Escape from Nihilism

J. Budziszewski | Friday, January 21, 2000
Copyright © 2000, J. Budziszewski

Friday evening, January 21, 2000 1100 Social Sciences, University of California, Davis Faith and Reason Lecture Series 2000

I am going to be speaking to you tonight about my escape from nihilism. I hope it doesn’t seem egotistical to talk about this biographical sort of thing, but we are all interested in hearing each other’s stories and sharing our journeys. I was asked to do this, and for that reason I am glad to do it.

Eighteen years ago I stood in front of a group at the University of Texas, which is where I teach now. I was fresh out of graduate school, just finishing my Ph.D., and it was my “Here’s why you should hire me” lecture.

I wanted to teach ethical and political philosophy. So, as academic jobseekers do everywhere, I was showing the faculty my stuff. What did I tell them? Two things. The first was that we human beings just make up the difference between good and evil. The second was that we are not responsible for what we do anyway. Then I laid out a ten-year plan for revolting ethical and political theory on those two propositions.

Now, does that seem to you to be a good plan for getting a job teaching the young? Or does it seem a better plan for getting committed to the state mental hospital? Well, I wasn’t committed to the state mental hospital, but I did get a job teaching the young.

I’ve been asked to tell you how I became a nihilist and how I later escaped from nihilism. Perhaps I should explain just what my argument for nihilism was. As I just told you a moment ago, I made two claims: First, that we make up the difference between good and evil, meaning there is no objective, rationally discernible difference, and, second, that we aren’t responsible for what we do anyway.

In my actual argument (the line of reasoning by which I tried to convince myself of these things) I took these ideas in reverse order. I addressed the issue of personal responsibility first because I began by denying free will. My reasoning for this was not very original. I reasoned that everything that we do or think or feel is just an effect of previous causes. I thought, “How can you deny the principle of causality, cause and effect?” I therefore thought that some of these previous causes are my own previous deeds or thoughts or feelings, because those would be traceable still further back to still earlier causes. And if we traced the chain back and back and back, sooner or later we would come to causes that were outside of me completely, rather than my own previous thoughts or feelings or actions. I would find something like my heredity or my environment to fill in the blank.

Second, I concluded that if we don’t have free will for the reasons that I just stated, then good and evil can’t make sense. You might say, “Wait a minute. Why can’t they?” Well, I thought to myself that, on the one hand, since I don’t have free will, I am not responsible for my deeds. It’s not really me. What I call “me” is just a nexus in this chain of cause and effects that originates outside of me. I am just a location in a chain that starts before me. I am not responsible for my deeds and can’t be praised or blamed for good or evil. On the other hand, I thought, I’m not responsible for my thoughts either because those too are caused, and so I can’t have any confidence that my reasoning will lead me to the truth about good and evil.

That last point was important. Now, so far it may seem that my argument was merely skeptical, not really nihilist; that is, whether you can know about good or evil, not whether there was any. But I reasoned this way: I thought that if the good for man, for human beings, cannot be known to man, then it cannot be offered to man as being for his good. So for practical purposes, there is no good.

It wasn’t precisely a theoretical nihilism–it was a practical nihilism. This practical nihilism was linked with a practical atheism because I couched my arguments in such a way that I believed that if there was a God, these arguments applied to him too. It wasn’t that I thought I could prove that there was no God; it was that I thought that he was trapped the same way I was. He couldn’t escape cause and effect either, I thought; therefore, he couldn’t possess confident knowledge of good and evil any more than I could. And even if he could somehow, in some manner that I didn’t understand, attain a standard of good and evil, it would make no sense for him to enforce it because, trapped in cause and effect like him, we human beings wouldn’t have any control over whether we obeyed his commands. So what kind of sense would there be in his making commands or enforcing a moral standard?

The upshot of all of this was that I thought that for all I knew God might exist, but he would be irrelevant. There might be a God, but there couldn’t be a God who would make any difference. I couldn’t quite rule out his existence, but I thought I could rule out the existence of a God who mattered.

