nihilism and experience

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Nihilism and Experience

Michael Novak

M y book, The Experience of Nothingness, was first written 30 years ago, and to make its ar-

gument clear and bring it up to date, I have given it a significant re-writing. The underlying argument is more clearly true today than it was then.

As I began writing the book, the shattering events of 1968 had not yet occurred, but one could feel them in the air. That year ended the quietude and compla- cence of the postwar years with a violent roar: the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the riots that left much of Washington in smoldering ruins; the assassination of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in a Los Angeles hotel the night of his great- est electoral victory (a campaign in which I had worked hard in Oregon and California); the great riots in such Ivy League universities as Columbia and Harvard; and the destructive riots of university students in France and Germany in the summer of 1968. The year 1968 reminded some people of the disruptions ignited by the Nazi Party in the streets of Europe in the I920s. To others, 1968 brought back memories of "the nihilists of the cafes," who prepared the intellectual ground for Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini. Some saw it as a time of a new youthful idealism, yet all saw it as an ominous time.

Before it was even known "back East," I myself gave "the student movement" the benefit of the doubt in A Theology of Radical Politics. I wrote it during 1967 but could not find a publisher until 1969. (East- ern editors thought it "too Califomia"--until 1968.)

You can still see my faded photo on it in turtleneck and beads.

I first went to California in the fall of 1965 as an assistant professor in humanities at Stanford Univer- sity, my first teaching position. My salary, as I recall, was $11,500, considerably lower than that of police officers in Palo Alto, but it then seemed very gener- ous. My wife and I were expecting our first child in about three months. My department was proud to be bringing in the first Catholic ever to teach classes in religion at Stanford.

The year before, during the presidential campaign of 1964, the student body had voted heavily (in a cam- pus poll) for Barry Goldwater. Not a few professors from the East warned me that Stanford students were children of the newly successful California upper- middle class, scrubbed, innocent, eager, protected, shallow, sometimes bored; this seemed to me to speak worse of Eastern professors than of Stanford students. The fathers of some of them had fought in World War II; many others had gone through the Depression as quite poor migrants from the Mid-West or elsewhere. The parents felt they had earned their success, and so did their kids. Their innocence, parents and children, in face of the coming maelstrom filled one with awe. ("Awesome" was itself becoming a term beloved of the young.)

Still, Stanford students compared favorably to the Harvard freshmen I had just been teaching. Those at Stanford seemed much less intimidated by the world

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of learning, took to that world--and life itself--as new and fascinating, did not affect world weariness, and were not nearly so afraid of failure. Harvard Yard de- liberately, it seemed, intimidated students; the Stanford Quad seemed like a park built for students. Watching the Stanford students still bronze in their shorts and sport shirts in the sun of mid-February, I remembered how pale from the cold and blustery winter Harvard students appeared when they first sought the sun's rays along the banks of the Charles in April.

At Harvard, I designed my course in "general edu- cation" (chiefly writing skills) around five books of Albert Camus. I figured it would help freshmen to come to the end of one semester knowing one significant writer quite well, more thoroughly than most of their peers. At the same time, in Albert Camus they would be studying a master of many different kinds of prose--philosophical and argumentative, fictional and evocative--and a truly serious ethical mind. We could study both writing skills and substance at the same time. We began with Camus' conviction that the central ethical problem of our century is the problem of meaninglessness: of nihilism.

For Camus, nihilism was first of all a personal problem. He also saw it as a political problem, involving incalculable potential violence. First, if human l i fe-- if the universe--is empty of meaning, then how ought I to live? (Can "ought" have any meaning?) Besides, if the universe lacks meaning, then aren't the Nazis just as fight as anybody else? Why shouldn't they do as they please, with whatever violence it takes? If they could make Walpurgisnacht come to life, why not? If there is no fight and no wrong, then anything goes. Power rules. The thugs decide.

This, of course, is the principle that St. Augustine said does rule the City of Man without God. Power rules. And power is governed in the kingdom of sin not by reason, but by passion and desire and lust. That is the moral that Machiavelli also drew, and Hobbes.

While the students wrote essays for my restless red pencil every week, they were reading the books in which Camus tried to find his way out of nihilism; his hope had been that a new world could be built on the ruins of World War II. They read The Myth of Sisyphus, The Stranger, The Plague, The Rebel, and The Fall.

