Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay

If nihilism is silence, that fits Kojeve's definition of silence as the only alternative to complete wisdom. Kojeve plots every philosophy in a little chart, and along one axis is time and the other axis is truth, and every philosopher can be understood as occupying one spot in the grid. So what Rosen does is present a history of nihilism that fits the precursors of contemporary nihilism in one spot or another on the grid. The origin of modern nihilism, as Rosen presents it, in very Nietzschean fashion, is Christianity. By locating the good in some distant beyond, Christianity broke from paganism by separating the good from the useful, and thereby separated reason from application to this world. Thus Kant's distinction between reason and understanding is an unwitting repetition of Christianity, which is exactly Kojeve's version of Kant as the typical Christian philosopher. Of course, Rosen is not a Hegelian but a Straussian, and the historical exercise is conducted in the name of a return to the classical political rationalism of Plato and Aristotle. An excellent book, Rosen at his most candid and clear.

Stanley Rosen says nihilism is the position that obtains when all speech becomes like silence- once all values become justifiable they also become meaningless. Wittgenstein and Heidegger represent the two movements in modern philosophy that Rosen accuses of rejecting the authority of words. The first part of the book brings out the similarities between fundamental ontology and ordinary language philosophy. Rosen shows that common to both is the misguided attempted to create themselves ex-nihilo while the major difference lies in their use of tools - one group uses sledgehammers while the other makes due with a nail file. Rosen then goes on to defend classical philosophy against Heidegger's charge that Plato dehumanized and devalued human existence- thus bring nihilism to the west. Stanley Rosen does a exceedingly good job of showing how existentialism reduces to the very thing it tries to escape -- in the end the master becomes defined by his slave--

Rosen says at one point that he set out to fill the gaping hole in Strauss's platonism, the entire absence of an ontology, or as Rosen calls, a technical philosophical doctrine. If for Strauss the ideas are "fantastic, not to say incredible," Rosen rejoins: and nothing you say changes that. Rosen is thus determined recover a true Plato, the philosophical plato, and with the help of Heidegger's Wiederholung of the gigantomachia, but explicitly against Heidegger. The project is thus to save Strauss from Heidegger by using Heidegger against himself to fill in the esoteric but hollow core of Straussian platonism. Capisce? That is the project of Nihilism, and Rosen never shys away from confronting Heidegger head-on. Yet Rosen, to his detriment, never learned one important lesson from Strauss: the depths are contained in the surface, and only in the surface, of things. For Strauss that meant, to my mind, that philosophy is always political because it can never be technical. Rosen's 'ordinary language metaphysics' is sensible enough, but Rosen himself (despite what he says) is deeply impatient with politics (and philosophy) precisely because he fails to see that politics is the surface that contains the depths.