Somewhere among the many mea culpas in my files is my confession that I once told innocent, trusting students that they couldn’t avoid becoming nihilists. They didn’t have to stay that way, I said, but they had to go through a period of believing in nothing before they could believe in something.
By itself, it wasn’t bad advice. Most of my students, I was sure, would face a loss of faith in the goodness of human beings, a conviction that there is no such thing as truth, a realization that hope is just whistling in the dark (and it’s really dark). And I reasoned that if you’re going to encounter these things, it’s best to encounter them when you’re young, so you can start accumulating the experiences and relationships that you can have faith in.
I fell down on the job when I didn’t tell them that making it through nihilism isn’t a sure thing. It requires the construction of honest relationships, and more than that, the construction of a compromised but livable world, and a willingness to face, again and again, the flaws and betrayals that world will inevitably contain. It requires you accept, as Solzhenitsyn notes, that “the line between good and evil runs straight through the human heart,” and that operating out of the good side of that heart requires deep attention to what’s going on in it. It requires that you not marinate in your own anger and disappointment. It requires that you know that what’s good for you isn’t necessarily good for other people.
My students resisted the idea that at some point they would ever believe in nothing. Most of them had dreams of successful careers and successful marriages, and kids who would grow up to have loving and happy lives as influencers. They believed in the god of the Bible, or of the Quran, or the Great Spirit of their ancestors. They believed in retirements that featured motorhomes and houses on the Oregon Coast, good and faithful friends, and pets who might not live forever but who could be cloned. They believed in living out their lives as good people.
It’s possible, I suppose. But it’s hard to find an adulthood that hasn’t been built on the wreckage of hopes and dreams. With luck, people can see that their youthful dreams moved aside for something better. Luck isn’t a constant companion, though, and many dreams get replaced with something worse.
Much depends on how you react when misfortune is overwhelming enough to cause the death of hope. The risk is ending up bitter, disappointed, and not sure enough of the world to believe in it. Over time, nihilism can turn into a death wish for nihilists and the people close to them.
Nihilism leaves you with no place to stand. It gets intolerable after a while.
I hope that telling my students they could get through nihilism gave them reason to keep going with their lives if and when all seemed lost.
I wish I had told them the bit about paying attention to your own heart and its two opposing halves.
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Friedrich Nietzsche didn’t go mad because of syphilis. He went mad because of his philosophy. That’s the gist of a recent article by Tim Brinkhof, a New York-based Dutch journalist writing on the Big Think website. It’s worthwhile reading, but not because it’s a deep dive into the lethal aspects of Nietzsche’s thought. (Sometimes Big Think’s articles end before their thinking has had time to get big.)
It's worthwhile because it raises the possibility that the wrong thoughts can wreck you.
Brinkhof lists Van Gogh, Schumann, Mozart, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, Poe, Georgia O’Keefe, and Jackson Pollock as people whose ability to see and think and create contributed to their destruction. Each of these people encountered the death of hope in the form of the void, or a horse being beaten to death, or German bombs raining from the sky, or alcohol, or the perceived end of their creative life.
Their deaths can rightly be called deaths of despair, and if I could go back to my long-ago classroom and correct all my culpas (a whole new career!) I would note that the book we were studying at the time, Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed (titled The Demons or The Devils by other translators), was followed, seven years later, by The Brothers Karamazov.
To my mind, The Brothers Karamazov is literature’s best counter to nihilism, even as The Possessed is its best explanation of what life looks like when you worship nothingness.
The Brothers is a big enough book that its enlarged-print edition comes in two fat volumes. The Russian culture it describes is a century or more gone. Its language and even its thoughts seem quaint and innocent and too good for this world.
But it’s a good test of your own nihilism and consequently your own despair. I’m not sure I have the patience or naivete to read it now. The first and only time I read it was before I became a professor, on a beach in Thailand. I would wake at first light and read until hunger forced me into the guest house’s restaurant for banana pancakes, then read again until it was time for an afternoon beer and curry, and so on until dark.
It took me two weeks, and at the end of it I had gained some weight and had an idea of what life could be like when lived from within the good side of my own heart. A worthwhile and filling read.
It would probably be even more worthwhile if I had lived up to its vision, but one of its lessons is that where goodness is concerned, you still get points for trying and failing.
The Brothers is the book I would teach now if I were still teaching literature classes, although I have no illusions that anyone would sign up for the class once they saw the reading list. It had taken a lot of patience to guide students through the thousand pages of The Possessed, even with its graphic renditions of pure evil. (I remember thinking, as the English Department I was a part of kept losing majors to STEM and business disciplines, that we could have more majors than any other department in the college if we’d change our required reading to nothing but true-crime novels.)
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Virtue is a tough sell when you’re dealing with twenty-year-old humans, or any other humans, for that matter. We don’t seem to be drawn that way, to paraphrase Jessica Rabbit.
But if Nietzsche really did go mad from his ideas, we should be careful of what we think, and maybe try to figure out how Dostoyevsky managed to resurrect an entire world’s hope—dead seven years—by embodying it in his character, Alyosha, the youngest Karamazov brother, who is twenty years old.
I know what my assignment would be for the paper due at the end of class: “You’re twenty. Alyosha’s twenty. Could you adopt him as a model for your life in 21st century America? Discuss.”
I find this question intensely interesting, especially as I look around at kids these days. I see lots of people as innocent and trusting as Alyosha, but I’m not sure their faith in things is durable enough to serve as a defense against evil.
I know that some of my former students have had successful and happy lives. But some of them turned out to be nasty and evil, some committed suicide, some died of drug overdoses, and some resigned themselves, far too young, to a false despair. (True despair being reserved for us old folks.)
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I won’t waste anybody’s time by telling them they need to read the whole of The Brothers so they can be good. They can simply read The Grand Inquisitor’s Scene from the novel. It’s shorter and provides a condensed version of what it means to derive a moral vision from the good half of your heart.
What they do with their knowledge is up to them. I realize that they could use it to trick, lie, and swindle the people who want to be good. The Grand Inquisitor also explains how that’s done.
A slightly tougher read—short, understandable, but possessed by a bleak if good-willed stoicism—is Albert Camus’s title essay in his Myth of Sisyphus collection. Camus is famous for finding an invincible summer in the depths of winter. This time of year, however, I find his stoicism lacking warmth. It does, now and then, make the cold bearable.
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I like to imagine my small reading list might have saved Dostoyevsky’s character Shatov, whose bitter and angry reaction to the ugly world of The Possessed causes him to announce he’s going to obliterate everything by shooting himself.
It works well for him. Once Shatov is dead, however, Dostoyevsky has the truly nihilistic characters in the novel, the ones who know that nothing is worth believing in or caring about, use his suicide to prove that his disappointed thoughts and dreams no longer matter if they ever did.
I couldn’t have said it to my students without sending them into depression, but the way you get through nihilism is by loving and mourning the world, in all its beauty and tragedy and finitude. You even try to love the beautiful, flawed people who so imperfectly inhabit it, the ones who accept the impossibility of life in the face of death, and who go on in the face of insanity and evil and do, without much complaint or fuss, what needs to be done.