From Active Nihilism to the Second Level
Retrieving reciprocity
Cyrille Ozanne
9/5/20264 min read
Another illustration of the shifting frame of reference is this phrase attributed to Franklin: "He who is willing to sacrifice his freedom for his security deserves neither." This maxim underlies the whole of modern Western thought. It is the idea that liberty prevails over everything, and that the need for safety is a weakness. Yet the quotation must be put back into its context: the conquest of America. In that context, danger was permanent and inevitable. Likewise, the state's capacity for control and coercion was far more limited than what we know today.
Franklin envisioned neither total safety nor the complete abolition of liberty. It would be anachronistic to read the sentence through the lens of total security. Besides, as noted earlier, this is not possible—nor would he have accepted total control and the wholesale suppression of freedoms. At the time, any addition of safety would not eliminate insecurity, and any restriction of liberty would leave ample room for it. And yet, he warns us against this transfer.
A translation, a requalification of the quote is needed to integrate it into our current reflection. One dimension of safety in society is the protection of the individual. This is not, strictly speaking, a theoretical or abstract defence, but protection against real dangers, more or less kept away from society. For this protection, a minimum of freedom is traded away. This is the social contract. Franklin's quote does not aim at destroying, at eradicating the state. But at limiting it to the strict minimum. One may then ask: since danger is in most cases kept at bay, why should the transfer of freedom continue? This overlooks the fact that danger is only kept at bay by society, and that abandoning it would quickly bring the dangers back. It is therefore the transfer itself that protects us from danger, since it is society that prevents it.
This is a good example of how a concept situated in one context can become more complex and refined as the situation evolves. By broadening its scope of application—here, a situation that changes over time—the perimeter of the quote must be questioned and reread. This is the mechanism that can be at play when facing nihilism.
Active nihilism: reclaiming through values
Because even though the awareness of the gap between reality and values is irreversible, we have seen that it can be managed by refounding the values on other grounds and by redefining their perimeter. This is the response to passive nihilism.
For active nihilism, the question is different. What place do values hold relative to omnipotence? In the first case, nihilism stems from a failure of omnipotence that shatters the values. In the second, omnipotence becomes exacerbated and can no longer be contained within the values. Behind the apparent freedom opening up hides a trap. To borrow from Nietzsche: omnipotence is not the Übermensch.
Active nihilists may allow themselves to be carried along by their omnipotence, through the same mechanisms as the passive ones: a new system of values and superstition—this time to maintain power. Thus, after destroying the values and establishing the rule of the strongest, they redefine reality itself by relabelling its elements. It is no longer war, but a special military operation, for instance. Yet as Hannah Arendt showed, this path offers no viable way out. It leads necessarily and automatically to the destruction of the individual, of their capacity to analyse and to think. But why should that ultimately matter to the active nihilist? They are in a position of strength and can take advantage of the situation with impunity.
Reciprocity as foundation
Yet whether they like it or not, whatever labels and demonstrations they offer, they are subject like everyone else to the rule of reciprocity. The gaze I cast on the other reflects the gaze I cast on myself. If I destroy the other, or humiliate them, it is a part of myself that I destroy and humiliate. This approach, which may seem idealistic and sentimental, is in fact perfectly rational and reasonable. Human beings are built through reciprocity. From childhood to adulthood, it is this exchange between reality and the individual that allows them to exist.
The need for alterity is a fundamental need of the individual, and being out of sync with one's environment does not sever the bond and the exchange in any way—it destroys their quality. In active nihilism, the personal value system replaces the inherited one, since the latter defeated it in a given situation. The person behaves badly. They escape the sanction promised by the value system, either by chance or through a subterfuge. The value system is thereby set aside, and the subterfuge may even become a superstition. Reality and its imperatives are henceforth taken into account only insofar as they serve the active nihilist's value system.
To restore a quality of exchange with reality, one must then restore reality's place in that exchange. Here again the task is doubly difficult, because the person has no immediate interest in doing so, and the very value system that would teach that the individual is not everything—that the world exists beyond oneself—is dismissed a priori.
The second level of nihilism: accepting the world's return
Yet it is by carrying out this work that we arrive at what Nietzsche calls the second level of nihilism. It is no longer a matter of denying the world even further, but of accepting that the world sends us back something different from our own value system. Behind the attempt to deny the world beyond the value system lies the temptation to rewrite a world that matches one's value system. What we find here is the preservation of that exchange, of that reciprocity with the world.
Unable to achieve this—because they have understood that values are not the world—the active nihilist will try to rewrite the world to make it fit anew, recovering an integrity, a totality anterior to nihilism. But that integrity has been destroyed. The only way to recover one is to accept, admittedly, that the world—which has no value in itself—may reflect back an image of us that does not match our self-image.
In other words, some believe that if the world has no value, it has the value we give it. This is in itself impossible, even with all the power in the world. The world has no value, full stop. So if the world has no value, it can reflect back whatever value it pleases—it does not matter. This is the key to the second stage of nihilism. Having relativised the world, the process leads to relativising the individual. The world and the values do not exist. They do not exist in themselves—not because of an ego or a power that would have destroyed them. That ego and that power destroyed only the illusion they themselves held of that system.
Consequently, since the world has no values, and since the person is in the world, they too have no value. After having destroyed their illusion about the world, they must destroy their illusion about themselves.
Proofread and edited with the assistance of AI.