There is no doubt that we are entering a cynical age – every idea, every glimmer of hope, every statement made by an authority figure – everything is to be questioned. Barack Obama was seen as this great hope and savior until he started listing some of his plans and ideas. So long as he simply said, “there is hope” and “there is change coming” people didn’t question how this hope or change would come about. Now that he is mentioning some of his plans, he has become nothing more than another joke on The Daily Show, another false hope produced by a secular society.
Generation X and, even more so, the generation following it (those born 1984-2000) has grown up an extremely nihilistic generation. I do not mean nihilistic in the way The Big Lebowski means it (where they care about nothing), but instead in what I believe to be the mantra of nihilism: de omnibus dubitandum (“everything is to be doubted”). Many people associate this saying with Descartes, but I believe it is Nietzsche that understood the real impact of the term.
In the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche uses this term and applies it to all previous Enlightenment thinkers, including Descartes. He argues that Descartes, Kant, Rousseau, and even Hume all took this mantra for granted by never questioning their own existence, their own thinking, their own absolutes, or in the case of Kant, his own synthetic a priori judgments and categorical imperatives. Nietzsche, instead, argued that we should question everything and that we may not come up with an answer to the question – we should simply question. Read the rest of this entry »
