The Two Nihilisms
Abel, Lionel
This essay was first delivered as an address to the Phi Beta Kappa chapter of Columbia University. WE ARE LIVING in a period of nlhllism, of cultural nihilism—no doubt there are many who...
...For the style of Rousseau's essay was intended to please Voltaire most of all, as in fact it did...
...But we do not know whether his death was willed...
...What was art...
...W W As ROUSSEAU'S ATTACK on the arts and sciences an invitation to humanity to go down on all fours...
...Why support science and art...
...No, I think we have to say that nihilism of the morning, however attractive we find it, has no right to exist...
...Which of us today shares that faith...
...Thus Rousseau was not quite as nihilistic in his essay as was Sigmund Freud in his repetition of it known to us as Civilization and Its Discontents or Norman 0. Brown in the repetition of both Rousseau and Freud which he entitled Lifee against Death...
...Simmel thought that as culture develops, cultivation tends, and necessarily, to become soulless...
...In any case it is the style our age offers you, and if you elect to be nihilists, this dispiriting style of nihilism is the one you will have to adopt...
...it was realized that humanity, as such, is incapable of action...
...For my own part, I cannot think of any better date for the modern and even contemporary assault on culture than 1749, called by the philosopher Ernst Cassirer the "midpoint of the enlightenment," when Jean-Jacques Rousseau made his violent and impassioned attack on the arts and sciences, which he accused of having weakened and depraved humanity, of having destroyed man's innate sense of manners, artistry, order and justice, and of ignoring the real needs of men while arousing desires that never can be satisfied...
...To be sure, we are all of us in some vague sense nihilists both of the morning and of the evening...
...What about nihilism of the evening...
...For we should realize that an age in which atomic energy has been liberated on a world scale could not but pass through a period of cultural nihilism...
...Would humanity respond to this new situation and act in its own defense...
...Well then, can we get back to a true simplicity by any other route than that represented by the arts and sciences...
...I must add that Pisarev also died by drowning...
...But among the things destroyed and also damaged there have been many things that were hardly positive...
...Perhaps he felt that the fact he survived these two attempts entitled him to live...
...even the strongest of us may search for idols during twilight, and even the weakest of us may think of destroying idols at the break of day...
...Very soon it was realized that it could not...
...Now these were treated by the audience, Rene Liebowitz told me, as poems...
...I thought of Voltaire's comment on the margin of his copy of Rousseau's essay...
...It was as if the exposure of the weakness of humanity made all those groups within it proud to be so much smaller and less inclusive than it, as if in their very lack of number was their real force...
...Said Liebowitz: "Perhaps the tragedy of culture was being played out for us, and we were hearing the very motion of the human soul refusing to become objective, to be formalized, to die...
...It used to be said that in philosophy one had to choose between Plato and Aristotle, and then it was said that such a choice had already been made for us, and by none other than Aristotle, who, for his part, chose Plato...
...On that topic you yourselves will have to speak...
...we know even that the earth itself can be destroyed...
...I heard of the affair from the conductor and composer Rene Liebowitz, who already had made sufficient stir to be invited...
...But how can we today not choose Rousseau, and choose him against Voltaire...
...But the part is also the negation of the whole, and as the partial took on greater and greater importance, so did the negating action of the whole which it implies...
...Nihilism of the evening has read all the books and finds the flesh sad, alas...
...if he had talent, he was psychotic, and had formed the habit of alcohol and drugs...
...And then Liebowitz related the event to Georg Simmel's famous essay on the tragedy of culture, in which, according to Cassirer, the problematics of culture is stated with "complete decisiveness...
...And if we are absolutely modern we may become aware of new facts, some of which may give us heart...
...That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea...
...I would like to speak to you encouragingly...
...you do not really have to choose between the alternatives represented by Voltaire and Rousseau...
...The cultural nihilism we are witnessing today began, of course, before this age, which, however, it characterizes...
...And among these I would place one of the forms of nihilism, indeed the most attractive form of it...
...but positively it could not situate itself so as to take up an attitude and act...
...Certainly the artists and scientists of Paris who applauded Antonin Artaud that night were joining in a condemnation of their art, and of their science, and making of this condemnation a sacred rite...
...Or to put the matter more pointedly, are we to pretend this is not the age of the worldwide liberation of atomic energy...
...Unfortunately, I cannot say anything to you which would be very hopeful and in which you could really believe...
...So much has been destroyed...
...Yet it was a poem...
...How can we choose the arts and sciences which have condemned themselves already...
...And what could they represent in a world in which nothing could be justified now in terms of humanity taken as a whole...
...Shall we say then that the earth, too, has no right to exist...
...In poetry, the anti-poem has been solicited...
