Philosophy antithetical to concepts of meaningfulness

Nihilism (; ) is the point of view that suspends belief in any or all general aspects of human life which are culturally accepted. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism, which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value.[1]Moral nihilists assert that morality does not exist at all. Nihilism may also take epistemological, ontological, or metaphysical forms, meaning respectively that, in some aspect, knowledge is not possible, or reality does not actually exist.

The term is sometimes used in association with anomie to explain the general mood of despair at a perceived pointlessness of existence that one may develop upon realising there are no necessary norms, rules, or laws.[2]

Nihilism has also been described as conspicuous in or constitutive of certain historical periods. For example, Jean Baudrillard and others have called postmodernity a nihilistic epoch[3] and some religious theologians and figures of religious authority have asserted that postmodernity[4] and many aspects of modernity[5] represent a rejection of theism, and that such rejection of theistic doctrine entails nihilism.

Nihilism has many definitions, and thus can describe multiple arguably independent philosophical positions.

Epistemological nihilism is a form of skepticism in which all knowledge is accepted as being possibly untrue or as being impossible to confirm as true.

Existential nihilism is the belief that life has no intrinsic meaning or value. With respect to the universe, existential nihilism posits that a single human or even the entire human species is insignificant, without purpose and unlikely to change in the totality of existence. The meaninglessness or meaning of life is largely explored in the philosophical school of existentialism.

Medical nihilism is the view that we should have little confidence in the effectiveness of medical interventions.[6] Jacob Stegenga proposed the term in the book Medical Nihilism. It is a work in philosophy of science that deals with contextualized demarcation of medical research. Stegenga applies Bayes' Theorem to medical research then argues for the premise that "even when presented with evidence for a hypothesis regarding the effectiveness of a medical intervention, we ought to have low confidence in that hypothesis." [7][8]

Mereological nihilism (also called compositional nihilism) is the position that objects with proper parts do not exist (not only objects in space, but also objects existing in time do not have any temporal parts), and only basic building blocks without parts exist, and thus the world we see and experience full of objects with parts is a product of human misperception (i.e., if we could see clearly, we would not perceive compositive objects).

This interpretation of existence must be based on resolution. The resolution with which humans see and perceive the "improper parts" of the world is not an objective fact of reality, but is rather an implicit trait that can only be qualitatively explored and expressed. Therefore, there is no arguable way to surmise or measure the validity of mereological nihilism. Example: An ant can get lost on a large cylindrical object because the circumference of the object is so large with respect to the ant that the ant effectively feels as though the object has no curvature. Thus, the resolution with which the ant views the world it exists "within" is a very important determining factor in how the ant experiences this "within the world" feeling.

Metaphysical nihilism is the philosophical theory that posits that concrete objects and physical constructs might not exist in the possible world, or that even if there exist possible worlds that contain some concrete objects, there is at least one that contains only abstract objects.

Extreme metaphysical nihilism is commonly defined as the belief that nothing exists as a correspondent component of the self-efficient world.[9] The American Heritage Medical Dictionary defines one form of nihilism as "an extreme form of skepticism that denies all existence."[10] A similar skepticism concerning the concrete world can be found in solipsism. However, despite the fact that both deny the certainty of objects' true existence, the nihilist would deny the existence of self whereas the solipsist would affirm it.[11] Both these positions are considered forms of anti-realism.

Moral nihilism, also known as ethical nihilism, is the meta-ethical view that there is no morality whatsoever; therefore, no action is preferable to any other. For example, a moral nihilist would say that killing someone, for whatever reason, is neither right nor wrong. Moral nihilism is distinct from moral relativism, which acknowledges individual or cultural moral values.

Other nihilists may argue not that there is no morality, but that if it does exist, it is a human construction and thus artificial, wherein any and all meaning is relative for different possible outcomes. As an example, if someone kills someone else, such a nihilist might argue that killing is not inherently a bad thing, or bad independently from our moral beliefs, because of the way morality is constructed as some rudimentary dichotomy. What is said to be a bad thing is given a higher negative weighting than what is called good: as a result, killing the individual was bad because it did not let the individual live, which was arbitrarily given a positive weighting. In this way, such a nihilist believes that all moral claims are void of any objective truth value. An alternative scholarly perspective is that moral nihilism is a morality in itself. Cooper writes, "In the widest sense of the word 'morality', moral nihilism is a morality."[12]

Ontological nihilism asserts that nothing is actually real; that is, reality does not actually exist, but is merely a thoroughly-constructed illusion.[13]

Political nihilism follows the characteristic nihilist's rejection of non-rationalized or non-proven assertions; in this case the necessity of the most fundamental social and political structures, such as government, family, and law. An influential analysis of political nihilism is presented by Leo Strauss.[14]

The Russian Nihilist movement was a Russian trend in the 1860s that rejected all authority.[15] After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, the Nihilists gained a reputation throughout Europe as proponents of the use of violence for political change.[citation needed] The Nihilists expressed anger at what they described as the abusive nature of the Eastern Orthodox Church and of the tsarist monarchy, and at the domination of the Russian economy by the aristocracy. Although the term Nihilism was coined by the German theologian Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (17431818), its widespread usage began with the 1862 novel Fathers and Sons by the Russian author Ivan Turgenev. The main character of the novel, Yevgeny Bazarov, who describes himself as a Nihilist, wants to educate the people. The "go to the people be the people" campaign reached its height in the 1870s, during which underground groups such as the Circle of Tchaikovsky, the People's Will, and Land and Liberty formed. It became known as the Narodnik movement, whose members believed that the newly freed serfs were merely being sold into wage slavery in the onset of the Industrial Revolution, and that the middle and upper classes had effectively replaced landowners. The Russian state attempted to suppress the nihilist movement. In actions described by the Nihilists as propaganda of the deed many government officials were assassinated. In 1881 Alexander II was killed on the very day he had approved a proposal to call a representative assembly to consider new reforms.

Scientific nihilism is the doctrine that we should have very little confidence in scientific conclusions, such as findings, analysis and attempts to understand or predict future natural events, including but not limited to meteorological predictions.[16][17]

The concept of nihilism was discussed by the Buddha (563 B.C. to 483 B.C.), as recorded in the Theravada and Mahayana Tripiaka.[18] The Tripiaka, originally written in Pali, refers to nihilism as natthikavda and the nihilist view as micchdihi.[19][20] Various sutras within it describe a multiplicity of views held by different sects of ascetics while the Buddha was alive, some of which were viewed by him to be morally nihilistic. In the Doctrine of Nihilism in the Apannaka Sutta, the Buddha describes moral nihilists as holding the following views:[21][22]

The Buddha then states that those who hold these views will not see the danger in misconduct and the blessings in good conduct and will, therefore, avoid good bodily, verbal and mental conduct; practicing misconduct instead.[21]

The culmination of the path that the Buddha taught was Nirvana, "a place of nothingness... nonpossession and... non-attachment... [which is] the total end of death and decay".[23] In an article Ajahn Amaro, a practicing Buddhist monk of more than 30 years, observes that in English 'nothingness' can sound like nihilism. However the word could be emphasised in a different way, so that it becomes 'no-thingness', indicating that Nirvana is not a thing you can find, but rather a state where you experience the reality of non-grasping.[23]

In the Alagaddupama Sutta, the Buddha describes how some individuals feared his teaching because they believe that their 'self' would be destroyed if they followed it. He describes this as an anxiety caused by the false belief in an unchanging, everlasting 'self'. All things are subject to change and taking any impermanent phenomena to be a 'self' causes suffering. Nonetheless, his critics called him a nihilist who teaches the annihilation and extermination of an existing being. The Buddha's response was that he only teaches the cessation of suffering. When an individual has given up craving and the conceit of 'I am' their mind is liberated, they no longer come into any state of 'being' and are no longer born again.[24]

The Aggivacchagotta Sutta records a conversation between the Buddha and an individual named Vaccha that further elaborates on this. In it Vaccha asks the Buddha to confirm one of the following, with respect to the existence of the Buddha after death:[25]

To all four questions, the Buddha answers that the terms 'appear', 'not appear', 'does and does not reappear' and 'neither does nor does not reappear' do not apply. When Vaccha expresses puzzlement, the Buddha asks Vaccha a counter question to the effect of: if a fire were to go out and someone were to ask you whether the fire went north, south, east or west, how would you reply? Vaccha replies that the question does not apply and that an extinguished fire can only be classified as 'out'.[25]

Thanissaro Bikkhu elaborates on the classification problem around the words 'reappear' etc. with respect to the Buddha and Nirvana by stating that a "person who has attained the goal [Nirvana] is thus indescribable because [they have] abandoned all things by which [they] could be described".[26] The Suttas themselves describe the liberated mind as 'untraceable' or as 'consciousness without feature', making no distinction between the mind of a liberated being that is alive and the mind of one that is no longer alive.[24][27]

Despite the Buddha's explanations to the contrary, Buddhist practitioners may, at times, still approach Buddhism in a nihilistic manner. Ajahn Amaro illustrates this by retelling the story of a Buddhist monk, Ajahn Sumedho, who in his early years took a nihilistic approach to Nirvana. A distinct feature of Nirvana in Buddhism is that an individual attaining it is no longer subject to rebirth. Ajahn Sumedho, during a conversation with his teacher Ajahn Chah, comments that he is "determined above all things to fully realize Nirvana in this lifetime... deeply weary of the human condition and ... [is] determined not to be born again". To this, Ajahn Chah replies: "what about the rest of us, Sumedho? Don't you care about those who'll be left behind?" Ajahn Amaro comments that Ajahn Chah could detect that his student had a nihilistic aversion to life rather than true detachment.[28] Ajahn Chah's answer clearly points to the Mahayana concept of the Bodhisattva, i.e. the consummated practitioner who renounces to obtain his own Nirvana and procrastinates his own liberation until everyone else has obtained it. Such concept is not to be found in the Theravada tradition as expressed in the Pali canon, which is mainly focused on individual liberation through the four stages of enlightenment culminating with the Arahant stage. Therefore, Ajahn Sumedho was correct in his interpretation of the teachings, and Ajahn Chah sought to mitigate and soften the nihilistic content of the original Theravada tradition blending Hinayana and Mahayana concepts.

