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| Full name | Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche |
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| Born | October 15, 1844 |
| Died | August 25, 1900 (aged 55) Weimar, Saxony, German Empire |
| Era | 19th century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Weimar Classicism; precursor to Continental philosophy, existentialism, Individualism, postmodernism, poststructuralism |
| Main interests | aesthetics, ethics, ontology, philosophy of history, psychology, value-theory, poetry |
| Notable ideas | Apollonian and Dionysian, death of God, eternal recurrence, herd-instinct, master-slave morality, Übermensch, perspectivism, will to power, ressentiment, der letzte Mensch |
| Signature |  |
Nietzsche by Danto – Bertrand Russell by Russell - Ivan S. Turgenev-Fathers and Sons
Introduction
It is sometimes thought or hoped that in addition to the commonly acknowledged modes of achieving positive knowledge of the world –through sense experience and scientific investigation – art provides us with a special way of attaining to perhaps a special class of truths; and these are said to have as great a claim to objectivity as any other. ART together with its escapes and pleasures has been thought to yield intellectual benefits as well of possibly a very high order conducting us to factual insights perhaps not otherwise accessible to mere human cognition.
The radical nature of Nietzsche’s thought even in its first significant expression may be seen in the fact that he is indeed prepared to allow that art has no less a claim than sense or science to objective truth. But this is because neither sense nor science can make any stronger claim to truth than art.
There is an analogy to be found between art and cognition (so called) regarding both their provenance and their function : each consists in illusions, the illusions of science and sense making life possible, the illusions of art making it bearable.
Nietzsche’s reasons for these highly skeptical conclusions consist in certain epistemological analysis rather like those often urged later by Bertrand Russell according to which our perceptions are said not to resemble their causes so that the language we employ learned in connection with the having of perceptions does not describe the world as it really is. Language rather describes- insofar as in Nietzsche’s view we may think of language as descriptive at all-the illusions we take for reality. At this point Nietzsche was supposing that there might be an order or structure in the world which we were capable of capturing. Yet given his ideas concerning the origin and function of our language, we could not say what the world might be in fact like even if , per impossible , we were in the position to experience whatever causes our perceptions. We plainly could not apply our terms to these causes.
Our primitive mode of contact with the world is essentially as artists, as more or less unwitting makers of images and metaphors transforming rather than reproducing our experiences, themselves transformations and not duplications of their causes and objects. But 'metaphors' through time and use become resolved into concepts and concepts elaborated into systems and ultimately these "edifices of concepts exhibit the rigid regularity of a Roman columbarium." One must vastly admire the architectural genius of mankind which builds "an infinitely complex cathedral of concepts upon shifting foundations and flowing waters, so to speak." But this admiration must be restricted to the structuring genius of the collective human intellect not to its capacity for discovering truth in any conventional sense of the term because at bottom our concepts are the residue of metaphors and the architecture of our conceptual structure is "anthropomorphic through and through and contains not a single point of which is 'true-in-itself,' objective and universal apart from man." We dwell in a structure we have built for ourselves and could not for a moment survive as recognizably ourselves "outside the prison walls of these beliefs."