This was the dual background against which The Experience of Nothingness was first written: on the one hand, the orderly and innocent world of these bright and good children of successful parents; and, on the other hand, the great problem of the experience of meaninglessness, violent meaninglessness, in our century. That experience is not the "nihilism with a

happy face" that Virginia's Professor Richard Rorty writes of today. It is the real thing, which in so many parts of the world has proved murderous beyond com- pare. (I think Rorty is playing with matches in a room of odorless gas jets.)

The task of a teacher of these themes in California in 1967-68 was made a great deal more vivid and con- crete by the cold fear of being sent to Vietnam to fight in an unpopular and little-understood war, on the one hand, and, on the other, by sudden widespread experi- mentation with marijuana, LSD, and other drugs. Old verities such as patriotism, obedience to parents, respect for the law, and moral commitments were slip- ping their moorings, floating into the night.

Long hair, jeans and old tee shirts, beards and the avoidance of make-up added one more important note: defiant rejection of "bourgeois" manners. These very well brought-up young people were being powerfully solicited to leave father and mother, abandon the manners and ideals and rules taught in the home, and "rebel." A shibboleth of the time became "revolution." Young people of the time took this "revolution" to varying depths: one level was merely appearance and style ("lifestyle" came into common usage); another level was the social activism of "the Movement"; a third was new partisan possibilities ("new left" or "radical"); another was anti-democratic sentiment (bourgeois democracy is a sham) and economic hos- tility (capitalism must go); another was philosophical despair. Some just enjoyed the new music, and the freer sex, and remained relatively untouched by the deeper currents. Some were lost and never came back.

In re-writing The Experience of Nothingness, I left in as many passages as I could that would recall the cultural edges of that period. (I had spent three weeks in Vietnam in August 1967, visiting two Stanford students---one of whom was slain in a guerrilla ambush while I was there--and staying with the Vietnamese family of a third; thus, searing images of Vietnam were on my mind.) We at Stanford believed that we were in some ways on the point of the arrow, more so than Berkeley. I remember that my former colleagues in the East simply couldn't understand the reports I was bringing back to them at various conferences during 1967. I told them that later they would see what I meant, and later they did. By that time, while some of them were becoming radicalized, I was struggling to find my way out of that mess. The book gave me a solid foundation for doing that, and I have been build- ing on it ever since.

Still, I have tried not to import into this early book all the lessons life later taught me. In rewriting, I have

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tried to limit myself to deleting some of the most egre- gious lines with which I no longer agree, and whose further discussion just then would disrupt the flow of the argument. The basic argument is sound and remains as it was. In fact, the passage of time has enhanced the main points I was making. For so many things that seemed real and immediate in 1968 have withered away like grass that once was, but now is gone. One form of the experience of nothingness is precisely that: an acute awareness of the present unreality of much that once seemed vividly real--and a suspicion that present realities inherit an identical fragility.

The great Plato made this point in his parable of the cave. The book of Ecclesiastes makes it over and over; Ernest Hemingway even alluded to the first chapter of Ecclesiastes in his title The Sun Also Rises. Dur- ing his years in Spain, Hemingway also encountered the tradition of the Catholic mystics, especially St. John of the Cross, who emphasized the short-circuit- ing of the human mind under the (so to speak) light- ning surge of God. Under excess light, human equipment burns out. For St. John, the encounter with God comes, therefore, as an experience of nothingness: nada y nada y nada. Hemingway secularized this theme in a short story, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."

For Hemingway, born a Catholic, nada means simply the emptiness without God, which he tried to fill up with vivid experiences of action--and booze. For St. John, it meant the emptiness in the soul of those who have sought God, who turned their minds and wills toward Him, and kept them fixed there, in that direction, even though "no one appeared." It is an odd- ity that those who seek God become quite familiar with the experience of nothingness. It isn't new to them. They have, in a way, more to say about it than the innocent atheist, who seems surprised by the night and sometimes (like the poet Dylan Thomas) rages, rages against it, and sometimes (like Bertrand Russell in Mysticism and Logic) marches around it with empty boasts of defiance. Nothingness is familiar terrain to the believer in a transcendent God. It is terrain tra- versed in great inner pain.

