I have made my living as a social philosopher, influenced above all by Marx, Marcuse, and John McMurtry. The thread that connects them and which I have used to stitch my own thoughts together is the unique value of human life. All the arguments that I have directed against the social, economic, political, and cultural structures of capitalist society have been developed from the principle that they are unnecessarily constraining of human sensibility, relationship, and creativity. Where I differ from those three influences is that I have also always been haunted by the existential problem of the consequences of a materialist understanding of human origins. If the universe began from nothing and will eventually decay back into nothing, if all matter and energy will run down in the heat death of the universe and we are matter and energy, then at the end of time human history will have amounted to nothing. Once the last proton decays and Being returns to the absolute silence of empty space from whence it came there will be no one to tally up the score to determine ultimate winners and losers. But if there are no ultimate winners and losers, if there is no cosmic purpose and no divinity to shepherd us to salvation, then does it not follow that our being here is meaningless, absurd, as Camus argued? And if life is meaningless and absurd then does it not follow, as Dostoevsky worried, “that nothing is true and everything is permitted?”

These questions press themselves upon my mind with the same urgency and intensity today as they did as a teenager when I was first struck by the implications of my own mortality. Trying to imagine one’s own not-being inspires a “special kind of being afraid,” as Philip Larkin says in his unforgettable “Aubade.” But one cannot live inside one’s own skull: the fear of death is ultimately a spur to living, as Camus also argued. The essence of nihilism is not the belief that life is without meaning or value. Rather, I think that nihilism forces us to value our real life, this one we have right now, as ultimate. The universe exploded into being from nothing and will return to nothing, but at this moment in time everyone alive is very much something. The honest admission that life is, biologically considered, contingent and finite, can lead to despair, can lead to a flight into comforting illusion, but it can also be the first step towards a re-valuation of life. If this one life is all that anyone has then every other value must serve it rather than, as most political ideologies maintain, life serving it. Nihilism need not lead to the immoralism that Dostoevsky was keen to pin on it. It can equally well expose the immorality at the heart of the religious or political instrumentalization of life-value. If life is a singularity then it is of infinite value. People cannot be substituted for one another: one generation’s pain is not made good by a future generation’s joy and what one believes does not elevate one’s importance over others who believe differently. Everyone is on the same plane: no one is chosen, no one matters to the stars, no one will be saved, but also no one will be damned. All that matters is the quality of this moment.

E.M. Cioran was a Romanian nihilist — what? philosopher?, poet? provocateur sui generis like Nietzsche? Whatever one wants to call him, his aphorisms, like Nietzsche’s before him, expose the abyss on which human thinking constructs the foundations on which it builds its systems. No one in the twentieth century has tried to actively affirm the nothingness and meaninglessness of our existence with more honesty. Although he extols the courage of the suicide on almost every page, he does not– like Kirilov in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, go through with it himself. Kirilov wanted to prove by his suicide that human beings are absolutely free– that we have the power of the gods over life and death. Dostoevsky presents him as a reductio ad absurdum of nihilism: he kills himself, and nothing changes. Cioran’s inability to remove himself from the life that he claims is meaningless proves something else– that life does not have to have an ultimate purpose in order to be meaningful and valuable.

Marx said that thinking has to be radical, has to get to the root of the problem, and the root of the problem for human beings are human beings themselves (i.e., we have the power to change our societies). I think the root lies one layer of soil deeper: the problem for human beings is that we can trace the history of being back to non-being, and thus contemplate the contingency and finitude of everything. But once we have confronted ourselves with the reality that we could just as easily not have been as been, and that one day we will no longer be no matter how we organize our societies, we should rejoice that we are here right now. Nihilism could produce despair, but it can equally well spur us to cherish life as the precious accident that it is. if we cherish life we must also cherish the material conditions that sustain it. So nihilism would also be a spur towards grounding production and distribution in life-need, not capital accumulation. Everyone is in the same boat, remember, and everyone therefore has the same legitimate claim on the resources that will keep them going. People do not need food because they are Catholics, or Buddhists, or atheist materialists. We need food because our organism requires energy. Start from that precious and fragile nature of life and not the specialness of some one form of life and universal sharing follows.

That which is invulnerable does not require care. People do not pray to their gods so that the gods are kept safe; they prey to the gods to keep their communities safe from the dangers that mortals face. But if there are no gods why live? Because this one life is all that we have. If we choose life we might choose to care only for ourselves, or for a subset of human beings. But we might also become capable of valuing everyone equally as a fellow sufferer.

I submit that it is impossible to strictly speaking care only for oneself. Donne is correct: no one is an island, and trying to live as if one were would lead to self-destruction. Plato laid bare the self-undermining logic of the pure egoism of the tyrant who destroys himself because he makes enemies of everyone else. The second possibility structures human history. To this point history has been the story of what happens when we care for only a subset of other human beings: some groups have developed at the expense of others and warfare has been a near constant. Universalist philosophies and religions have arisen to combat this division. Stoicism, Christianity, Islam, and Marxism all stake their claim on the priority of human sameness over difference, but they mediate human identity through the particularity of their singular interpretation. They argue that the world will be one, once everyone has become Christian (or the right sect of Christianity), or Muslim (or the right sect of Islam), or after the revolution (led by the right sect of Marxism). What is left but to start from the value of life as an unrepeatable gift of the evolution of matter and energy, equally valuable to everyone lucky enough to be thrown in to being (Heidegger)? Nihilism, calumnied as a license for murder and mayhem, might actually be the disposition best attuned to the real value of life.