...A theologian has distinguished subtly between grace in the morning and grace in the evening, and I would like to make a similar distinction between nihilism of the morning and nihilism of the evening...
...Andthis negation and this destruction has been called the anti-novel...
...Some of you perhaps witnessed on television the explosion of ice boxes in Nevada staged by the Swiss artist Tinguely...
...N HIS ESSAY, ROUSSEAU, after all, had not attacked everything...
...Here was the quintessence of French art and litera ture, but also the quintessence of French science, French philosophy, French society, and even French finance...
...What was nihilism of the morning...
...I must note here that this optimistic nihilist twice attempted suicide...
...But, of course, you do not have to accept these alternatives, which those of us who belong to this age more completely than you do are unable to see beyond...
...For there was something precious in nihilism, and what was precious in it has, I think, been destroyed...
...I would suggest this to you, though...
...For, he pointed out, the soul which is "vibrating, restless, endlessly self-evolving" seems always to die in its products, its motion is arrested by the very forms which it creates, for these are frozen, timeless and still...
...Suddenly the part was stronger than the whole...
...And with this realization came a devaluation of the universal, which became synonomous with weakness, and also a dynamization of the particular, which now alone seemed capable of drama and definiteness...
...The damaging effect of conscious thought and conscious culture, to which Kleist ob jected as strongly as did Rousseau, may be seen in the fact that conscious art and conscious culture have excluded men not only from the spontaneity of nature but also from that of the marionette, from that of the machine...
...If we have not yet had any thoroughgoing cult of the antifilm, this is no doubt going to come...
...For our part we must all admit that we have had no contact with any such men...
...his speech was larded with the four-letter words which were not used so frequently some twenty years ago, and which, partly because of his example, we seldom stop hearing today...
...nor, by the way, can we...
...It has been said that whatever date one gives for the beginning of some trend can always be set aside in favor of some earlier date, and it may be that the dating of any trend cannot but be arbitrary...
...How then continue to believe in or work for the values of culture...
...He hoped to find them in a different environment, but not in one unrecognizable to a Geneva citizen...
...I asked him...
...Who knows...
...What was science...
...In the 1920s, novelists were interested in creating what was called the "pure" novel, and poets were interested in a poetry possibly "pure" of all prose elements, and among playwrights there was talk of a "pure" theater, and in the new art of the movies of "pure" films...
...But if we are to take that route then, as another poet has said, we must be absolutely modern...
...But before trying to answer this question, let me describe to you an event which took place in Paris almost 200 years to the year after Rousseau's discourse...
...And this spontaneity, Kleist told us, we could regain not by trying to be simple and natural once again, which we could hardly succeed in being anyway, but by pushing our damaged and damaging selfconsciousness to its furthermost limit, so as to reenter the paradise of spontaneity through the gate of a supreme consciousness...
...It was us he turned into monkeys...
...for we now know something Pisarev did not know...
...Rousseau gave his attack on culture the most exquisite expression, so that Voltaire wrote him: "Never has anyone employed such wit to turn us into dullards...
...certainly not for the primitiveness of a rustic scene...
...LIONEL ABEL So let us strike out right and left...
...The audience sat through it all, not sure that this was the real thing, some hoping it was not...
...Was there any applause...
...The political expression of the fact was the impotence of the United Nations, which grew more garrulous and absurd as the atomic weapon whose use it should either have been able to forbid or control became more precise and threatening...
...To understand what we have lost, we should think of that almost irrecoverable grace which Heinrich von Kleist found not in nature or in primitives or in rustic man, but in an art object, in the marionette...
...one not for young idealists...
...only what can resist our blows is worthy to survive them...
...and so I leave this natural posture LIONEL ABEL to those who are worthier of it than you or I...
...If the arts and sciences are now under attack, yet attacks of this sort are by no means new, nor are the ideas that are advanced to justify them...
...The effects of the discovery of atomic energy remain with us, and so the entire race remains in jeopardy...
...Our own poet, Allen Ginsberg, in the fifties recited a poem which he entitled Howl...
...Against the arts, against the sciences, Rousseau could assert the value of the primitively unspoiled, and simple life...
...It is the one kind of nihilism which it is possible to hold...
...But in any case you will be free of one illusion by which many of my generation were bound...
...Prolonged applause," he replied...
...Thus, it is not only the violent who are violently attacked nowadays, but also, and sometimes especially, those who have made a point of being moderate...
...Science had provided a model in the atomic explosion which art would not ignore...
...He expected the resistance, as he said, of all whose existence was deserved...
...Artaud was poor, and close to death, and the great of Paris were determined to do him honor...
...Before this audience Artaud appeared, in the last stages of decomposition, dirty, in rags, and instead of reading poems, what he did was to scream and howl...
