Active and Passive Nihilism
When Values Disconnect from Reality
Cyrille Ozanne
9/5/20266 min read
As Nietzsche shows, nihilism arises from a disconnect between reality and the values we ascribe to it. Individuals see their values—whether acquired or personal—as protections or limits. Individuals adjust their behavior in accordance with these values, either with the aim of being protected and succeeding, or with the aim of avoiding punishment. Nihilism emerges when, for whatever reason, these values no longer play that role. It may be the person who is certain of winning because their cause is just, yet loses; or the one who realizes that one can harm another without being punished.
The self-evidence of these values—or their unquestioned nature—gave them a real dimension, that is, one exterior to and independent of the individual. This is often the case with religious rules and values, which are supposed to come from God. The disappearance of God—and of the post-mortem perspective of heaven and hell—removes the primary benefit or sanction attached to the value. Doing good or doing evil now brings nothing more than what they bring during one's lifetime. These elements, secondary compared to paradise, become preponderant in the decision. If the fantasized function of the reward attached to values fails to materialize, the individual's entire foundation collapses. This configuration is specific to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic worldview.
Nihilism and ancient cultures
In a typical ancient polytheism, in Judaism, or in Far Eastern cultures, nihilism may be less present. The disillusioned tend—as happened in Antiquity—to stop at the cynical stage. This is because, in these cultures, good and evil are defined in terms of alignment with reality, rather than with a view to ultimate gratification. In ancient Greece, as in traditional Chinese culture, what is good is what is in harmony with reality. And what is evil is what disturbs the equilibrium of that reality.
Among the Jews, the only law that applies is the law of God, which applies for its own sake. The notion of an afterlife in these cultures is secondary. There is no concept of paradise or reward from which the "benefit" aspect of a good deed would derive. In Christian and Muslim cultures, certain behaviors are considered good and are absolutely rewarded with paradise, while others are considered bad and are punished by hell.
This approach confers a kind of premium on good actions and a discount on bad ones. Following the disappearance of the notion of paradise, the notion of gain associated with these actions—and with the values connected to them—tends to be understood in a material way. What is good should be crowned with success, and what is bad should be punished. This is also the childlike vision conveyed in fairy tales.
But here too, these tales should not be taken literally. Like mythological narratives, they primarily serve to transmit an experience and a teaching to the community, and can be read symbolically. We can observe, for example, that in most tales, legends and myths, the cunning tricksters behave in the same way. Whether it is Loki in Norse mythology, the Fox in French folk tales, or Juha among the Arabs, their behavior is similar. This teaches the people that, when they encounter a person displaying such behavior, they should be careful—these may be dangerous individuals.
It is also from this that the idea comes that gods and such characters can disguise themselves. In popular cultures, claiming to have met one or the other meant having encountered a cunning person, at a time when the concept of individual personality did not yet exist. In these fairy tales, the positive ending or the punishment of the villain—which is not always the case in the original tales, moreover—can be understood as the idea of maintaining a positive outlook and hope. A form of positive psychology that allows the individual to face the question with the hope of coming through. This is a completely different idea from the added value of paradise.
The nihilistic depersonalization
Returning to nihilism: it manifests itself as a result of a dissociation between the mechanics of reality and those associated with values. This dissociation occurs in a deep part of the self, at the boundary between psychology and spirituality. The issue does not necessarily involve the person's direct, psychological identity. Rather, it seems to endanger their persona. It lies in their relationship to the world, in their projecting aspect. The person in themselves is not endangered in their inner dimension. Their relationship to the world is modified, destroyed—and poses an even greater danger. In a sense, the individual finds themselves teleported to a planet they do not know, into a parallel world that resembles what they knew without being it. This is a profound and involuntary form of depersonalization.
Beyond the triggering event, the new situation brings a whole series of consequences—the same for passive nihilism and active nihilism. The individual tries to preserve what they have acquired amid the collapse they are experiencing. Much like a house whose foundations are under attack, the nihilist fears that their entire psychological structure will be destroyed in a domino effect following the challenge to their relationship with the world.