The term nihilism was first used by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (17431819). Jacobi used the term to characterize rationalism[29] and in particular Immanuel Kant's "critical" philosophy to carry out a reductio ad absurdum according to which all rationalism (philosophy as criticism) reduces to nihilismand thus it should be avoided and replaced with a return to some type of faith and revelation. Bret W. Davis writes, for example, "The first philosophical development of the idea of nihilism is generally ascribed to Friedrich Jacobi, who in a famous letter criticized Fichte's idealism as falling into nihilism. According to Jacobi, Fichte's absolutization of the ego (the 'absolute I' that posits the 'not-I') is an inflation of subjectivity that denies the absolute transcendence of God."[30] A related but oppositional concept is fideism, which sees reason as hostile and inferior to faith.

With the popularizing of the word nihilism by Ivan Turgenev, a new Russian political movement called the Nihilist movement adopted the term. They supposedly called themselves nihilists because nothing "that then existed found favor in their eyes".[31] This movement was significant enough that, even in the English speaking world, at the turn of the 20th century the word nihilism without qualification was almost exclusively associated with this Russian revolutionary sociopolitical movement.[32]

Sren Kierkegaard (18131855) posited an early form of nihilism, which he referred to as leveling.[33] He saw leveling as the process of suppressing individuality to a point where an individual's uniqueness becomes non-existent and nothing meaningful in one's existence can be affirmed:

Levelling at its maximum is like the stillness of death, where one can hear one's own heartbeat, a stillness like death, into which nothing can penetrate, in which everything sinks, powerless. One person can head a rebellion, but one person cannot head this levelling process, for that would make him a leader and he would avoid being levelled. Each individual can in his little circle participate in this levelling, but it is an abstract process, and levelling is abstraction conquering individuality.

Kierkegaard, an advocate of a philosophy of life, generally argued against levelling and its nihilistic consequences, although he believed it would be "genuinely educative to live in the age of levelling [because] people will be forced to face the judgement of [levelling] alone."[34] George Cotkin asserts Kierkegaard was against "the standardization and levelling of belief, both spiritual and political, in the nineteenth century," and that Kierkegaard "opposed tendencies in mass culture to reduce the individual to a cipher of conformity and deference to the dominant opinion."[35] In his day, tabloids (like the Danish magazine Corsaren) and apostate Christianity were instruments of levelling and contributed to the "reflective apathetic age" of 19th century Europe.[36] Kierkegaard argues that individuals who can overcome the levelling process are stronger for it, and that it represents a step in the right direction towards "becoming a true self."[34][37] As we must overcome levelling,[38]Hubert Dreyfus and Jane Rubin argue that Kierkegaard's interest, "in an increasingly nihilistic age, is in how we can recover the sense that our lives are meaningful".[39]

Note, however, that Kierkegaard's meaning of "nihilism" differs from the modern definition, in the sense that, for Kierkegaard, levelling led to a life lacking meaning, purpose or value,[36] whereas the modern interpretation of nihilism posits that there was never any meaning, purpose or value to begin with.

Nihilism is often associated with the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who provided a detailed diagnosis of nihilism as a widespread phenomenon of Western culture. Though the notion appears frequently throughout Nietzsche's work, he uses the term in a variety of ways, with different meanings and connotations. Karen L. Carr describes Nietzsche's characterization of nihilism "as a condition of tension, as a disproportion between what we want to value (or need) and how the world appears to operate."[40] When we find out that the world does not possess the objective value or meaning that we want it to have or have long since believed it to have, we find ourselves in a crisis.[41] Nietzsche asserts that with the decline of Christianity and the rise of physiological decadence,[clarification needed] nihilism is in fact characteristic of the modern age,[42] though he implies that the rise of nihilism is still incomplete and that it has yet to be overcome.[43] Though the problem of nihilism becomes especially explicit in Nietzsche's notebooks (published posthumously), it is mentioned repeatedly in his published works and is closely connected to many of the problems mentioned there.

Nietzsche characterized nihilism as emptying the world and especially human existence of meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value. This observation stems in part from Nietzsche's perspectivism, or his notion that "knowledge" is always by someone of some thing: it is always bound by perspective, and it is never mere fact.[44] Rather, there are interpretations through which we understand the world and give it meaning. Interpreting is something we can not go without; in fact, it is something we need. One way of interpreting the world is through morality, as one of the fundamental ways that people make sense of the world, especially in regard to their own thoughts and actions. Nietzsche distinguishes a morality that is strong or healthy, meaning that the person in question is aware that he constructs it himself, from weak morality, where the interpretation is projected on to something external.

Nietzsche discusses Christianity, one of the major topics in his work, at length in the context of the problem of nihilism in his notebooks, in a chapter entitled "European Nihilism".[45] Here he states that the Christian moral doctrine provides people with intrinsic value, belief in God (which justifies the evil in the world) and a basis for objective knowledge. In this sense, in constructing a world where objective knowledge is possible, Christianity is an antidote against a primal form of nihilism, against the despair of meaninglessness. However, it is exactly the element of truthfulness in Christian doctrine that is its undoing: in its drive towards truth, Christianity eventually finds itself to be a construct, which leads to its own dissolution. It is therefore that Nietzsche states that we have outgrown Christianity "not because we lived too far from it, rather because we lived too close".[46] As such, the self-dissolution of Christianity constitutes yet another form of nihilism. Because Christianity was an interpretation that posited itself as the interpretation, Nietzsche states that this dissolution leads beyond skepticism to a distrust of all meaning.[47][48]

Stanley Rosen identifies Nietzsche's concept of nihilism with a situation of meaninglessness, in which "everything is permitted." According to him, the loss of higher metaphysical values that exist in contrast to the base reality of the world, or merely human ideas, gives rise to the idea that all human ideas are therefore valueless. Rejecting idealism thus results in nihilism, because only similarly transcendent ideals live up to the previous standards that the nihilist still implicitly holds.[49] The inability for Christianity to serve as a source of valuating the world is reflected in Nietzsche's famous aphorism of the madman in The Gay Science.[50] The death of God, in particular the statement that "we killed him", is similar to the self-dissolution of Christian doctrine: due to the advances of the sciences, which for Nietzsche show that man is the product of evolution, that Earth has no special place among the stars and that history is not progressive, the Christian notion of God can no longer serve as a basis for a morality.

One such reaction to the loss of meaning is what Nietzsche calls passive nihilism, which he recognises in the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer's doctrine, which Nietzsche also refers to as Western Buddhism, advocates separating oneself from will and desires in order to reduce suffering. Nietzsche characterises this ascetic attitude as a "will to nothingness", whereby life turns away from itself, as there is nothing of value to be found in the world. This mowing away of all value in the world is characteristic of the nihilist, although in this, the nihilist appears inconsistent: this "will to nothingness" is still a form of willing.[51] He describes this as "an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists:"

A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the pathos of 'in vain' is the nihilists' pathos at the same time, as pathos, an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists.

Nietzsche's relation to the problem of nihilism is a complex one. He approaches the problem of nihilism as deeply personal, stating that this predicament of the modern world is a problem that has "become conscious" in him.[52] According to Nietzsche, it is only when nihilism is overcome that a culture can have a true foundation upon which to thrive. He wished to hasten its coming only so that he could also hasten its ultimate departure.[42]

He states that there is at least the possibility of another type of nihilist in the wake of Christianity's self-dissolution, one that does not stop after the destruction of all value and meaning and succumb to the following nothingness. This alternate, 'active' nihilism on the other hand destroys to level the field for constructing something new. This form of nihilism is characterized by Nietzsche as "a sign of strength,"[53] a willful destruction of the old values to wipe the slate clean and lay down one's own beliefs and interpretations, contrary to the passive nihilism that resigns itself with the decomposition of the old values. This willful destruction of values and the overcoming of the condition of nihilism by the constructing of new meaning, this active nihilism, could be related to what Nietzsche elsewhere calls a 'free spirit'[54] or the bermensch from Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Antichrist, the model of the strong individual who posits his own values and lives his life as if it were his own work of art. It may be questioned, though, whether "active nihilism" is indeed the correct term for this stance, and some question whether Nietzsche takes the problems nihilism poses seriously enough.[55]

Martin Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche influenced many postmodern thinkers who investigated the problem of nihilism as put forward by Nietzsche. Only recently has Heidegger's influence on Nietzschean nihilism research faded.[56] As early as the 1930s, Heidegger was giving lectures on Nietzsche's thought.[57] Given the importance of Nietzsche's contribution to the topic of nihilism, Heidegger's influential interpretation of Nietzsche is important for the historical development of the term nihilism.