...I suggest that you can be aware now, at the outset of your careers, that the only kind of nihilistic style possible to you is a most dispirited one: a stale nihilism, a tired nihilism, a bad nihilism...
...But is it proper for you, is it proper for the young...
...If he had physical beauty, this was befouled by cancer...
...But most important of all, the values of tact and manners and artistry together with those of individual feeling and the sense of personal worth, were not values Rousseau was willing to sacrifice any more than Voltaire would have been...
...For it now became apparent that the human race was a whole only insofar as it could be destroyed, and that its members could not represent its wholeness if they were indeed to act...
...Rousseau, too, wanted the values THE TWO NIHILISMS of civilization...
...WE ARE LIVING in a period of nlhllism, of cultural nihilism—no doubt there are many who would prefer to describe it as one of cultural revolution, of cultural change...
...It is, as no doubt some of you will remember, the love of the fatherland, and the readiness to die for it, the simple martial valor of the good citizen or member of a tribe...
...The natural man, the simple man, the rustic— this was Rousseau's thought—could also be the moral man...
...good only for old frauds...
...It is 1948, three years after the ending of the Second World War with the terrible bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the city is Paris, whose intellectual elite has decided to aid and honor the poet Antonin Artaud, the one living representative of those French poets—some of the greatest in the language—who have been called "accursed," the reason being that their poetry is connected with unhappiness of some unbearable yet exemplary sort...
...And with this feeling there has come a mounting violence in the kinds of rhetoric employed, a violence, which, by the way, does not seem adjusted to any special or favorite target...
...Artaud's contributions to that evening in Paris were just howls...
...But in any less vague sense than that, the nihilism which I have called the nihilism of the morning, active, ecstatic, arrogant, and destructive, however we judge it, is not for us, is not for this age...
...you are like Achilles, inveighing glory and like le Pere Malebranche, who with brilliant imagination wrote against the imagination...
...God, as we know, did not, but Lecquier did not renege on his defiance of life, and drowned...
...Pisarev expected resistance to his effort to destroy...
...Now this was the naturalness and simplicity of rustic manners and rustic life...
...And Voltaire added: "after reading your work one almost feels like going down on all fours...
...At once all the particularist tendencies in modern society acquired a new strength...
...Only that...
...And so a soiree was arranged for him in an elegant Paris apartment, where he was to read some of his verses...
...Throughout the field of what we call culture, the negative, violently at work, continues to affirm itself, while the positive negates itself, and is either faltering or mute...
...The discovery and utilization of atomic energy for military purposes placed the whole of humanity in jeopardy...
...But I should say that our loss of grace goes deeper than the loss of the style once possessed with some naturalness...
...How are we not to be cultural nihilists, if this is indeed the spirit of the age...
...But in the margin of his copy of Rousseau's essay Voltaire wrote: "how you condemn yourself, you ape of Diogenes...
...It was simply terrible, Liebowitz said, to hear Artaud screaming and howling before that audience...
...where did he belong if not in the collegium of "the accursed...
...However, since for more than sixty years I've lost that habit, I feel...
...It, too, is a casualty along with many other precious things our time has seen destroyed...
...What had happened to make it possible for scientists to join with artists in such a display of contempt for their disciplines, and for culture generally...
...I would say similarly that in social questions, but also on this question of the arts and sciences, we have to choose between Voltaire and Rousseau, and in making this choice, we can do no better than follow Rousseau himself, who may be said to have chosen Voltaire...
...Now Artaud was surely of this company...
...and I think this designation a perfectly accurate one, too...
...that it would be impossible to reacquire it...
...We had come there to approve, and we would have applauded no matter what we had thought of his poems, had he recited poetry...
...Far different is the enervated nihilism which looks forward, as did Ernst Renan, to the invention of a painless odorless gas which men could turn to when their problems became too pressing...
...It was set forth in the clearest way in the middle of the last century by the young Russian nobleman Dimitri Pisarev, who had the audacity to exhort his fellows thus: "whatever can be smashed ought to be smashed to bits...
...There is a feeling that one is right only when attacking, whatever be attacked, and that one is wrong only when defending, whatever it be one defends...
...In any case, it must be said that his efforts at suicide were less impressive than that of the French philosopher Jules Lecquier, who cast himself into the ocean with the resolve not to swim to safety unless God made him do this...
...Will it be a better or worse age than this...
...In the audience were Andre Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, and others of like fame...
...That dead men rise up never...
...namely, that there is nothing on this earth which cannot be destroyed...
...In both cases there is the assertion of the part, precisely that which requires justification, against the only thing which could justify it, the whole...
...In our time, in our age—and I mean in this period which began with the atomic explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki— it has not been the "pure" novel that has been pursued, but rather the negation of the novel, the destruction of the novel...
