symptom of decadence, but, to the extent to which it comes to light and becomes conscious, it can also be a sign of strength, indicating that the energy of the spirit has grown to such an extent that the aims pursued so far seem inadequate, and starts a 'counter-movement’ compared to decadence.

It should be recalled that for Nietzsche the possible overcoming of nihilism takes place only with an aesthetical, inventive activity; all other forms of overcoming obey those moralistic reasons that caused nihilism. This allows to understand the profound links between nihilism and expressionism, ties that have found the formulation perhaps more explicit and significant in the critical and philosophical writings of G. Benn. But apart from these developments, the active nihilism, always in the field of aesthetics, can not underestimate the fact that without the negative nihilism, as a symptom of decadence, no one could understand much of the contemporary art and literature, where the sense of the end of an ancient civilization is often themed or otherwise is an essential component.

More difficult is to determine the relationship between nihilism and philosophy of the 20th century. For one thing, in fact, it is indisputable that the notion of 'nothing' has had great importance in the existentialist philosophies, from K. Jaspers to M. Heidegger and JP Sartre. On the other hand, however, the apocalyptic pathos and the function of historical judgment on a millennial destiny of Nietzschean nihilism can be found effectively perhaps only in Heidegger and in his interpretation of the history of metaphysics, up to Nietzsche included, as a progressive manifestation of nihilism stemming from the oblivion of being.