Heidegger's method of researching and teaching Nietzsche is explicitly his own. He does not specifically try to present Nietzsche as Nietzsche. He rather tries to incorporate Nietzsche's thoughts into his own philosophical system of Being, Time and Dasein.[58] In his Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being (194446),[59] Heidegger tries to understand Nietzsche's nihilism as trying to achieve a victory through the devaluation of the, until then, highest values. The principle of this devaluation is, according to Heidegger, the will to power. The will to power is also the principle of every earlier valuation of values.[60] How does this devaluation occur and why is this nihilistic? One of Heidegger's main critiques on philosophy is that philosophy, and more specifically metaphysics, has forgotten to discriminate between investigating the notion of a being (Seiende) and Being (Sein). According to Heidegger, the history of Western thought can be seen as the history of metaphysics. And because metaphysics has forgotten to ask about the notion of Being (what Heidegger calls Seinsvergessenheit), it is a history about the destruction of Being. That is why Heidegger calls metaphysics nihilistic.[61] This makes Nietzsche's metaphysics not a victory over nihilism, but a perfection of it.[62]

Heidegger, in his interpretation of Nietzsche, has been inspired by Ernst Jnger. Many references to Jnger can be found in Heidegger's lectures on Nietzsche. For example, in a letter to the rector of Freiburg University of November 4, 1945, Heidegger, inspired by Jnger, tries to explain the notion of "God is dead" as the "reality of the Will to Power." Heidegger also praises Jnger for defending Nietzsche against a too biological or anthropological reading during the Nazi era.[63]

Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche influenced a number of important postmodernist thinkers. Gianni Vattimo points at a back-and-forth movement in European thought, between Nietzsche and Heidegger. During the 1960s, a Nietzschean 'renaissance' began, culminating in the work of Mazzino Montinari and Giorgio Colli. They began work on a new and complete edition of Nietzsche's collected works, making Nietzsche more accessible for scholarly research. Vattimo explains that with this new edition of Colli and Montinari, a critical reception of Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche began to take shape. Like other contemporary French and Italian philosophers, Vattimo does not want, or only partially wants, to rely on Heidegger for understanding Nietzsche. On the other hand, Vattimo judges Heidegger's intentions authentic enough to keep pursuing them.[64] Philosophers who Vattimo exemplifies as a part of this back and forth movement are French philosophers Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida. Italian philosophers of this same movement are Cacciari, Severino and himself.[65]Jrgen Habermas, Jean-Franois Lyotard and Richard Rorty are also philosophers who are influenced by Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche.[66]

Gilles Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche's concept of nihilism is different - in some sense diametrically opposed - to the usual definition (as outlined in the rest of this article). Nihilism is one of the main topics of Deleuze's early book Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962).[67] There, Deleuze repeatedly interprets Nietzsche's nihilism as "the enterprise of denying life and depreciating existence".[68] Nihilism thus defined is therefore not the denial of higher values, or the denial of meaning, but rather the depreciation of life in the name of such higher values or meaning. Deleuze therefore (with, he claims, Nietzsche) says that Christianity and Platonism, and with them the whole of metaphysics, are intrinsically nihilist.

Postmodern and poststructuralist thought has questioned the very grounds on which Western cultures have based their 'truths': absolute knowledge and meaning, a 'decentralization' of authorship, the accumulation of positive knowledge, historical progress, and certain ideals and practices of humanism and the Enlightenment.

Jacques Derrida, whose deconstruction is perhaps most commonly labeled nihilistic, did not himself make the nihilistic move that others have claimed. Derridean deconstructionists argue that this approach rather frees texts, individuals or organizations from a restrictive truth, and that deconstruction opens up the possibility of other ways of being.[69]Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, for example, uses deconstruction to create an ethics of opening up Western scholarship to the voice of the subaltern and to philosophies outside of the canon of western texts.[70] Derrida himself built a philosophy based upon a 'responsibility to the other'.[71] Deconstruction can thus be seen not as a denial of truth, but as a denial of our ability to know truth. That is to say, it makes an epistemological claim, compared to nihilism's ontological claim.

Lyotard argues that, rather than relying on an objective truth or method to prove their claims, philosophers legitimize their truths by reference to a story about the world that can't be separated from the age and system the stories belong toreferred to by Lyotard as meta-narratives. He then goes on to define the postmodern condition as characterized by a rejection both of these meta-narratives and of the process of legitimation by meta-narratives.

In lieu of meta-narratives we have created new language-games in order to legitimize our claims which rely on changing relationships and mutable truths, none of which is privileged over the other to speak to ultimate truth.[citation needed]

This concept of the instability of truth and meaning leads in the direction of nihilism, though Lyotard stops short of embracing the latter.[citation needed]

Postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote briefly of nihilism from the postmodern viewpoint in Simulacra and Simulation. He stuck mainly to topics of interpretations of the real world over the simulations of which the real world is composed. The uses of meaning were an important subject in Baudrillard's discussion of nihilism:

The apocalypse is finished, today it is the precession of the neutral, of forms of the neutral and of indifference...all that remains, is the fascination for desertlike and indifferent forms, for the very operation of the system that annihilates us. Now, fascination (in contrast to seduction, which was attached to appearances, and to dialectical reason, which was attached to meaning) is a nihilistic passion par excellence, it is the passion proper to the mode of disappearance. We are fascinated by all forms of disappearance, of our disappearance. Melancholic and fascinated, such is our general situation in an era of involuntary transparency.

In Nihil Unbound: Extinction and Enlightenment, Ray Brassier maintains that philosophy has avoided the traumatic idea of extinction, instead attempting to find meaning in a world conditioned by the very idea of its own annihilation. Thus Brassier critiques both the phenomenological and hermeneutic strands of Continental philosophy as well as the vitality of thinkers like Gilles Deleuze, who work to ingrain meaning in the world and stave off the "threat" of nihilism. Instead, drawing on thinkers such as Alain Badiou, Franois Laruelle, Paul Churchland, and Thomas Metzinger, Brassier defends a view of the world as inherently devoid of meaning. That is, rather than avoiding nihilism, Brassier embraces it as the truth of reality. Brassier concludes from his readings of Badiou and Laruelle that the universe is founded on the nothing,[72] but also that philosophy is the "organon of extinction," that it is only because life is conditioned by its own extinction that there is thought at all.[73] Brassier then defends a radically anti-correlationist philosophy proposing that Thought is conjoined not with Being, but with Non-Being.

The term Dada was first used by Richard Huelsenbeck and Tristan Tzara in 1916.[74] The movement, which lasted from approximately 1916 to 1923, arose during World War I, an event that influenced the artists.[75] The Dada Movement began in the old town of Zrich, Switzerland known as the "Niederdorf" or "Niederdrfli" in the Caf Voltaire.[76] The Dadaists claimed that Dada was not an art movement, but an anti-art movement, sometimes using found objects in a manner similar to found poetry.

The "anti-art" drive is thought[by whom?] to have stemmed from a post-war emptiness.[citation needed] This tendency toward devaluation of art has led many[who?] to claim that Dada was an essentially nihilistic movement.[citation needed] Given that Dada created its own means for interpreting its products, it is difficult to classify alongside most other contemporary art expressions. Due to perceived ambiguity, it has been classified as a nihilistic modus vivendi.[75]

The term "nihilism" was actually popularized in 1862 by Ivan Turgenev in his novel Fathers and Sons, whose hero, Bazarov, was a nihilist and recruited several followers to the philosophy. He found his nihilistic ways challenged upon falling in love.[77]

Anton Chekhov portrayed nihilism when writing Three Sisters. The phrase "what does it matter" or variants of this are often spoken by several characters in response to events; the significance of some of these events suggests a subscription to nihilism by said characters as a type of coping strategy.

The philosophical ideas of the French author, the Marquis de Sade, are often noted as early examples of nihilistic principles.[78]

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Nihilism - Wikipedia

I Am Dynamite! lacks the philosophical scope of prior biographies by Rdiger Safranski and Julian Young, but Prideaux is a stylish and witty narrator. She begins with the pivotal event in Nietzsches life: his introduction, in 1868, to Wagner, the most consequential German cultural figure of the day. Nietzsche would soon assume a professorship in Basel, at the astonishingly young age of twenty-four, but he jumped at the chance to join the Wagner operation. For the next eight years, as Wagner completed his operatic cycle The Ring of the Nibelung and prepared for its premire, Nietzsche served as a propagandist for the Wagnerian cause and as the Meisters factotum. He then broke away, declaring his intellectual independence first with coded critiques and then with unabashed polemics. Accounts of this immensely complicated relationship are too often distorted by prejudice on one side or another. Nietzscheans and Wagnerians both tend to off-load ideological problems onto the rival camp; Prideaux succumbs to this temptation. She insists that Nietzsches talk of a superior brood of blond beasts has no modern racial connotation, and casts Wagners Siegfried as an Aryan hero who rides to the redemption of the world. In fact, Siegfried is a fallen hero who rides nowhere; the redeemer of the world is Brnnhilde.

Prideauxs picture of the Wagner-Nietzsche relationship fails to explain either the intensity of their bond or the trauma of their break. Early on, Nietzsche was hopelessly infatuated with Wagners music and personality. He described the friendship as my only love affair. As with many infatuations, Nietzsches expectations were wildly exaggerated. He hoped that the Ring would revive the cultural paradise of ancient Greece, fusing Apollonian beauty and Dionysian savagery. He envisaged an audience of lite aesthetes who would carry a transfiguring message to the outer world. Wagner, too, revered Greek culture, but he was fundamentally a man of the theatre, and tailored his ideals to the realities of the stage. At the first Bayreuth Festival, in 1876, Nietzsche was crestfallen to discover that a viable theatre operation required the patronage of the nouveau riche and the fashionable.