The infinite value of human life is implicit in Marx’s belief that in a socialist society everyone will be exactly what they reveal themselves to be through their own activity. Money and the symbolic capital it can purchase will no longer be meaningful: if you want friends you will have to be friendly, if you want resources for your own projects you will have to contribute. And people will contribute, Marx believes because, once they see their efforts realized in the enjoyment of others’ lives, work will become “life’s primary need.” (Critique of the Gotha Program). But neither Marx nor subsequent generations of less philosophical Marxists examined politics through the lens of the infinite value of life. Instead, they viewed the infinite value of life through the lens of political struggle, and concluded that life will have infinite value under socialism, but at present has only instrumental value as a resource for the struggle. But once political struggle becomes a matter of redemption it is too easy to adopt violent strategies that are excused by the future dividends that they will eventually pay. As of yet, the account is still outstanding. Does not critical theory insist on the need for a radical break with the thinking that has underlined the failed politics of our own and all previous ages?

Nihilism is the most radical break with the structure of thought that underlies the politics of sacrificing the present for the future. Nihilism turns Macbeth’s lament against itself. Life “signifies nothing” but the “sound and fury” with which it is filled is the substance of the tale, and we are idiots only if we misunderstand the temporal dynamics of valuation. Life is not a sign of some deeper reality; it does not point beyond itself to some transcendent template that allows us to decode its meaning. It has no meaning in that sense. But the sound and fury is real, it impresses itself on us whether we want it to or not, and it forces us to respond. Transcendent purposes are nothing, they do not exist, but our sensuous relationship to the universe and to each other is real and– so long as we choose life– valuable.

Cioran is unconcerned with the political implications of his arguments, but he is– perhaps despite his intentions– a profound advocate for the supreme value of life as it really is. “It is because it rests on nothing, because it lacks even the shadow of an argument that we preserve life … We cling to days because the desire to die is too logical…. Give life a specific goal and it immediately loses its attraction. The inexactitude of its ends makes life superior to death.” (A Short History of Decay, 10-11). Every day brings us one step closer to death. But so long as we are stepping we are not dead and because there is no omniscience that already knows where the path we are creating by walking will lead, it is worth staying alive if for no other reason than to see what lies around the bend. The nothingness in which we move is the condition of our freedom, as Camus, Sartre, and de Beauvoir argued. Would you really want to be a marionette in a divine puppet show with God pulling the strings? If that were so, then human life would have no value. The same holds true if we replace God with History.

Marx believed that we are the root of our own problem because we only had to recognize our ability to change our societies in order to “solve the riddle of history.” Marx was correct. But the means by which subsequent Marxists and other liberation movements have pursued this goal has only ever led to ironic results. Cioran lays bear the irony: “Truths begin by a conflict with the police and end by calling them in, for each absurdity we have suffered for degenerates into a legality, as every martyrdom ends in the paragraphs of the Law.” (74) Dogmatism is the slayer of dreams of liberation, because dogmatism is about truth while liberation is about life-activity. Forms of life are not true or false, they are modes of activity. Doctrines are true or false– or their adherents insist that they are true and false. As soon as someone becomes convinced that their doctrine is absolutely true they are not only willing to kill for it, they feel themselves obligated to kill for it. To allow others to wallow in darkness when one has the truth is sin. Better to be burned in an auto da fe than to live as a heretic. So the dogmatist lights the match that sets the stake ablaze. We may posit as a basic condition of the goodness of a form of activity that it does not depend upon the killing of others. As a corollary we may infer that no form of life should be imposed through violence on other people.

Dostoevsky worried that if there were no God everything would be permitted, but (as Camus pointed out) people also conclude that if God is on their side then everything is permitted to them. But if we think of truth in human terms only, as a shared resource for living, then the question of killing for the truth becomes a contradiction in terms. We need to understand the world so that we can produce and use the resources that we require in a materially rational way. We cannot survive and continually mistake toxins for nutrients, or produce beyond the carrying capacities of the natural world. But taxonomy and ecology are not principles to go to the wall for: only a completely irrational zealot would go to war against scientific generalizations that prove themselves in practice everyday. Joseph Conrad exposes the idiocy of the anarchists at the centre of his novel The Secret Agent by having them declare war on geography by trying to blow up the Greenwich observatory.

The human form of truth is an open weave. The dogmatist, the zealot, do not want inquiry but finality. “The mistake of every doctrine of deliverance is to suppress poetry, climate of the incomplete. The poet would betray himself if he aspired to be saved: salvation is the death of song; the negation of art and mind.” (28) To be incomplete is to be open, but also to suffer: “We exist only in so far as we suffer.” (28) But suffering is the world coursing through us every moment. To suffer means to undergo, to be subject to: to suffer is therefore synonymous with receptivity as the origin of all human thinking and action. Suffering as receptivity is thus also, as Feuerbach argued, the mother of poetry (and death the mother of beauty, as Wallace Stevens added). We might therefore think of poetry not as a species of literature but more broadly as as philosophy that invokes rather than argues, suggests, points to, opens up, illuminates self-consciously from one perspective only, deliberately leaving open the possibility of others adopting other perspectives. Nihilism is the supreme life-value of this moment, the invitation to savour the magnificent surface of things.