On Nihilism and the Power of Nothing

“While the mass man is the product of his history, the mass man recognizes no necessary connection or debt to his past. He is ‘the spoiled child of human history’ with a, ‘radical ingratitude to all that has made possible the ease of his existence.'”

Nihilism is a word which, if used at all, seems to be used quite liberally, even flippantly. A television sitcom may be called nihilistic, or the actions of a terrorist; there is even a “nihilist” toothpaste. But as Matt McManus observed in his March essay, nihilism is a persistent and essential peculiarity of the modern experience. But what is nihilism?  How does “nothing” manifest itself?

Regarding the building of a cathedral in Milan in 1398, architect Jean Mignot said, “Ars sine scientia nihil est“—art without knowledge is nothing.  The architect’s knowledge is not simply knowledge of the parts of a process; the architect’s knowledge is knowledge of the whole.

As its Latin etymology suggests, art has to do with “doing” or “joining.” To affirm a relationship between ideas and doing is to establish a relationship between ideas and experience. To affirm ideas which have no relationship to experiential reality is to affirm nothing. Nihilism is manifest as ideas or knowledge with little or no grounding in experience.

Of all animals, we humans have an amazing capacity to generate ideas about reality. Our ideas can project across space and time, altering our environment and organizing our experiences. The construction of a cathedral begins as an idea, which is then realized in a complex configuration of stone, iron, wood, and glass, which, in effect, acknowledges and then transforms the powers of gravity, weather, decay. The cathedral is a manifestation of the unity of idea and experiential reality. The cathedral embodies a unity of temporal and eternal, visible and invisible, physical and spiritual.