The New Nihilism: The Existential Crisis of Our Time

The New Nihilism: The Existential Crisis of Our Time

In this highly engaging book, Costantino Esposito argues that nihilism is not merely the loss of the classic values of the Western tradition―rather, it presents a critical opportunity to ask pertinent, timely questions about the meaning of self and the world. Nihilism is a problem that has troubled the culture, philosophy, and worldview of people and societies for more than a century―a problem that seemed, thanks to the advance of cultural relativism, to have become an obvious and globally shared condition. However, in recent years, the conversation around nihilism has begun to change. The questions that nihilism once declared impossible to answer―questions about the ultimate meaning of self and reality, the truth of the person and history, our desire to understand ourselves in relation to the infinite―are reemerging in today’s culture and proving to be profound, reasonable, and of vital importance. In its classical form, nihilism is the loss of values and ideals, but its modern iteration manifests as an irreducible need: more basic but far more challenging. Esposito suggests that rather than being an obstacle, nihilism can become an opportunity to search for true meaning for our experiences in the world. With philosophical rigor, he intercepts and narrates this new phenomenon, focusing on social trends, poetic voices, philosophical and scientific visions, ethical problems, and aesthetic experiences. The New Nihilism unravels and makes sense of the real stakes of the existential crisis of our time. “Esposito’s book is a balanced description of those forms of nihilism that most ail modern society. Inquiring with journalistic incision into deeply philosophical issues, he provides insight, perspective, and vigor in assessing our current situation, and he does so in a way that can only be described, in the best possible sense, as absolutely charming.” ―Colby Dickinson, author of Giorgio Agamben’s "Homo Sacer" Series "Far from nihilism being a worldview that is impossible to endure, as is so often said, Costantino Esposito thinks it is the worldview that we all now live with―it conquered our horizons by shedding its angry and destructive image to become a 'quiet product of consumer society.' Esposito’s original and very readable book is his 'attempt to listen to what the nihilism of our time is telling us.'" ―James Tartaglia, author of Philosophy in a Meaningless Life Costantino Esposito is professor of history of philosophy and history of metaphysics at University of Bari Aldo Moro and at the Institute of Philosophical Studies of the Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI) in Lugano. He is the author of many books and articles, including Introduzione a Heidegger . Nihilism has re-emerged as a significant problem, in people's lives and in the events of the world. While its victory was almost hidden in the folds of individuals' lives, it seemed nevertheless to have won, definitively and quietly, in the societies of the advanced West, achieving a universal dominance accelerated by world globalization and an increasingly developed information technology. It is the pervasive conception that marks the most diverse worldviews, united by a tacit recognition that there is no longer a meaning to reality, an ultimate sense of oneself and of things, that can really “take hold” of our lives in the present; conquer and change us, that is, make us free. Certainly, values remain (solidarity, legality, care for the environment...), as duties to which we should direct our ethical responsibility. And yet, these often resonate as sadly beautiful words, incapable of overcoming that dull feeling that we are all destined to simply end. A consensual divorce seems to have been consummated between life and its meaning: life is identified with the naked desire to want itself, as an instinct of self-affirmation; and meaning is reduced to an uncertain cultural construction, made up of what we would like to be, of what we believe we are entitled to, of what the social system presents to us as an obligation. While nihilism seemed to have won, it was a strange victory. It was no longer due to the ever-increasing “power of the spirit” (the superman as will to power). On the contrary, it was that “passive nihilism” which is rather the “decline and recession of the power of the spirit”, so that, As Nietzsche writes, “previous goals and values have become incommensurate and no longer are believed; so that the synthesis of values and goals (on which every strong culture rests) dissolves and the individual values war against each other: disintegration–and whatever refreshes, heals, calms, numbs emerges into the foreground in various disguises, religious or moral, or political, or aesthetic, etc.” (Posthumous Fragments 1887-1888) . This was an inverted outcome, so to speak: not the revolutionary attack against the idols of the clerical bourgeoisie―which still resounded in ‘68―but the educated and “correct” style of a radical mass bourgeois