As for myself, from the time I was fourteen until the year I was twenty-six, I studied with the Holy Cross Fathers, an order of priests and brothers (and a cog- nate order of nuns) founded in France after the Revo- lution, and modeled in part after the Jesuits, in part after the Benedictines, with the tradition of communal prayer, liturgy, and contemplation of the latter, along with the varied active life of the former. I loved the contemplative part, despite my natural activism, and soon found favorite guides among the Carmelite

mystics: St. John of the Cross, Saint Teresa of Avila, and St. Therese of Lisieux. (The famous Mother Teresa of Calcutta of our time also took her name from that tradition.) I learned a lot about emptiness, barrenness of soul, dryness, abandonment--nothingness, if you wil l - - for months, even years at a time, and also about various torments of soul. People who say that people seek God to find "peace" do not know what they are talking about. The peace that is found is not what most people say is peace. It is a frequent inner storminess, experienced in darkness and emptiness.

As a consequence, I came to the literary tradition of nihilism--Turgenev, Dostoevski, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Freud, and many others--from a set of experiences that were not of the usual sort. These literary descriptions of a world without God did not affright me. Something like them had been my daily bread. Philosophers need to know that a world with God is often experienced, at its depths, as a world without God. It does seem that every action is meaningless. Life does seem to lack point. So what? The practical question is, "What am I going to do next?"

Most of the nihilists I read chose to act as if God does not exist. By indulging passions against which they had no strength, they usually, not always, made a wreck of their own lives. Some licensed their follow- ers to do horrible things, of which they themselves in their humanity would not have approved.

By contrast, those who experience the same nothingness but nonetheless choose to act as if God does exist, though they see Him not, try to live according to His commandments and His counsels. This brings them quite often little or no consolation, and much suffering, in keeping with what His word would lead them to expect of this world. The Jewish and Chris- tian God is no Pollyanna. As The Book of Job recounts, He lacks a liberal sensibility.

This God is, however, in his person (by dint of cre- ating all things), the source of "truth," which because of Him is sometimes written Truth. Because of this Truth, power is not the last word. Conversation based on reasoned evidence is a realistic possibility. The ideal of the free man and the free woman beckons us. Civi- l i z a t i o n - t h e regime in which rational persuasion through conversation is the norm, not clubs, beatings, and torture--lies just up ahead, over the mountains, as a shining city on the hill. Because a regime based solely on power (a regime in which "truth" has no meaning in personal lives) can support no civilization, atheism is in the end self-refuting.

Perhaps it is wrong of me to claim a certain origi- nality for my approach to modem nihilism. All I can


say is, I drank the experience of nothingness full- draught. Tell me what you wish about the illusoriness, the meaninglessness, the emptiness, of things. I have been there. Everything I valued most has been taken away from me, more than once. Worlds which seemed solid and gave me meaning have dissolved into thin air. I have felt myself plummeting, unsupported, for long periods of time, when I thought death would be a blessed release, and when it was hard for me to act for longer than an instant at a time; I could not plan ahead; I could not bear the thought of a future. It was then that I learned the meaning of creatio ex nihilo, to create something out of nothingness: to act, when reasons to act seemed empty. In this way, staccato second by staccato second, one can get through a day. (I had a secret for that, let me confess, learned from St. Therese: since God is love, which we do not see, act as if God through you is loving others, even if you do not feel any love for them or even for Him. This is one way of acting. Why not? Nothing else seems meaningful either.)

Also, and on another front, when I felt great despair and emptiness, just then I would make time to write my essays and books: another enactment of creatio ex nihilo. I felt nothing. I wrote anyway. Noth- ing "came." I just started thinking and moving the pen. As football players play "through" pain, I sometimes wrote "through" writer's block. I just did it. (This, I later learned, is a useful way of construing William James' will to believe. One wills, not exactly to believe, but to act. One does so, even when reason pre- sents no reasons why one should--or should not.) A lot of the writing I did then had to be thrown away, particularly the first pages; but this is always true.

The experience of nothingness has been a great friend to me. When it is no longer with me, when things are going well, I almost miss it--almost. Let me say that I do not ever want to be too far from it, because I never know when everything will come crashing down again. Even when things are really good, you can see through them: We really do not cause our own being. We do not hold ourselves in existence. Pull out the supporting hand, and we're dead. The whole thing around us is sometimes like a play, a stage, which will soon be empty of our presence.

