Torpedo the Ark

Arrange for a flood to the high-tide mark,

And I'll gladly, myself, torpedo the ark.

The lines were written by Ibsen for a revolutionary friend. Whilst troubled by how such violent political fantasies came to fruition within modernity, nevertheless the final phrase continues to appeal to the nihilist in me. And this is so even when the concept of nihilism now has a rather hackneyed quality, as Ray Brassier concedes in his excellent study Nihil Unbound (2007).

In this text, Brassier argues persuasively that, as a philosopher, one remains obliged to affirm the essential truth of nihilism. This, of course, is the truth of extinction: a truth with which philosophy has long struggled to come to terms. Even Nietzsche, whilst boasting of his being the 'first perfect nihilist', wasted a good deal of his intellectual energies trying to find a way to revalue values and thus overcome his own fatal conclusion that life is not only without any meaning at all, but is purely epiphenomenal; i.e., just a very rare and unusual way of being dead.

If only he hadn't been so determined to make philosophy into a medium of life's affirmation and eternal return, then Nietzsche might have seen that, ultimately, it serves best as what Brassier terms the 'organon of extinction'. He might also have agreed that torpedoing the ark is necessitated not only because the sentimental notion of salvation for the righteous deserves to be sunk without trace, but because intellectual honesty requires it. 

For what nihilism teaches us is that even without Noah and his floating zoo - and even without a perverse and pathological deity first causing destructive floods and then gently placing rainbows in the sky - there remains an independent reality which is completely indifferent to our existence and oblivious to our vain attempts to make it more hospitable. Nature is not our home and we should forget about any covenant made with a dead God. 

Brassier is right: philosophy should do more than simply further human conceit. Its duty and, indeed, its destiny is to acknowledge the fact that "thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of the living" [2007: xi].