Beyond Values
From Ancient Cynism to Modern Nihilism
Cyrille Ozanne
8/6/20266 min read
Moral rules are a human construction. Like language or culture, they are established within a community to ensure its cohesion. It is often on the grounds of this relativity and artificiality that these rules are rejected. Nevertheless, they are strongly linked to the idea of society. Denying one often amounts to denying the other. Thus, it means denying society—which, as we have seen, is itself an intellectual construct as well.
The Origins of Greek Cynicism
This thought finds its origin in Greek cynicism. It relativizes social behaviors and their codifications on the grounds that they are relative to a city-state or a society, therefore artificial and not natural. It is an attempt to anchor oneself, to align with a reality beyond the representation we form of it. This philosophy emerges at the time when gods lose their aura and Socratic philosophy arises. Individuals become aware of a disconnect between reality, the polis, and the gods. The first physical laws are formulated. Commerce and war confront the Greeks with other cultures and push them to relativize their pantheon; thus constants emerge beyond local specifics. Facing this loss of bearings, some attempt to seek a reality existing beyond society, a kind of natural state purified of the societal framework. This is cynical thought.
A Western Distinction
The distinction between society and reality is a constant throughout all subsequent Western thought. It is not universal, however. It is less present, for example, in Confucian thought, which considers that society, embodied by the Emperor, is an integral part of reality by essence. In this thought, each element integrates into a greater whole of which it is part. This is the fractal image of the Tao. It consists of Yin and Yang, two forces in a dynamic relationship, each born from the heart of the other. But another dimension of the Tao is that each element—Yin and Yang—can be taken as a whole, dividing itself into Yin and Yang, shifting the distinction to a lower level. Similarly, each unit (Tao) is an element of a pair at a higher level, Yin or Yang depending on the case. This is the simple example of the family: a parent has children, and each child is destined to become a parent someday. At the same time, the parents are themselves children of other parents. Each element is both whole and part of the whole.
From Machiavelli to the Enlightenment
The arrival of Christianity, bringing a new prism and new stability, tends to make this philosophical current disappear. The idea remains, however. It is present in Machiavelli. It expresses itself within a completely accepted and assimilated Christian framework. The question is more to dissociate the activity of the prince, which must be loving to be effective, from the activity of the man who concerns himself with his paradise. It is in the transition to the Enlightenment that cynicism becomes nihilism. If cynicism was born from the awareness of a reality beyond our cultural gaze on the world, nihilism appears when we realize that the world exists beyond our projections. Even if the concept of gods as individual projection is formulated much later by Freud, the Enlightenment philosophy, by dissociating reality from God and thinking the world without reference to it, brings about the awareness of the difference between projection and reality. This is the thought of Mandeville and Sade.
Descartes and Human Interiority
After the materialization of God by Louis XIV, humanity must take full responsibility for its life. It is the creation of the notion of "passions of the soul" by Descartes that makes a beginning of interiority appear in the person: the perspective of complete rationalization of the world and the supremacy of reason in the understanding of the world, which will open the Enlightenment. The supernatural is integrated into human thought. Following Descartes, demons become our neuroses. We should note here that, following a negative humanist vision carried by Hobbes and Machiavelli notably, only demons are integrated into the human mind. Popular culture retains the concept of the guardian angel, exterior to oneself. Yet, in Judeo-Christian culture, angels and demons are two sides of the same coin. They should be integrated in the same manner: demons as neuroses, angels as qualities and hopes.
The Crisis of Values
The emergence of the idea that our emotions belong to us confronts the individual with their depth. On one side, the disappearance of an ethereal and omniscient God loses the perspective of paradise and the notion of omniscient surveillance to which one must answer. This difficulty, on one side, and the disappearance of the safeguard, on the other, lead individuals to take liberties with commonly accepted morality. If demons are our impulses and they belong to us; if there is no reward when they are controlled, why give so much trouble when immediate benefit can be drawn? Acts are taken for themselves, values, by definition relating to something beyond us, being discarded. Whether Mandeville, who describes society solely from the angle of the individual by functionalizing morality as a means of social control, or Sade, who claims the disappearance and inversion of good and evil values that were endorsed by God—the human being abandoned to themselves plunges into a materialist atheism without truly questioning what God was.
Society, Liberty, and the State of Nature
This forgets that society is not reality. If humans are free by essence, their necessary association within a society leads them to sacrifice a minimum of liberty for this association. This concession is made exclusively for security reasons. Human association goes beyond a security need. It has a dimension of efficiency, identity, protection—which is not security—all that founds a group. This thought, attributed to Franklin and which may seem one of the prejudices of our modern world, does not invite total freedom through courage of confrontation; it invites us to dose our concession by distinguishing between protection against real danger and security against imagined danger. Liberty is by essence incompatible with society. Without guide and without values, society loses its very justification. There cannot be absolute freedom within society. Absolute freedom can only be done and lived outside of it. Following Aristotle, who considers society as fundamentally necessary to the individual, and whether we start from the premise that man is good or bad, society justifies itself by the will to apply values. If there are no longer values to apply, society no longer justifies itself.
Without these values, even in collectivity, it is a return to the state of nature. The individual takes precedence over the collective and the law of the strongest is the only law of Nature. Without values, no right, deontology or ethics; hence no vision beyond egocentric individual vision; hence no cohesion within the group.
The Knot of Modern Atheism
This problem forms since the knot and foundation, more or less assumed, of atheism. As Nietzsche shows at the individual level, whether weak or strong, nihilism appears precisely when there is conflict between reality and the individual's values. It is the psychological response to suffering related to the mismatch between reality and the representation the individual forms of it: their values and their personal place.
Twenty-First Century Nihilism
The twentieth century goes even further. Like cynicism, this individual psychological response to a situation is elevated to a system. While Nietzsche envisages a second level of nihilism which would lead the individual to relativize themselves after relativizing the world, modern nihilists no longer content themselves with relativizing the world by denying its values. They deny the world itself. This is the total systemic application of Sade: with, through the disappearance of values, the reclassification of facts. Good and Evil do not disappear, but Good can become Evil and vice versa according to the speaker's interests. We find here all the semantics of dictatorships with their "ministries of Information" and other measures qualified in acceptable ways to hide another reality.
Toward a Second Nihilism
This reality is dangerous. Hannah Arendt demonstrates it in her analysis of Nazism. The requalification of the world, the lie and the virtual reality created thereby, leads the individual to renounce thinking and therefore acting. Yet Nietzsche proposes another nihilism. For him, once accepted and digested the relativism of the world, once aware that our vision is not the world but just its projection, we must relativize what we are by accepting the mirror the world returns to us. First-degree nihilists tend to resolve this question by saying that if the values I apply to the world are false, the values the world applies to me are false too. "Hakuna Matata": "If the world persecutes you, you must persecute the world." Yet if the world is nothing and I am (in) the world, I am nothing. If the values I apply to the world are false, then the image of myself, what I am and how I represent myself in relation to what the world returns to me, may be false too. It is no longer about refusing the world, but fully accepting it. After having accepted a first dimension of reality on the absence of reality of values—they are not linked to the thing but to the individual—it is necessary to accept that the individual can be something other than their labels. This is an almost spiritual dimension of the approach and philosophy: the questioning of the individual, not in what they live—that is the domain of psychology—but in what they are. The two being linked.
Proofread and edited with the assistance of AI.