TürkçeChallenger Or Nihilistic Modernity?
Prof. Dr. Adnan Bülent BALOĞLU*
Not to hesitate, not to be afraid, to challenge; these attitudes contain within them a claim of superiority, an implicit bully attitude that does not put a premium on fear. "Challenge", which means to invite an opponent to a fight, a duel, a competition to show that you are not afraid of them, is perhaps one of the most frequently used phrases of modern times. Yet there is no age without a challenge, for every age carries with it its own risks as well as its own possibilities and opportunities. Similarly, the times we are living in also pose countless challenges to the human being, the family, society, religion, morality, and established culture. Each century adds its own challenges to those inherited from its predecessor. We should therefore note that the current challenges are superior in strength and quantity to their past counterparts, and that the modern individual's task is not easy. There are many challenges today, each more formidable than the other, and these are enough to explain the kind of age and society we live in. There is open disharmony and conflict everywhere, with differences of opinion that deny each other the right to life. In an age that deeply traumatizes souls, shatters emotional bonds, and wastes lives at breathtaking speed, the enormity of the myriad challenges is beyond dispute. As hopes for the future of a world that compromises its values and beliefs more and more every day and loses its balance due to systemic failures diminish, there is an increase in the number of those who join the caravan of those who fight with their values and beliefs. The breaches in the fortresses to resist the challenges are growing. It would not be an exaggeration to say that mankind has never witnessed a time in history when threats and dangers have been so abundant and diverse. Having to cope with these challenges, which today are becoming increasingly brazen with their various tricks and schemes, is undoubtedly the most difficult test of humanity. In this challenging process, in which digital technology is now in play, humanity will either keep its determination to win this test alive by fortifying and reinforcing its own sources of strength and resistance, or it will dig its own grave pit.
For Zygmunt Bauman, the modern man of modernity is a "modern pilgrim" wandering in the desert, making his own way, living a project-oriented life. Byung Chul-Han compares this modern pilgrim to a steam engine that crushes everything in its path. Just as the steam engine crushes with its tremendous power what comes in its way, so the modern pilgrim of modernity exerts tremendous power to overcome spiritual obstacles with great courage, envy, prejudice and arrogance. He desperately wants to tear down all spiritual walls, experiencing an unspeakable loss of horizon, goal and purpose. He has an overly hectic, excited, restless, irritable, nervous, scattered, unstable and anxious state of mind; he thinks that he will be liberated when he breaks all his ties; he seeks worldly satisfaction and happiness in an aimlessly flowing, rhythmless spiral of life. (Han 2020: 40-42). It struggles to face the various threats and challenges of a flexible, loose, fluid, ever-changing, self-doubting world, a chaotic age riddled with hope, doubt and anxiety. Because even though he thinks he is the master of the world, he has an extraordinarily weak and fragile nature, and unfortunately he does not have a "threshing machine" to detect deceptive traps, to distinguish what is real and precious from lies and illusions, from garbage and chaff. (Bauman 2011: 8).
According to the modern individual, tradition, religion, culture, morality, morality, the state and the institutions that represent and sustain them have expired. This individual, whose brain is filled with the slogans of liberal culture, thinks that to live in touch with the morality, religion, tradition, culture and institutions of the past is to give up freedom. For him, this is the era of judging history, of questioning authorities, of rebelling against imposed norms and values. Exhausted from pursuing what is in his mind and heart, he sees it as a freedom, even a given right, to take out his anger on religion, morality and God.
This individual, whose salient characteristics we have briefly summarized so far, possesses personality traits that are perfectly suited for modernity. In the eyes of modernity, which promotes liberation from the transcendent in the name of freedom, such an individual is a "new" member of the group of the identical, ordinary, obscure, objectified, objectified. In the "show" society of modernity based on "taste", personalities, consciousnesses, lives that are hooked by the promises of so-called liberation and in the meantime are dematerialized - in Han's terms, "instagrammable lives" - are included in the folder of capital. While they appear in the display windows of social media with their "fashion" attached bodies, carefully cleansed of purity and decency, with their walls of purity cracked and fake smiles, they are unaware of the fact that they actually function as machine oil for the gears of the industrial production wheels of global capital. These so-called subjects do not realize that they have become commodities of commerce, persuaded by the deception of a transparency "devoid of meaning" to turn their possessions outward, to expose, to become naked and stripped. Each of them is a self-promoting object of consumption in the exhibitionist society of capitalism, stripped of all its secrets. (Han 2022a: 27-30). It is not only bodies that are consumed, but everything without exception. A society that is willing to be stripped of all its values and stripped of its obligations will eventually fall into the lap of narcissism. A society of narcissists who are exhausted and worn out from the pursuit of success and performance while positioning themselves at the center! (Han 2022b: 10).
