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Monograph: Nihilism and Tragedy

Coordinator: Remedios Ávila Crespo (University of Granada)

 

In this new volume of Azafea. Revista de Filosofía, and under the generic title of Nihilism and Tragedy, we would like to propose two questions: the first of them refers to the semantic field assigned to each of these terms. This question implies to define what can be understood by both terms, and with which definition we commit ourselves. The second has to do with their relationship: are the two terms independent or is there, at least sometimes, a relationship between them? And if so, is it a relationship of coordination, dependence, or otherwise?

 

            Without wishing to be exhaustive, let us try to address the first question and to attempt a definition, albeit a provisional and revisable one. Marx and Engels began The Communist Manifesto thus: “A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre”. Well, for some time now, perhaps today more than ever, another one seems to be threatening: the spectre of nihilism. Everywhere it insinuates, warns, points: in the sciences, the arts, the humanities, politics... Our culture is growing under its shadow. Or rather, "the most disturbing of all hosts" seems to have settled in "our house" with no intention of leaving it.

 

This has been going on for a long time, but the characters and effects of this host are prolonged and aggravated. Still following the tone and reflection of Marx and Engels, nihilism seems to nourish an unstable, fragile, inconsistent, vacillating state of affairs: "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned". Today we live in a "liquid society", also according to the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman's work, Liquid Modernity.

 

            And this lack of solidity is still perceived as before. Among other things, it is perceived as an absence of meaning and values. This is also what nihilism is: the realisation of a lack. And, for that very reason, of a deprivation, of a scarcity. If we use the metaphor of life as a journey, it is a journey to nowhere and from nowhere. As in that Bertolucci film, inspired by Paul Bowles' novel of the same title, The Sheltering Sky, the travellers move without a place to return to. There is no homeland, no point of reference that one leaves and that awaits one: there is no "odyssey".

 

Tragedy also has to do with this: with the lack of reference. And at this point we can address the second question we raised: that of the relationship between one concept and the other. Extending Trías’ reflection on the difference between drama and tragedy, we could say that the tragic is experienced as the absence of a beginning and an end, of an end and a resolution: as if there were nothing beyond the knot. But tragedy also reflects an irresolvable conflict, a struggle between necessity (to seek meaning) and impossibility (to achieve it). Nihilism is the absence of meaning, and tragedy is the conflict between the necessary and the impossible –that could be a way of putting it succinctly–, and both go back to the dawn of our civilisation.

 

            Tragedy is already at the beginning of Western thought, to the extent that perhaps there would be no philosophy without this reference to tragedy. Plato, who determines his activity as an alternative to tragedy (philosophy as an educational activity linked to the written form of dialogue, as G. Colli has taught), ends up banishing the poets, expelling them from the ideal city because they do not fulfil the true ideal of the paideia: knowledge and moral excellence. But this banishment will not last long and Aristotle recognises in the Poetics the extraordinary service that literature, and in particular tragic works, render to thought. Mimesis, catharsis, verisimilitude, character, fortune, passions (fear and compassion as passions proper to tragedy)... All this serves as a stimulus to our thoughts and it is by no means alien to then. From then until today, tragic thought has explored in depth and in many different ways the close and profound relationship between literature and philosophy.

 

But let us return to nihilism. Although the nihilistic phenomenon has become more evident over the last couple of centuries, the interest in nothingness and nihilism —problems that should not be confused— prolongs a double philosophical tradition. On the one hand, the closest one came from Jacobi, who, in a letter to Fichte in March 1799 and published in the autumn of the same year, accused idealism of being nihilism and for the first time gave the term a philosophical value. The term was soon to enjoy great popularity throughout the 19th century, thanks to writers such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, etc. And it is in these philosophical-literary origins that the negative and critical character of the term "nihilism" is to be found. But it is in another, more distant, tradition that we must look for a more positive meaning and, above all, interest in the problem of nothingness. It is a tradition of great philosophical depth that, from Gorgias, through Scoto Erigena, Eckhart, Dionysius the Areopagite, John of the Cross, J. Böhme, Angelus Silesius, Leonardo da Vinci, Francisco Sánchez, reaches Leibniz and will continue up to Schelling.

 

All the above in relation to nihilism. However, if there is one author capable of combining in his reflections the two aspects referred to, nihilism and tragedy, this one is F. Nietzsche. His entire oeuvre is a good example of this. The universality and transversality of the nihilistic phenomenon were recognised by him, but perhaps what is most striking is the ambivalence that the tragic phenomenon possesses: its double valence of illness and remedy, of poison and medicine. Although Nietzsche accuses in the decline of the tragic the triumph of nihilism, he is able, in a paradoxical leap, to show that in the deepening of nihilism, in the will to take it to its ultimate consequences, lies the possibility of a return and a rebirth of the tragic.

 

            It is worth referring here both to the origins of Nietzsche's nihilism ("life is worthless" and the influence of Schopenhauer on his philosophy) and to its consequences (Heidegger's accusation of taking nihilism to its culmination). But it is also worth confronting his diagnosis with our times and recognising what the latter owes him and to what extent it has fulfilled or betrayed the hopes that Nietzsche expressed in the Prologue to the Second Edition of The Gay Science:

 

“Confidence in life is gone: life itself has become a problem.—Let it not be imagined that one has necessarily become a hypochondriac thereby! Even love of life is still possible—only one loves differently.”

 

Along with all this, it is necessary to address the problem of the actuality of the nihilist phenomenon: not only if it is still there (which it is), but, above all, how it is: if it is a prolongation, or, much more, an aggravation or recrudescence of a disease that Nietzsche diagnosed and whose therapy and resolution are far away.

 

In this monograph, we invite you to think about these and other questions, addressed or simply related to those that have been suggested:

 

  • The phenomenon of nihilism: Characteristics; Relationship with metaphysics; Relationship with the problem of Nothingness; Transversality of the nihilistic phenomenon; Ambivalences of nihilism, Nihilism as an obstacle or as an opportunity.
  • The nihilist phenomenon in the course of thought: Relationship with ancient and medieval authors and with others such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jünger, Camus, Nishitani, Zambrano, etc.
  • Relationship between philosophy and tragic thought: Concept of the tragic, Characteristics of tragic thought; Relationship between character and fortune; Tragic passions.
  • Relationship between philosophy and literature (Kaufmann; Nussbaum, etc.): Tragedy and humour; Tragedy and affirmation of life; Tragedy and melancholy; Tragedy and comedy from the point of view of philosophical reflection.
  • Nihilism and tragedy: Relationship between these two concepts; Nihilism and the decline of the tragic; Tragedy and overcoming nihilism.
  • The current state of nihilism and tragic thought: how it is posed today and what are the challenges that nihilism and tragic thought present us with.

 

 

(Remedios Ávila Crespo)

 

 

Call for papers and reviews open until 15 January 2025.