A Letter to Chomsky about Nihilism:

3/18/2016

4:13-6:22am

Dear Chomsky,

A couple of nights, I woke up in the middle of night and thought about writing a letter to you—to the truth teller of our time that I am glad to be his contemporary.

I was a former political activist in Iran and spent seven years (1981-1989) in prisons of the Islamic Republic due to my little peaceful though subversive and socialist activities in Iran.  I don’t take pride in it anymore, but I am glad that I came out of prison with some sense of integrity.

I am now an adjunct philosophy teacher at different colleges in Bay Area California.  I am 56 years old now.

Once I emailed you about your debate with Foucault.  And to my surprise you responded the other day.  I was a Nietzschean-Foucauldean in the graduate school.  Something happened and changed my direction of thinking to mostly you, however not completely aligned with your understanding of science and progress, of spirituality and meaning of life, and this letter is about these topics, the parts that I don’t agree with you, not the part that I agree.  And I feel this impulsion in the middle of night to write to you about them.

First, let me briefly tell you what makes sense to me and I agree with you:

Ø  I agree with you that we have an embedded sense of Justice, morality, and creativity (linguistic and otherwise); it took a long time I realized that the anti-essentialist movement of post-modernism (from Sartre to Foucault) and Anglo-American philosophical tradition had a clearing effect and were and are instructive but basically are one-dimensional and, in terms of meaning and ethics, are nihilistic.  For example, Foucault is instructive because it zooms out to history and institutions and he is destructive because he ignores our dependent origination and essential connectedness to the world, nature, and universe, and now in my new journey: God.

Foucault’s “regime of truths” makes it possible to stand outside a dominant discourse and evaluate it according to …. What?  The instructive part is this standing “outside” and the destructive part is that any method of evaluation is arbitrary and nihilistic.  As Foucault puts it in a footnote to his lectures (1982-1983) in College de France:

“What meaning is this enterprise [replacing the history of knowledge with the historical analysis of forms of veridiction] to be given?  There are above all its immediately apparent ‘negative’, negativistic aspects.  A historicizing negativism, since it involves replacing a theory of knowledge, power, or the subject [the self] with the analysis of historically deterministic practices.  A nominalist negativism, since it involves replacing universals like madness, crime, and sexuality with the analysis of experiences which constitute singular historical forms.  A negativism with a nihilistic tendency, if by this we understand a form of reflection which, instead of indexing practices to systems of values which allow them to be assessed, inserts these systems of values in the interplay of arbitrary but intelligible practices” (The Government of Self and Others].

It is meaningful to see how values work within a system, but the question is what value holds you, Foucault, in the experience of “outside”?  What “value” moves you to investigate forms of veridiction?  You don’t talk about love, care, and justice, because they are values, and you are Nietzschean and value-less or evaluating all values based on “historical deterministic practices”.  Too broad, too deterministic, too much thinking in terms of totality again, but this time the totality of “historical deterministic practices” whose measure and tool of judgement is not clear or indeed is nihilistic.  I have to admit Foucault is always stimulating to me, however, like a barren and beautiful tree, it doesn’t give us any nutritious fruit to chew on.   It is true, it is all negative, and we need it partly to make sense of ourselves and our time; however, we can’t dwell in it. 

Ø  I agree with you that sciences are important tools in making sense of ourselves, they are stimulating and imaginative.  Most importantly sciences have now important practical role —say technology-- in our way of life whether for good or worse.

Ø  I agree with you on the importance of having a moral impulse in application of the Golden Rule, to free ourselves from the destructive hypocrisy of our time.  And I agree with you—let me see I got it right? —that our morality cannot completely be grounded in reason, that at some point only “faith” holds this incessant adherence to the Golden Rule and telling the truth and being ready to devote one’s life to it, as you did, not reason alone.

Ø  In your response, you wrote to me that things are getting “better”.  I agree with you and I think you have a clear insight that in the face of this 6^th mostly human-made mass extinction of species, including ourselves, in this looming utter hopelessness- a hope is giving birth that can change our lives for better.

What I don’t agree with you:

Ø  You claim that sciences are the only method and tool that we have and kind of worship them.  I think we need a critical analysis of sciences and their method.  Basically the reductive method of sciences (while productive and practical—they create technology) are mostly reductive-rule explained ways of thinking, which are taken as how things are, i.e., the reality is governed by those rules.  Similar to Foucault’s negativism, sciences give us something while take something away from us:

They give us evidence based (observable or inferable-for example “dark energy”) imaginative, effective, and practical (pragma) investigation of reality.  And like a blind bat who is proud in its sonar sound perception of objects, they give us the false consciousness that the reductive method really reveals the world as it is.  I never heard any critique from you of science and the advance of technology, while you admit that we are on the verge of extinction due to our instrumental reason and turning the whole world—including animals and humans—into our “resources”.  We have disconnected with the world, nature, universe, and God, as soon as the whole world turned into nothing but ‘observable’, ‘verifiable or falsifiable’, ‘reducible’, and ‘mechanistic’ objects.