Now, I don’t know if you noticed as I was going along, but the holes in the line of argument that I just described to you are so big that you could drive a truck through them. There is a line in Mallory’s poem about Arthur and all those guys at the Round Table–when the evil Mordred put his lance through Arthur, you could see light through it. That’s how my arguments were, but I didn’t see it.

What were these holes? One hole was that in order to deny free will, I assumed that I understood cause and effect or causality. Well, so what? Well, it was foolish, because I don’t really understand causality any more than I understand freedom. I don’t understand what cause and effect really are any more than I understand what free will really is. They are equally wonderful and mysterious, so I had no business pretending to understand one of them in order to attack the other.

I had another problem, and that was an even deeper one. Look, I am a philosopher; you might expect that every now and then I am going to use ten-gallon words, so here comes one. I don’t want to disappoint you. My argument was self-referentially incoherent. Self-referential incoherence means you pull the rug out from underneath yourself. You know those guys who in the old Warner Brothers animated cartoons where somebody is sitting on a branch of a tree and he is sawing it off while he is sitting on it? Think of an argument that is like that. That is self-referential incoherency.

Now, my argument was self-referentially incoherent. It pulled the rug out from underneath itself. This is why: I said earlier that my lack of free will made all of my reasoning unreliable, and that is why I thought, “Well, we can’t really know the truth about things, including good and evil.”

If my lack of free will really did make my reasoning unreliable so that I couldn’t find out any truths about good and evil, then by the same token, I shouldn’t have been able to find out which of my ideas about free will were true either. I shouldn’t have been able to find out that there isn’t any. But in that case, I had no business denying that I had free will in the first place. My argument reached around and bit itself on the tail.

At this point you have to understand two things very clearly. Here is the first: You might think that my arguments for nihilism were what led me to become a nihilist; in other words, that I became one because of that argument that I gave you.

Now, it is true that I gave myself that argument. You know, we give little speeches to ourselves, we engage in interior monologues. It is true that was my interior monologue. But, in fact, that is not really why I was a nihilist. I was committed to nihilism already and I cooked up arguments only to rationalize what I had already chosen. The arguments didn’t come first and then lead me to the position. No, the nihilism came first and I looked for the arguments afterward.

Here is the second thing you must understand: You might think that it was my recognition of the holes in these arguments that eventually led me to escape nihilism, that I saw, “Oh, golly, my argument is self-referentially incoherent, and so I must abandon ship.” But that’s not true either.

Now, it is not that I didn’t see the holes. I did see the holes, and I understood about incoherence and so forth. But I covered this over with elaborate nonsense, like that we needed to take an ironic view of reality, that good and evil just had to be meaningless, that personal responsibility just had to be nonexistent. The arguments were secondary. I was determined.

I’ve given this talk in various settings and various forms and it’s even been written up in some forms, and a friend of mine who heard part of this story once said, “Jay, your dismissal of your own previous rationalizations as elaborate nonsense–that seems too pat. Was it really that simple? You say, “Well, the arguments were secondary. I was just determined.” Is it really that simple? You had these sophisticated arguments, even if they were full of holes. Weren’t you really, really deep down convinced by them?”

Was it really that simple? The answer is, “Yes, it really was that simple.” You see, in my present opinion, although not in my opinion of eighteen years ago, modern ethical philosophy is going about matters backwards. Modern ethical philosophy assumes that the problem of human sin–if that word gives you tremors, we could say human wrongdoing or human wickedness or being lousy to each other or something–modern ethics assumes that the problem of human sin is mainly cognitive. That means that it has to do with the state of our knowledge.

In other words, what we tell ourselves is that we really don’t know very clearly what is right and wrong, and we are trying our best to find out. That is not true. Actually, the problem is not cognitive. The problem is volitional. That means it has to do not with the state of our knowledge, but with the state of our will. To put it still another way, by and large we do know the basics of right and wrong. I won’t claim every detail, but we do know the basics of right and wrong, but we wish we didn’t. We are trying, for one reason or another, to keep ourselves in ignorance or to pretend that we are ignorant.