...This was already present in the 1890s, one of whose artistic styles known as l'art nouveau is enjoying a vogue right now...
...It was like hearing a monkey reciting Racine...
...We, for our part, can repeat Rousseau's negations, but we cannot with any honesty say we share his positive faith...
...Whatever we can destroy is just rubbish...
...The adjectives "red," "brown," "black," "yellow," and "white" suddenly became more forceful than the substantive "man," whose meaning we had thought of as merely limiting...
...How is it that in this age the negative has taken over the role the positive is normally called upon to fill...
...Yes, we lack the grace of the natural man, whom we have encountered only in books...
...The messiah, if you like, has turned out to be negative, and there is no positive messiah to be found...
...You will notice that I connect two phenomena: separatism, a virulent separatism in politics, and an aggressive attack on the very forms of art...
...At one stroke all those past cultural values which have taken their meaning from the notion of universality became as questionable as that notion itself...
...Said Liebowitz: "Did I compare Artaud to a monkey...
...and as to change, many more are convinced that change as such is desirable, than that it is possible to get something they particularly desire...
...it is certainly on the order of the day...
...This discourse, says Ernst Cassirer, "shook eighteenth-century rationalism to its very foundations...
...The attack has been repeated many times of late, but no version of Rousseau's discourse has equaled the original in eloquence or in finesse...
...Perhaps you will create a new age with new alternatives...
...Moreover it was Voltaire Rousseau wanted to convince, more than any other of his contemporaries...
...But many of those who prefer the word revolution are also likely to tell you that they do not look forward to revolution...
...He was filthy, in rags, full of accusations...
...If the arts and sciences had encumbered the human race with useless artifices, there was yet something worth saving, something which human beings could still remember, and which JeanJacques himself remembered well...
...I have called this an age of cultural nihilism...
...And as the United Nations became more and more exposed for fulsome phrases and lack of deeds, so, too, was the human race...
...I mention Tinguely's television stunt simply because its very obviousness points up the much more subtle destructions now being pursued in all the arts...
...These are days when as a result of having given thought to some matter, one is likely to be accused of not having made up one's mind...
...some pretended, of course, that what they were listening to was, no matter what it sounded like, the very essence of poetry...
...THE TWO NIHILISMS According to Voltaire, Rousseau condemned himself in that essay...
...Certainly such nihilism is coherent with this age and supported by it...
...in the theater, first the "absurd" play was put on, and then, that not being sufficiently destructive of dramatic form, the anti-play...
...it is not exclusively directed against governments and their representatives...
...Asked why he should be interested in the destruction of his chosen object, Tinguely replied that he was asserting the right of the artist to destroy as equal to that of the technicians and of LIONEL ABEL the military...
...And there was another value Rousseau could hold on to, and did hold on to in his essay...
...Anything like that was long ago pulverized by the onward march of industry and science...
...How are we to counteract the cultural effects of that liberation: the dynamization of all the forms of separatism, the insurgence of the part against the whole, and the destructive attitude of our artists toward the very forms of art...
...This essay was first delivered as an address to the Phi Beta Kappa chapter of Columbia University...
...Now in a world of such powerful machines as those around us, the spontaneity of nature seems to me insufficient...
...I would even say that our modern situation is far too drastic for us to accept the problem as it was put by them...
...it has also been called by a modem philosopher, Martin Heidegger, "the age of the worldwide liberation of atomic energy...
...Different, too, is the nihilism of Swinburne, who found whatever gods may be worth praising for this and only this: That no life lives forever...
...We would not be able to hold our own against such machines without the spontaneity precisely of the machine...
...I would like to point to positive values and say things to you that might cause you to open your eyes, and yet not harden your hearts...
...In any case, whatever we think about Pisarev in connection with suicide, his nihilism was of an optimistic cast...
...Negatively, humanity was indeed in a situation insofar as it could be destroyed...
...For Sigmund Freud and Nor man 0. Brown could not look back on or remember any such rustic simplicity of manners...
...Now if art has always been quite prone to self-condemnation, this was certainly not true of science, at least in the first part of the century...
...And it is about this precious and no longer available form of nihilism that I would like to speak now...
...Few were invited, but these few were famous, and all were expected to contribute substantial sums against Artaud's grim future...
...Every form of separatism asserted itself more strongly, the French against the English in Canada, black against white and white against black in our own country, and throughout the world, man against woman, woman against man, children against parents, students against teachers, and even, in the mayoralty campaign over which Norman Mailer presided, New York City against the state...
...Let me recall for you just one of the moral principles Rousseau set himself to defend in his essay against the debilitating effects of art and science...
...We can always question, however, whether he tried hard enough to die...
Vol. 17 • September 1970 • No. 5
