Transcript for Robert Pippin Interview | Overcoming Nihilism with Nietzsche

0. Introduction

Johnathan Bi: My guest, Robert Pippin, is one of the great philosophers of our age. But you’re going to hear why he’s turned away from philosophy, and towards literature and film for meaning. The topic of our discussion today is Frederick Nietzsche, who expressed very similar discontents about traditional philosophy. Nietzsche became disillusioned with academic philosophy because he thought it was impotent in resolving one of the most important challenges of our age, nihilism.

Nihilism might sound like a merely theoretical problem, but it’s a disease that can hollow out your life from the inside, even if everything externally is going well. Why are more and more people becoming disillusioned with modernity when every measurable metric–life expectancy, productivity, representation–are all going up? Why do many feel empty, even in careers that provide challenging and well-paid work? It’s because the primary threat to living a good life in the 21st century is no longer external: “will I survive? will I starve?” but it’s internal: “what pursuits will give my life meaning?”

As an example, the best periods of my own life have all been marked by an all-consuming desire. And the worst periods weren’t when that desire was thwarted, because that still gives me orientation and energy. It’s when there’s no desire to begin with. Feeling in love and having your heart broken is preferable to not feeling anything at all. This is what nihilism threatens. It threatens these life-orienting commitments that you can’t help but feel pulled by. Nihilism, then, is an inability to desire. It’s an erectile dysfunction, but of the soul.

In this interview, you’re going to learn why the traditional sources of meaning have dried up and how Nietzsche proposed to overcome nihilism.

1. What is Nihilism

Johnathan Bi: Let's begin with definition. What is Nietzsche's understanding of nihilism, this thing that we are plagued by in modernity? 

Robert Pippin: Nihilism means nothing is true, everything is allowed, that the confidence we had that we could discover the truth, and that we could regulate our conduct in common by commitment to a certain set of core values had collapsed. But nihilism actually had a tradition before Nietzsche. It's an 18th century word that was popularized by a philosopher, theologian, and novelist named Friedrich Jacobi. In his anxiety about the optimism of the Berlin Enlightenment, people like Kant, he believed that the foundation of Christian Western society since the Middle Ages had been religion. The orienting principle of life had been basic tenets of Christian morality and that the insistence by people like Kant on rational autonomy in human life would succeed in undermining the sort of inspiring qualities of religion, especially in Germany, the Protestant religion. And that the collapse of this belief in religious value would mean the collapse of all confidence that we knew how we should live.

If you ask yourself, “what are the major sources of meaning and contemporary life where people feel their lives potentially fulfilled?” of course they have to do with things like romantic love, the nuclear family, security, peaceableness, and essentially freedom as people understand it, that is, freedom to direct the course of my own life as I see fit.

And Nietzsche regards all of those as incomplete. Nietzsche thinks most of our commitments are really just surface commitments. I mean yes, people are committed to the nuclear family, but they get divorced. People are committed to their work, but then their work exhausts them and they see themselves as working for the profit of others. Some people are still committed to religion, but they see around them a world that does not reflect back to them the significance of their religious lives. They get very angry. They think they've lost something that we could politically restore. All those kinds of phenomena go back to the question of the sources of meaning. And the sources of meaning have dried up.

This is a phenomenon Nietzsche was interested in from the very beginning of his career, with the death of a form of life in Greek culture, the tragic way of life, the way in which tragic poetry had formed the core of the Pre-Greek enlightenment, life of Athens, especially. He saw the same thing happening in late Western society that he saw happening with the moment of the Socratic Enlightenment in Greek culture.

Johnathan Bi: So what I take nihilism to be is an inability to form these life orienting commitments, that's the core issue. And maybe to relate this to my own life and share with our audience why I'm so excited to discuss your book with you, when I graduated college, I went into the technology industry, the startup industry because I thought it was one of the last realms of sincerity in the West today. That you could say with a straight face, “I want to build a starship that takes us to Mars,” and hire a thousand people who worked a hundred hour weeks in total belief and immersion. And so, I think most realms in the West are not like that. Academia is very self-critical, Finance is very cynical. What I wanted entering into the technology was that type of ability to devote myself, to throw myself into something.

So I did that. I went and built a tech company, and then for some mysterious reason, three years later, I lost that ability, that ability to devote myself, and that was kind of my sign that I had to move on. And so then I started this project. I still had the burning passion for philosophy, and now I wake up, sometimes in the middle of the night, so excited about what I'm going to do that I can't fall back to sleep, but it's that sense of commitment and devotion that I was chasing. Is that a good understanding of what nihilism is threatening to take away? 

Robert Pippin: Your personal experience, it's a very parallel kind of phenomenon, but I think what interests Nietzsche is that this kind of orientation and commitment can't really be understood in kind of isolation as something true only of a personal life history. It has something to do with the enterprises available to you as sources of mattering or meaningfulness in late Western modern society. If you would imagine Nietzsche considering somebody passionately committed to the project of sending us all to Mars or building a chat box, a ChatGPT or something like that, he would regard that as so naive, so low-minded, so devoid of any kind of genuine greatness as a civilizational project, not just as a personal project. So that these two things are interconnected. The fact that Nietzsche devotes so much of his attention to modern culture, to modernity as a problem, which he says in many of his books is his chief problem, problem of modernity means the sources for this dissatisfaction, even though they can arise personally in an existential way, are not just isolated to, they have to deal with what's available as avenues of meaningfulness.

Johnathan Bi: So another way to frame your response is that this doesn't manifest obviously in individuals, but there's a social cultural component to this about what means are... about what passions you can fully devote yourself to.

Robert Pippin: Right.

Johnathan Bi: You can't be a sincere aristocrat anymore because the institution of the aristocracy is no more.

Robert Pippin: Right, right, right.

Johnathan Bi: I want to say that is probably why philosophy might be the only devotion I could see myself devoted to right now is because philosophy promises to tell me where I can throw myself. And so, I'm devoting to finding a devotion or I'm committing to find a commitment, if that makes sense. Let me ask you one question. So, when Nietzsche talks about great historical enterprises, he has the Goethes and the Beethovens in mind. And your claim is that he wouldn't think of any of our technological progress to be in that category, is that right?