Personal differences between the two men provide amusing anecdotes. Nietzsche made sporadic attempts at musical composition, one of which caused Wagner to have a laughing fit. (The music is not very good, but it is not as bad as all that.) Wagner also suggested to Nietzsches doctor that the young mans medical issues were the result of excessive masturbation. But the disagreements went much deeper, revealing a rift between ideologies and epochs. Wagner embodied the nineteenth century, in all its grandeur and delusion; Nietzsche was the dynamic, destructive torchbearer of the twentieth.

When they first met, they shared an admiration for the philosophical pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer, who saw a world governed by the insatiable striving of the will. Only through the renunciation of worldly desire, Schopenhauer posited, can we free ourselves from our incessant drives. Aesthetic experience is one avenue to self-overcomingan idea that the art-besotted Nietzsche seized upon. But he disdained Schopenhauers emphasis on the practice of compassion, which also promises release from the grasping ego. Wagner, by contrast, claimed to value compassion above all other emotions. Parsifal, his final opera, has as its motto Durch Mitleid wissend, der reine Tor (The pure fool, knowing through pity). Nietzsches 1878 book, Human, All Too Human, his inaugural assault on Wagner and Romantic metaphysics, hammers away at the word Mitleid, considering it an instrument of weakness. In its place, Nietzsche praises hardness, force, cruelty. Culture simply cannot do without passions, vices, and acts of malice, he writes.

These views made Wagner wince, as the diaries of Cosima Wagner, his wife, attest. In an earlier essay entitled The Greek State, Nietzsche had declared that slavery belongs to the essence of a culture. The intellectual historian Martin Ruehl speculates that Wagner persuaded Nietzsche to omit the essay from his first book, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872), which culminates in a paean to Wagner. During the same period, though, Nietzsche was castigating German tendencies toward nationalist chauvinism and anti-Semitismconspicuous elements in Wagners political blatherings. What seems particularly unfortunate about the break is that each man had an acute sense of the others blindnesses.

Nietzsche not only rejected the sublime longings of nineteenth-century Romanticism; he also jettisoned the teleology of historical progress that had governed European thought since the Renaissance, and that had found its most formidable advocate in Hegel. Instead, Nietzsche grounded himself in a version of naturalismthe post-Darwinian conviction that humans are an animal species, led by no transcendent purpose. This turn yields Nietzsches most controversial concepts: the announcement of the death of God; the eternal return, which frames existence in terms of endlessly repeating cycles; and the will to power, which involves a ceaseless struggle for survival and mastery. It might be said that Nietzsche, in backing away from Wagner, backed into his own mature thoughtthe celebration of Dionysian energy, the triumphal yes to life over and above all death and change.

Between his final meeting with Wagner, in 1876, and his mental collapse of 1889, Nietzsche lived the life of an intellectual ascetic. Health problems caused him to resign his professorship in 1879; from then on, he adopted a nomadic life style, summering in the Swiss Alps and wintering, variously, in Genoa, Rapallo, Venice, Nice, and Turin. He wrote a dozen books, of increasingly idiosyncratic character, poised between philosophy, aphoristic cultural criticism, polemic, and autobiography. He worked out many of his ideas during vigorous Alpine hikesa practice fondly re-created by John Kaag in the recent book Hiking with Nietzsche. The possibility of a romance with the psychologist Lou Andreas-Salom arose and then subsided; a serious relationship was probably beyond his reach. The landscape of the mind consumed his attention. As Safranski wrote, For Nietzsche, thinking was an act of extreme emotional intensity. He thought the way others feel.

Translating Nietzsche is a difficult task, but the swagger of his prose, with its pithy strikes and sudden swerves, can be fairly readily approximated in English. Kaufmann, in his translations, brought to bear a strong, pugnacious style. In his introductions and footnotes, he distanced Nietzsche from fascist bombastnaming the bermensch the Overman was just one strategyand recast him as a kind of existentialist. But Kaufmann underplayed Nietzsches slippery elegance, and his choice not to translate Human, All Too Human and its successor, Dawn (1881), gave a skewed view of the thinkers development. A series of translations from Cambridge University Press covered the gaps. Now Stanford University Press is halfway through a nineteen-volume edition of Nietzsches complete writings and notebooks. The press has been threatened with cuts in funding, but if the project is achieved English readers will have, for the first time, access to the entirety of Nietzsches work.

Since 1967, the German publisher De Gruyter has been amassing a critical edition of Nietzsches complete writings, which can be browsed on a dizzyingly comprehensive Web site, nietzschesource.org. This monumental project has, to the annoyance of some scholars, attracted increasing attention to Nietzsches extensive notebooks. These show a less awe-inspiring side of the philosopher, as he jots down items from his reading and delivers utterances esoteric, mundane, and bizarre:

Read more from the original source:
Nietzsches Eternal Return | The New Yorker

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Philosophy

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List Rules Must be a famous or well-known quote. If a quote is cut off you can hover over the text to see the full quote.

A list of the best Friedrich Nietzsche quotes. List is arranged by which ones are the most famous Friedrich Nietzsche quotes and which have proven the most popular with visitors to this page. All the top quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche should be listed here, but if any were missed you can add more quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche at the end of the list. This list includes notable Friedrich Nietzsche quotes on various subjects; if you are looking for subject-specific quotes, those can also be found on Ranker along with the authors name.

This list answers the questions, "what is a list of Friedrich Nietzsche quotes?" and "what are the most famous Friedrich Nietzsche quotes?"

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dinni added And those who were dancing were thought to be insane,by those who could not hear the music.

schlimmerjaeger added The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.

schlimmerjaeger added The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.

schlimmerjaeger added The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

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Best Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes | List of Famous Friedrich ...

The class of 2020 always knew they were special. Born in the shadow of 9/11, they grew up listening to their familys stories of that day and the aftermath; they grew up listening to stories of how strangers stepped up to help out each other; they grew up listening to stories of why older siblings had decided to join the military to fight Americas latest threat. They grew up during a time of economic prosperity and they were confident that graduation from high school was a step that would launch them into a world they had dreamed of and where they had a myriad of choices. Go to college? Sure, fill out this application and youre in. Take a gap year and travel the world? Sure, get your passport and a backpack and youre all set to go. Find a job in the oilfield? Sure, learn to get good and dirty but youll be able to buy that pickup or house youve been dreaming of. Buy the family ranch? Sure, your parents will be grateful to pass on what generations of your family have worked hard to build.

When the news of a strain of coronavirus that had appeared in Wuhan, China first hit the headlines and social media, it caused some concern and a great deal of interest, but that was in China. How could a virus in China impact our lives in Baker, Montana? We watched as the virus spread throughout the world; in February cruise ships began quarantining passengers - keeping cruise-goers on board for weeks before allowing them to disembark. Then Italy reported a spike in infections and by the end of February, the first reported US death from COVID-19 was reported in Seattle and a do not travel to Italy and China advisory was issued to Americans. But still, we live in Baker, Montana.

On March 13, President Trump declared a national emergency and state after state ordered the mandatory closing of schools, colleges, universities, restaurants, stores, malls, and even public parks. When the students and staff of Baker Public Schools left school for the weekend on Friday, March 13, they had no idea that would be the last time they would have the opportunity to be together as one. Their thoughts and plans were focused on the upcoming Prom, Track, Golf, Tennis, State FFA, State BPA, Close-Up, National Student Council, graduation trips, graduation itself.

Suddenly the class of 2020 was right in the middle of another national crisis - the Pandemic of 2020. All their carefully laid plans, all their hopes, all their dreams, were suddenly put on hold, if not discarded outright. Many tried to reassure themselves that the shutdown would only last a few weeks; surely by May 1 we could all be back in school and life would continue as normal. The slight bump of COVID-19 would soon be only an unpleasant memory. But, as we all know, thats not how it turned out.

Across the world, there are students who never got to really say good-bye to their teachers; there are teachers who never got that last day of their career with their kids and colleagues; there are families who didnt get to sit by their loved ones bed and hold their hands as they died; there are families who have lost their jobs and dont know how theyre going to pay their mortgages, their car payments, their familys food. Putting it in that perspective, life can always be worse. Yes, there are many milestones in our lives that have had to be changed or perhaps even cancelled, but life does go on. Friedrich Nietzsche said, That which does not kill us, makes us stronger. Those words are never more true than today. We are fortunate to live in a community that has worked hard to make certain our lives can go on as normally as possible. The Class of 2020 DID get a graduation ceremony as scheduled on Sunday, May 17.

Superintendent Aaron Skogen delivered the commencement address to the students who were seated in the Schillinger Stadium - with the proper social distancing limits imposed. Immediate family members were seated in the grandstands and friends and other family members lined the fence of the stadium to listen to the ceremony and to cheer on the graduating class. Our local radio station, KFLN, sponsored a live broadcast of the ceremony and the NFHS network streamed the event.