For those who are waiting to come out of their shells to challenge the common cultural values of society, modernity serves as a suitable incubator. Modernity, the final stage of modernization, is not independent of values. Modernity, which presents itself as an end in itself, aims to annihilate all that stands in its way, or if this is not possible, to completely change and metamorphose it, and sees all historical and institutional structures of society as rivals to itself, continues its existence with its own unique values. In the ups and downs of the West such as Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, social revolutions, industrialization, world wars, the values of modernity kneaded with capitalism, rationalism and liberalism have caused serious damage in Muslim geographies. While today's societies are being dragged into a life without any trace of God in the maelstrom of modernity, an unlimited freedom project that has lost the meaning of existence is being carried out at full speed. Modernity, which proceeds under the shadow of a systematic capitalist exploitation activity that has been stripped of mercy and conscience, is also busy weeding out the seeds of love from human existence and life. In this case, the questions "Why was I born?" and "Why didn't God ask me if I wanted to be born?" are the footsteps of the nihilistic challenge that flourishes in the bosom of modernity. It promises a parallel paradise on earth with the help of science and technology to young minds that despise life. But first, he tries all sorts of tactics: he tugs at the heartstrings (agnosticism); he invites them to believe in a "disinterested" God (deism) or convinces them of his non-existence (atheism); he instills in them a carefree disregard for life (nihilism). All these challenges are as vital to the survival of modernity as capitalism and liberalism. Deconstructive modernity needs all this to shake up all indigenous, established structures in order to establish its own cultural order; to dismantle everything related to politics, economy, religion, everyday relations.
Buried in the Swamp of Nothingness
The most obvious characteristic of nihilism, which has made a name for itself among the challenges of the modern age, but which is not easily understood exactly what it is, is that it sees nothing positive in human life. For this reason, it is associated with negative attitudes and pessimism in areas such as politics, ethics, epistemology and cosmology. In any case, since they are all ultimately about human existence, they meet under the umbrella of existential nihilism. (Gertz 2022: 83; Weller 2011: 10-11). From this point of view, what needs to be emphasized is the nihilist's indifferent attitude towards his own existence. According to him, everyone is born into a particular situation, a particular place, a particular historical period, in a particular family. These are ordinary situations for everyone, nothing to exaggerate, nothing to attach importance or value to. The human being, who is not involved in any of this, can only go on living aimlessly. Striving for life is meaningless; there are no obligatory things to do, no rules to follow. However, no matter how meaningless and worthless life may be, it is inevitably necessary to meet physical needs such as eating and drinking in order to sustain the body and sustain life. But in the end they are all meaningless routines of daily life.
Nihilism not only takes a negative view of life, but also ignores everything about it, denies everything that surrounds it, gives it order and form, and imposes obligations and rules on it. It does not seem possible to fit this total denialist attitude into a single mold. (Gertz 2022: 83-84). From this point of view, life is all about possessing and consuming; it is meaningless to believe, to be virtuous. All structures, beliefs and actions that are considered important and meaningful, that are allowed to encompass and govern life, are the same as nothingness. This personality, buried in its own pessimistic world, is in one way or another in the life it negates, even though it finds life meaningless and equates it with nothingness. It is sustained by the illusion that a meaningless world from A to Z is the "real" world. After all, it is not so important that everything is insignificant, life must somehow go on, even if it is devoid of meaning. What is normal for everyone else is meaningless to him, it is nothing. What you find meaningful is stupid to him.
How realistic or sincere it is to transform the world of nothingness into the world of reality with a strong illusion is open to debate. It is interesting that a nihilist who denies social norms and values does not turn down the blessings of life in a resentful, cynical manner. To invert what is happening in real life with an illusion in the mist of pessimism is not only to deny reality or equate it with nothingness, but also to reduce the mind to a hollow pit and the body to a useless lump of flesh. It must be very easy to wander idly in the world of rules and norms and not take any responsibility, to be a numb, carefree, uncaring unhappy person. This person is somehow able to pursue every thought and desire that comes into his mind, but he persistently avoids acknowledging the fact that he lives in a world he cannot control. What he is experiencing is a certain exhaustion that is slowly collapsing as he rushes through the world of speed, pleasure, success and performance-oriented capitalism. What is undeniably evident in the wake of extreme degeneration is a loss of faith, ideals and goals. It is clear that in the long run, failure to manage life, to face events and to overcome obstacles can make a person doubt even his or her own existence. Souls incapable of reading life and the world from a wider perspective will end up wallowing in the deep, dark pit of nothingness. They stubbornly refuse to see the positive impact and contribution to life of the wealth and power they have been endowed with. They are willing to pay a heavy bill imposed by the corruption and alienation that comes with rulelessness, powerlessness, meaninglessness and isolation. This heavy bill is, in the final analysis, self-negation, absolute denial.
