The Challenge of Nihilism to the Crisis of the New Time

Costantino Esposito - In our time, nihilism has become "fulfilled" as a widespread common sense in the societies of the so-called advanced West, and from there, in various forms, at the planetary level. The tendency that seems to prevail is the seemingly insurmountable difficulty in recognizing the ultimate reason why we are in the world-even though we all know from experience that it is not possible to be in the world without at least posing the problem of the meaning of existence.

For better or worse, for more than a century the term "nihilist" has been the ambiguous title given to the most radical proponents of the crisis, to those who really wanted to free the self from any kind of constraint or superstructure. But in the long run, the crisis overflowed into its own solution: an answer that hides and seems to forget the question from which it also comes.

But now that the crisis of meaning has been "normalized," now that this crisis is increasingly turning from pathology into physiology, what is "new" left in this scenario? What is the heaven that nihilism must now attack?

As we have seen, many "metaphysical" idols have fallen, other "cultural" idols have been created, but often even the latter, like the former, seem to lack a true inner life: their substance seems to be mostly "projections" of our mind, and the mind, in turn, is like the projection of the winning cultural models, of the trends produced or induced in that endless technological network that has become the world.

What remains, then, (...) to ask? Is everything already potentially programmable? Or are there points of resistance that elude the virtual totality of the world?

Here [appears] the most interesting - and unexpected, given the premises - discovery in the nihilism of our time. Not beyond it, but within it. What is new is the realization of a strange, apparently residual, but actually original fact: the desire to know why each of us is in the world clearly testifies to the presence of an irreducible meaning, even if it cannot be fully explained or comprehended.

If it were indeed reducible - or only producible by us - it would not appear as a problem, but would already be solved, i.e. reduced in its very being to a "problem". The fact is that the meaning of being is not reducible to partial answers, precisely because it is our own "self" that is irreducible to the whole world. The moment of discontinuity, of interruption, of transcendence, in which meaning emerges for consciousness. [...]

Finally, nihilism, in its various versions, has always had the temptation to overcome the crisis of the absence of an ultimate sense of self and world by trying to mourn this absence with a new creation of values and goals that could fill it. But this has always been an illusory strategy: effective in many cases in establishing a new cultural and social order, but ultimately losing, precisely because it "loses" those irreducible needs that constitute the human experience.

The irreducible nature of the self lies in the fact that nothing can satisfy it, that everything (to use Leopardi's words) is "too small and insignificant for the capacity of the true soul," and that precisely here lies "the greatest sign of greatness and nobility that one sees in human nature" (Pensiero LXVIII).

Recognizing this, however, does not mean remaining indefinitely suspended in one's own impossibility, but rather being open, so to speak, to the impossible. That is, to be open to the possibility that from outside us someone or something will reach us as from the nul-la, touch us, and call us precisely to be ourselves. The solution to the crisis of nihilism coincides with the realization of the most obvious but least recognized thing: the realization that we are there in the world.

Not to emphasize our will to power, but to reclaim the original power of our self that coincides with our relationship to being.

A power that, paradoxically, coincides with the capacity to receive the world, which is never a mere recording of data, but the capacity to see - and also to hear, to touch - the presence of things that is given to us. It is in this presence of things that the meaning we seek is offered. That is, meaning is not our own addition or construction, not a value or goal that we assign to things, but it is the response to the presence of the real that calls us to participate in its giving.
The author has not revised its translations. This article appeared on La Repubblica.
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