Active nihilism is a trap-it offers no way to transcend despair and relies on romanticized notions of the past

(Brandon M., Nihilism, Pessimism, and Tragic Hope: Black Nihilism Reconsidered in Prophets Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope New Essays on the Work of Cornel West Ed. Will)

From a particular vantage, however, nihilism may contain something laudable. In its “active” form, at least, nihilism rejects the “lies we should like to tell ourselves” about the depth, certainty, or significance of human suffering. It breaks with the forms of “self-narcotization” (e.g., distraction by entertainment, nostalgia, ressentiment, fanaticism) by which we evade the terrible truths of our condition or descend into “passive” despair.40 A particularly deceptive and self-deluded myth, Nietzsche argued, by which the most “level-headed are led astray,” is the idea of “Progress,” where both time and everything in it marches forward toward developing the highest human ends or goods together.41 In Nietzsche’s view, the past is “a tremendous experimental laboratory in which a few successes are scored, scattered throughout ages, while there are untold failures, and all order, logic, union, and obligingness are lacking.”42 For West, the vital rejoinder to romantic notions of progress is not the cultural degeneration that animated Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism, but instead “the pervasive evil of unjustified suffering and unnecessary social misery in our world,” and the ghastly wreckage of past injustice.43 In this sense, West shares much in philosophical orientation with the well-known passage from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” where the latter describes the mythos of “Progress” through the image of Paul Klee’s painting, Angelus Novus, which: shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned towards the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at its feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.44 An “active” nihilism, then, may at least pave the way for a more clear-eyed recognition of the extent of human suffering, now and in the past. Yet this raises for West an immediate question. How can this honest confrontation help us overcome nihilism and find redemptive meaning and value in the resistance, travails, and disappointments we inevitably confront as finite beings pursuing our goals? After all, judgments of pessimism about the ability to overcome or redeem such suffering can lead to despairing skepticism or ironic condescension on the value of any particular political program and the worth of politics, collective agency, and even life itself. Without some form of hope or a sense that the sufferings and strivings that constitute African American life have import and value, West sees no opening for struggle, resilience, and reverence for the dignity of the oppressed. Without these, it becomes impossible to keep the possibility of “hard-won progress” in particular domains alive.45 A courageous confrontation with the abyss of suffering, in other words, may lead some to a judgment that misery and despair are inevitable and treat this fact as a condemnation of the world or life itself. Against this temptation, those like Nietzsche and West seek orientations to the world that are “life-affirming.” Since some degree of suffering is inevitable, as a fact of the human condition and as part of any struggle to improve it, this practice of philosophy champions modes of being that create redemptive meaning within and through suffering. It is incumbent upon us not to flee from the pain and disappointment germane to human life but to transfigure it as best we can. For Nietzsche, such transfiguration would not, for example, affirm the excellences, ideals, or values of creative geniuses who create despite suffering but also affirm even the suffering and resistance that occasioned or constituted such creativity.46 While West shares with Nietzsche an interest in genius cultivators of artistry and creativity that transfigure the value of suffering rather than deepening it, his distillation of nihilism’s threat is ultimately sparer and more egalitarian.47 West’s concern to convert people away from nihilism is not primarily about cultural vitality as a way of life or radical aristocratic perfectionism. It is, fundamentally, about refusing to allow despair the last word over whether the lives of oppressed peoples are worth living, whether their traditions and exemplary instances of fortitude and moral courage are worth celebrating and sustaining, and whether it is worthwhile to struggle and strive in pursuit of justice and good.48