I feel that way about the 1960s, the period when I wrote this book. It is gone. (But, then, I feel that way about almost everything.) Some of the things I then believed about the world, believed solidly, turned out not to be true. Recent memoirs from former Viet Cong and North Vietnamese have shown how much decep- tion they mounted; and some of it fooled me. Some of my anti-capitalist beliefs turned out to be very wide

of reality. Without recognizing it, I had internalized the socialist bias of the humanities and social sciences, not to mention of radical intellectuals; and I had not (yet) taken time to examine this bias against the evidence, for myself.

Because I was somewhat more radical than others around me, I felt more "honest." I didn't realize until later that, in the university, "lefter than thou" almost always confers higher moral status. Moving to the "right," even if that means moving to the truth of things and not merely away from the "left," will quite often bring down upon your head moral disdain. In practice, "radical" in our age doesn't mean "honest"; it means "morally privileged." That is how so much nonsense has been spread through the universities since the 1960s. Even deans, provosts, and presidents are intimidated; they know whence moral punishments come. Thus, in addition to the normal illusoriness of all things of this earth even in the best of times, in our intellectual world since the late 1960s a second layer of illusion settles like fog.

The Double Game of Nihilists My first task in this book's original edition was to

call to the attention of good and wholesome young people the kind of assault upon their sense of reality that they could expect to face in the future--and that a good number of them were already suffering. That was the first part. The second was to show that the experience of nothingness, honestly analyzed, contains within itself the seeds of a full-blown, and solid, mo- rality. For this experience implies, by its very presence in consciousness, a prior commitment to freedom, personal courage, community, and the evidences that winnow truth from falsehood. The prophets, saints, and mystics who have shaped our moral traditions-- essentially Jewish and Christian or, as we say, "West- e rn"- -were quite well experienced in nothingness, meaninglessness, emptiness. They did not build up our moral sense upon illusions, but upon every experience of irrationality, terror, oppression, lack of faith, and emptiness of heart that any human is likely to face. Compared to us, they were sometimes giants. (If a conservative is one who has come to think, after having been a radical, that our ancestors on this earth were sometimes better than we are, I have become a conservative.)

I failed to find any writer in the tradition, however, who pointed out that those who call themselves nihilists, such as Nietzsche and Sartre (among many others), have committed one flagrant oversight: they have failed to examine the prior moral commitments that

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led them into the abyss. To compound this dishonesty, they said they found meaninglessness, and then they performed an act requiring discipline and pain and prolonged commitment: they wrote books. Writing books further has as its indispensable presupposition that there is enough community and meaning in the world for books to find readers. (Reading, like writing, exacts discipline and commitment). Can the world be as meaningless as their words say, when their ac- tions confess their confidence in meaning, honesty, community, courage, and commitment to truth? Con- sistent nihilists would not write books.

In addition, neither Nietzsche nor Sartre nor any of the others boasts of being dishonest or cowardly or care- less with truth; on the contrary, they boast of their he- roic virtue. On what grounds do they value virtue? Or heroism? Are terms such as these not meaningless?

Pointing such duplicity out, then, and showing how the experience of nothingness can be the starting place for an adequate and admirable moral code, I have tried to pull out from the rubble of the evil of our century some good, some hope, some sound basis for the human future. I have tried to elicit from the dark soil of nihilism the tendrils of a moral civilization to come. This has been the aim of all my work, beginning even from my brief reflections on the brave Hungarian Revolution of 1956 in my first novel, The Tiber Was Silver, and continuing right up to the lecture I gave in Westminster Cathedral in London in 1994 on the oc- casion of receiving the Templeton Prize. That address was called "Awakening From Nihilism," and it was given exactly twenty-five years after The Experience of Nothingness went to press.

Corrections and Elucidations In addition to the general comments already made

above, eight or nine specific clarifications are in order. My friend and colleague Brian Anderson helped to raise these questions for me.

The intellectual situation of 1998 is almost a re- verse image of that of 1968. For example, in writing of the "myths of the university" in 1968, I described the meritocracy that then existed the stress on hard work, competition, empirical research, and the like. That world no longer prevails. In 1968, I sought even a small crack in the thick fortress of narrow rational- ism in the university. Today, that world has been swept away in a great tidal wave of deconstruction, postmodernism, nonfoundat ional i sm, and mult icul- turalism. In 1968, virtually no blood of experience and tacit knowing flowed through the veins of the con- stricted form of "objectivity" that then deprived us of

air, I tried to move its arms and slap its face. Today, that too-thin "objectivity" has been replaced by a swampy, marshy "subjectivism." For intelligence, this is also death--by asphyxiation in muddy water.

