The Poetics of Nothingness: Revaluing Nihilism

The paper reconsiders the relationship between nihilism, the absence of transcendent foundations of ethical and political values, and the problem of the meaning or meaninglessness of life. What I will call life-valuable nihilism rejects divine, transcendent, and eschatological sources of value but not the existence of aesthetic, ethical, and political values that human beings discover and create. There were no values at the beginning of space-time and there will be no values after the end of space-time, but people have nonetheless found reasons for living within the limits that physical and human nature impose. Whereas earlier attempts to vindicate the value of life despite its cosmic purposelessness stressed this human existential freedom, I want to concentrate on the other side of existential freedom: existential responsibility to care for and improve the conditions of life expressed as political struggle against the social causes of avoidable damage to actually existing human beings. The more those causes are addressed, the more life-time can be spent in receptive openness to the beauty of the world, creative activities which contribute in valuable and valued ways to the common wealth upon which our lives depend, and mutualistic relationships with other people.