There were four Valedictorians, Katie Wang, Caleb Ploeger, Alissa Schell and Rachel Rost, and one Salutatorian, Lena Kennel, who delivered humorous and personal speeches to the audience. The remaining Top Ten of the Class of 2020, Shelby Moore, Halle Burdick, Mattie Mastel, Macee Hadley and Javan Kesinger, were recognized for their dedication and commitment to their education. There were numerous scholarships awarded to the graduates that will provide them opportunities to fulfill their goals. There were also the omnipresent eastern Montana winds that sent mortarboards flying, tassels tangling in hair and even taking temporary control of the microphone.

The graduating class of 2020 certainly had a unique graduation ceremony. Was it what they had planned on? Was it what they had counted on? Was it what they had always taken for granted? You know the answer to that - no. But it WAS a ceremony that they will never forget. The senior class bought banners featuring individual photos of the seniors to hang on Main Street; the After-Prom Party bought personalized car magnets for every senior; the local police department and fire department led the Senior Graduation Parade throughout the town to the cheers and delight of all. It certainly wasnt what anyone could have planned or envisioned on March 13, but there WAS a graduation.

Once again, the Class of 2020 had a front row seat to history in the making.

Go here to read the rest:
Graduation in the Times of COVID-19 | Schools Paid - Fallon County Extra

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Cold Chain Tracking and Monitoring Market Top Manufacturers, Consumption, Sales, Revenue & Trend For Next 5 Years - Cole of Duty

Life's been tough lately. A lot of us are stuck at home, watching our hair get long and missing our friends, and even our families. Sure, our neighbors are cool, but it's the same faces every day.

We've tried the group online calls and that helps.

We never thought we'd get so excited about going to the grocery store.

Some of us need some encouraging words right now, a little more than, "We're all in this together."

So we thought, you know who is always good for words of hope and promise? Commencement speakers.

Hear us out, we know most speeches on graduation day follow a pattern. Famous person says, "I can't believe they have me up here." Famous person drops some humor about a campus icon they learned about since they flew in. Famous person talks about their life for 15 minutes.

But then there's that nugget, those wise and learned words of how that future will unfold and how we should go after it.

Here is some good advice we found from some famous folks. It might be for 22-year-olds about to make a huge life change, but we think it's good to think about these things as we navigate this pandemic.

"Nobody is going to take you to the front of the line unless you push your way to the front of the line. ... One of the biggest lessons that I've learned in life is that you cannot achieve success without failure.

"Either I was going to sit in that failure and give up or I was going to make a decision to step out of the darkness. You see when you in that darkness you want to sit there and wait for the light to come. When you in that darkness it feels uncomfortable, but you can't wait and sit in that darkness. The only way out is to step forward, to face your fears, to become your own light."

"So I hope you find the courage to decide for yourself what is right and what is wrong. And then, please, expect as much of the world around you. Try to make the world good according to your standards. It won't be easy.

"Get ready for my generation to tell you everything that can't be done -- like ending racial tension, or getting money out of politics, or lowering the world's carbon emissions. And we should know they can't be done. After all, we're the ones who didn't do them."

"(Philosopher Friedrich) Nietzsche famously said, 'Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.' But what he failed to stress is that IT ALMOST KILLS YOU. Disappointment stings and, for driven, successful people like yourselves it is disorienting. What Nietzsche should have said is: Whatever doesn't kill you, makes you watch a lot of Cartoon Network and drink mid-price Chardonnay at 11 in the morning. ...

"In 2000, I told graduates to not be afraid to fail, and I still believe that. But today I tell you that whether you fear it or not, disappointment will come. The beauty is that through disappointment you can gain clarity, and with clarity comes conviction and true originality."

"As each of you looks toward your future, always focus on finding that which you do well and that which you love doing. Do something that gives you satisfaction every day and makes our society a better place. Do something that helps your fellow citizens. Make sure you give a good measure of your time and your talent and your treasure in service to others. The need to serve others has never been greater in our nation. ...

"Whatever you think of the world right now, good, bad, better than it used to be, worse than it used to be, whatever you think of it, it is going to be yours to shape. It's gonna be yours to help bring the positive future, better future for all of our citizens of the world, and America has a vital role to play."

"Now, why are you here? I'll tell you why you're here. You've been put here because the universe exists. There's no use the universe existing, if there isn't someone there to see it. Your job is to see it. Your job is to witness. To witness, to understand, to comprehend, and to celebrate! To celebrate with your lives. At the end of your life, if you don't come to that end and look back and realize that you did not celebrate, then you wasted it."

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma -- which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

"Fear is going to be a player in your life, but you get to decide how much. You can spend your whole life imagining ghosts, worrying about the pathway to the future, but all there will ever be is what's happening here, and the decisions we make in this moment, which are based in either love or fear.

"So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality. What we really want seems impossibly out of reach and ridiculous to expect, so we never dare to ask the universe for it. I'm saying, I'm the proof that you can ask the universe for it -- please! ...

"And when I say, 'life doesn't happen to you, it happens for you.' I really don't know if that's true. I'm just making a conscious choice to perceive challenges as something beneficial so that I can deal with them in the most productive way. You'll come up with your own style, that's part of the fun."

"Abide in the space of gratitude, because this is what I know for sure, that only through being grateful for how far you've come in your past can you leave room for more blessings to flow. Blessings flow in the space of gratitude.

Everything in your life is happening to teach you more about yourself, so even in a crisis, be grateful. When disappointed, be grateful. When things aren't going the way you want them to, be grateful that you have sense enough to turn it around."

"America (is) the greatest democratic country so you should look (to the) whole world. ...

"So you see, you think on a global level now in order to create a sense of global responsibility. ... It is extremely important to develop a concept of oneness of humanity. Seven billion human beings, we are part of that. If the seven billion human beings are happy and also the nations' involvement positive then everybody gets a benefit."

"We cannot always bend the world into the shapes we want but we can try, we can make a concerted and real and true effort. ... Always just try. Because you never know.

"And so as you graduate, as you deal with your excitement and your doubts today, I urge you to try and create the world you want to live in.

"Minister to the world in a way that can change it. Minister radically in a real, active, practical, get-your-hands-dirty way."

"Preparation is the key to victory in any game that you play. The prepared people win a lot more than the unprepared people. You can never spend too much time on preparation. The will to prepare to win is far more important than the will to win. ...

"And I think the ability to adjust, the ability to be able to see something and adjust to it, to change your approach because there's a better approach is going to be very important to each of you."

"I want you to remember that your sense of humor is your life preserver in what could definitely be a veil of tears.

"Relish it. Cultivate it. It will keep you sane in the midst of the madness you will encounter nearly, and I promise you, nearly every day of your life. It is vital to your existence. It's so important that people pay morons like me to make them laugh.

"I want you to remember that you are now entering a world that's filled to the brim with idiots. ... Since there are so many idiots out there you actually may start to think you're crazy. You are not. They are idiots."

Original post:
These commencement speakers have wise words for these times - erienewsnow.com

You probably know the story of the 917/30. You probably saw it run in all its Can-Am Cup-quashing glory back in 1973, with its engineer Mark Donohue at the wheel. You may think motorsports had never been so good nor produced a car so dominant. And youd be right.

A Porsche historical document described the advent of the 1973 engine:

Back then, the 917s dominance was so stifling that motorsport authorities decided to intervene. Porsche had won the manufacturers title at the World Sportscar Championship in 1970 and 1971. The 917 had racked up 15 endurance victories, including the brands first two overall victories at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, before its 5.0-liter, 12-cylinder engine was no longer permitted to compete in 1972.

It couldnt compete in Europe, but here in North America there was this thing called the Can-Am.

Canepa

Porsche found a new field of activity. North America had long since become the brands largest individual market, and the Canadian-American Challenge Cup, or Can-Am for short, became an attractive racing series. In order to be able to compete against the dominant McLarens and their 800-hp V8 engines from Chevrolet, the V12 (normal-)aspiration engine of the 917 was not enough. Performance improvement by turbocharging was still largely uncharted territoryone that Porsche explored.

Among the explorers was American Mark Donohue, a successful race-car driver and engineer. Thirty-four years old at the time, he was appointed developmental and factory driver. In 1972 the approximately 1,000-hp 917/10 TC Spyder (TC stands for turbocharged; Spyder refers to the now-open cockpit) won six Can-Am races and the title. As competitors got their vehicles ready for the 1973 motorsport season, Porsche presented its answer: the 917/30.

And we all know what happened after that, a dominant season so thorough, that it eventually killed the whole series. By 1975 Porsche used the car, with Donohue at the wheel, to set a closed-course speed record at Talladega that would stand for 11 years.

A 917/30 sold for $4.4 million in 2012

After that, Roger Penske owned the car for a while, sold it to LA collector Otis Chandler, who sold it to French collector Jackie Setton. Motorsports restoration mega-specialist Bruce Canepa found the car and sold it to its current owner, Rob Kauffman, who had Canepa restore the whole thing, including rebuilding both the 5.4-liter engine you see here and a spare 5.0 flat 12, both things of beauty to certain eyes.

But unless you worked on the team back in the day, chances are youve never seen a 917/30 engine out of the car. Well, feast yer eyeballs upon its magnificence presented here.

Canepas shop in Scotts Valley, California, just finished rebuilding the 5.4-liter flat-12 turbo engine from Donohues car, with help from original engineers Valentin Schaeffer and Gustav Nietzsche.

To have Gustav teaching us and Valentin teaching, it's been unbelievable. You know, retired factory guys helping out. And then Ed Pink Senior, all three of them helping, said Canepa.

