The idea that culture is an adventure of the human spirit, to be carried on in fellowship for the good of our souls, vanishes from sight. – Theodore Roszak
In 1887 iconoclastic German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche issued an ominous warning: “Our knowledge will take its revenge on us, just as ignorance extracted its revenge during the Middle Ages”.
No longer confident of their central place in a God-created universe and lacking a sense of their lives having divinely-mandated meaning and purpose, denizens of the modern West began to drift uncertainly, prey to a chaos of competing views and beliefs about themselves and the surrounding world. Cultural reflections of this tumultuous new dispensation were soon evident in art, literature, music, philosophy, and the demise of religious faith. Nietzsche’s pronouncement of the death of God and advent of nihilism, existentialism, and postmodernism marked an era of unprecedented ambiguity and decline.
Splendid Isolation
While liberating in many ways the collective impact of the epochal philosophical, scientific, political, and cultural innovations outlined in Chapter One also fostered great uncertainty. People may have been freed of a host of outmoded beliefs but were at the same time growing ever more anxious and directionless: inheritors of a disenchanted world spiralling out of control, no longer able to take for granted a sense of solid ground beneath their feet.
In a relatively short period historic scientific advances drastically restructured the scope of human understanding, frequently to great practical benefit, but often with unforeseen consequences far less benign. Under the contemporary mind’s penetrating scrutiny long-established views of “reality” as a comfortingly solid, universally shared phenomenon gradually fell by the wayside, relics of a simpler, more innocent era.
The dynamic thrust of the West’s cultural, scientific, and intellectual evolution removed us from an original condition of primal unity wherein we experienced ourselves embedded within a living matrix of meaning and connectedness with nature and the universe, to our current condition of disorientation, estrangement, and cosmic insignificance.
Advent of the modern Western worldview exacted a cost: “It divided us from our world, locked us in the armoured turrets of our consciousness. Outside was an alien landscape which was either illusory or meaningless, inside was the only possession of which we could be sure – the continual, anxious chattering of our self-awareness.”
Valley of Humiliation
Compared to the divinely-created realm in which our ancestors dwelt the modern universe of cold scientific fact appears spiritually barren and morally ambiguous. “How totally different did the world appear to medieval Man”, observed Jung.
“For him the earth was eternally fixed, at rest in the centre of the universe. Men were all children of God under the loving care of the Most High, who prepared them for eternal blessedness; and all knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves in order to rise from a corruptible world to an incorruptible and joyous existence.”
“Such a life no longer seems real to us, even in our dreams”, said Jung. “Natural science has long ago torn this lovely veil to shreds. Modern man has lost all the metaphysical certainties of his medieval brother.”
For all its undeniable benefits the modern scientific worldview has resulted in a “progressive impoverishment of human life and the human spirit, a fragmentation of original unities, a ruinous destruction of the sacred community of being.”
Straying and Drifting Uncertainly
Freed of many earlier cultural constraints and intellectual limitations, humankind found itself rudderless and adrift: “In the combined wake of eighteenth-century philosophy and twentieth-century science, the modern mind was left free of absolutes, but also disconcertingly free of any solid ground.”
Artists, writers, poets and philosophers were among the first to notice the rents appearing in the fabric of Western culture and the sense of cosmic absurdity that seemed to be rapidly overshadowing modern life.
Consciously or unconsciously the artist acts as instrument and spokesperson of the spirit of the age, Jung believed: “The great work of art is a product of the time, of the whole world in which the artist is living, and of the millions of people who surround him, and of the thousands of currents of thought and the myriad streams of activity which flow around him.”
Fin de Siècle
In Europe the so-called fin de siècle period was marked by growing disquiet concerning the decadence and immorality which seemed to be debasing every strata of society. Confidence the old century’s end would mark a hopeful new beginning was dampened by widespread fear Western civilisation was teetering on the brink of epochal crisis.
Munch’s iconic painting furnished an image emblematic of these troubled times. This disconcerting work was inspired, the artist said, by feelings experienced watching a blood-red sunset: “I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.”
While science had promised liberation from ignorance, many felt it had failed this mission by robbing human life of its sacred dimension. In 1891 celebrated author H. G. Wells likened science to a match Man had just struck, naively expecting its light to reveal splendours long hidden in impenetrable darkness:
“He thought he was in a room – in moments of devotion, a temple – and that his light would be reflected from and display walls inscribed with wonderful secrets and pillars carved with philosophical systems wrought in harmony. It is a curious sensation, now that the preliminary sputter is over and the flame burns up clear, to see his hands lit and just a glimpse of himself and the patch he stands on visible, and around him, in place of all that human comfort and beauty he had anticipated – darkness still.”