Now, some of you, especially if you have had training in logic, may say, “Ad hominem argument, Dr. B. You are saying your motive was bad; therefore, your position, nihilism, must have been false. We know that the mere fact that a fellow’s motive is bad doesn’t mean his argument is invalid.” That’s true, but that is not what I am saying. I am not presenting an ad hominem argument that because my motive was bad, my conclusion must have been false. No, I am presenting a diagnosis with myself as a case in point. My nihilism was false, not because my motive was bad, although my motive did have to be bad. My nihilism was false because it was self-referentially incoherent.

It was like something from the old Star Trek shows–not this newfangled “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” I am a dinosaur here. I mean the good stuff, back in the black and white days. You know, there were these computers. You would always outwit the bad computers by giving them some riddle like saying, “Everything I say is a lie.” And the thing would say, “Well, wait. If everything you say is a lie, then you are lying now, but then you may be speaking some truth. But if it is true, then it is a lie,” and it would start smoking. I sort of think that is what we ought to do more often on a college campus. So when I said some of these things, like what I used to tell myself, my head should have started smoking at that point. My argument was self-referentially incoherent, just like androids, and that is why it was false.

Now, the motive was also bad, surely. But the motive was bad because even though I knew the argument was self-referentially incoherent, rather than give up nihilism, I embraced the incoherency, accepted it, and took it into myself.

What do you do with somebody who was like I once was? What do you do with that sort of a fellow? Well, you don’t try to tell him what he doesn’t know. You know why? Because he knows it already. He really does know it. Instead, what you have to do is blow away the smokescreens by which he is hiding from the knowledge that he has already.

Well, then, how did I become a nihilist? If it wasn’t because of those arguments that I cooked up afterward to rationalize it, how did I become one in the first place? Why was I so determined? What were my real motives? Now, maybe some of you will not recognize anything in your own experience having any resemblance to any of the motives that I am about to talk about. That’s fine. Maybe some of you will notice some resemblance, or, if not about yourself, about somebody you know. So maybe this will be of some use to you.

But, actually, there were quite a few reasons. One was that, having been caught up in the radical politics of the late sixties and early seventies–it’s really hard to believe this now, the world has changed so much–but we were all expecting a revolution any day. I had my own ideas about redeeming the world, basically–ideas that were opposed to the Christian faith of my childhood. As I got further and further away from God, I also got further and further away from common sense about a lot of other things, too, like moral law and personal responsibility.

That first reason for nihilism led to a second. By now I had committed certain sins that I didn’t want to repent of. And so the presence of God made me more and more uncomfortable, and so I began looking for reasons to believe that he didn’t exist. It’s a funny thing about us humans. Very few of us start doubting God’s existence and then go off and begin to sin. Rather, most of us get entangled in some sticky kind of sin and then start doubting his existence.

A third reason for being a nihilist was simply that nihilism was taught to me. You might find that preposterous: “Nihilism was taught to you?” I was raised by Christian parents; they didn’t teach me nihilism. But I had heard all through school that even the most basic ideas about good and evil are different in every society. I bet you have heard that too, right? That is empirically false. It is just not true. As C.S. Lewis once remarked, “Cultures may disagree about whether a man may have one wife or four, but all of them know about marriage. They may disagree about which actions are most courageous, but none of them rank cowardice as a virtue.” There are some moral universals.

So this notion that ideas about right and wrong are completely in every detail different everywhere is really a crock, but by the time that I was taught the false anthropology of the times, I wanted very much to believe it, so that was a reinforcement.

Now, a fourth reason, related to the last one, was the very way that I was taught to use language. One of the things that has fascinated me ever since my conversion is the ways in which we unconsciously take in certain ideas, not because we are thinking them consciously, but just because of certain speech habits, because the idea seems to just be sucked in with the breath that you take in to say a certain line.

My high school English teachers, for instance, were determined to teach me, bless their hearts, the difference between what they called facts and what they called opinions. Well, I won’t deny that not all opinions are factual. But I noticed that in these fact and opinion drills, things like moral propositions–any moral ideas or moral statements–were always included among the opinions, never among the facts. Wasn’t that interesting?

