Subject: Re: What is nihilsim?
From: Ania Lian (ania@lingua.arts.uq.edu.au)
Date: Tue 11 Jan 2000 - 23:39:38 MET
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 08:39:38 +1000 (EST) From: Ania Lian <ania@lingua.arts.uq.edu.au> Subject: Re: What is nihilsim?
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On Mon, 10 Jan 2000, Muhammad Betz wrote:
> My Webster's dictionary defines nihilism as, "the denial of the existence of
> any basis for knowledge or truth." The previous century (CE) can attribute
> at least 50 million violent deaths to the nihilistic purges of the
> Bolsheviks and the Nazis.
I am not sure whether persecutions ever are a result of nihilism. But
more to the point, there are no true nihilists if only because their
belief in not beliving is a belief which they take as fundamental. Thus if
nihilists ever kill it is because they believe stronger than anyone else
in the essence of things.
> My question to Professor Hagan, isn't nihilism the ideological result of
> skepticism and relativism applied to political philosophy? And if, as I
> suppose, it is, skepticism and relativism have killed more people than
> objective truth, which is left undefined for the present.
Nihilism would not be able to explain why i write this message.
Relativism, on the other hand, locates the reason in conditions that
shaped it and says that history (as my act of writing is both:
mobilisation of history and its creation: for an observer it is an act of
history) is not only part of these conditions but its comprehension is not
independent from it. As a result, every observation is historically based
and hence bias. Skepticism does not come from not believing: On the
contrary. It comes from the recognitions that beliefs are part and parcel
of actions and hence no side can be cannot be separated from the other.
Since
(a) I have not got the experience and the eloguence of Christopher, and
(b) I have brought Calhoun before,
let me show another interesting quote from him regarding theory and its
bases (Calhoun, Craig, 1995, Critical social theory, Blackwell, Oxford UK
& Cambridge USA):
"To treat an individual as an asocial, ahistorical, objective starting
point for knowledge, "an illusion about the thinking subject, under which
idealism has lived since Descartes, is ideaology in the strict sense.""
(1995, p. 21)
Ania Lian
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