It thus naturally tends to seize semantically on the substantiality of the negative and on what might have been said otherwise but was not — a not that is felt to contain the secret of everything. For example, Meister Eckhart’s exegesis of Paul’s blinding vision on the road to Damascus entirely ignores the ordinary, regular sense of “and when his eyes were opened he saw nothing” (Acts 9:8) [apertisque oculis nihil videbat] in favor of a mystically literal plenitude of possibilities: “I think this text has a fourfold sense. One is that when he rose up from the ground with open eyes he saw Nothing, and the Nothing was God; for when he saw God he calls that Nothing. The second: when he got up he saw nothing but God. The third: in all things he saw nothing but God. The fourth: when he saw God, he saw all things as nothing.”[2] Similarly, Augustine’s well-known statement as to the unknowable knowability of time — “What therefore is time? If no one [nemo] asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone questioning me, I do not know”[3] — may be (im)properly read as saying that time is known in the positively negative presence of a nemo, a not-man (ne+homo) who asks about time, a pure question posed by nobody. The presence of this no-one who is still there, a senseless letter-spirit and sudden negative indication upon which superlative understanding depends, provides a fitting structural figure for this method and an image of its divinatory, daimonic form, its sortilegic reading of received signs.

[2] Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, trans. Maurice O’C Walshe (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2009), Sermon 19, p. 142.
[3] “Quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio” (Augustine, Confessions, 11.14).

Between The Nothing and Abstract Horror there is no difference. Some related hints (and others). Eventually we reach the Vast Abrupt.

Stolen immediately from T-Zip, this kind of crypto-nihilistic word game has an archaic classical pedigree, is (weakly) anticipated in the Odyssey, became an obsession among the Elizabethans, and contributed the engine of Heideggerian fundamental ontology. It still guides the Outside in reading of Milton, and no doubt much else besides. It hides a gnostic-skeptical metaphysics within a commonplace resignation. Zero, time, and camouflage are bonded in chaos. Make of it what you will …

ADDED: “The Austrian theory of the business cycle has never been a radical premise. It only stipulates that any workaround of the natural cycle of economic growth must come with ensuing costs. It’s a simple law: you can’t get something for nothing. A majority of economists believe the opposite. In other words, they believe in magic.”

The emergence of this objectively pro-Hamas and pro-war Left is an historically significant event. It breaks with both the self-understanding and public image of a Left that carried a banner of anti-fascism. It rests on a double standard of critique, a critical one applied to the extreme Right in the West and another, apologetic standard applied to similarly based rightist Islamist movements.

So the left intelligentsia is prone to extreme hypocrisy, anti-semitism, crypto-fascism, opportunism, and the unrestrained politics of ressentiment? Is this supposed to be news of some kind? Political controversy is to be measured against some yardstick of fundamental decency, that is now, peculiarly, being betrayed? Who or what is supporting that yardstick, exactly? If we subtract any such ‘yardstick’ entirely from our considerations, haven’t we thereby, for the first time, begun to approach the topic realistically?

(2) As noted before, I’m a terrible reader of Scott Alexander. There’s always a point, early on, in any of his posts, where my concentration is wrecked by the buzzing question: how is this any kind of problem? So I’m reliant on better followers of his lithe reasoning to explain to me how this post can make any sort of sense except through the expectation that life should be fair. The attractiveness of that dream (or delusion?) is easy to grasp. What is difficult (for me) to understand is how an acute intelligence can fail to realize, intuitively, that thinking begins at exactly the point such indulgent fantasy terminates.

It’s quite clear that Scott knows obnoxious PUA sociobiology is basically correct. How else to read this?

If you’re smart, don’t drink much, stay out of fights, display a friendly personality, and have no criminal history – then you are the population most at risk of being miserable and alone. “At risk” doesn’t mean “for sure”, any more than every single smoker gets lung cancer and every single nonsmoker lives to a ripe old age – but your odds get worse. In other words, everything that “nice guys” complain of is pretty darned accurate. But that shouldn’t be too hard to guess …

How could the aspiration to any kind of ‘social justice’ in this context (or in fact any other) conceivably be anything but a fantastic falsification of the world as it deeply (or pre-conventionally) exists? To acknowledge this reality is to admit that our ideas of ‘justice’ mean nothing. One might as well “complain” about gravity or the second law of thermodynamics.

