More on Being a Baby

After writing my last blog, with its rather exaggerated conclusion that Helena Iara knows more about Being than Heidegger (because for her "é" is an empty signifier), I began to think a little more about my argument, and to talk it over with Helena as we sat in the winter sun and enjoyed one of the few nice days we've had in the last several weeks.  Nietzsche seemed to be an interesting addition, and since she liked the sound of his name, I talked about him for a bit.

I hope I am getting this argument right here: I have robbed in mostly from one of the best books I've read on the mad German genius, Alan White's In Nietzsche's Labyrinth.  For Nietzsche, "nihilism" is an important category, but not in the sense that was most common in his time, that of the nihilist revolutionaries first chronicled by Turgenev, who tried to overthrow the Russian Tsar.  For Nietzsche, nihilism was an ontological category, a consequence of his discovery that "God is Dead."

I explained to Helena that there are three levels of nihilism in Nietzsche's thought.  First comes religious nihilism, the stage in which most of humanity lives.  It is religious because people believe that there is a God, but because such a being does not exist, they really believe in nothing.  Religious nihilism is about delusion.  At the second level is absolute nihilism, which happens when people come to recognize that God does not exist, and they then accept the truth that they believe in nothing.  But this form of nihilism is basically negative, because these nihilists are disappointed that there is no Divine in which to believe.  Absolute nihilism is the kind of disenchantment we associate with the word "nihilist."

The final level of nihilism, "realized nihilism" (and again, I hope that I have the terminology right), is when one recognizes that there is no God, and that it doesn't matter in the least.  One could argue that the Madyamika Buddhist idea that there is no difference between nirvana and samsara (perfection and the real world) is exactly this: we don't need to condemn the world for being less than we want, but to celebrate it for all of the good it has.

Now, I don't want to enter into the debate about the death of God (because I think the God who Nietzsche declared dead is very different from any God I would find convincing... after all, as I mentioned in the last blog, the Hebrews don't even have a word for Being, so God as Infinite, Omnipotent Being would be very foreign to them.  But the point, I think, works when we talk about Being instead of God.  Helena, who says "é" (it is) and leaves the signified empty, is a realized nihilist, not even concerned that Being, as imagined by philosophers of the West, is a delusion.

Perhaps this is why Buddha is so often represented as a baby...