Canepa

Before stuffing it back into the blue and gold Sunoco chassis, the Canepa people took some photos of it, which is what you see here. Look at it and ponder the engineering that went into it, back in the days before CAD, CFD, CAE and a bunch of other C acronyms. Back when all the German engineers and Donahue had were their enormous brains, some pencils and a slide rule. Canepa is still in awe of it all.

What's amazing is when you go back, now you're talking about the early 70s, when you look at the brainpower of those guys between (Hans) Mezger and Valentin Schaeffer and the guys building the engine, when you look at the brainpower, they didn't have computers telling them, there wasn't a program on how to build an engine. I mean, this is all in their heads. And to build that big an engineand it's a big engine, its size, it's a big thingto build that thing and have it run 8,000 rpm, which is a lot for a big engine, and make that kind of power boosted and reliable. I mean, that engine would run for 25, 30 hours without them touching it. Those guys were geniuses, period.

So it must have been kind of cool to be able to take one all apart and put it back together again. Canepa figures theyve done seven or eight rebuilds on 917 engines in the last three years, both the normally aspirated flat-12s that won the World Sportscar Championship and Le Mans in 1970 and 71, and the later turbo powerplants like this one.

Those engines were incredible. And when you see them all apart and you look at the pieces, and you just study the design of it, even if you don't even know what you're looking at, you're just impressed. Just in all the detail and all the things they were paying attention to.

If you ever get a chance to go to the Rennsport Reunion or anywhere one of these great race cars are shown, try and lean over to get a peek into the engine bay. You wont be disappointed.

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Gaze in Wonder at This Porsche 917/30 Flat-12 Fresh out of Canepas Shop - Autoweek

There is something inside all of us that yearns not for reason, but for mystery not for penetrating clear thought, but for the whisperings of the irrational.-Karl Jaspers, Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time (1952)

In the closing days of the Third Reich, when still-surviving Germans finally realized that they had been following a murderous charlatan,[1] it was way too late for any redemptive turnaround. But why had they been so wittingly deceived in the first place? After all, prima facie, the Fuehrers starkly limited education and wholesale incapacity to reason had been evident from the start. Had the German people somehow been influenced by a subconscious preference for whisperings of the irrational, that is, for the always-pleasing simplifications of mystery over any penetrating clear thought? And if so, were these nefarious influences more than narrowly or peculiarly German defects? Were they determinably generic for all peoples and thus effectively timeless?

Today there arise various other good reasons for analytic perplexity. These questions become even more bewildering when one considers that many true believers of the Fuehrer were conspicuously well-educated and also well acquainted with established textbook requirements of logic and modern science. In the end, of course, there are many additional, varied and predictable answers to factor in including cowardice, fear and presumed self-interest but most broadly coherent explanations must still correctly center on a populist loathing of complex explanations and a national surrender to mass.

Sometimes this source of surrender (mass is the term of preference embraced by Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung[2]) has been called herd (Friedrich Nietzsche); horde (Sigmund Freud) or crowd (Soren Kierkegaard), but all of these terms have essentially the same referents and reveal virtually identical significations. Above all, the discernible common meaning is that an easy to accept groupthink makes annoyingly difficult individual thinking unnecessary, and thereby renders feelings of individual responsibility moot or beside the point.

Now we may detect all this once again in Donald Trumps increasingly deformed and weakened United States. In this determinedly unreasoning presidents vision of resurrected American greatness, more conscious citizen thought is presumed to be not just extraneous, but also harmful. I love the poorly educated were the exact words Trump used during the 2016 campaign. Not to be ignored, these words were a near-exact replication of Joseph Goebbels favored National Socialist sentiment, one most famously expressed at the 1934 Nuremberg rally (Intellect rots the brain.). Though admittedly painful to accept, Mr. Trumps current know nothing vision endangers present-day Americans just as plainly and existentially as earlier Nazi deformations had corrupted Europe.[3]

While Germany ended with an incomparably grotesque Gotterdammerung in the spring of 1945 an apocalyptic consummation driving both Hitler and Goebbels (with Goebbels entire family) to commit ritual suicide in the Fuhrenbunker Americans now face a twilight of the Gods of their own making: at least hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 fatalities.

In fairness, US President Trump did not cause this plague of virulent disease pandemic. Nonetheless, his endlessly injurious manipulations of mass have repeatedly undermined myriad and indispensable contributions of science. To wit, in the year 2020, tangible portions of the civilized United States began to accept medical advice from Donald Trump that fully contradicted well-established medical orthodoxy, including promoting alleged medications that have subsequently proved useless at best or pernicious at worst. At the same time, authoritative, well-respected and capable professional scientists have been fired to make way for the next viscerally compliant batch of Trump sycophants and presidential lap dogs.

If these unprecedented affirmations of anti-Reason were not sufficiently endangering, they have been reinforced by a shameless battery of propagandistic deflections. As just one egregious example, in the middle of May 2020, Trump held a news conference to announce his successful launch of Americas Space Force and to laud its super-duper missile. One neednt be a deep thinker to recognize the utter irrelevance of any such crude military initiative to US security, or the obvious public relations intent of announcing such a program at this perilous time; that is, as a convenient distractionfrom a rapidly expanding disease plague, one taking cynical advantage of ordinary Americans usual and well intentioned patriotism.

Let us be even more precise. The United States is not becoming Nazi Germany. Thats not the problem. But this assessment ought not to become a simple all or nothing comparison. Then, as now, an irreversible social and economic decline arrived more-or-less indecipherably, effectively in generally hard-to-fathom increments. While there are abundantly vital differences between then and now, between the Third Reich and Trumps America, there are also several very disturbing forms of close resemblance. If we should wittingly choose to ignore these forms, we would also risk ending up in irremediably perilous national circumstances.

Or to continue with a useful metaphor, we would risk heading for our own separate and collective versions of the Fherbunker.

For America in a time of plague, a single core question must consistently remain uppermost, lest we forget how we even got here, to a point where an American president could say without embarrassment and without much public reaction: During the Revolutionary War in the United States, American military forces took control of all national airports, or to deal with the Corona virus, we should consider an internal body cleansing, perhaps even widespread ingestion of certain household disinfecting chemicals. How shall this massively ominous American presidency best be explained? Inter alia, we will need some purposeful answers here before we can be rescued. In part, at least, we can learn from the pre-Nazi German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. This means that some correct answers should be sought in the paradoxical juxtaposition of American privilege with American philistinism.

For such a seemingly self-contradictory fusion, Nietzsche coined an aptly specific term, one that he hoped would eventually become universal.

This creatively elucidating German word was Bildungsphilister. When expressed in its most lucid and coherent English translation, it means educated Philistine.[4] To a significant and verifiable extent, this term underscores both the rise of German Nazism in the 1930s and the rise of populist support for then candidate Donald J. Trump in 2016.[5]

Naturally, there is much more. In all linguistically delicate maters, carefully-crafted language and penetrating clear thought are required. Accordingly, Bildungsphilister is a word that could shine some additional needed light upon Donald Trumps uninterrupted support among so many of Americas presumptively well-educated and visibly well-to-do.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump had several-times commented: I love the poorly-educated, but in the end a substantial fraction of his actual voter support arrived from the not-so-poorly-educated. It had been very much the same story back in Germany in 1933. We can ignore this portentous commonality only at our own existential risk.

Always, anti-Reason is an existential threat, but never more menacing than during an active disease pandemic. And always, however we may find it discomfiting, truth is exculpatory. Incontestably, even by definition, uncomfortable truths are upsetting and bewildering, but they remain truths nonetheless. Apropos of this plainly unassailable conclusion, any ascertainable distance between I love the poorly educated and Intellect rots the brain is not nearly as substantial as might first appear.

In essence, and plausibly also in consequence, they mean exactly the same thing.

There remain markedly meaningful distinctions between German National Socialism and the current US presidential administration, most significantly in leadership intent, but these distinctions generally express more of a difference in magnitude than in pertinent demographic aspects. At one obvious level, a great many American citizens (tens of millions) remain wholly willing to abide a president who not only avoids reading anything, but who announces his indifference to learning with fully limitless pride. For a president who consistently claims that corona virus testing and contact tracing are overrated, and who simultaneously announces mindless and incoherent threats of starting a new Cold War with China, I love the poorly educated should become an easily recognizable mantra.

We may recall too that for negotiating successfully with North Korea,[6] President Trump had openly advised attitude, not preparation.[7]At any normal or Reason-based level of policy assessment, this advice was openly caricatural. But Trumps once-unimaginable comment was not actually intended as satire. Not at all.

The dissembling policy problem with President Donald Trump is not just a matter of bad manners, occasional foolishness or gratuitous incivility. More than anything else, it is the quality of a far-reaching derangement and incapacity, a particularly lethal fusion that recently led Donald Trump to punish the World Health Organization for imaginary wrongdoings, and at the very same moment that such perverse withholding of funds could only further impair critical worldwide Covid19 responses.[8] Now, substantially more penetrating clear thought is desperately needed to understand this countrys manifold Trump-era declensions,[9] including its seemingly endless violations of authoritative international law.[10]

Do many (or any) Americans actively object to a president who has never even glanced at the US Constitution, the very same allegedly revered document he so solemnly swore to uphold, protect and defend? Is it reasonable or persuasive to uphold protect and defend a document that has never even been read? Is it reasonable or persuasive for We the people. not to be troubled by such a vast intellectual and ethical disjuncture? How long shall we endure profoundly lawless presidential behaviors concerning almost every manner of public responsibility and public service?

While Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort are rewarded by this president for placing loyalty to Fehrerabove justice, tens of millions of poor Americans now being forced to work without proper disease protections can only make desperate personal plans to sleep in the dust.[11]

There is more. Key questions about pertinent historical analogies should not be skirted, obfuscated or ridiculed any longer. How, then, has the United States managed to arrive at such a portentous and dismal place in history? What have been the relevant failures (both particular and aggregated) of American education, most notably failures in our once-vaunted universities? Its an unsettling but sensible two-part question, especially as the Trump presidency assiduously transforms a merely self-deceiving country into one that represents a finely-lacquered collective corpse.

Once upon a time in western philosophy (a genre obviously unfamiliar to absolutely anyone in the White House[12]), Plato revealed high leadership expectations for his philosopher-king. Yet, even though we should no longer reasonably expect anything like a philosopher-king in the White House, we are still entitled to a man or woman president who reads and thinks seriously.

Even in Trumps grievously demeaned United States, true learning deserves its historic pride of place. Nietzsches Zarathustra warns prophetically: One should never seek the `higher man at the marketplace. But the suffocating worlds of business and commerce were precisely where a proudly know nothing segment of American society first championed belligerent impresario Donald J. Trump.

What else could we have possibly expected?

In the United States, a society where almost no one takes erudition seriously, we are all ultimately measured by one singularly atrocious standard. We are what we buy.[13] Accordingly, the tens of millions of Americans being shunted aside by the White House as presumptively extraneous to their political success are less highly valued (much less) than those who have managed to attain egoistically the conspicuous rewards of everyone for himself.[14]

There is still more, much more. This American president is not merely a marginal or misguided figure. Quite literally, he is the diametric opposite of both Platos philosopher-king and Nietzsches higher-man. Unambiguously, and at its moral and analytic core, the Trump administration now exhibits a tortuously wretched inversion of what might once have been ennobling in the United States. Even more worrisome, we Americans are rapidly stumbling backwards, always backwards, during an unprecedented viral pandemic, further and further, visibly, unsteadily, not in any measurably decipherable increments, but in giant or distressing quantum leaps of various self-reinforcing mortal harms.

In essence, these are historically familiar leaps of unforgivable cowardice, especially as evident in certain narrowly-partisan sectors of the Congress and federal government. How else shall we differentiate a now completely submissive attorney general or vice president or secretary of the treasury or secretary of human services or Senate Majority Leader from their manifestly hideous forbears in Munich or Berlin? Are they really all that different? Are they really any more upset by the prospective but possibly preventable deaths of several hundred thousand Americans from Pandemic disease than were Nazi officials Goebbels or Speer about then-suffering German families and workers?

A positive answer here would demand considerable leaps of permissible formal logic.

Among so many palpable deficits, Americas current president still does not begin to understand that US history warrants some serious re-examination. How many Americans have ever paused to remember that the Founding Fathers who framed the second amendment were not expecting or imagining automatic weapons? How many citizens ever bothered to learn that the early American Republic was the religious heir of John Calvin and the philosophical descendant of both John Locke and Thomas Hobbes? How many successful US lawyers have even ever heard of William Blackstone, the extraordinary English jurist whose learned Commentaries formed the indispensable common law underpinnings of Americas current legal system?

Literally and comprehensively, Blackstone is the unchallenged foundation of American law and jurisprudence.[15]

Does anyone reasonably believe that Donald Trump has even ever heard of Blackstone? Is there a single Trump lawyer (personal or institutional) who could conceivably know (let alone read) about the seminal Blackstones unparalleled juristic contributions? If there were such a person, he would understand, ipso facto, what is so utterly defiled (and defiling) in this presidents Department of Justice.

It is therefore, a silly question.

There is more. Human beings are the creators of their machines, not the other way round. Still, there exists today an implicit and grotesque reciprocity between creator and creation, an elaborate and potentially lethal pantomime between the users and the used. Nowhere is this prospective lethality more apparent than among the self-deluded but endlessly loyal supporters of US President Donald Trump. They follow him faithfully only because the wider American society had first been allowed to become an intellectual desert, and because they are most comfortable amid such reassuringly barren wastes.

Soon, we must inquire, will they also, like Third Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and his entire family, follow him dutifully and unquestionably into the Fherbunker?

Epilogue

In an 1897 essay titled On Being Human, Woodrow Wilson inquired tellingly about the authenticity of Americans. Is it even open to us to choose to be genuine? he asked. This US and (earlier) Princeton University president had answered yes, but contingently, only if citizens would first refuse to cheer the herds or hordes or crowds of mass society. Otherwise, as Wilson had already understood, our entire society would be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of broken machinery, more hideous even than the biological decomposition of individual disease-ravaged persons.

In every society, as Emerson and other American Transcendentalists had already recognized, the scrupulous care of each individualhuman soul is most important. Looking ahead, there can likely still be a betterAmerican soul[16] (and thereby an improved American politics), but not before we can first acknowledge a prior obligation. This antecedent and unalterable requirement is a far-reaching national responsibility to overcome the barriers of a know nothing culture or remembering German philosopher Karl Jaspers apt warning whisperings of the irrational.

Though overwhelmingly lethal all by itself, the current Trump government of anti-Reason is as much a dreadful symptom of much deeper menacing harms. Similar to any other complex matrix of virulent pathologies, the proper ordering of therapeutics will ultimately require this government to accomplish more than just a cosmetic excision of visible disease symptoms. In the end, to protect us all from a future that would be finalized in the Fherbunker, Americans must finally learn to favor Reason and Science over stock phrases, shallow clichs, banal presidential phrases and barbarously empty witticisms.

[1] In this connection, notes Sigmund Freud: Fools, visionaries, sufferers from delusions, neurotics and lunatics have played great roles art all times in the history of mankind, and not merely when the accident of birth had bequeathed them sovereignty. Usually, they have wreaked havoc.

[2] Says Jung in The Undiscovered Self (1957): The mass crushes out the insight and reflection that are still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional State should succumb to a fit of weakness.

[3] Consider, for example, the stunning Goebbels-Trump commonality concerning approval of street violence. Said the Nazi Propaganda Minister: Whoever can conquer the street will one day conquer the state, for every form of power politics and any dictatorship-run state has its roots in the street. Much more recently, and in an almost identical vein, Donald Trump declared: I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump. I have the tough people, but they dont play it tough until they go to a certain point and then it would be very bad, very bad. See, by this writer: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/04/louis-beres-trump-violence/#

[4] The first language of the Swiss-born author, Professor Louis Ren Beres, was German. This is his own straightforward translation.

[5] Also appropriate here is the nineteenth century description offered by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard in The Sickness Unto Death: Devoid of imagination, as the Philistine always is, he lives in a certain trivial province of experience, as to how things go, what is possible, what usually occurs.Philistinism thinks it is in control of possibility.it carries possibility around like a prisoner in the cage of the probable, and shows it off.

[6] I dont think I have to prepare very much, said Donald Trump before his Singapore Summit with Kim Jung Un on June 11, 2018, Its all about attitude.

[7] The mass-man, says philosopher Jose Ortega yGassett in The Revolt of the Masses (1930), has no attention to spare for reasoning; he learns only in his own flesh. This is exactly how President Trump learns. When asked on April 10, 2020 how he would create metrics for determining when the country could be safely opened up again, he pointed to his head, and exclaimed: This is my only metric. Always, this crudely primal method of understanding represents in his own flesh reasoning, his disjointed calculations spawned by raw instinct and revealed with demeaning frivolity.

[8] In stark contrast, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director General of WHO, spoke modestly, intelligently and purposefully: COVID-19 does not discriminate between rich nations and poor, large nations and small. It does not discriminate between nationalities, ethnicities, or ideologies. Neither do we, he said. This is a time for all of us to be united in our common struggle against a common threat, a dangerous enemy. When were divided, the virus exploits the cracks between us.

[9] Regarding US President Donald Trumps persistent and often egregious crimes involving the law of war and the law of human rights (e.g., Syria; Afghanistan; Iraq; Mexican refugees, etc.), criminal responsibility of leaders under international law is not necessarily limited to direct personal action nor is it exculpable by official position. On this peremptory principle of command responsibility, or respondeat superior, see: In re Yamashita, 327 U.S. 1 (1945); The High Command Case (The Trial of Wilhelm von Leeb), 12 Law Reports of Trials Of War Criminals 1 (United Nations War Crimes Commission Comp., 1949); see Parks, Command Responsibility For War Crimes, 62 MIL.L. REV. 1 (1973); OBrien, The Law Of War, Command Responsibility And Vietnam, 60 GEO. L.J. 605 (1972); U.S. Dept. Of The Army, Army Subject Schedule No. 27 1 (Geneva Conventions of 1949 and Hague Convention No. IV of 1907), 10 (1970). The direct individual responsibility of leaders is also unambiguous in view of the London Agreement, which denies defendants the protection of the act of state defense. See AGREEMENT FOR THE PROSECUTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE MAJOR WAR CRIMINALS OF THE EUROPEAN AXIS, Aug. 8, 1945, 59 Stat. 1544, E.A.S. No. 472, 82 U.N.T.S. 279, art. 7.

