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The Critique of European Nihilism. Interpretation, Responsibility, and Action
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2014
Abstract
The concept of ‘nihilism’ is ambiguous and has had and continues to be attached to several different usages. This special Focus primarily looks at the ways in which ‘nihilism’, in and following the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, has been understood as specifically tied to a crisis of European culture or civilisation, and has come to be politicised in conjunction with the National Socialist and Fascist movements in Germany and Italy during the twentieth century. Specifically, the individual articles deal with the connection between an understanding of nihilism and what it entails for the question concerning political responsibility. This introductory article presents this thematic, introduces the other contributions, and attempts to situate these debates on nihilism in the context of processes of secularisation. The article retrieves three major themes in relation to the critiques surveyed in this special Focus: nihilism as a crisis of beliefs and values, as an appropriation of religious elements into ideological grand narratives, and as the unshackling of an instrumental approach towards reality, and argues that all of them remain relevant to contemporary debates.
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- Focus: Nihilism
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- Copyright © Academia Europaea 2014
References
Notes and References
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40.It is hardly surprising that so many scholars on the subject, despite their differences in other respects, have pointed to the analogies between nationalism and organised religion. According to some, nationalism has served as a kind of replacement in this respect; C. Hayes claims, for example, in (1960) Nationalism: A Religion (New York: Macmillan), p. 15, that developments during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resulted in ‘a kind of religious void … for large numbers of people in modern Europe and the contemporary world … any such void is unnatural, and an urge arises to fill the void with some new faith.’ And W. Parker claims in (1984) Europe, America and the Wider World: Essays on the Economic History of Western Capitalism, Volume 1: Europe and the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 231, that ‘Europeans … seemed increasingly to need in politics, as they once had needed in religion, an intercessor between the individual and the universal, an object of tangible love on a grand scale [...] It was not simply a political necessity, but a psychic hunger that the national idea fulfilled…’ Several theorists have pointed to such similarities more recently, for example Smith, J. (1994) Quasi-Religions: Humanism, Marxism and Nationalism (Basingstoke: Macmillan); B. Anderson (2002) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London & New York: Verso); and A. Smith (2001) Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History (Cambridge: Polity Press). Strictly speaking, however, national narratives, rituals and symbols typically neither entirely replace, nor function in an identical way to, those of organised religion. Furthermore, religious elements may become part of national narratives.Google Scholar
41.These ambiguities can be clearly perceived in classical, indeed canonical, works on the sacred, such as Durkheim, E. (1995) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: The Free Press), R. Otto (1950) The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational (Oxford: Oxford University Press); and M. Eliade (1987) The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (Orlando: Harcourt).Google Scholar
42.This is not only a question of the reach of the commodification of objects, but also of landscapes and bodies as well as of time: an important part of early industrialisation in England consisted of the destruction of traditional holidays, removed from the world of work. Cf. M. Perelman (2000) The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Duke University Press: Durham & London), p. 17.Google Scholar
43.Tensions between national symbols and supra-national ones have been clearly visible in the development of the EU, for example in the transition from the rejected Constitutional Treaty to the Lisbon Treaty, a development that entailed both a rejection of the explicit reference to the EU’s shared symbols as well as a hesitance to clearly and concisely state the actually recognised primacy of EU law over national law; cf., for example, Piris, J.-C. (2010) The Lisbon Treaty: A Legal and Political Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 23, 81–89. Trans-national and cosmopolitan democratic projects ought certainly to reflect on the proper locus, if any, of shared, publicly supported symbols and rituals, but also on the role presently carried out by narratives on nations in withdrawing certain domains from ordinary usage and hence restraining tendencies towards commodification.Google Scholar