The share of the famous classics of Russian literature in the frequent mention of nihilism among the challenges of our time cannot be ignored. Some nihilist Russian writers and their novels, which often made their characters repeat the ideals of autonomy, revolution and a new society, but also vomit their anger at a society plagued by wars, epidemics, poverty and, more importantly, despotism, are in high demand today. The concept of "nihilism", which appeared in the conversations between Chernyshevsky, Pisarev and Turgenev, entered circulation from the 1860s onwards, starting with Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. (Weinacht 2021: 16). These writers fight against the "System", which they believe shackles the freedom of the individual. While they flatter individualism in order to bash the System, consciously or unconsciously they have also stoned and insulted society, the family and the values that sustain them. For them, these values feed the System, which represses the individual, and hinder the material, mental and spiritual development of the individual. What needs to be created, then, is an all new libertarian, progressive System that will completely erase the rule of the old order. Their nihilism represents the hopes that will open the door to new happiness, new values, new loves from the ruins of the old. (Krause 2022). The nihilist characters they produced from the heroes of the novel - Bazarov, the Underground Man, Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, Verkhovensky, Kirillov, Karamazov, etc.- Although they represent the dark side of nihilism and narcissistic identity, their reckless attacks on society's culture, religion, customs and moral values have left behind hard-to-remove residues and destroyed the deep and precious meaning of human existence. With an insane attitude of absolute negation and contempt, they recognized no rules and no limits. While their shadows seeping through the pages of literary works have become nihilistic monuments, their conscience-searing words have become the motto not only of narcissistic nihilism but also of neoliberal capitalist culture.
The fact that this nihilistic understanding, which stands out in Russian novels and whose revolutionary goals are obvious, sees the old as a set in front of freedom, development and progress reveals the radical face of nihilism. Undoubtedly, this radicalism is essential for the destruction of the impossibilities and barriers that Dostoevsky's "underground" man characterizes as "stone walls". No matter how hard and impenetrable this wall is, there is still no submission. The one who submits will either hit this wall or risk becoming a "slothful, bitchy" person, making others feel the pain (toothache) he feels, disturbing their sleep and peace of mind. For this reason, he does not mind being called a "chatterbox, a blabbermouth, a bore". Because chatter, which he likens to carrying water through a sieve, is "destined for every intelligent man." This restless man of the underworld is not sure that reason and science will make everything rosy. According to him, those who think that an ideal social order will be established with science and an ideal economic order with mathematics, and that all problems will be solved in this way, are fools waiting for the phoenix. In the same way, reason is incapable of this because it is incapable of transcending its own framework, the only thing it can do is to respond to the needs of its own mind. The underground man (Dostoyevsky), who has difficulty in concealing his fragile nature against external dangers even though he appears to be in control of his own universe, insists on his God-man role, albeit implicitly, regardless of the circumstances, in order not to tarnish his valor.
God taking on the form of "man" in Jesus to save humanity did not work very well, because he could not save himself, he was killed. If there is no voice from God when man is most in need, then there is no God. Ivan's reasoning is this: "This sublime harmony is not worth a single tear of a baby begging its God! It is not worth it because the child's tears remain unaccounted for. There must be reciprocity, otherwise it is impossible to grasp the meaning of the sacred harmony. But with what can they be paid? Is there such a thing? Is it just revenge? What should I do with revenge, the monsters will go to hell; can hell bring back the evil they did, the life they ruined?" (Dostoyevsky 2021a: 326). If there is no God, then heaven and hell have already ceased to exist. Justice that comes too late is not justice. Kirilov of The Lamentations "For me there is no higher idea than the absence of God. I am the only one in history who refuses to invent God" (Dostoevsky 2021b: 778).