My college social science teachers from my political science courses were equally determined to teach me the difference between what my teachers called “facts” and what they called “values.” They were very big on the so-called fact/value distinction. And they did this to much the same effect as my old high school English teachers. You see, the atomic weight of sodium was a fact, but the wrongness of murder–that was a value. Now, if it was a value, that meant it wasn’t a fact, right? In other words, to paraphrase, it is not factual that murder is wrong. It is something other than a fact. Maybe it is a value. What is a value? It if is not a fact, it must be something like just a preference or a feeling. I thought that to speak in this way was just being logical, but, in fact, I was wallowing in sort of a moral metaphysics which said there is no such thing as a moral fact. Well, that is at the bottom of nihilism. It was nihilism itself, but just in disguise.

A fifth reason for nihilism was that disbelieving in God was a good way to get back at him for the various things which predictably went wrong in my life after I had lost hold of him. The psychologist Paul Vitz is an expert in the psychology of atheism. He points out in his books that there are many atheists who are angry with God because they are angry with their fathers. There may have been some defective father earlier in their childhood.

It wasn’t that with me. But I was angry with God. I was angry with him for the way I screwed up after I had deserted him. Now, screwing up because I deserted him–that’s my fault. But I got mad at him about that anyway.

Now, of course, if God didn’t exist, then I couldn’t get back at him, right? So this may seem a very strange disbelief to get back at him by not believing in him, but most disbelief is like that, when you look yourself in the face and you get down to it.

Now, a sixth reason for nihilism was that I had come to confuse science with a certain worldview. I am all for science, okay? Follow the facts where they lead. But I had come to confuse science with a certain world view, one which, as a matter of fact, a lot of science writers and some scientists hold, but which really has nothing to do with science. It just comes along for the ride.

I mean the view that nothing is real but matter. If nothing is real but matter, then there couldn’t be such things as minds. There couldn’t be such things as moral law. There couldn’t be such things as God–right? Because, after all, none of those things are matter.

Of course, not even the properties of matter are matter. So, after awhile, it became hard to believe even in matter itself. This was another self-referentially incoherent idea. But by that time, I was so disordered that I couldn’t even really tell how disordered I was. I did realize that I had committed yet another incoherency. But I concluded that reality itself was incoherent, and that I was pretty clever to have figured that out. And even more clever, in fact, because I figured it out even though, in an incoherent world, figuring didn’t make sense either.

A seventh and reinforcing reason for nihilism was that I had fallen under the spell, by the time I was in graduate school, of the nineteenth-century German writer Friedrich Nietzsche. Maybe some of you have heard of him. He was the fellow who came up with the slogan, “God is dead.” I was, if anything, more Nietzschean than Nietzsche was. He thought that if you really understood the meaninglessness of everything, then nothing was left but to either laugh or be silent. Laughter or silence were the only possible responses.

Well, I recognized that if everything is really meaningless, not even laughter or silence were left, because those responses were just as meaningless. Nobody had any reason to do anything at all. And what makes matters worse, nobody had any reason not to do anything either. You were really in a jam.

Now, this is a terrible thing to believe. But, like Nietzsche, I imagined myself one of the few who could believe terrible things–one who could walk the rocky heights where the air is thin and cold. Nietzsche himself used to use language like that, so I suspect that he must have been in a state of mind pretty much like mine.

Well, I’ve given you seven reasons, but not the main one. The main reason I was a nihilist–the reason that tied all of these reasons together–was sheer mulish pride. I didn’t want God to be God. I wanted J. Budziszewski to be God.

I see that now, but I didn’t see it then. I’ve already said that everything goes wrong without God, and this is true even of the good things that he has given us, such as our minds.

One of the good things that I have been given is a stronger than average mind. Now, I don’t say that to boast. Human beings are given different gifts to serve him in diverse ways. Many people have particularly powerful and usable gift. I don’t have that. I admire many beautiful things but I don’t have the gift of making them. There are a lot of things I can’t do, but I do have a strong intellect. That was a gift from him.

