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_p ... And therefore we admire
what thou dost foist upon us
that is old.

p SHAKESPEARE

p But does nihilistic criticism offer any affirmative conclusions? Does not the person who unequivocally shares its views condemn himself to defeatism? Nihilism rejects these assumptions on the grounds that to think in such terms is to have a biased notion about it. How then is the transition from destructive criticism to an affirmative programme effected?

p Nihilism asserts that everything genuinely human, natural, free and unfabricated is asocial. Therefore to seek reconciliation with capitalist society means betrayal of one’s own self, while war with it is madness. Nihilism’s slogan is “Neither war nor peace”. But since man cannot live outside society he allegedly cannot, on the strength of this alone, be entirely free and happy; it would be better if capitalist society’s imaginary freedoms and substitutes of happiness had not existed. In the view of nihilism, the task, consequently, is that it is necessary to learn to live in capitalist society in such a way as to feel as little of its oppression as possible; without severing all social links, one must be able to break loose from the power of the alienated, irrational world, which is devoid of any gleam of hope and future, for which it could be worth fighting, working, loving and suffering.

p It is only by leaving in order to remain that one can hope to break free from the tenacious embrace of capitalist society. It was difficult, nihilism says, to tread the road to Calvary, to endure the foregoing revelation that the 166 world was absurd: it is now necessary to be able to endure the realisation of one’s own division. One must be able to cut away and isolate that part of one’s consciousness that is occupied by forces emanating from society. Man must know that in his association with other people he is speaking an alien tongue; that his attachment to persons, things and ideas is not his own; rituals, customs, aspirations and ideas—still less his own—they all belong to society and are dictated by it by means that tolerate no objection. This is the part that must be submissively given to its actual owner: Give unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. This is tormentingly difficult to do. But one cannot count on shaking off the ashes of suffering. A common language, a form of reconciliation with it must be found. This is the only way one can wring a particle of inner freedom—such, after all these arguments, is the conclusion drawn by nihilism.

p Thus, according to the affirmative programme, nothing changes in the external world. And perhaps there is even no need for breaking away from the stable way of life. Attention is directed towards change only in the spiritual sphere. Grandiose revolutions are to take place only in the area of the experience of perceiving the world. For the sense of wretchedness, whose favourite nihilistic mythology is, acquired freedom means nothing more nor less than to experience one’s wholeness. It is attainable provided one becomes aware of oneself as a person, as a member of the human species, and not as a man of the organisation that imposes incompleteness, mutilation and the miserable fate of a functionary. But the flight from history and anonymous existence is accomplished not to some new world, not in the direction of other social links. For nihilism there is only one channel of emigration—into oneself. It regards freedom as a retreat into the asocial past, into the depths of history, into mythology.

p Special ways of experiencing inner freedom are worked out in the process of resistance to the technocratic paradise, to its stereotype ideals that are forced upon the individual, suppressing his own aspirations and stimulating in him unnatural requirements and desires. In the long run resistance leads to the expression of own convictions and ideals.

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p As nihilism sees it, an individual projected extraneously remains in the grip of a torn, distorted and therefore sick consciousness. An intraneously projected individual is allegedly able to balance the painful disagreement of ideals with reality. Having shed his ideals and correspondingly “transformed” reality in his subjective perception, this individual in one way or another finds the key to harmonising them. This gives him the impression that he has acquired the state he has longed for. He believes that he has at last restored his uniqueness, shaping himself in accordance with his own understanding and desire. The meaning of life and happiness, lost in social existence, are allegedly acquired in wisdom and in the ever-lasting joy of the sense of participating in it. Such, in general outline, is the reasoning of the sense of wretchedness.

p Stopping at no barriers, nihilism gives the impression of totally demolishing official ideals and the prevailing mythology. However, in the final act it finds that the absence of ideals is as unbearable as submissive acceptance of official ideals when one sees their glaring incompatibility with reality. While the sense of contentedness uses its ideals to consolidate itself more firmly in its contented state, the sense of wretchedness does its best to break out of its state, adapt itself to the oppressive world and deliver itself from suffering, at least in its initial form. What it wants are not the ideals of unhappiness but ideals leading to the attainment of happiness, with deliverance from optimistic delusions and surrender to evil, the ideals which would at least give the sensation of having escaped from the impasse of hopelessness. Thus, after withering criticism, nihilism gets down to the unaccustomed work of producing moral matters and moral values  [167•*  that would suit the sense of wretchedness and tie in with reality, albeit negatively.

p These ideals or, rather, anti-ideals, among which are the neohedonistic hopes of the sense of contentedness, are formed of definite thought material, that is to some extent approved by history. This material is placed around some basic idea, concept or pivotal value. Structurally it is an 168 intricate frame consisting of stereotype behaviour patterns, value-norm orientations, and socio-political, moral and aesthetic notions, preferences and views of the meaning of life and happiness. This thought material has for nihilism the invaluable advantage that while constantly repeating itself and being undeducible directly from social reality it is the result of the spiritual output of all classantagonistic social systems, including the earliest system, the product of the spiritual activity of man as a social being generally, and not as a member of any specific social organisation. Reflecting some general features of class society’s life, the material used for the production of ideals creates the illusion that it and the way of action recommended by it are not dependent on time, on the spirit of change, that the set of ideals of the human tragicomedy is constant under any social circumstances and able to move easily from one epoch to another.

p These ideals may lose their supremacy, acquire new foundations and correct the models of happiness, plans and programmes, and some behaviour patterns. For some time they may even be in, so to say, a state of anabiosis, and regarded as purely ritual, disengaging themselves from the actual vital activity of the individuals endeavouring to remain faithful to them. Nevertheless, like the eternally dying gods of ancient religions invariably brought to life again, they do not vanish completely, reinforcing the illusion that certain requirements of the human spirit are constant.

p Of a venerable age and having passed through ideological and cultural selection and acquired a large reserve of strength, the halo of consolidation in experience, these ideals are merely appropriated by the sense of wretchedness, to some extent customarily and even mechanically reproduced by it. The latter circumstance does not prevent, of course, each individual consumer of these ideals from believing that they are the fruit of his own, ungoaded independent creativity.

p How is this illusion reinforced? By the fact that the traditional ideals called up by nihilism for good are not, strictly speaking, theoretically polished, systematised conceptions. As we already know, they are to some extent the vapours, the echoes of an actual vital process, of spontaneously formed 169 moulds of the specific conditions of people’s existence, of their way of life. The social orientation and morals in these loose ideals, and the entire ideological practice of the sense of wretchedness coalesce with definite frames of mind, with a special organisation of feelings, with an inimitable tonality of emotional accompaniment.

p Each of these ideals expresses the way of thinking of social sub-types of the common bourgeois social and class type of individual. It expresses his inter- and inner-individual esoteric language. Each generates a specific and manysided complex of mobile emotional states from calm but stable to turbulent, albeit transient, passions, including such that are temporarily able to lessen the burden of negative feeling (anxiety, fear, despair, a sense of oppression) and transform them into affirmative states with a veneer of optimism (satisfaction, joy, tranquillity). Shape is thus given to an autonomous system in which affirmative and negative emotions interact, temporarily fostering a sense of selfrealisation of the individual and strengthening the ideal’s attractiveness.

As outlets the sense of wretchedness uses quietist, stoic and anarcho-ascetic ideals (the list of ideals and their varieties is much longer). They are united into something of the nature of a single whole by their hostility for the optimistic scientific world outlook (and the corresponding stereotypes of the perception of the world) and by their futile attempt to rise above the antithesis between bourgeois and socialist ideals.