Author: M. Farahi Tojegi
The Evolution of Nihilism and Its Opposition to Religious Faith (part 12)
In general terms, the characteristics of value-oriented ideological nihilism within the blind Enlightenment can be summarized as follows:”
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Enlightenment nihilism is humanistic. The nihilism of the Enlightenment era is largely based on an individualistic interpretation of the human being as a psychic subject.
Fundamentally, the civilizational structure that the modern world builds upon value-oriented nihilism is, in its principal and dominant aspect, based on dividing and defining human beings according to a kind of psychic atomism, which regards each human individual as a self-grounding, psyche-centered atom in competition and conflict with other human psychic atoms.
The foundation of the socio-political system in modern Enlightenment societies is likewise organized on the basis of regulating a type of individualistic legal relations within the horizon of humanism. In the midst of the postmodern crisis and absurd nihilism, it is precisely the collapse of this individualistic psychic subject that has brought about an all-encompassing and comprehensive crisis in the various dimensions of individual and collective life in the modern world.
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So-called Enlightenment nihilism possesses a prominent and decisive positive aspect, which undertakes the role of formulating and theorizing psychic values, illusion-based moralities, and secularist socio-political directives that appear in the form of modern ideologies, as well as ethical schools and theoretical models of legal and economic systems.
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Although value-oriented nihilism, in its inner core and essence, contains a hidden and concealed aspect of negative outlook, despair, and absurdism, in its principal mode of appearance and actualization it is more positive in character. It promotes theoretical and practical models that encourage utilitarianism and competitiveness, pursuing and objectifying their ultimate aims and aspirations in the concept of hedonistic worldly welfare, mercantile and power-seeking worldly progress, and pleasure-seeking.
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In so-called Enlightenment nihilism, due to its humanistic essence, human beings are obliged to engage in meaning-giving and meaning-construction of life and existence themselves.
In humanistic thought, the order of existence has no inherent meaning or direction in itself. Humanistic thinking regards the self-grounding psychic subject as the axis and center of the world and humanity, and the human being, as a self-grounding psychic subject, is considered the only being who can and must give meaning to life and existence.
Value-oriented nihilism seeks to control, through reliance on secular-humanistic ideologies and the ethical, value-based, and socio-political models derived from them, the suffering and anxiety arising from religion-hostility and humanistic tyranny, which, by denying divine guardianship, negates any transcendent meaning and spiritual purpose for life and the order of creation.
In fact, ideological Enlightenment nihilism attempts, by drawing on the teachings and concepts of humanistic philosophy and well-known modernist notions, to produce a kind of worldly, secular, subject-centered meaning- and purpose-making, through which it seeks (in its own view) to resolve the great crisis of meaninglessness facing modern humanity.
However, although these efforts and constructions of meaning were, for a time, somewhat successful by relying on the immense power of propaganda and by presenting claims such as being “scientific” and “rational,” while labeling religious knowledge and truths as “superstition” in deceiving and distracting the peoples of the West during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the deepening of the crisis of the modern world and its entry into the phase of postmodern decline, and consequently with the intensification of the crisis of thought and the exposure of the fundamental contradictions of humanistic thought, and especially with the unveiling of the depth of irrationality and the falseness of the promises of these ideologies, the deceptive and soothing role of secular–humanistic ideologies turned into its opposite. With the exposure of their illusory, groundless, and futile principles, foundations, and goals, the crisis of the loss of meaning and the problem of modern humanity in supposedly “constructing” a meaning for existence manifested itself more seriously and on far more critical dimensions, such that today one of the manifestations and symbols of postmodern nihilism is precisely the widespread anxiety of meaninglessness, confusion, bewilderment, and pervasive absurdism.
In reality, so-called Enlightenment nihilism has completely failed in its effort to create an effective and comprehensive secular–humanistic meaning-making.
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One of the aspects and dimensions of the emergence and expansion of Enlightenment nihilism is the establishment of gigantic, extensive bureaucratic–technocratic organizations and institutions.
In fact, technocracy and modern bureaucracy are among the arenas of manifestation and also among the fundamental components of modern nihilism in the second phase of the expansion of Enlightenment nihilism. So-called Enlightenment nihilism, contrary to the multitude of slogans it raises regarding “freedom,” “individual rights,” “human rights,” and the like, possesses a bureaucratic and authoritarian structure and has extended a kind of harsh militaristic order in the form of social and political totalitarianisms across all levels of modern human life. This very feature, by increasing the scope and depth of its crisis, has provided the grounds for its decline and, ultimately, its complete extinction.
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Value-oriented nihilism has entangled Western humanity in alienation and self-alienation more than Renaissance nihilism and more than pre-modern forms of Western nihilism. In the era of so-called Enlightenment nihilism, the painful process of self-alienation of humanity trapped under the despotism of the modern world became a universal problem and concern in the world held captive by modernity; especially in the imperialist modern West and increasingly weakened the roots of social relations and human interactions with oneself and with others.
