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What
is the Nihilism in which we have seen the root of the
Revolution of the modern age?
The answer, at
first thought, does not seem difficult; several obvious
examples of it spring immediately to mind. There is
Hitler's fantastic program of destruction, the Bolshevik
Revolution, the Dadaist attack on art; there is the
background from which these movements sprang, most notably
represented by several "possessed" individuals of the late
nineteenth century--poets like Rimbaud and Baudelaire,
revolutionaries like Bakunin and Nechayev, "prophets" like
Nietzsche; there is, on a humbler level among our
contemporaries, the vague unrest that leads some to flock
to magicians like Hitler, and others to find escape in
drugs or false religions, or to perpetrate those
"senseless" crimes that become ever more characteristic of
these times. But these represent no more than the
spectacular surface of the problem of Nihilism. To account
even for these, once one probes beneath the surface, is by
no means an easy task; but the task we have set for
ourselves is broader: to understand the nature of the whole
movement of which these phenomena are but extreme
examples.
Rose's (1932 -
1982) brief but potent deconstruction of nihilism is just a
fragment of much larger but never completed work.