Therefore, if there is to be a God, it must be man himself and he must realize his own salvation through his own means. This salvation is necessary even if it means destroying others. Thus, when the restless Raskolnikov of Crime and Punishment deliberately commits murder, he is aware that he has done something against the customs and morals of society, but he has a valid excuse: He has eliminated the threat to himself. If survival is a question of survival in a society where there is no God, everything is permissible, including killing. The same thought applies to Smerdyakov, who copied his life motto from his half-brother Ivan Karamazov: "Since there is no God, belief in virtue is empty and useless." Wasn't it Ivan, his half-brother, who said, "Everything, I mean anything you want in the world, can be done, nothing should be forbidden from now on?" The message of these characters, who sink deeper and deeper as they struggle to get out of the quagmire of nothingness into which they have fallen, is, as the father Karamazov says in The Brothers Karamazov, "Let the world sink, as long as I am comfortable".
Nietzsche foretold in his own time that nihilism would be a challenge today. We can say that Nietzsche, who claimed that nihilism would descend upon Western civilization in the next two centuries, that the reign of values was coming to an end, that great goals and ideals would come to an end with nihilism, was right. The influence of Nietzsche, all of whose works have been translated into our language, on young minds cannot be ignored. For him, a world dominated by matter could only harmonize with nihilism, and lives here could only be stories. A spiritually and morally rotten civilization had killed God with its own hands. In such a world, man's part was to pay for the sins he had committed with his own hands. For Nietzsche, who struggled with severe health problems for most of his life, this was the world of nihilism and, whether accepted or rejected, the "real" world. Man was breathing in a deceitful, lying, treacherous, false world, a world tailored precisely to his animal needs. Searching for the meaning of life in this world was futile.
We can imagine that selfish nihilistic lives, who think they have killed God and buried him in a dark, secluded corner of their own souls forever, are content to be trapped in the cage of a world devoid of meaning. If we were to describe this state with Byun-Chul Han's quotations from the French poet and philosopher Paul Valéry, we would probably say: writhing in the throes of an "unbearable" forced confession "as grave as the death of God", this nihilist who has "lost his most vital "narrative refuge", who has "fallen unprotected into the hands of the naked body, stripped of meaning, without language, without language", the only thing this nihilist can ultimately feel is the "bone-deep cold" of pitch-black space. (Han 2022c: 31-32). Bauman likened modern man to the modern pilgrim; the German writer Ernst Jünger likened him to Sinbad the Sailor. For Sinbad, who enjoys himself by eating and drinking on the back of a giant fish he mistakes for an island, the fish's back is a "safe island" free from any danger. Like Sinbad, the nihilist who thinks he is safe in a godless universe represents, as Han correctly observes, "an enduring metaphor for human folly". (Han 2022c: 37).
Ultimately, the understanding of believing in the non-existence of existence, ignoring existence, accepting it as imperfect or incomplete, and accepting its absence leads us to the conclusion that if there is nothing of value, then life is meaningless. Therefore, there is nothing worthy of being known, nothing that deserves to be communicated with. The French spiritual atheist-materialist Comte-Sponvill had this to say about this nihilistic logic: "For what destiny was I born? I don't want to hear the same old song: To desire and to die! To die of desire! ” If life is deficiency, what is deficient? Another life, another death. Death That is the logic of nothing. ” (Comte-Sponville 2015: 319). But is this alone the logic of nihilism? Can nihilism, understood as withdrawal from the world, also mean over-attachment to it? Why not? I would like to point out that there is an organic connection between so-called liberation and being a deist, atheist, nihilist, agnostic or whatever.
Let's walk from here. If one speaks of a nihilist challenge today, one must examine its relation to modernity. Could nihilism really be the camouflaged face of modernity? Is there a hidden nihilistic nature in the depths of modernity? Could it not be modernity pulling nihilists into the pit of nothingness? Could there be an implicit connection between modernism and nihilism that is not really revealed? The questions are quite provocative.
Is Nihilism the Hidden Face of Modernity?