(3) Perhaps Nothing isn’t in any way real, suggests Leon Horsten. Zero, unlike any other small Natural, would have no irreducible designation. It would function only as shorthand, abbreviating a concatenation of plenary operations. Linguistic applications of “nothingness” would be dissolved by analogy.

According to the scientific picture of the world, absences do not seem to be fundamental building blocks of either the concrete (physical) world or of the abstract (mathematical) realm.

So Nothing can be ‘scientifically’ annihilated — that will surely dispel its irritation. (Or not.)

***

Of the world’s various contests, there have to be some which do not draw Outside in unreservedly to the nihilistic side of the battlefield. If I turn to this possibility with sufficient dedication, perhaps I will think of some.

ADDED: Nice guys finish last. (Linked in Jim’s comments, this classic.)

There is one point in liberal ideology that has brought about a crisis within it: liberalism is profoundly nihilistic at its core. The set of values defended by liberalism is essentially linked to its main thesis: the primacy of liberty. But liberty in the liberal vision is an essentially negative category: it claims to be free from (as per John Stuart Mill), not to be free for something. […] … the enemies of the open society, which is synonymous with Western society post-1991, and which has become the norm for the rest of the world, are concrete. Its primary enemies are communism and fascism, both ideologies which emerged from the same Enlightenment philosophy, and which contained central, non-individualic concepts – class in Marxism, race in National Socialism, and the national State in fascism). So the source of liberalism’s conflict with the existing alternatives of modernity, fascism or communism, is quite obvious. Liberals claim to liberate society from fascism and communism, or from the two major permutations of explicitly non-individualistic modern totalitarianism. Liberalism’s struggle, when viewed as a part of the process of the liquidation of non-liberal societies, is quite meaningful: it acquires its meaning from the fact of the very existence of ideologies that explicitly deny the individual as society’s highest value. It is quite clear what the struggle opposes: liberation from its opposite. But the fact that liberty, as it is conceived by liberals, is an essentially negative category is not clearly perceived here. The enemy is present and is concrete. That very fact gives liberalism its solid content. Something other than the open society exists, and the fact of its existence is enough to justify the process of liberation.

In Dugin’s analysis, liberalism tends to self-abolition in nihilism, and is able to counteract this fate — if only temporarily — by defining itself against a concrete enemy. Without the war against illiberalism, liberalism reverts to being nothing at all, a free-floating negation without purpose. Therefore, the impending war on Russia is a requirement of liberalism’s intrinsic cultural process. It is a flight from nihilism, which is to say: the history of nihilism propels it.

Outside in is far more inclined to criticize Dugin than align with him, or the forces he orchestrates, but it is hard to deny that he represents a definite species of political genius, sufficient to categorize him as a man of destiny. The mobilization of resistance to modernity in the name of a counter-nihilism is inspired, because the historical understanding it draws upon is genuinely penetrating. Through potent political alchemy, the destruction of collective meaning is transformed into an invigorating cause. When Dugin argues there will be blood, the appeal to Slavic victimology might be considered contemptible (and, of course, extremely ‘dangerous’), but the prophetic insight is not easy to dismiss.

Modernity was initiated by the European assimilation of mathematical zero. The encounter with nothingness is its root. In this sense, among others, it is nihilistic at its core. The frivolous ‘meanings’ that modernizing societies clutch at, as distractions from their propulsion into the abyss, are defenseless against the derision — and even revulsion — of those who contemplate them with detachment. A modernity in evasion from its essential nihilism is a pitiful prey animal upon the plains of history. That is what we have seen before, see now, and doubtless will see again.

Dugin gazes upon modernity with the cold eyes of a wolf. It is merely pathetic to denounce him for that.

ADDED: Sunshine Mary has some closely-related thoughts.

ADDED: An absorbing debate between Alexandr Dugin and Olavo de Carvalho.