http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/european-union-nihilism
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE AND MARTIN
HEIDEGGER continue to be controversial political figures in European culture.
But this should not hold us back from singling out the aspects of their thought
that allow for an emancipation from nihilism — the same nihilism that, in our
view, affects European politics today. Many continue to consider Nietzsche a precursor of
Nazism; in Heidegger’s case, more evidence is now available of his indisputable involvement with
the anti-Semitic regime in the 1930s. Still, both thinkers elucidated not only
European nihilism but also its consequences. This is the philosophical
background of Syriza’s recent
election in Greece, the first representative of an anti-austerity
party to obtain power within the European Union. This election should not only
be conceived of as a political event, but also as a response to the European
Union’s latent nihilism.
Heidegger, in his writings on
Nietzsche in the 1950s, defined nihilism as the process in the course of which
“there is nothing to Being itself.” He was not only thinking of the forgetting
of Being (existence) in favor of beings (objects), but also of the future of
Europe. And this future, as we have since been able to see, has turned out to
be a metaphysical organization of society in which science and power
reciprocally sustain themselves through technology Before we get to nihilism,
then, a quick word about metaphysics.
According to Heidegger,
thought is metaphysical when it tries to determine Being as presence, that is,
as a simple set of descriptions of the present state of affairs, thus
automatically privileging terms of temporal, spatial, and unified presentness.
This is why Heidegger believed that “insofar as the pure relationship of
the I-think-unity (basically a tautology) becomes the unconditioned
relationship, the present that is present to itself becomes the
measure for all beingness.” Even though these sets of measurable descriptions
took diverse approaches throughout the history of philosophy (from Aristotle’s
motionless true substances, to Kant's transcendental conditions of experience,
to John Searle’s ontology of social functions), philosophers were always
directed to consider Being as a motionless, nonhistorical, and geometric object
or fact. Truth, in this form, became a correspondence that adapts or submits to
Being’s descriptions; thought dissolves itself into a science, that is, into
the global organization of all beings within a predictable structure of causes
and effects. In the 1950s, when Heidegger stated in his course What is
Called Thinking? that “science does not think,” he was not simply
denigrating it, but rather pointing out that it functions exclusively within
causes and effects previously established. Now, if science today has become an
instrument of oppression, it’s not simply because its technicians pose as
respected officers who organize Europe’s political, economical, and cultural
life, but also for metaphysical reasons, because Being has been forgotten,
discharged, and annihilated. This is probably why Heidegger was able to predict
already back then that “Europe
will one day be a single bureau, and those who ‘work together’ will be the
employees of their own bureaucracy.” This bureaucracy has become the essence of
EU measures, or better, science in Heidegger’s terms.
And here is where we return to
nihilism. Syriza’s victory in Greece’s recent elections represents more than
the emerging possibility of the weak redeeming themselves from the imposed
austerity measures of the European Union. It also signals a breaking away from
European (Union) nihilism. Arthur C. Danto explained that
nihilism represented for Nietzsche “a thoroughly disillusioned conception of a
world which is as hostile to human aspirations as he could imagine it to be. It
is hostile, not because it, or anything other than us, has goals of its own,
but because it is utterly indifferent to what we either believe or hope.”
Although philosophical nihilism has little to do with the term’s ordinary
political connotations, the European Union nonetheless has instantiated it
through measures imposed by technicians predominantly indifferent to the
aspirations of Europeans.
Haven’t we reached the moment,
as Nietzsche explains in The Will to Power, where “the highest values
devaluate themselves”? Europeans, as the last elections and polls show, are
increasingly disillusioned about their economic conditions and their leaders
and have almost lost all faith in the idea of European unity. We believe that
this disillusionment is not caused exclusively by the EU’s controlling
corporate interests, or by Germany’s interest in maintaining the debt of Greece
and other southern countries. Rather, it is the Europeans themselves who reflect
back and realize the EU’s latent nihilism.
Perhaps the “logic of
decadence” that Nietzsche uses to explain nihilism’s development, tracing it
back to three essential causes, can also be related to this declining faith in
the Union. According to
Nietzsche, nihilism commences when a providential order is assigned to history.
However, when it turns out this providential order does not to exist, it loses
meaning. Second, nihilism arises when the world and its unfolding are conceived
as a totality in which every part has its place in a systematic whole. In this
case, it is not so much that this whole or system has become false; it has
simply turned out to be unbearable for human existence because it neutralizes
politics, finance, and culture through globalization. This is how we arrive at
the final, extreme form of nihilism: the loss of faith in the metaphysically
relevant world and in truth itself, at least as it is traditionally understood
(as temporal, spatial, and unified presentness, as we explained earlier on).
That loss of illusions can
signify either the absolute incapacity to will any more, or the joyous and
creative recognition of the fact that there exists no order, truth, or
stability outside the will itself. Nihilism derives precisely from having
wished, at all costs, to find these exterior organizing principles. It can thus
be both the incapacity to experience a meaningful existence and a practical way
to escape from this decadence. The first aspect of nihilism, where “a decline
and retreat of the spirit’s power” takes place, is considered “passive.” The
second is defined as “active,” a “sign of the increased power of the spirit.”
But if the power of the spirit exerts itself primarily by dissolving everything
that demands consent as objective structure, eternal value, and fixed meaning,
then saying “no” to this is arguably a sign of activity, that is, of active
nihilism.
Who, then, is the active
nihilist in Europe today? The ones who state the accusation, as Slavoj Žižek put it, that the “government
in Greece is composed of a bunch of populist extremists who advocate
‘irrational’ and ‘irresponsible’ populist measures”? Or those who “struggle for
an entire way of life, the resistance of a world threatened by rapid
globalization or, rather, of a culture with its daily rituals and
manners, which are threatened by post-historical commodification.” Regardless
of the EU’s warnings and threats, the people of Greece have accepted this risk
by voting and supporting a party determined to dissolve the objective, fixed
meanings as determined by the EU — or, as Heidegger would call it, to contest a
condition that has become metaphysical. Metaphysics is the condition where “the
only emergency is the absence of emergency,” that is, “where everything is held
to be calculable, and especially where it has been decided, with no previous
questioning, who we are and what we are supposed to do.” It is a form of
passive nihilism. Greece, within the European Union, is considered an
emergency, an alteration of the ongoing neutralization of politics. The active
nihilism that Greece has endorsed is manifest not only in their minister of
finance, Yanis Varoufakis, who has refused
to engage with auditors from the Troika, but also in Alexis Tsipras’s role in
promoting leftist anti-austerity politics throughout Europe. The emergency in
Europe is not Syriza, but rather all those who submit “passively” to the
Union’s flattening measures: its enforced absence of emergency.
In sum, the active nihilism or
emergency that Syriza enacted by saying “no”
to the Troika is an event that involves not only Greece but all of Europe. This
might be the only possibility that allows Europe to wake up from the passive
nihilism of its bureaucratic dream, which its governors (the commons, the
council, and a substantial part of the Parliament) have imposed and wish to
conserve. As Pope Francis recently said in
his native Spanish, one must “hacer lio,” that is, generate non-violent
disorder, disarray, or say “no” to the international capitalist establishments
that are choking the
European economies, and in particular those of the South. One must “make a
mess.”
This means being active European nihilists, the only ones who can
confront the Union’s ongoing political, financial, and, most of all, spiritual
decadence.
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