Leaping Behind the Retina
Artists had long focused on subjects external to themselves, aiming at faithful depiction of objects thought to exist out there in the surrounding environment. If portraying non-physical subjects such as mythological characters or supernatural beings the artist had to utilise his or her imagination but still endowed them with familiar human characteristics and traits (e.g. God was shown as a grey-bearded old man, angels as ethereal women, and Greek gods and goddesses as idealised human beings).
Something entirely new appeared via the endeavours of a small group of European artists, most notably Spanish painter Pablo Picasso and his creative collaborators. The Cubist movement they instigated revolutionised the visual arts, overturning centuries-old assumptions of Western art.
Cubism radically shifted the traditional focus toward subjective experience – what was occurring within the artist: “From painting things, the painter has turned to painting ideas. He shuts his eyes to the outer world and concentrates upon the subjective images in his own mind.” This challenged classical assumptions about the existence of an objective external reality identical for all human beings.
No longer merely passive receptors of images from the outer world, human eyes “are converted into projectors of private flora and fauna.” The consequences were momentous: “Leaping behind the retina – a tenuous frontier between the external and internal – painting completely reversed its function and, instead of putting us within what is outside, endeavored to pour out upon the canvas what is within.”
The implications of this new emphasis on subjective experience were comparable to those of a second Copernican revolution: human beings were increasingly seen to be the centre of an experiential reality about which perceptual objects revolve like planets, their ultimate status ambiguous and uncertain, sensory reflections of a spectral world emerging from mysterious inner depths. “Radical uncertainty prevails, for in the end what one knows and experiences is to an indeterminate extent a projection.”
Advent of Cubism seemingly confirmed in a tangible way the claims of philosophy concerning an impenetrable “veil of perception” that prevents human beings from directly experiencing or confirming existence of a reality outside their own minds.
If the human mind is indeed a projector rather than a passive receiver of objective impressions of the world, how far does this subjective fabrication of reality go? What are its limits? What, if anything, is “real”?
Advent of abstract art, said painter Robert Motherwell, reflected a human feeling of being alone and ill at ease in the modern world: a disconcerting sense growing numbers had of being “unwedded to the universe”.
Age of the World Picture
Traditionally understood to be an objective, independently existent, God-created realm, the world came to be perceived as nothing more than whatever a person happens to be experiencing at any given point in time. There is, in fact, no “true” world, many now insisted.
In 1938 German philosopher Martin Heidegger dubbed this startling new dispensation “The Age of the World Picture” as human beings had come to perceive the world as a kind of picture, each individual’s self-created view representing an entirely subjective version of reality. We look at the world and understand the world as whatever we happen to see.
Since a given individual’s “reality” is totally determined by the way his or her mind happens to select and interpret perceptual information, everyone’s version is sure to be different and unique.
This is historically unprecedented, stressed Heidegger: “The world picture does not change from an earlier medieval one into a modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age.”
How many “world pictures” are there? Does each person see something different? Which view is “correct”? Is any? Can there actually be such a thing? How could we ever be certain? Given an unlimited number of “pictures” to choose among, and knowing all may be subject to revision if seen from a different perspective, human beings seemed condemned to experiencing the world as detached onlookers, always aware their own “picture” of reality can never amount to anything other than a subjectively-coloured impression no more valid than anyone else’s possibly entirely different version. All anyone can ever hope to know and experience are the images they unknowingly concoct and project from within.
Once central figures in a shared and bountiful God-created realm, human beings had been reduced to isolated inhabitants of self-created worlds.
While in one sense reversing the cosmological displacement, as Richard Tarnas points out, this shift was deeply ambiguous: “Man was again at the centre of his universe, but this was now only his universe, not the universe.”
Puzzled and Adrift
As the Western worldview splintered into an unbounded multiplicity of subjective realities the human species entered uncharted territory. Commonly known as the era of postmodernism, this singular new order was distinguished by destabilising, iconoclastic tendencies. Huston Smith emphasised its subversive character: “Not only does it lack an embracing outlook; it doubts that it is any longer possible (or even desirable) to have one.”
Characterising an intellectual and aesthetic era suffused with myriad interpretative concepts and frameworks was a kind of radical perspectivism which considered any and all points of view equally legitimate but also of entirely relative value.
Postmodernism’s overthrow of established forms and dissolution of absolutes fostered an outlook characterised by indeterminacy and fluidity in which neither self nor world were the solid, objective, clearly defined phenomena they were once confidently assumed to be.
