The Evolution of Nihilism and Its Opposition to Religious Faith (part 11)

Author: M. Farahi Tojegi

The Evolution of Nihilism and Its Opposition to Religious Faith (part 11)

Modern Nihilism of the Enlightenment Era

In examining the concept of violence from a general perspective, two types of violence can be distinguished from one another:

1. Legitimate violence, which is an action or reaction undertaken for the purpose of defending the freedom and life of an individual or a nation, and which pursues justice-seeking aims or, in general, aims that are legitimate and ethical.

2. Illegitimate violence, which has an oppressive nature and is used precisely against the right to life, independence, freedom, and perfection of an individual or a people. Illegitimate violence generally has a direction opposed to human perfection and growth, whether on the individual or collective level, and stands in conflict with freedom, spirituality, justice, and truth-centeredness. Due to its anti-right orientation and its unjust and anti-human-perfection character, illegitimate violence belongs to the category of oppressive and unlawful violence.

The prevailing form of violence in modern and semi-modern societies, under the framework of Enlightenment humanistic nihilism and also postmodern nihilism, is of the type of illegitimate, oppressive violence. From certain perspectives, it is rooted in the active waves of existential anxiety and depression of modern humanity and in the identity crisis arising from the fundamental contradictions of the modern world.

Illegitimate (oppressive) violence can also be classified from certain angles. In other words, two types of illegitimate oppressive violence may be identified:

1. Conventional and common illegitimate oppressive violence, which in the modern West is largely rooted in motives of profiteering, pleasure-seeking, and arrogant power-centeredness. This type of violence, which may be called the ordinary and prevalent violence of the modern world, is rooted in the reduction of the human being to the level of a purely instinct-driven subject with purely animalistic motives and desires.

The dominance of humanism places human beings, both individually and collectively, in a constant state of hostile competition with one another. These hostile competitions are rooted in profit-seeking, power-centered, and pleasure-seeking motivations and constitute the main and dominant aspect of individual and collective behavior and social life of humanity in the modern West. The signs of this common modernist violence can be observed in the anthropological views of Thomas Hobbes, the political philosophy of Machiavelli, the family of liberal-democratic ideologies, Nietzsche’s interpretation of morality, the Marxist understanding of class struggle, the philosophy of Fichte, the views of social Darwinists, and other theoretical domains of modern thought, as well as in the fundamental components and principal manifestations of economic, social, political life, human relations, ethics, and other civilizational dimensions of the modern world.

Another type of illegitimate oppressive violence is “cruel and sadistic violence.” The driving force behind this type of violence is also egoistic motivation, and its orientation is likewise oppressive and in opposition to truth, justice-centeredness, and religiosity. What distinguishes this type of violence from conventional oppressive violence in the modern world is that in sadistic violence, violence itself and acts of cruelty become the very objective, and the acting agent commits such violence solely for the sake of deriving pleasure from the violence itself and from cruel and sadistic behaviors.

In customary oppressive violence, modern human beings resorted to violence with the motive of instinctual domination, the advancement of their own aims, and the pursuit of ever-increasing illegitimate profit, power, and pleasure. However, in sadistic violence, the issue is not merely the exercise of power against the perfection and growth of a being in an oppressive manner; rather, the point is that the oppressive individual who commits violence seeks to accompany this violence as much as possible with cruelty, brutality, and sadistic torment. Moreover, such a person derives a sadistic pleasure from cruelty, sadistic behavior, and the suffering of another living being.

The principal and dominant aspect, and the typical form of behavior, action, and thought in modern nihilism, is based on customary oppressive violence. Yet with the modern world’s entry into a phase of degenerative crisis, and with the West becoming trapped in ahistoricity and the destabilization of the subjectivity of the modern instinctual subject afflicted by crisis and illness, it has increasingly turned toward brutal and sadistic forms of violence. Day by day, the scope, number, variety, and complexity of sadistic violence have increased, such that it can be said: in the modern world, from the moment it entered the phase of postmodern degeneration, sadistic, cruelty-driven violence has gradually become a frequent form of violent behavior in the crisis-stricken postmodern West, and is steadily becoming the dominant form of violence in the crisis-ridden postmodern city. This is yet another manifestation and symbol of the comprehensive illness with which the modern West has become afflicted in the final period of its existence.

The violence that is, in certain cases, permitted in the sacred religion of Islam is legitimate violence exercised in defense of religion, independence, honor, and the individual or the Islamic community, whereas modern nihilistic violence is an illegitimate, oppressive, destructive, and satanic violence of ruinous pleasures which, during the postmodern degenerative crisis, also acquires brutal and sadistic qualities and gradually becomes the principal and dominant form of individual and collective behavior in the societies of the crisis-stricken postmodern city. Ideological, value-negating modern nihilism has appeared in various forms in different fictional works of the modern West from the seventeenth century onward. As examples, one may refer to the novels The Nun by Denis Diderot; Mother by Maxim Gorky; works by George Orwell; Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev; or even Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre.

The novel Nausea, however, has the characteristic that, as a value-negating nihilistic novel, it simultaneously carries within itself certain aspects, elements, and themes of postmodern nihilism. In the stormy atmosphere stirred up by postmodern nihilism, neo-sophistry, and its absurdism, despite weakness and instability, it attempts in some manner to preserve a kind of order within the collapsing structure of modern nihilism, and it is clear that in this futile effort it is itself condemned to failure.

To be continued…

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