Post-modernism, multiculturalism. In a way I did not intend, therefore, the experience that I sensed all around me in 1968 did proceed to expand and fill the academy (and film and music and much else); and it did spread the gas of a deadly nihilism. Giddy with relativism, postmodernists rejected the modern project of reason and slew the idea of truth on altars to power. Having studied what this rejection led to in the Weimar Republic, one of my aims in these first chapters was to build an argument that would prevent that from happening again.

While the experience of nothingness is vitally important, and should be carefully reflected upon, it does not logically lead to postmodernism, relativism, or the cult of power. On the contrary, within it lie the seeds of a new vindication of reason, but "reason" more ac- curately conceived. Beginning within the experience of nothingness, and provisionally accepting its acute sense of estrangement, isolation, and purposelessness, I was trying to bring to light the evidence that revealed how communal that experience is, especially in our sort of society. (This is one root of my later notion of the communitarian self described in ! 982 in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.) Beginning with the acute self-consciousness of a highly fluid and evanescent self, a sort of flickering Humean self like a stream of impressions projected through a celluloid film upon a silver screen, I showed how this self belongs to a community of others even in its experiences of disorienta- tion. In our practice we are much more a part of each other than in our theories. Evidence for that insight is piled up in the fourth chapter.

I should have made such things more obvious; but at that time I had only four chapters in which to present an already complex argument. The book published soon after this one, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, is obviously social in its point of view, and its continuity with The Experience of Nothingness seems to me plain. The central subject of that book is not the isolated individual but the family member, nourished in a particular tradition that is part of a symphony of other traditions. (I rejected the metaphor of the "melt- ing pot" and the "salad," in favor of a metaphor taken from the world of music, a symphony, and therefore more apt for realities of the human spirit.) While criti- cizing American elites for looking down on family and neighborhood subcultures, what I was praising about the United States was its symphonic quality, its union


of many, which allows us to learn from each other without becoming all alike.

By the very fact of belonging to a pluralistic society of this type, of course, Americans do become a distinctive type of human being everywhere recogniz- able, whatever our ethnic origins, as "Americans." A Chinese friend of mine, not a Chinese-American but a Chinese student on a visa, once pointed out to me that if he stops people in the street in an American city to ask them the time of day, they take him to be just another American. He finds this expectation relatively rare--it would not happen, he says, to an American in China. In America, anyone from anywhere might be an American.

From roots to relativism? In those days, writing about ethnicity was passionately resisted by liberals, and I took a fair amount of abuse. It never occurred to me that multiculturalism would one day turn into relativism. The fact of rootedness in a particular tradition seemed to me to offer a far better and more common- sensical defense against anomie and loss of moorings than rootlessness and anonymity. My own family, for instance, and those of my diversely ethnic friends seemed to me bastions of common sense and traditional virtues. (In fact, in celebrating "family, neighborhood, work, peace and strength" in The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, even while working for the presidential campaign of George McGovern, I was un- knowingly anticipating Ronald Reagan's five-word slogan in the presidential election that was to come eight years later.) My slowly broadening respect for traditions and particular communities led me to become critical of radical individualism on the fight and Washington-run collectivism on the left. I sought a politics of family, neighborhood, traditional values, and what came to be called "mediating structures." You can see how I came to appear to my former friends on the left as a "neoconservative." (They meant by this "turncoat.") For me, the roots lie in The Experi- ence of Nothingness.

What's left of the left? The attentive reader will note how many sentences even in the new and revised version of my 30-year-old book still reek of leftist sen- timents. The footnotes are still filled with the original left-wing citations. That's where I was- -many of us were-- in 1969. Yet, the fact that so many of the views I then held now seem to me to have been illusory does not injure, indeed it helps, the original argument of the book. So many things seemed real to me then that now, on inspection, were illusory. That is the main point I was making. Whole worldviews, whole worlds, sometimes come collapsing down. What we call "re-

ality" is quite often, time shows, without foundation. It is not always so; there are, in fact, some things that endure. Within the structure of the experience of nothingness itself--as pain and reflection taught me-- intellectual honesty, intellectual courage, community, and liberty endure. Apart from them, the experience of nothingness does not arise. We fly from it.

