WHY NOTHING SEEMS TO MATTER ANY MORE: A Philosophical Study of our Nihilistic Age confronts what is arguably the most important philosophical issue of our era: nihilism, the withering of established beliefs and their replacement by no new beliefs that seem to fulfill a similar role in human imaginations, priorities and emotions.
Our abilities to deal with the crises facing the world are shaped by our faith in science, elections, courts, politicians, schools, universities and our communities. This faith, or lack of it, affects our actions on topics ranging from vaccinations to climate change, abortion, taxation, economic governance, technological regulation, policing, education, housing, healthcare, gender relations and identity, race, marriage, the apportionment of blame for society’s problems, and more. Our fundamental values and beliefs lie at the root of our choices in all these areas, and of the deepest divisions and culture wars that boil throughout today’s Internet-linked world. The questioning and abandonment of long-established values and beliefs are now so common that the most unifying thread linking our civilization’s value experience appears to be bewilderment and a hunger for clarity and direction.
Professor Bert Olivier answers this hunger with an impressive range of philosophical erudition combined with unusually broad cultural reference. Few if any readers will fail to find in these pages a door into philosophy that relates stimulatingly to some facet of their intellectual life. Expanding on a prizewinning work (it earned the South African Academy for Science and Art’s 2021 prize for the best paper published in the Academy’s humanities journal in the past five years, an award Olivier also won in 2006), it offers clarity and relevance. Expertly surveying its subject for those outside academia who are interested in knowing what philosophers have to say about nihilism, it also offers a guide for beginning philosophy students, using nihilism discourse as a lens through which to view the many directions from which philosophy engages major questions about the present and future of our civilization. Our Nihilistic Age‘s linear structure allows every chapter to lead logically to the next, yet one can dip into any section and find a chunk of thought that stands on its own. It is not necessary to have read extensively in philosophy to follow it, but most readers will come away eager to know more about the novels (including bestsellers), films and philosophers Olivier cites. However, this is not a superficial summary but an original work of sustained reflection and incisive analysis, studded with provocative insights into the conduct of life in the 21st century, in regard to not only great questions of social, environmental and technological policy but also the experience of individuals who, bombarded by a media avalanche of what appears to be chaos, long for a reasonable and practical philosophical footing.
Opening with a philosophical look at the Covid-19 pandemic, Olivier moves briskly on to tackle consumerism, capitalism, ideology, anger, the Gaia theory, mass media, technology, alienation, fascism, the quest for a new intellectual vocabulary, feminism, science fiction, the need to change our relationship with nature, the character and influence of American culture, Trumpism, sexuality, the task of philosophy, and the prospect of building a new set of values based on a rejection of outworn ideas. The techniques of film, literary and art criticism, political argument and cultural history are vigorously used alongside the use of the ideas of philosophers (Nietzsche, Castells on the Internet, Stiegler on technology, Baudrillard and more). Olivier does not disguise his philosophical sympathies. He argues passionately against neoliberalism and capitalist overreach, whose failures he sees as having brought about the crisis of values, but he sees optimistic scope for the emergence of a new worldview which will renew human dignity and hope. It is not necessary to agree with his diagnosis in order to profit from his discussion, which, among other merits, illustrates a style of culturally literate philosophical thought and writing that promises a new path for the future of philosophy.
Bert Olivier, PhD
Our Nihilistic Age brings to a thorny subject the luminous mind of a lifelong professional teacher and scholar, as well as the literary craftsmanship of an experienced explainer of ideas to the general public. The author delights in pointing out how intellectual movements mesh with popular culture and the daily news. The result is an exciting tour of the contemporary landscape of the mind in the company of a guide who knows the territory well. He has held two Research Fellowships at Yale University, where he was based for six years and worked with Cornel West and Karsten Harries. Other leading academics with whom he has worked include Jacques Derrida at the University of Paris’s École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. A paper by him on the crisis of values will appear in a forthcoming collection edited by Heidelberg University theologian Michael Welker, who delivered the 2019–20 Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh. Olivier’s papers in academic journals, lectures around the world, and columns for the Mail & Guardian newspaper in Johannesburg total in the hundreds. From 1998 to 2005 he directed the Center (formerly School) for Advanced Studies, University of Port Elizabeth (now Nelson Mandela University). His publications include the books Philosophy and Psychoanalytic Theory, Philosophy and Communication, Philosophy and the Arts, and Intersecting Philosophical Planes (Peter Lang Academic Publishers, London and Frankfurt). His interests include philosophical aspects of film, architecture, art and mass media. His honors include the 2004 Stals Prize for Philosophy and several Excellence in Research awards. He currently supervises doctoral researchers at the University of the Free State, South Africa, where he holds an honorary chair, a rank granted only to academics of special distinction. Previously he was Extraordinary Professor at the same university, and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Nelson Mandela University, where he won three Top Researcher of the Year awards. He has conducted research, lectured and/or served in other academic capacities at universities and academic conferences in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Europe, Australia and Asia, held editorial positions on various academic journals, served as an expert reader of academic manuscripts for publishers, and supervised, and/or served as examiner for, dozens of Master’s and Doctoral theses.
What People Are Saying
“Under the slick culture of hyper-industrial consumerism, values have evaporated; people live in a cloud of unease. Things don’t seem right, but how to put a finger on it? In this text, Bert Olivier weaves narratives from recent cinema together with critical European thought, highlighting the disorientation and exterminist tendencies of contemporary capital. This book should be an essential read for students of Philosophy101 in our emerging neoliberal universities.”
— Professor Ariel Salleh, author of Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern, Editor of Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology
“… an insatiable researcher … he has interwoven a plethora of information to educate and equip readers … he bursts open numerous cans of worms … he provides readers with a philosophical toolbox packed with an assortment of conceptual tools to understand what is going on… a passionate thinker and writer … every reader will be left thinking differently and more clearly about the dispensation in which s/he lives after reading the book.”
— Dr. David Anthony Pittaway, writing in Acta Academica: Critical Views on Culture, Society and Politics
“... an invaluable contribution to the ongoing effort by the wiser among us to articulate a vision of the world capable of introducing an animating spirit into an otherwise dispirited age. Bert Olivier offers his readers an insightful and impassioned account of what matters and the forces at work that erode the sensibility that things matter. If that were not enough, he points as well to a way out of our current civilizational impasse. No more can one person accomplish.”
— Professor Gil Germain, Dept. of Political Science, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada, writing in The Journal of International Political Anthropology