What hopes and dreams do we have for our lives? Is it the bourgeois dream; of comforts and security that exist at costs of which we remain utterly oblivious ? Is it the utopian dream of the end of history, the end of conflict, the culmination of all contradictions, and the reign of eternal peacability? Or is it the dream of the Beyond, the survival of spirit in the face of worldly temptations and entanglements?
Attached to grand expectations is crushing disillusionment. Nihilism is idealism gone astray. The choice is not an either/or. What we envision, what the self imagines is brought to bear in the world through action. The creations of the mind requires the labour of man. The idealist who grows disengaged from actuality sees himself as Creator. Sartre held stringently that God was dead, because he wanted to occupy the space of the divine intellect. He wanted to be the one that provided wisdom and hope. The philosopher, since Plato and Aristotle, has wanted to provide ideas that would give people hope, but in the process, establish themselves as prophet, philosopher-king or philosopher-Lord.
Hope is important to life. But hope is empty if merely a program. Hope is vacuous if it produces ends and dictate means. Hope is superficial when salvation is akin to capitulation. Hope can not be promised from beyond, for actualization lies only in our ephemeral encounters with earth and with life. "Abandon all false hope", is that what the title means?
Why does humanity so often look to the heavens for hope? Is it because the majority of human beings are complacent creatures? No, if this were true, the human race would long ago have perished. It is because humanity, since its most nascent periods, have had a belief in the sacred, in something incommensurable beyond the ephemeral.
This fascination with sacredness provides life with meaning and gives the community a spiritual centre. The sacred, although serious, involved a sense of play, such as the retelling of myths from one generation to another. Spirits grew along with the communities who revered them. But as human life 'progressed' from primative villages to modern cities, the emergence of religion codified the sacred, and made the radical exclusion between the chosen and the heathen. This is true of western 'religions', in addition to, as Raymond Aron put it, 'secular religions'. The division between inside and outside, between believer and non-believer, of course has existed since the very beginning of monotheistic worship. But the violence of partition has been most pronounced in the modern world. Why is this the case? Why has "clashes of faith" become the impetus for unspeakable violence in the name of sacred godheads?
In the face of a world where life is extraneous to the process, man is fully aware of his limitations. He loathes his own limitedness - his human nature. His fascination with the universal has forced him to transgress, to dominate, and to devour all others that do not conform to his particular 'universal' world-view. Once religion occupies the universal, the battle has already been lost. Humanity, confronted with the crisis of humanity, has aligned itself with nihilism. Unable to accept the fall from great expectations, it retrenches and clings to the now impossible dream - fulfilling an illusion and refusing to encounter the actual.
Nihilism flowers within the disaffected, be it the disillusioned romantic or the disciple who sees his saviour still laying dead on the third morning.