The problem is that a strong mind that refuses the call to serve the God who made it has its own way of going wrong. When some people run away from God, they rob and kill. When other people go away from God, they do a lot of drugs and have a lot of sex. When still other people run away from God, they just sleep their lives away.

Well, when I fled from God, I didn’t do any of those things. My way of running away from God was to get stupid. I am very serious. Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that you have to be highly educated and intelligent to commit, and I discovered them all.

God keeps them in his arsenal to pull down mulish pride. That is how I ended up doing a doctoral dissertation to prove that we make up the difference between good and evil, and that we aren’t responsible for what we do.

You know, I remember now that I even taught those things to students. That is a sin. I still wonder what consequences that may have had on some lives, and can only pray that God will make some use in his own mysterious ways even of my own former sins.

Now, I said that this was sin. It was also agony. You can’t imagine what a person has to do to himself to go on believing such nonsense. It is very common nonsense. We run into it all the time in college. We become so habituated to it at the university that we get used to it and we stop regarding it as nonsense, but, of course, it is. What do you have to do to yourself to go on believing?

St. Paul said, “The knowledge of God’s law is written on our hearts, our consciences also bearing witness.” In some branches of philosophy, that is called “natural law.” The way natural law thinkers paraphrase that is to say that these laws, these moral principles, constitute the deep structure of our minds. That means that as long as we have minds, we can’t not know these laws. It is possible to not know the boiling point of water. It is possible to not know that you forgot to put on your belt. It is possible to not know what politeness requires in the particular society that you are visiting. But there are certain moral principles that you cannot not know.

Well, I was unusually determined not to know them. Now, what happens if you are determined not to know what you really can’t not know? I had to destroy my mind. That is why I say I got stupid. I resisted the temptation to believe in good and in its distinction from evil with as much energy as some saints, holy people, are said to have resisted the temptation to neglect the good.

Let me give you an example, because that may be a little bit abstract. I loved my wife and children–somehow, I still did. But I was determined to regard this love as merely a subjective preference with no real and objective value, and that I was involved in this love for reasons that were out of my control, traceable back to causes antecedent to me.

Think what that did to the very capacity to love them. After all, what is love? It is not a feeling. Love is a commitment of the will to the true good of another person. And how can your will be committed to the true good of another person if you deny the reality of good, deny the reality of persons, and deny that your commitments are in your control?

The computer metaphor for the mind, I suppose, is overused these days. We are not machines. But as an analogy, if you recognize the limits of analogy, it has some use sometimes. Visualize a man opening up the access panels of his mind and pulling out every component that has God’s image stamped on it. Now the problem is that they all have God’s image stamped on them, so the man can never stop. No matter how much he pulls out, there is still more to pull.

I was that man. Because I pulled out more and more, there came to be less and less that I could even think about. The conditions that some people get into because they fry their brains on drugs, I got into because of false philosophy. But because there was less and less that I could think about, I thought that I was becoming more and more “focused.” Because I believed things that filled even me with dread, I thought I was smarter and braver than the people who didn’t believe them. I thought I saw an emptiness at the heart of the universe that was hidden from their foolish eyes. Of course, I was the fool, but I didn’t see that then.

How did God bring me back? Obviously not from feeling miserable. That just fed my pride. But I came to feel something that was different than misery. I came, over time, to feel a true intuition. It took the form of a greater and greater horror about myself. Not exactly a feeling of guilt, not exactly a feeling of shame. Just horror–an overpowering sense that whatever I felt or didn’t feel about it, my condition was terribly wrong, that it was objectively evil.

Finally, after this intuition became so strong that I couldn’t deny it any longer, it occurred to me to wonder why I had it. If there was no difference between good and evil, if there was no difference between the wonderful and the horrible, why should I feel horror? In letting that thought through my mental sensors blundered. I had all these defenses set up against this, but they blundered here. They let that one through, and it was the mole.

In order to take this sense of horror seriously, and by now I really couldn’t help doing so, I had to admit that there was a difference between the wonderful and the horrible after all. For once my philosophical training did me some good, because I knew this: if there really were such a thing as good and evil, which I didn’t believe but still, hypothetically, it seemed logical, if there were such a thing as good and evil, the only way to get a bad thing, an evil thing, would be to take a good thing and spoil it.