Traditional notions about the nature of “reality” came under siege: “Whereas in the past people argued and battled over which view of reality was true, the postmodern position is that none are true. Postmodernists even wonder if truth has any meaning in this context.”
These epochal developments signalled the advent of a uniquely volatile period in Western cultural history with multiple, profoundly uncertain repercussions that are unfolding around and within us still.
Advent of postmodernism marked a decisive shift in the West’s intellectual, philosophic, and aesthetic worldview. While liberating in many respects it has nevertheless exacerbated the sense of alienation and estrangement which overshadow the modern world.
Without any stable and authoritative worldview, notions of self and reality were increasingly at risk of foundering in disorienting ambiguity and uncertainty.
The scepticism and ambiguity characteristic of the postmodern era have been aggravated by disappearance of reliable guidelines for addressing the growing challenges of modern life.
Prophet of Nihilism
The idea a given individual’s worldview is simply one possibility among countless others of equal validity contrasted sharply with the ethos of traditional cultures where such relativism is virtually unknown due to the existence of clearly defined, socially-sanctioned collective belief systems which provide secure foundations for individual identity and communal stability. Unlike the modern West, such cultures possess a keen sense of the sacred dimension of life and trust themselves to the embrace of a benevolent cosmic order whose existence and intrinsic validity are never in doubt.
The personal and social consequences of the West’s burgeoning subjectivism, wherein “facts are precisely what there are not, only interpretations”, greatly concerned Friedrich Nietzsche. This excessively self-referential mentality, he predicted, would inevitably result in a “madly thoughtless fragmentation and fraying of all foundations” which would provoke the most ominous cultural crisis of modern times.
Nietzsche considered nihilism an inevitable consequence of modernity’s elevation of human subjectivity and parallel devaluation of the world since immersion in a maelstrom of relativity undermined claims made for the absolute values of truth and morality. With arresting imagery, in 1888 he made a stark prediction about the ineluctable fate of Western civilisation:
“What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere.”
Nihilism would become endemic, Nietzsche predicted, its corrosive power weakening and ultimately destroying the moral, religious and metaphysical foundations of Western civilisation and provoking the greatest crisis it would ever face.
God is Dead!
Nietzsche traced the origin of nihilism to collective loss of faith in an objective foundation of values fostered by the West’s exaggerated subjectivism. If, like everything else in human experience, values are merely subjective, their authority and commanding power is destroyed and they become meaningless: there is no longer any absolute standard by which to distinguish right and wrong, good and bad. Relativism regarding morality means no morality.
Rather than being emancipated and empowered by this monumental cultural shift, Nietzsche feared human life was fated to become shallow and chaotic under the sway of its anarchic motto, “Everything is false! Everything is permitted!” We might now be free to think and do as we please, but nothing has real meaning or lasting value any more.
These developments would have devastating consequences for humankind, said Nietzsche. To underscore their gravity, in 1882 he made the pronouncement for which he is best known: God is dead.
Having long noted the Christian God image becoming less evident in his patients’ dreams, in 1937 Carl Jung declared the death of God a psychic fact of the modern era: “I only know, and I am expressing what countless other people know, that the present time is a time of God’s death and disappearance”.
“When Nietzsche said ‘God is dead’ he uttered a truth which is valid for the greater part of Europe”, noted Jung. “People were influenced by it not because he said so, but because it stated a widespread psychological fact. The consequences were not long delayed.”
“From its beginnings,” says Richard Tarnas, “the Western self was informed by the momentous disclosure of humanity’s special relationship to a transcendent divine reality, a monotheistic supreme being who was both the creator of the world and the ultimate locus of meaning and value: ‘Man was made in the image of God.’” Jung likewise insisted “the life of the individual is not determined solely by the ego and its opinions or by social factors, but quite as much, if not more, by a transcendent authority.” Without affirmation by something beyond itself human identity shrinks to the size of a cosmically insignificant skin-encapsulated ego.
Being and Nothingness
Ever since Nietzsche announced the death of God the human condition – and particularly questions regarding human identity, meaning, and purpose – has provided compelling subject matter for artistic creativity and behavioural science. Intellectual engagement with these issues resulted in the emergence, in the early twentieth century, of existentialism, a cultural movement whose outlook and tenor profoundly affected the Western worldview’s subsequent evolution.
While it encompassed agnostic and theistic forms, existentialism’s vehemently atheistic mode proved particularly influential. Nihilism in one guise or another constituted one of its most potent themes. Nihilistic existentialism is founded on the claim existence has no meaning or purpose and human life itself is ultimately empty and senseless.
Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was uncompromising in his views about the meaninglessness of creation: “All existing things are born for no reason, continue through weakness, and die by accident. It is meaningless that we are born; it is meaningless that we die.”
Existential nihilism sees human beings as condemned to an inescapable condition of isolation and aloneness. Such isolation persists despite the establishment of gratifying interpersonal relations as there is always an inherently unbridgeable gulf between one person and another, and a perennial gap separating human beings from the surrounding world.
While philosophers outlined its conceptual foundations, the essence of nihilistic existentialism was most graphically depicted by writers, artists, and poets. French existentialist author Albert Camus expounded his views on the human condition in a series of essays, plays and novels for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.
In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) Camus likened the human condition to the wretched plight of the mythical Sisyphus whom the gods condemned to repeatedly rolling a boulder to the top of a mountain whereupon it immediately rolled back down. Human life, Camus said, is absurd and tragic, as senseless as the toil of Sisyphus forced to repeat his futile, meaningless task without end or reward.
Because it was seen to be addressing real and pressing human concerns, unlike much academic philosophising existentialist thought was not confined to rarefied intellectual circles but became a recurring theme in popular culture. As a result it had a decisive influence (often unconscious) on the attitudes and orientation of vast numbers of people.
Cultural Epidemic
Nietzsche’s forecasts have proven unnervingly astute: the “death of God” cast a long shadow. Nihilism has indeed become rampant throughout the Western world and other places exposed to its decadent modernising influence. In 1927 Heidegger maintained nihilism had become Western culture’s normal state.
Noting a 2,000% increase in its use compared to earlier years, in 2016 “post-truth” was named international word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries.
Exacerbated by a toxic political climate, neologistic terms such as “fake news” and “alternate facts” became tragically familiar symptoms of the “post-truth world” lamented in a 2017 Time cover story asking “Is Truth Dead?”
Nietzsche anticipated these trends: “The most extreme form of nihilism would be the view that every belief, every considering-something-true, is necessarily false because there simply is no [one] true world.” As he predicted, in eradicating any enduring foundation for truth the “death of God” unleashed a chaos of relativism.
In stark contrast to the world experienced by the “primal” self (Chapter One), the modern self is increasingly felt as apart from, even set against, an encompassing outer world perceived as entirely impersonal and without intrinsic meaning, value or purpose. Such an isolated self more readily perceives other people, cultures, animals, plants, entire ecosystems, as mere objects, inferior in value and less important than itself, to be ignored or exploited to satisfy its own hedonistic desires. In a disenchanted cosmos, nothing is sacred.
So pervasive has nihilism become some fear it now constitutes a lethal cultural epidemic inexorably destroying Western civilization. Some claim nihilism’s most insidious effect, “destruction of our faith in ourselves, our most basic sense of who we, as human beings, essentially are and who we could become”, is relentlessly pushing humankind toward a perilous crisis in which the “death of Man”, possibly of the entire planet, now seem real possibilities.
Sense of an Ending
Jung observed in 1958 that “we are again living in an age filled with apocalyptic images of universal destruction.” Despite subsequent social, technological and scientific advances, similar concerns have become increasingly prevalent in our own time.
“Storm warnings, portents, hints of catastrophe haunt our times. The ‘sense of an ending’, which has given shape to so much of twentieth-century literature, now pervades the popular imagination as well.”
The threat of nuclear annihilation, depletion of natural resources, and well-founded predictions of ecological disaster have fulfilled poetic prophecy, giving concrete historical substance to the nightmare, or death wish, avant-garde artists were first to express.”
Vastly more knowledgeable but arguably no wiser, contemporary humankind has become its own worst enemy. Alienation of human beings from themselves, one another, and the natural world has resulted in the automatization of life on a vast scale as entire populations struggle to adapt to artificial environments that are increasingly soulless and self-destructive.
Lack of a shared perspective, or even of confidence one might yet be found, has fostered a paralysing stalemate: “In the absence of any viable, embracing cultural vision, old assumptions remain blunderingly in force, providing an increasingly unworkable and dangerous blueprint for human thought and activity.”
In the face of multiple challenges too powerful and ubiquitous to influence or resist, individual and collective anomie has become rampant and vast numbers are in retreat, having elected to focus primarily on themselves and their own comfort, security, and survival. Pervasive social alienation and spiritual emptiness have galvanised a shallow preoccupation with self symptomatic of the “culture of narcissism” now pandemic across the Western world.
Recommended Reading
- Allan Bloom The Closing of the American Mind
- Louis Sass Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought
- Brian Appleyard Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man
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