We are in the grip of historical oscillation between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’, between the “inner or innate” and “outer or experience”, between “universality” and “singularity”, between Cartesian priority of innate capacities of mental inspection (vs. mental images), and the fact that we are not just a “mind” or “thinking thing” but represent the whole world or universe.  This reductive one-sidedness has been killing us and will kill us despite all our technological advance.  From seeing myself as a mind equipped with logical tools, there is only one step to seeing myself as a ‘calculating machine’, computer, and finally a robot.  A nihilistic project completed.  You don’t address anything that put in question sciences and their limitations, you have faith in them.

But after Gödel, Goodman, Quine, Wittgenstein, Popper, and Heidegger (I know you never take him seriously) we all know our hypothetical-deductive-empirical method is not grounded in reason.  Reason can’t ground anything.  At the end our trust in reason is an item of faith, as well as our holding onto a universal moral code (as evolutionary as it might look).

Ø  You never question the mechanical-reductive method of evolutionary biology (Dawkins) and psychology (Pinker).  They both agree with you that we are not blank slates but instead of linguistic rules, they posit or reduce us to “genes” and call it “science”.  Now when I read them it is striking to me that they justify anything including egoism and altruism in terms of “survival of genes”.  Now this is the new faith: survival of genes!  They define the ethical impulse for which we live and die or kill as what works for genes.  These evolutionary theories have lost their scientific gesture when they can explain away any manifestation of life in terms of ‘genes’.  In Popperian terms, they can’t tell us the condition of their falsifiability: they can’t tell us what would happen that their reduction-to-the-evolution-of-genes-theory can be false.  Their theory gives us this false satisfaction that it has a great explanatory power, but indeed they are like air that goes into any hole but doesn’t open any door, or worse, locks it more, because it is mechanistic and nihilistic.

Ø  You never talk about the meaning of life, because you don’t believe it has any meaning.  In Michel Gondry’s “Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?”, he asks you about the meaning of life and you assert “no meaning”.  So sure!  You believe in Russell’s version of logical thinking and atheism because of course there is no evidence for God and you may say all the scriptures (from Vedas to Koran) are jumbles of incoherent and superstitious ideas.  But you know well and don’t address the fact that the very Golden Rule which is the hallmark of all your moral-political inquiry is given to us by the Axial Age sages (Socrates, Euripides, Upanishad’s mystics, Buddha, Jeremiah, Amos, and Ezekiel, Confucius, and Mencius, etc.) and then by Jesus and Mohammad.  They didn’t just allude to the Golden Rule, they didn’t just imply it, they literally asserted and established it.  They invented justice for which you strive.  And as we are in the historical oscillation, through their very righteous indignation and excess, religions undid the Golden Rule into atrocity, like a dying tree which has lost its flexibility, and now we have to turn the table and ask all religions: do unto others that you want to be done to you.  But in this historical oscillation, we are used to throwing the baby with bath water out.  

There is a meaning to life, dear Chomsky, and you can see it well.  Everything is coming to surface, the explanation of everything in terms of “survival” or “survival of genes as the only meaning” is undoing itself.  You are the voice of this undoing.  That our lives can’t be reduced or interpreted in terms of only survival, but our survival has to be interpreted in terms of the meaning that is coming to the surface: without taking care of our species and other species we will die, physically as well as spiritually.  Ironically, the fierce competition for survival of the fittest theory is nihilistic and destructive.  If we destroy most species and consequently ourselves through our scientific reductionism, nihilism, and technological advance, we are less fit than microbes, germs, and cockroaches, because they may outlive us.

There is enough evidence for God, and enough evidence that there is an internal moral light within us, given by the grace of God, not blind evolutionary mechanistic process.  The evidences reside in thousands years scriptures that have to be read and investigated by the moral light and reasoning within—not accepting and following every line blindly.  Indeed, the evidence is the moral light itself.  While Axial Age sages differ on how they address the metaphysics of God, they all connect to the Source and the Way (Dao) of heaven, the ineffable, the unnamable, which manifests itself in the inner light, the urge to awakening and enlightenment, to do the right thing, to love and to care, against the dominant nihilism.

It is painful that you won’t talk about these, and after all your endeavor for justice and morality, you are another devoted nihilist like Fredrick Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and Michel Foucault. 

With love and respect,

Ardeshir