Aristotle believed in an invariant sequence of operations of human understanding: experiencing, imag- ining, understanding, and judging (deciding). All human beings perform these four acts everyday, even though they may not have thought through the rela- tions among them. These four operations follow one another in sequence; one prompts the next into action, and each later operation presupposes the earlier. Ex- periences sometimes give rise to images, which sometimes ignite insights, which sometimes pass the tests of critical judgments and lead to decisions. Sequences of these operations, in turn, provide for a certain law- likeness in our search for meaning, even while leav- ing scope for infinite variety. In the very structure of our minds, liberty and law-likeness go together. Law and liberty are friends.

When I say "liberty" I am careful to insist upon "ordered l iberty"--the liberty, as Lord Acton put it, that is distinctive to American civilization. I am reminded of the line from the hymn: "Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law." I had not yet read Acton carefully. I had not yet studied the American founding, nor discovered its emphasis on character and virtue as inner preconditions of liberty. But I did know that for Aristotle liberty is a form of self-mastery. The "liberation" of the self is the "mastery" that one part of the self (the human spirit; that is, our capacity for insight and deliberate, reflective choice) gains over other parts of the self. That is what self-mastery means, and it is hard-earned. Other kinds of "liberation" are forms of slavery to lesser masters. In the original chapters, I was not clear enough about this. I have tried to make a few light changes to bring this out, without disrupting the original flow.

Creation Out of Nothing What I commend in the experience of nothingness

is that it forces you to face your liberty in utter naked- ness. What are you going to do about it, when all the familiar expectations seem meaningless? What are you going to do? You feel, perhaps, like falling asleep, escaping from consciousness, running. You feel empty, motiveless.

At such a time, you learn new meaning for "cre- ated out of nothing." You have to create a course of

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action. You have to create a motive. Nothing is given. Nothing seems to come with instructions. You have to become a self-starter. Your mind being empty, motion must come from your will. Your will has to lead the way because your mind seems blinded. (Theologically speaking, those who speak of grace or faith operating in this vacuum don't feel or see faith or grace or anything else in this vacuum; they, too, are empty and arid, often for years on end.) You have to "go out into the night" and, as it seems, "make" something be that now is not. Of course, we already have a mind and a will, a capacity to act in this way, and so we do not begin with literally "nothing"; but it sure feels that way. Made in the image of the Creator, human mind and will can create out of this experience of nothingness something substantive. You can prove this to your- self by doing it.

Many professors of nihilism write books, for instance, and that long-term action certainly requires a continuous and sustained activity by one subject over time. I myself am unambiguously conscious of having written The Experience of Nothingness thirty years ago; and I take full responsibility for it. That was me. I am the person who wrote it. Of course, I see faults in it and, before it was revised, sentences with which ! no longer agree. But I also see the continuity between the "I" who wrote this thirty years ago and the "I" who edits it today. One meaning of "selF' is to express this conscious unity across time. Yet in the original four chapters I was most of all trying to give a faithful account of an experience, in which the goals, structures, values, and significance through which the self had previously understood itself seemed suddenly empty. In that state, the self seems to itself to have a protean, undefined, fluid, inherently shapeless character--like a tabula once again rasa.

To put this another way, my aim in these original chapters was not to offer a theory of the self, or of the relation between freedom and truth, or an epistemology. It was to express an increasingly common experience faithfully. Further, I aimed to make explicit, in a way no one else had, its moral preconditions, without which it cannot even occur and certainly cannot persist. For that reason, much that I say about the self (and other related matters) is said from the perspective of a wounded self in a condition of turmoil and confu- sion, aridity, and directionlessness. Beginning there, in the center of a storm, I work outward, trying to expand the circle of intellectual honesty, courage, community, and liberty. I have tried to carry that outward movement through in all my work. My Templeton address of 1994, illustrates this continuity. From a dif-

ferent angle than earlier chapters, it shows the ways in which since World War II many have climbed out of nihilism. This effort is the main moral and intellectual task of our time: to absorb the lessons of the experience of nothingness and, on those grounds, build a new civilization.

To search in this book for a full theory about the self, or the epistemology of knowing, or a taxonomy of different types of objectivity and subjectivity, would be in vain. My main aim is quite different. It is to show that implicit in the experience of nothingness is already a creative ethic. The proper conclusion to draw from that experience, then, is not that everything is relative; or that the individual self is sentenced to solitary confinement in a meaningless universe; or that only power, not truth, has real weight in human af- fairs. Those things did not prove to be so just because the Nazis said so, or because Lenin and Stalin said so. Some people obviously have drawn that conclusion, but no one needs to. And, if anyone does so, it is only by being blind to considerable evidence plainly avail- able in their own experience. We are not fated to nihilism. If we choose it, we do so in self-mutilation.