Indeed, materially speaking, if the foundations are destroyed, the entire supporting structure will collapse. In psychology, however, the situation is different. Our identity does not rest on our relationship to the world—our persona. It rests on mechanisms and a general construction that develop over time. The persona is one of these aspects. Admittedly, since the world is our frame of reference and our mirror, the destruction of our relationship to it is deeply unsettling. We project onto people, things and events, and their feedback helps us build ourselves. If the feedback suddenly becomes unpredictable, the situation is utterly distressing. Yet it does not touch what we are as individuals.
Rebuilding from oneself
So the individual will attempt to recreate an environment close to the one they knew, but in rupture with the previous system. They create for themselves a new system of values—but this time, one founded on themselves. The taught and fallible systems of values are abandoned, at least in part. And new ones are created, following more or less the fault lines of the individual. This is the end of ethics for the individual. Whatever values are put into practice, the system is built at the scale of the individual. The supra-individual dimension—whether spatial, that is, taking the other into account in one's reasoning, or temporal—what will happen after my death, or what happened before my birth—disappears. This dimension is shared with religions and spiritualities. If one fails, the other is swept away with it.
Ethics and morality are the questioning of our attitudes and actions against a frame of reference that is different from ours and that transcends us. Since this transcendence is rejected as unreliable, nothing more can be founded upon it. Deontology and ethics disappear. What is good is what we love, and what is bad is what we hate.
Mechanisms of superstition and psychological survival
The other lever at play in the attempt to save the self is a mechanism of superstition. Since the world becomes unpredictable, just as with people in extreme situations, the individual develops a set of superstitious mechanisms to help manage and stabilize their relationship with the world. Like all superstition, these mechanisms aim to reassure the individual and sustain their self-confidence. They often consist in the acceptance of cognitive biases and personal preconceptions.
Indeed, in the triggering event, the value system was in conflict with an inner voice—a dimension of the mind that fought against it. Defeat or victory vindicated this dimension so forcefully that it became generalized to reality as a whole. In the face of such trauma, only a deliberate, active effort can enable the individual to digest the situation.
Disjunctions between values and reality are relatively common in everyday life. Observing things calmly, situations where reality does not work ideally for us are fairly frequent. It is the emotional intensity, the projections and the individual expectations attached to a particular event that make that event capable of triggering nihilism.
The work of digestion and reconciliation
If this process of digestion does not occur naturally, active work is needed to understand that, in the case of passive nihilism, responsibility lies with the fact of not having heeded that inner voice—not with the system of values itself. That, indeed, the little voice was right—that it signaled a danger—but that it was compatible with the values. The question is less an opposition between the one and the other than a matter of understanding how the two could be articulated together to reach the desired outcome.
A system of values has no purpose in winning some battle or other. Its purpose is to teach the individual an attitude that enables them to live better. Beyond individual impulses and assumptions, people—both collectively and individually—have found answers to the questions that animate all human beings. Life in community is difficult; it involves compromises, frustrations, conflicts, and so on. History and experience have taught us certain answers, notably through the recognition and acceptance of a supra-individual dimension. It may be one god or several, a society, a state, a family...
These teachings and experiences were justified by God insofar as they are universal. God, or the gods, representing the world—the reality—common to all human beings, to say that a law is divine is to say that it is justified universally, for all human beings.
The specific difficulty of active nihilism
Herein lies the great difficulty of active nihilism. In that hypothesis, the system of values loses its coercive dimension. In the passive dimension, the relevance of the supra-individual dimension—in whatever form it takes—is accepted. It loses strength as it loses its protective dimension, but it had been accepted. That acceptance can return with the healing of the wound to the persona.
In the case of active nihilism, acceptance never took place. The system of values was, from the start, experienced as unjust and unjustified. It will be much harder for the individual to agree to submit to it again unless they see a more or less immediate personal interest in it. Fortunately, active nihilists are quite rare. Most are passive nihilists who have entrenched themselves in a valueless system.
Proofread and edited with the assistance of AI.