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| Full name | Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell |
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| Born | 18 May 1872 |
| Died | 2 February 1970 (aged 97) Penrhyndeudraeth, Wales, UK |
| Era | 20th century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic philosophy Nobel Prize in Literature 1950 |
| Main interests | Metaphysics, epistemology, logic, mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, ethics, philosophy of religion, history of philosophy |
| Notable ideas | Analytic philosophy, logical atomism, theory of descriptions, knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description, Russell's paradox, Russell's teapot |
Part 1
Nihilism connotes Negativity and Emptiness; in fact it denotes two bodies of thought that although distinct from Nietzsche’s never the less bear it some partial resemblance. The Nihilism of Emptiness is essentially that of Buddhist or Hindu teaching both of which hold that the worked w e live in an seem to know has no ultimate reality and that our attachment to it is an attachment to illusion. Reality itself has neither name nor form and what has name and form is but a painful dreaming from which all reasonable men would wish to escape if they knew the way and knew that their attachment was to nothingness. Life is without sense and point there is a ceaseless alternation of birth and death and birth again the constantly turning wheel of existence going nowhere eternally; if we wish salvation it is salvation from life that we must seek. This Oriental pessimism articulated in
Part of what we must clarify then is the manner in which Nietzsche was able on the basis of a metaphysical Nihilism of the most uncompromising sort to justify an attitude toward life which in its affirmative was in every respect discordant with the Nihilism of Emptiness: his “new way to ‘YES’”.5
Part 2
The Nihilism of Negativity as I shall call it is exemplified in the movement properly known as 'NIHILISM', which flourished in the latter decades of the 19th c in Europe especially in the 1850's -1860's in Russia and which found it most respectable expression in Turgenev's 'Fathers and Sons' (1861). Russian Nihilism was essentially a negative and destructive attitude against a body of moral, political and religious teachings found or felt by the Nihilists to be confining and obscurantist. As against their elders, Nihilists claimed that they believed in nothing, though what this specifically meant was that they held in total discredit the beliefs, tastes, and attitudes of their elders and those in current authority. Shades of most revolutions. "Nihilism in the St. Petersburg style- i.e., belief in unbelief to the point of martyrdom for it, shows always and above all the need for belief...."6 In actual fact they believed, in an uncritical and wholesale manner, in a crudely materialistic interpretation of science. Materialism, the word is often used to stand for the view that everything is material and that there is nothing mental at all: "All matter, no mind." What exactly does this mean? This materialistic interpretation of science will be discussed later. It is the typical 'mind-body' problem that faced Descartes when he presented his solution : cogito ergo sum - "I think therefore I am". It was basically in the name of science that they proclaimed, as invalid, the principles they inveighed(violently attacked) against. But inasmuch as their understanding of science was filtered through a version of materialism which they mistook for science itself or which if more sophisticated they took to be the only attitude compatible with and justified by science there was an undeniable component of belief indeed faith which interpenetrated their nihilism and rendered it halfhearted. Nihilists believed that there was no such thing as meaning or value, no inherent value in the universe, pursuit of meaning was not possible, the pursuit of constructed meaning was not possible, there is no solution to the individuals desire to seek meaning and there should be no room here for the kind of faith or belief posed here!
The 19th c, in its way was as much an age of faith as was the 12th c. Almost any European thinker of this epoch appears to us today as a kind of visionary committed to one or another program of salvation and to one or other simple way of achieving it. It was as though the needs and hopes which had found satisfaction in religion still perdurable (permanently durable) in an era when religion itself no longer could be credited and something else - science, education, revolution, evolution, socialism, business enterprise or, latterly, sex -must be seized upon to fill the place left empty and to discharge the office vacated by religious beliefs which could not now sustain. And so it was with Nihilism.
In Fathers and sons Barazov repudiates everything that cannot be explained by the laws of natural science, striving for reality rather than negation and he embodies the spirit of revolution. This gives you a clue as to the true nature of this touchingly adolescent attitude that relied on science and faith through revolution to form a new society. This type of Russian Nihilism took place locally about 1850 to 1860.
| Ivan Turgenev | |
|---|---|
 Ivan Turgenev, 1872 portrait by Vasily Perov | |
| Born | October 28, 1818 Oryol, Russian Empire |
| Died | September 3, 1883 (aged 64) Bougival, Seine-et-Oise |
| Occupation | Novelist and Playwright |
| Genres | Realism |
| Notable work(s) | A Sportsman's Sketches • Fathers and Sons • A Month in the Country |
Part 3
The Enlightenment Ideal and Nietzsche's more Negative Nihilism
3. JGB Beyond Good and Evil -56
4.Ibid.
5.Nachlass p.834
6. FW, 347 The Gay Science
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