There is an asymmetry here. This is like with the light. You can block the light to get darkness, but you can’t block the darkness to get light. There is asymmetry. You can take a good thing and spoil it and get bad; you can’t take a bad thing and spoil it and get good. I knew that if there existed a horrible, there had to exist a wonderful, of which the horrible was the absence. So my walls of self-deception collapsed all at once.

Now, you could say that up until this point I couldn’t see the obvious because I had my hands over my eyes, I had my fingers in my ears, and I was saying, “I can’ hear, I can’t see anything. It’s not my fault. There is nothing to be seen.” But once this broke through my mental sensors, it was like the plug was coming out, the hands coming off the eyes. This didn’t lead me to anything profound, but certain obvious things became seeable again.

One of the things that became obvious, by the way, was that when I had abandoned my Savior in my twenties, I had never really had a good reason to do so. Oh, I had those motives that I told you about, but not a reason.

Astonishingly, although I had abandoned him, he had never abandoned me. I now believe that he rescued me just in time. There is a point of no return, and I was almost there. I used the computer analogy a moment ago. I told you that I had been pulling out one component after another. Well, I had nearly gotten to the motherboard.

The next few years after my conversion were like being in a dark attic, but with this difference: It was like being in a dark attic where I had been for a long time, but which now shutter after shutter was being thrown back so that great shafts of light could start pouring in and illuminating all those dark and dusty corners. I found that I recovered whole feelings, whole memories, even whole ways of understanding things that I had blocked out.

Of course, there was a sort of a downside, if you want to think of it a downside. It doesn’t seem to me that way now, but it was rather depressing at the time. I had to repudiate my dissertation, knowing that it was all wrong now. I had to stop trying to get it published. At the time I thought, “Well, my career is over. I can’t possibly retool, rethink, and get anything written and published before my tenure review comes up, so, all right, I’m redeemed by God but out of a job.” But, by God’s grace, that turned out to be untrue also.

What I do now is in ethical and political philosophy, to the frustration of some of my colleagues who were perfectly comfortable with me when I was a nihilist. What I write about now is those very moral principles that I mentioned a few minutes ago, the ones we can’t not know because they are imprinted on our minds, they are inscribed on our consciences, they are written on our hearts.

Some people, as I mentioned, call this natural law. My own contribution to the theory of natural law is a little different than that of some other writers. Most people who contribute to this tradition write about this or that aspect of it. You might say that I specialize in understanding the ways that we pretend that we don’t know what we really do, the ways we suppress our knowledge, the ways we hold it down, the ways we deceive ourselves and consequently others. Can you guess why I write about those things? I have some personal experience.

Now, I don’t try to prove the natural law. You don’t prove that by which all else is proven. That is just like asking a mathematician to prove the axioms. “Yeah, I see that the axioms can prove the theorems, but aren’t you going to prove the axioms for me?” No. It’s the wrong question to ask, “How do you prove the axioms?” because they are that by which you prove everything else.

So, in the same way, there are first principles in morality. I don’t try to prove the principles of the natural law, but I do try to show that, in order to get anywhere at all, even the philosophies of denial must always at some point, despite themselves, assume the very things that they deny.

Now, it is a matter of awe to me that God has permitted me to make any contribution at all, after wasting my mind like that, destroying it, misleading others. But his promise is that if only the rebel turns to Jesus Christ in repentant faith, giving up claims to self-ownership and allowing this Christ the run of the house, he will redeem everything there is in it. And just so, it was through my own rescue from self-deception that I learned about self-deception. He has redeemed even my nihilist past and put it to use, something I certainly never deserved, and it is awesome.

A lot of my students tell me, and every now and then even a colleague will tell me, in a moment of weakness, a kind of weakness called “honesty”, that he or she struggles with the same dark influence that I once did.

Maybe some of you are in this same place. I want to tell you that, in Christ, God has thrown down a rope. I hope that by telling the story of my own escape I might encourage you to grab on.