the paper will take nihilism to follow the definition provided by Reginster
Reginster= argues that Nietzsche seems to have two different things in mind when he talks about nihilism. These are: disorientation and despair.
Disorientation is the loss of faith in the existence of any values, which are sufficient to empower or add our lives meaning. Simply put, it is the inability commit to any values
Despair is the belief that what is most important to us is unattainable
nietzche’s response:
– So there is a kind of re-evaluation of values that we could go for, which is a re-evaluation of their status rather than their content
– We can abandon our commitment to the objectivity of values, and instead embrace the idea that the values we adopt can direct us without being afforded the status of objective values in the sense that they are the same values, which everyone else needs to endorse consistently
Abandoning this assumption means we can leave disorientation behind because if our values are conceived as only having a subjective significance and not an objective one, then presumably we can make our subjective values goal setting for us, in a way that objective values would be, but without needing some grounding in the kind of metaphysical extravagances that you might think objective values need grounding in
on the upside here, the subjective view of morality or value generally, would not require an answer to the question of why we should buy into these values this is because this question is not assumed to have an answer
This means that disorientation will be avoided because we still have values which we regard as subjectively valid, and those can give us direction and aim
We can also leave despair behind on the grounds that if our values are considered from our own point of view to be subjectively valid, then if the world fails to live up to them, we can replace them with more realistic ones
This is only possible if we consider our values to have the status of subjective validity this is because the notion of objectivity appears to imply that if we were to change our values, we would be making some mistake; an objective value is one we ought to be committed to consistently
Dropping this assumption enables us to respond to the world in setting out values and not to keep them fixed and thereby being distraught by the fact that the world does not match them
Because if the world does not match them, they can be altered without me assuming that something will go wrong because I have only considered subjective validity
having a more fleet footed, subjectivist idea of value means that the collapse of one interpretation does not imply that we have no meaning at all that we can attribute to existence, because we can just reach for another one which we select that will be okay because values only have subjective validity anyway
there is a way in which the re -evaluation of values might occur, where the re-evaluation of values is to do with our second level attitude towards value : our theory about whether the status of value is subjective or objective
this might be one way of developing the idea that we can retain some sense of value, even once we have had the death of god
A different approach to the re evaluation of values is not to do with a shift from objectivism to subjectivism, but rather to do with valuing one type of thing= Love of fate amor fati
