The History of Philosophy Summary: Nihilism, Postmodernism, and the Future of Philosophy – Discourses on Minerva
Welcome to the end. Not the apocalypse. Not the end of history. But the end of philosophy. We have thus far covered the history of philosophy in three stages: the rise of reason with the Greeks, the creation of the self with Christianity, and the rise of practical science in the modern period. We are now entering the fourth and final stage of philosophy: nihilism and postmodernism.
The triumph of practical science, which is what occurred in modern philosophy, marked the end of intellectual contemplation. Reason is no longer concerned with understanding ourselves through the observation of nature as it was for the Greeks or the discovery of inner nature and the human heart as it was for the Christians. Reason is concerned with the most efficient ways to obtain what the body needs to live and thrive. This is modern rationalism which gave way to a materialist understanding of everything, materialist determinism, which eventually gave birth to utilitarianism: the philosophy that believes all questions can be solved by the answer of practical benefits to the body.
Even though some modern philosophers, like the German Idealists, rejected this hollow vision of the cosmos and humanity, practical science triumphed. Even in Marx practical science is the normative governing understanding—hence “scientific socialism” and why socialism will inevitably triumph: it is materially determined just like how all science is materially determined per the discoveries of Newton. However, Marx also gave room for the rediscovery of thought within this materialist prison, why, if all human action is based on pragmatic materialism, is there inequality between people? This question, the only question that is permitted in the Marxist framework, the question of inequality, allowed for the last hurrah of philosophy. This is why the question of inequality is now the final question of philosophy.
Because the world of materialist causality ultimately has no meaning, nihilism emerged in the mid and late nineteenth century beginning with Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche. Nihilism, however, is much more than the philosophy of nothingness or the belief that there is no inherent meaning to life and the cosmos. Yes, that is true in a crude sense. But this fails to explain why people live by meaning. According to Nietzsche, that’s because people create their meaning to live by. This becomes the basis of existentialism: the self-creating self in a world of nothingness as Jean-Paul Sartre would explain in Being and Nothingness.
The Nihilists, then, articulated a philosophy of constant creation and struggle against the emptiness of life. To live is to struggle, to create, where there is nothing to ultimately accept or grow into. Nihilism rejects the teleological understanding of nature offered by the Greeks. Nihilism also rejects the idea of an inner reality belief in God as Truth and Love offered by Christianity. Instead, Nihilism posits that all reality is self-constructed. You may know this idea through another term: social construction.
Social construction does not mean something is not “real.” It just means something is not determined by nature. All values are socially constructed and socially constructed values help create laws and institutions. These laws and institutions that are socially constructed by the values that people created for themselves are, therefore, unnatural in the sense that they cannot be found in nature. Those who attempt to explain laws and institutions as defending “laws of nature” or “natural rights” are guilty of the naturalistic fallacy. There is no fixed nature. This is the discovery of modern philosophy. All things are fluid and malleable. Values change because new values are created by people who lack power and influence in the world of human action.
This becomes the foundation for what we call postmodernism in philosophy. The essence of postmodernism, pardon the pun that any postmodernist would reject since there are no essences, is that there are no essence! Essence does not precede existence. Existence precedes essence. Even though the world is causally determined by materialist forces for practical bodily desires (this postmodernism shares with modern philosophy), the fact that humans create values and laws and institutions to benefit themselves over others is what explains the inequalities that Marx observed.
Why are there inequalities? People created and took for themselves to empower themselves at the expense of others.
These inequalities then become embedded in the world of human creation. Because humans are not the same as nature (an inheritance from modern philosophy), and because humans create their own world (something postmodernism also shares with the modern philosophical idea of creating the “empire of man” and “relief of man’s estate”), the task of philosophy is aimed at the deconstruction of these inequalities that exist in the socially constructed world. Postmodern philosophy is principally a philosophy of critique, of deconstruction—that famous phrase you have most likely heard used in the 21st century by everyone from political activists and journalists to philosophers and scientists.
Postmodernism, then, far from a rejection of modern philosophy, is actually a continuation of the modern project with just a rejection of the pragmatism of the Enlightenment—postmodernism, therefore, attempts to return to questions and skepticism which has always been part of the philosophical tradition. In its rejection of practical philosophy, however, postmodernism casts doubt over the principal narrative that emerged from Enlightenment philosophy: progress through science, technology, and economics. Postmodern deconstruction started as a deconstruction of the modern narrative of progress but has since developed into a deconstruction of all meta-narratives in philosophy, culture, religion, etc.
At its root, though, postmodernism shares with Marxism the concern for an oppressor-oppressed dialectic. With Nihilism, postmodernism shares the assumption that all values and realities are socially constructed. This is how we get down to what we said earlier, postmodernism rejects the idea of essences. Whereas the Greeks asserted essence precedes existence, a view that would have been shared by Christianity, postmodern philosophy turns this paradigm on its head: existence precedes essence and all forms of essentialism are simply social constructions and are, therefore, manifestations of “bad faith” to use the term from Sartre.