Myth as "reality." Again, I must say a word about my use of the word "myth." A close re-reading of the original chapters convinces me that my meaning is quite clear--and valid----even though I am sometimes using the term in a way in which it is not usually used. Usually, we reserve the term "myth" for those things we disregard as not really true, even though some (others) might be in their grip. I try to get the reader to examine those general views (narrative structures, story lines) that she does hold to be true; and to bring forth in consciousness all those solid things that she thinks of as "reality." I ask her (or him) to try to imag- ine what it would be like suddenly to find them false. For that is what the experience of nothingness makes people do. The structure they had formerly taken for granted in existence is suddenly pulled out from under their feet. They sense themselves falling, disori- ented, without solidity. Such perceptions, I know from experience, come to people rather frequently, or at least to persons of certain types--persons somewhat more detached and reflective than purely extroverted activ- ists. The latter may seldom seem to ask themselves questions or entertain self-doubts, but such appear- ances are often deceptive; sometimes people are hy- peractive precisely because they smell the gas of nothingness seeping up from the sod they walk on. They keep busy to avoid it.

But aren't you, once again, falling back into radical subjectivism? Once again, no. I do not believe that

NIHILISM AND EXPERIENCE I 67

the fact that we can always question our most deeply held narrative structures, or learn that all we most care about was based on a radical mistake, entails a radical subjectivism or solipsism. We are not helplessly im- prisoned in illusions, either solitary illusions or mass illusions. Our capacities to question, reflect, weigh evidence, seek counsel, hear arguments, sort through traditions, and otherwise test hypotheses against one another are not godlike; but they do make headway a slogging step at a time. We can see this just by using these capacities. Further, we are surrounded by reality checks, outward and inward. It would be wrong for us ever to become content that we have found "the" truth, or that we "possess" the truth. But we do keep assembling significant fragments of truth, quite enough to live by. True, even then we continue to stand under questioning and judgment, trying to get another step closer to truth by weighing such evidence as we can accumulate, point by point. The only thing we need to bow to is evidence. This is quite enough.

Obviously, we are not gods. We are finite question- askers, seekers, voyagers, pilgrims. (I am thinking of

Recipient of the Templeton Prize

for Progress in Religion

the range of epic quests that includes Paul Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Homer's Odyssey.) The advan- tage intellectual traditions give us is a chance to learn from consequences suffered by our predecessors, lest we unwittingly repeat their errors. The experience of nothingness has been well known to Western (and other) traditions for centuries. Hard reality disciplines the community of seekers.

The experience of nothingness is potentially univer- sal, as extensive as the inexhaustible drive to ask questions. The current fads of relativism, postmodernism, antifoundationalism, and "multiculturalism" serve only to make the experience of nothingness, once again, our daily bread. Such sophisms are an old story, and our culture is likely to move beyond them--and soon- - along some such path as is marked out here.

Michael Novak holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in religion and public policy at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the recipient of the 1994 Templeton Prize and many other awards. Among his many books are The Unmeltable Ethnics, The Guns of Lattimer, and The Expe- rience of Nothingness, all published by Transaction.

Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Institutions FREEDOM WITH JUSTICE, SECOND EDITION Novak's thesis is that although the Catholic Church set itself against liberalism as an ideology during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it has slowly come to admire liberal institutions such as democracy and free markets. "An important contribution to our critical understanding of the possibilities for dialogue and mutual influence between Catholic social thought and Anglo-American liberalism." ---John Langan, S.J.,

Journal of American Academy of Religion ISBN: 0-88738-763-2 (paper) 292 pp. $18.95/s

Books Mzchael Novak Unmeltable Ethnics Oreer irom yo.r bookse.er airect y from

POLITICS AND CULTURE IN AMERICAN LIFE SECOND EDITION With a new introduction by the author The aim of this book is to involve each reader in self-inquiry. Who are you? What history brought you to where you are? When the book first appeared, Time said that "Novak has at- tacked the American Dream in order to open up a possible second chapter for it." Newsweek called it "a tough minded pro- vocative book which could well signal an important change in American politics." ISBN: 1-56000-773-7 (paper) 1995 450 pp. $21.95/s

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