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From Issue: 1031 [Read full issue]
Nihilism
Nihilism is not a negation of God, but a protest against His absence or, as with Beckett, a protest against the absence of man, against the fact that man is not possible or not realized. That attitude implies a religious - not a scientific - conception of man and the world. Man, as conceived by science, is possible and realized, but all that is final is inhuman. Sartre's famous sentence that man is a futile passion is religious by its sound as well as by its spirit.
In materialism, there is neither passion nor futility; there cannot be futility because there are no passions. Rejecting the higher purpose of the world, materialism got rid of the risk of absurdity and futility. Its world and its man have a practical end; they have a function, be it a zoological one. The statement that man is a futile passion implies that man and the world are not congruous. This radical attitude toward the world was the beginning of all religions. Sartre's futility or Camus' absurd presume a search for purpose and sense, a searching which, as distinguished from the religious one, ends in failure. That searching is religious because it means rejecting the worldly purpose of human living, rejecting the function.
Searching for God is a religion, but every searching is not a discovery. Nihilism is a disappointment but not because of the world and order. It is a disappointment caused by the absence of good from the universe. Everything is futile and absurd if man dies once and forever. The philosophy of the absurd does not speak directly of religion, but it clearly expresses the belief that man and the world are not made by the same measure. It expresses the anxiousness which is, in all its degrees except the conclusion, a religious one. For both nihilism and religion, man is a stranger in this world; for nihilism he is a stranger hopelessly lost, for religion he is with a hope for salvation.
The thoughts of Albert Camus can be understood only as the thoughts of a disappointed believer:
In a world from which the illusions and the light suddenly disappear, man feels like a stranger. It is the expulsion without any way out, as there are no memories of the lost homeland or any hope to reach a promised land. . . . If I were a tree among trees . . . that life would have its sense, or better, this problem would not arise because I would be a part of this world that I now resist with all my conscience . ... All is allowed since God does not exist and man dies.
The last statement has nothing in common with the superficial and convinced atheism of the rationalistic thinkers. On the contrary, it is rather a silent curse of a soul tired of searching for God without finding Him. It is the "atheism of despair."
Compiled From:
"Islam Between East and West" - Alija Ali Izetbegovic, pp. 72, 73