The problem with postmodernism is that even though it attempts to carve out space for a return to questioning that was jettisoned by the practical materialism of Enlightenment philosophy, it is, in fact, very narrow-minded and dogmatic (ironically) in that the schools of philosophy that would assert essence before existence, objectivity over subjectivity, truth over relativity, are bad faith questions or beliefs to hold and cannot be tolerated. So postmodernism ends up imposing its monopoly over the realm of questions. One must accept the postmodern credo: thus, the reopening of the western philosophical mind after its closure by the pragmatism of the Enlightenment also brought about its second closure in postmodernism: the answers to philosophy have been answered – all things are socially constructed and all social constructions that have thus far existed in history (itself a social construct) have resulted in some sort of oppressor-oppressed dialectic. Any deviation from this narrative is considered anathema.
What, then, can we summarize through the history of philosophy?
Philosophy actually begins with poetry. Greek poetry asserted the cosmos was one of chaos and violence and that human nature was a mirror image of that chaos and violence. Philosophy, the birth of reason, challenged this view: the cosmos was rationally ordered and humans, possessing a soul (which is the rational part of the mind) can conform to the nature of the cosmos. Greek philosophy and Greek reason is outwardly focused on the imitation of nature (the most famous argument of Aristotle and also shared by the later Stoics).
The unity of human nature with the natural world was the product of Greek philosophy. The next stage in the evolution of western philosophy was the birth of the self which began with Christianity. Christianity inherited many of the Greek philosophical assumptions—which is why, particularly in Catholic philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics still predominate and are concerned foundational for Catholic philosophy which has elicited strong jeers by the children of Protestantism accusing Catholics as being “pagan.” Those shallow polemics aside, the revolution in Christian philosophy is the concern it has for love: love of self, love of neighbor, love of the world, love of God. Christian philosophy began the inward turn to the self and the rise of subjectivity. Whereas Greek philosophy looked outward to the observation and imitation for the answers of human nature, Christianity turned inward for the answers of human nature by probing the depth of the human psyche and heart.
Greek and Christian philosophy are, therefore, concerned with the questions of human nature. Modern philosophy, beginning with the Enlightenment, is no longer concerned with the questions of human nature but with human power. Reason is no longer to be employed to understand the self in relation to the cosmos or the self in relation to ideas of love or God. Reason is simply the practical thought process of material beings attempting to acquire the material goods necessary for life. The Enlightenment marks the ascendancy of pragmatic philosophy with its belief in materialist determinism as humans are simply manifestations of the same physics that govern the universe: matter in motion. The Enlightenment philosophy isn’t about reason in the why abracadabra magicians like Steven Pinker assert. Instead, Enlightenment philosophy represents the eventual transformation into practical science as per Francis Bacon: the scientific, industrial, and economic conquest and transformation of the world to improve the material conditions of life. Philosophy is now concerned with the material conditions of life instead of the questions of human nature, metaphysics, and ontology that preoccupied the Greeks and Christians.
This, however, was not satisfactory to all. The Romantics and German Idealists, especially, rebelled against this materialization of life and the cosmos. They realized that, if true, there could be no morality and no freedom since freedom is found in moral choice. Kant, then, inaugurates the reaction to Enlightenment determinism, materialism, and practical reason. Hence, Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason. The German Idealists revive the concern of the self from Christianity and the concern for nature from the Greeks and fuse these earlier beliefs with the new discoveries of modernity and give rise to the philosophies of consciousness that we find in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.
The German Idealist project, however, collapsed under the weight of practical materialism. The German Materialists replaced the Idealists who asserted that consciousness is not the byproduct of the self or nature as proclaimed by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, but by the determinative material forces that govern the universe. The most famous of these philosophers was ultimately Karl Marx. Eventually, modern philosophy concluded with the rise of nihilism – the belief that all values and all beliefs were socially constructed by the struggle against the meaningless of the cosmos.
At long last we arrive at postmodernism, as we just covered, which took over the German Materialist and Nihilist traditions of philosophy: the world is socially constructed which has produced the oppressor-oppressed classes we witness today. Postmodernism is concerned with the practical material conditions of existence, just like modern philosophy is, but it is doubtful over the narrative of progress offered by the Enlightenment. Instead of becoming freer and more prosperous, postmodernism eventually came to belief that we were becoming enslaved and poorer. Those who disagreed were wrong and could not be tolerated.
However, with more and more people returning to the questions of first principles (metaphysics), the self, and human nature the questions of philosophy are reemerging in the 21st century. The end of philosophy that we are witnessing today is also becoming the rebirth of philosophy before our very eyes. Those who have been indoctrinated in the modern and postmodern mindset, however, are terrified of the prospects of everything they’ve been told to believe have been lies. But that is what philosophy is in its purest form: a questioning of the inherited beliefs that came before us. Some of us may agree with those beliefs. Others may be skeptical of them. Others more may find wisdom in those beliefs while adding new wisdom from the more recent past. But so long as some agree and others do not, the dialectic of philosophy remains and philosophy remains. Philosophy, to put it simply, concerns itself with the questions of the human condition: who we are and the world we inhabit. And while answers have always been given, the fact that we still have questions proves the invaluable reality of philosophy: the open mind, to which we are all called to consider.
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Hesiod, Paul Krause in real life, is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of Finding Arcadia, The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.
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