Laughing at Nothing: Humor as a Response to Nihilism

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. De Sousa points out, “Determinism and fatalism are often confused, perhaps because both seem to entail the impossibility of freedom. . . . Yet they are logically antithetical . . . . The central idea of determinism is that every event depends on its antecedents. Fatalism, on the contrary, views some particular event . . . as inevitable no matter what the antecedents turn out to be. The point is that determinism is a causal notion, whereas fatalism is a teleological one.” Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997), pp. 85–86. 2. Originally published in Dutch in 1960.The English translation was published in 1980. Johan Goudsblom, Nihilism and Culture (New Jersey: Rowan and Littlefield, 1980). 3. Ibid., p. x. 4. Ibid., p. 69. 5. Ibid., p. 109. 6. Ibid., p. 190. 7. Ibid., p. x. 8. Ibid., p. 177. 9. Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 255. 10. Stanley Rosen, Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 206. 11. Throughout this book Rosen uses terms such as speech, reason, and rationality almost interchangeably. I believe this is so because he has in mind the Ancient Greek notion of “Logos,” the meaning of which encompasses all of the following: “reason, word, speech, discourse, definition, principle, or ratio.” W. L. Reese, Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1980). 173 Notes 12. Rosen. p. 212. 13. Ibid., p. 213. 14. Ibid., p. 216. 15. Ibid., p. 136. 16. See Keiji Nishitani, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, trans. Graham Parkes with Setsuko Aihara (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); Martin E. Marty, Varieties of Unbelief (New York: Anchor Books, 1966); Michael Novak, The Experience of Nothingness (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970); Michael Novak, Awakening from Nihilism (n.p.: Crisis Books, 1995); Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). 17. Karen Carr, The Banalization of Nihilism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 7. 18. Ibid., pp. 17–18. 19. Ibid., p. 7. CHAPTER 1. GERMAN AND RUSSIAN NIHILISM 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufman, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 17. 2. Gillespie, p. vii. 3. Goudsblom, p. 14. 4. Goudsblom claims to have been unable to locate purported references to the term nihilism in the writings of Augustine. Cho recognizes “relatively obscure occurrences of the term in Latin and French sources.” Stephen Wagner Cho, “Before Nietzsche : Nihilism as a Critique of German Idealism,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 18, no. 1 (1995): p. 205. Gillespie specifically cites F. L. Goetzius’s 1733 work De nonismo et nihilismo in theologia as the first place where the term nihilism appears in print, though this work was “relatively unknown and apparently played no role in the later reappearance and development of the concept.” Gillespie, p. 65. 5. “For we are brought to the conclusion that we can never transcend the limits of possible experience, though that is precisely what this science is concerned, above all else, to achieve.This situation yields, however, just the very experiment by which, indirectly , we are enabled to prove the truth of this first estimate of our a priori knowledge of reason, namely, that such knowledge has to do only with appearances, and must leave the thing in itself as indeed real per se, but not known by us.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), p. 24. 6. Cho, p. 207. 7. Goudsblom quotes the words of Heinrich von Kleist who reacted with despair upon reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: “I recently became acquainted with Kant174 LAUGHING AT NOTHING ian philosophy—and now I must quote you a thought from it, though I do not imagine that it will shake you as deeply or as painfully as it did me. We cannot decide whether that which we call truth is real truth or whether it only seems so. . . . My sole, my highest goal has foundered and I no longer have an aim.” Goudsblom, pp. 36–37. I have found even today, in teaching introductory philosophy courses, that students often react in a very disturbed and unsettled manner when introduced to Kant’s Transcendental philosophy for the first time. 8. Cho, p. 206. 9. See Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, “Jacobi to Fichte,” in The Main Philosophical Writings...