[10] Though wholly disregarded by President Trump, international law is an inherent part of United States law and jurisprudence. In the words of Mr. Justice Gray, delivering the judgment of the US Supreme Court in Paquete Habana (1900): International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained and administered by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction. (175 U.S. 677(1900)) See also: Opinion in Tel-Oren vs. Libyan Arab Republic (726 F. 2d 774 (1984)).Moreover, the specific incorporation of treaty law into US municipal law is expressly codified at Art. 6 of the US Constitution, the so-called Supremacy Clause.

[11] One should also think here of the countrys indigenous peoples, especially tribes such as the Navajo Nation. These vulnerable peoples are suffering disproportionate harms from this pandemic, harms that are effectively considered tolerable or even reasonable by US President Donald Trump.

[12] In this connection, Americans should also be reminded of the total absence of any cultural life or life of the arts going on in the Trump White House. Together with Trumps endless attacks on a life of the mind, this demeaning absence points toward the very worst imaginable case of Nietzsches Bildungsphilister or educated Philistine. See, by this author, at Yale Global: https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/trumps-america-anti-intellectual-and-proud-it

[13] The rich man glories in his riches, says Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), because he feels that they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world.At the thought of this, his heart seems to swell and dilate itself within him, and he is fonder of his wealth, upon this account, than for all the other advantages it procures him.

[14] The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of `everyone for himself,' says Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man (1955), is false and against nature.

[15] Significantly, in this connection, Blackstone emphasized the importance of global cooperation between nations: Each state is expected to aid and enforce the law of nations as part of the common law, says Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Law of England (1765) by inflicting an adequate punishment upon the offenses against that universal law. Similarly, says Emmerich de Vattel, in his prior and classic The Law of Nations (1758), The first general law, which is to be found in the very end of the society of Nations, is that each Nation should contribute as far as it can to the happiness and advancement of other Nations.

[16] Sigmund Freud maintained a general antipathy to all things American. In essence, he most strenuously objected, according to Bruno Bettelheim, to this countrys shallow optimism and to its corollary commitment to a dreadfully crude form of materialism. America, thought Freud, was very lacking in soul. See: Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Mans Soul (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), especially Chapter X.

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Coronavirus: The Collapse of Higher Education -Or its Revolution? - Modern Diplomacy

But years before Burke and Pates latest success, the two were students at UNC, studying English and enjoying indie music.

Memories at UNC

Burke, who graduated in 1988, said he remembers his favorite study spot as the lounge of the eighth floor of Davis Library overlooking the Pit.

I swear I must have spent I almost spent more time there than anywhere else, Burke said.

On Franklin Street, Pate, class of 1992, said he frequented Pepper's Pizza and Cats Cradle before it moved to its current location in Carrboro in 1993.

There was such an unbelievable indie rock scene when we were there, like it was exploding, Pate said. It was often called the next Seattle.

Burke and Pate credited their English and creative writing professors for their support and mentorship.

I wouldnt be a writer if it werent for going to Carolina, Burke said.

They were so supportive and cool, and really madeyou believe that you could do it, Pate said.

Pate and Burke both majored in English. Despite receiving an unsatisfying grade on a paper about Nietzsche, Pate said professor Reid Barbour in the English and Comparative Literature department played an important role in his academic career.

Although he has not seen the show, Barbour said he appreciates how the show posits archival work as a part of the adventure.

To dedicate yourself to an English major when Josh was an English major was also to dedicate yourself to history, and to digging up history, Barbour said.

Creating Outer Banks

Pate said a photo of a power outage in the Outer Banks inspired the initial conversation between Burke and himself.

There was a photograph of all these darkened mansions at dusk, Pate said. It was such an evocative photograph I had grown up on the Carolina coast, and it kind of just spurred a little creative instinct.

Much of the inspiration for the setting stemmed from spending time in Wilmington, North Carolina, Pate said.

Even though the show is called the Outer Banks, and even though the show is not completely realistic, a lot of the way I would imagine scenes had to do with the area around Wrightsville Beach, Pate said.

While Burke and Pate were planning on filming in Wilmington, North Carolina, the show was filmed in Charleston, South Carolina, because of a standing policy at Netflix in opposition to the 2016 House Bill 2 and its replacement House Bill 142.

On set, Burke and Pate agreed it felt like a constant, chaotic party.

As soon as the cameras stopped rolling, people were throwing Frisbees and footballs and joking; it was sort of an ongoing happy vibe that you could see on screen, Burke said. That feeling between the actors, who all become friends and good friends, it sort of continued onto the set.

Connections to Chapel Hill

While the show focuses on life by the coast, Pate and Burke included nods to their alma mater throughout the show.

In one episode, a character is seen wearing a UNC hat. In episode four, the characters take a trip from the Outer Banks to Chapel Hill to visit the state archives, housed today in Wilson Library.

And yes, Pate and Burke know you cannot take a ferry from the Outer Banks to Chapel Hill.

Burke said the characters take the ferry to get from the island to the mainland, then an Uber from the mainland to Chapel Hill. The shot of them getting into the car was cut out, but when the characters arrive, they can be seen getting out of a car.

So its actually on-screen, and then we were still misunderstood, Burke said.

Other criticisms from geography trolls have pointed out how the show doesnt actually resemble the Outer Banks, Pate said.

Theyre like, It doesnt look like the Outer Banks, or, You cant take a ferry to Chapel Hill, Pate said. Im like, Its fiction, bro.

And believe it or not, a love for UNC basketball and a passion for the Tobacco Road rivalry made it into the narrative. Burke later said in an email that the show does acknowledge Duke subtly.

When we were naming our villain, we were having trouble with the last name, and we just decided to name him after the most hated place in (the) universe, Burke wrote. His name, if you remember, is Ward Cameron.

Rise to success

While creating the show, the team felt confident throughout the process. But Pate and Burke said they did not anticipate just how successful the show would be.

The story was dynamic and the kids were doing a great job, Burke said. Everybody seemed to be pulling in the right direction. You can tell when something is going wrong it felt like it was going right.

Pate described the shows success after its original release date as a gradual process.

It kept going higher on Netflix, and weird things started happening, Pate said. The cast started to text with Drake and stuff everything that just got weirder and weirder and weirder.

Weeks after its release, Burke thought, "Holy shit. This is a hit.

Although Netflix has not confirmed a second season, Burke and Pate are already working on the script for season two. They said they feel confident about the shows return.

And looking ahead to the UNC mens basketball, Pate said he hopes that next season will be better than the last.

@madelinellis

@DTHCityState | city@dailytarheel.com

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'Outer Banks' co-creators talk Netflix, the UNC-Duke rivalry and the ferry to Chapel Hill - The Daily Tar Heel

Sometimes people dont want to hear the truth, wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, because they dont want their illusions destroyed. Welcome to the United States.

The first principle of the American creed is that world is redeemable.We believe that we are exempt from the constraints of the human condition. I disagree. As Albert Camus suggests: We areSisyphus.

Whatever their faith, ideology or party, most Americans are utopians. Since the Puritans washed ashore and John Winthrop foresaw a city upon a hill, the American experiment has been a perfectionist project, an exceptional escape from nature and history. No matter if you believe in free markets, a welfare state, democratic socialism or anarchism, your agenda is grounded upon an unshakable faith in human perfectibility and the inevitability of creating a heaven on earth.

Every so often, a calamity of such magnitude occurs that it shakes the foundations of our taken-for-granted reality. COVID-19 is such a moment. The United States is awash in cognitive dissonance: Our illusion is that America is redeemable, that the Promised Land is just around the corner; the truth is that we are embedded in nature and history, tossed about by their unpredictable vicissitudes.

Monte Bute

In all societies, power struggles between groups are ubiquitous and perennial. The powerful are predators who prey upon the vulnerable they always have, and they always will. In all environments, natural and human-made calamities are ubiquitous and perennial. No amount of Shangri-La prophylactics will shield us from injustice and cruelty, from death and destruction.

To acknowledge this is not a brief for quietism; by no means does unblinkered realism absolve us from acting against suffering, cruelty, and injustice. Nevertheless, we are Sisyphus, forever condemned to push the rock of righteousness up the mountain, only to see it roll back down, perpetually. The world is not redeemable.

But what if we have it all wrong? What if redemption is not a forever after thing? Perhaps it is more like extendedepiphanies, interludes in which we transcend our mundane lives.

For sure, communities do not experience forever-after redemptions; nevertheless, they do have redemptive episodes. Throughout history, exemplary communities have stood up against pestilences, disasters, and social catastrophes like war, human slavery, ethnic cleansing, and climate change. Regrettably, too often these redemptive communities have faced unresponsive dominant communities and nation states. In this time of COVID-19, our essential workers are redemptive communities, inspiring the rest of us to listen to our better angels, ignoring the shrill voices of our demons.

During this plague, the selfless acts of courage rise to a heroic level when speaking of health care workers, first responders, transit workers, and workers in essential industries. At a more prosaic level, we must not overlook a contagion of kindness, the millions of small acts of care and compassion that emerge like blades of spring grass. Amidst all the death and destruction, this too is a redemptive moment in American history.

Still, Camus closes The Plague with a cautionary note:

None the less, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had to be done, and what would assuredly would have to be done again in the never-ending fight against terror and relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.

The world remains a hellish place. It cries out for our attention. We must create what Martin Luther King Jr. called beloved communities who answer those pleas by pushing the rock of righteousness toward the peak, acting against suffering, cruelty, and injustice. I am one with Camus: The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a mans heart. One must imagineSisyphushappy.

Monte Bute teaches sociology and social science at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul.

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COVID-19 is a cruel reminder of the human condition - MinnPost