diff --git a/book/src/preface.md b/book/src/preface.md index 0d1eed9..c377847 100644 --- a/book/src/preface.md +++ b/book/src/preface.md @@ -38,7 +38,7 @@ First and foremost, it does not treat nihilism as a disease, requiring diagnosis --- -Two basic contentions underlie this book. First, that the disenchantment of the world understood as a consequence of the process whereby the Enlightenment shattered the ‘great chain of being’ and defaced the ‘book of the world’ is a necessary consequence of the coruscating potency of reason, and hence an invigorating vector of intellectual discovery, rather than a calamitous diminishment. Jonathan Israel’s work provided a direct source of inspiration for this idea and his magisterial recounting of philosophy’s crucial role in what was arguably the most far-reaching (and still ongoing) intellectual revolution of the past two thousand years furnishes a salutary and much-needed corrective to the tide of anti-Enlightenment revisionism with which so much twentieth-century philosophy has been complicit.3 The disenchantment of the world deserves to be celebrated as an achievement of intellectual maturity, not bewailed as a debilitating impoverishment. The second fundamental contention of this book is that nihilism is not, as Jacobi and so many other philosophers since have insisted, a pathological exacerbation of subjectivism, which annuls the world and reduces reality to a correlate of the absolute ego, but on the contrary, the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality, which, despite the presumptions of human narcissism, is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable. Nature is not our or anyone’s ‘home’, nor a particularly beneficent progenitor. Philosophers would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. Philosophy +Two basic contentions underlie this book. First, that the disenchantment of the world understood as a consequence of the process whereby the Enlightenment shattered the ‘great chain of being’ and defaced the ‘book of the world’ is a necessary consequence of the coruscating potency of reason, and hence an invigorating vector of intellectual discovery, rather than a calamitous diminishment. Jonathan Israel’s work provided a direct source of inspiration for this idea and his magisterial recounting of philosophy’s crucial role in what was arguably the most far-reaching (and still ongoing) intellectual revolution of the past two thousand years furnishes a salutary and much-needed corrective to the tide of anti-Enlightenment revisionism with which so much twentieth-century philosophy has been complicit.³ The disenchantment of the world deserves to be celebrated as an achievement of intellectual maturity, not bewailed as a debilitating impoverishment. The second fundamental contention of this book is that nihilism is not, as Jacobi and so many other philosophers since have insisted, a pathological exacerbation of subjectivism, which annuls the world and reduces reality to a correlate of the absolute ego, but on the contrary, the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality, which, despite the presumptions of human narcissism, is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable. Nature is not our or anyone’s ‘home’, nor a particularly beneficent progenitor. Philosophers would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity. Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living; indeed,