One argument is that there is a closed relationship between nihilism and modernity. Nihilism is as much a form or strategy of modernity as it is its opponent. Accordingly, nihilism is, on the one hand, withdrawing from the world, rejecting it, ignoring its positive values, and on the other hand, being passionately attached to it. (Scott 2012). This is not a claim to underestimate. Another thesis that supports this is that modernism and modernity are both at the opposite pole of nihilism and identical to it. Modernity is essentially deconstructive. It shatters traditional structures and lifestyles, sweeps away the sacred, destroys local habits and languages. It is founded on the values and rationality of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and in its world these have no place. Technology plays a vital role in satisfying his destructive spirit. However, it draws strength from many essential elements such as rationalism, liberalism, secularization, individualism, capitalism, social mobility and industrialization, which eliminate its obstacles; its ideological project of "progress" against the "past/old" is responsible for the catastrophic destruction of societies. The "fundamentalist war" of the French revolutionaries against tradition not only heralded the imminent triumph of modernity, but also, with Nietzsche's historic "nihilist" breakthrough, gave the final shape to the "theoretical" man of the modern age who wanted to understand the world through "reason" alone. This is the historical moment when the precise distinction between pre-Socratic Greek thought and "modern" was clearly established. (Weller 2011: 2-3)
James Tartaglia, who does not hide his nihilistic attitude, argues that contemporary secular culture has made a mockery of the question "what is the meaning of life?" and that the so-called "deep" meaning attributed to this question is meaningless and invalid where science exists. Tartaglia, who confines the question to the realm of religion, says that "talkative and stupid" philosophers once discussed it a lot, but it has lost its importance and interest for them as well. Moreover, the question has an unanswerable, vague character. (Tartaglia 2016: 1) For the analytic philosopher Tartaglia, nihilism is not something that leads to intrinsically bad or negative actions. He draws an analogy between life and chess. Although chess is a meaningless game, its moves have meaning. In the same way, life is meaningless, but everyday life hides meanings for people, and these can well be discovered. Therefore, nihilism is not bad, because it does not harm anyone. (Tartaglia 2016: 5-6). These and similar views, which can be interpreted as an attempt to sympathize with nihilism, are far from reflecting what it really is. When there is nothing to believe in, there is nothingness. The existence of something that is itself nothingness is absurd. If there is no life to attribute meaning to, there is nothing to talk about. The right way to live is to live according to the understanding that life is nothing. According to nihilist ideology, the belief or beliefs one thinks one has are in reality tantamount to nothingness. (Gertz 2022: 14).
The rise in nihilistic deviations parallels the rise in other pathological conditions caused by liberalism, which considers that the cultural heritage that holds societies together restricts the autonomy of the individual and thus his or her space for action. There is a correlation between the development of liberalism and the increase in individuals' denial of social and cultural belonging. In other words, the more individuals reject inheritance, the faster liberalism spreads and takes hold. (Deneen 2022: 80-81). In this sense, liberalism, which wages war on indigenous cultures, supports the rupture of individuals while paralyzing their perceptions of time, space, meaning and value. It doesn't matter what individuals are and what they want to be, because none of them can escape from his universe. Each is besieged by liberalism, which prides itself on being the way of life of the modern industrial West and its dominant ideology. It would be misleading to see liberalism only as a culture of freedom, it is also a nihilist culture that stealthily usurps freedoms. The truth hidden by the propaganda that techno-culture, born as a hybrid culture of technology and liberalism, will increase happiness and prosperity on earth, is that a possible "Android Humanity" project is on its way. It is among the long-term plans of global capitalists that individuals, who are set out with songs of freedom, lose their freedom with technology and are put under the domination of the machine. It will be necessary to emphasize here that modernity has a nature that is exactly compatible with this culture. A machine civilization in which existence and meaning lose their value is gradually approaching in the shadow of modernity. While modernity and its liberal system, which strips the individual of his/her belonging, dissolves the individual's identity, relationships and cultural codes through the deception of "free market/economy", it cuts the columns of all cultural structures that nourish and reinforce these identities, relationships and codes.
After all, deviations that reject their past, their historical heritage and their environment, retreating into their own inner world, seeking solace in the embrace of meaninglessness and nothingness, disturb neither modernity nor its much-vaunted liberal ideology. In this respect, the hidden connection between nihilism and modernity rightly raises the question whether modernity is essentially nihilistic.
Conclusion
Nihilism is a Challenge to the Individual and the World. Modernity, which indulges the Enlightenment mind and sanctifies its utopian ideology of "progress", has made considerable progress in disabling the mechanisms that would prevent the violation of humanitarian and conscientious boundaries by technique and technology. If even the very existence of the human being has become redundant in a contemporary secular culture that accompanies it, then the role and function of meaning is over. Especially when the overwhelming majority of the world's population, which is nothing more than "waste", is on a serious upward climb, meaning is better dead. In fact, for modernity and its secular/liberal order, as well as for nihilist ideology, the death of meaning has already occurred, since lives have already turned into ordinary lives, dematerialized lives. In an order where God, religion, tradition and traditional culture have no right to life, it is meaningless to assign meaning and value to life. To do otherwise would obviously not please liberalism, which pays lip service to all this.
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* Prof. Dr. Adnan Bülent BALOĞLU (Italy Milan Religious Service Attaché)