Quote of the Day

I distinguish nihilism both from what I call rationalism and from my own position, which I prefer not to label but which for clarity's sake I will here call irrationalism.... Rationalism encompasses two fundamental assumptions, neither of which I accept. The rationalist believes that a rational foundation and method are necessary, both epistemologically and psychologically, to develop legitimate commitment to moral values; she also believes that such a rational foundation and method either already exist or can be discovered or invented. Nihilism is only a partial rejection of rationalism: The nihilist rejects the second assumption, but not the first. Thus a nihilist would argue that a rational foundation is necessary to sustain values but that no such foundation exists or can be identified. This sort of nihilism leads directly to psychological feelings of impotence and despair, and to the sense that nothing matters, because what we desperately require to make our lives meaningful is impossible to achieve. My position rejects both assumptions. We do not have a rational foundation and method for legal or moral reasoning (in the sense that traditional legal theorists imagine such rational foundations to be possible); we do not, however, need such a foundation or method to develop passionate commitments and to make our lives meaningful. This formulation removes the dilemma that is the basis for the despair of the middle position. I prefer not to describe my position as "irrationalism" ... for the same reason I decline to adopt nihilism as a way to describe myself. It would be misleading and confusing to appear to be advocating that decisions be made "irrationally" -- without connection with discernable goals. A better term might be pragmatism. I would prefer, as would Mark Tushnet and Richard Bernstein and Gerald Frug, that we stop thinking about moral, political, and legal choice in terms of the dichotomies between reason and emotion, law and politics, rationality and irrationality, objectivism and relativism. These dichotomies are inadequate to express the dilemmas of social life.

Joseph Singer, The Player and the Cards: Nihilism and Legal Theory, 94 Yale L.J. 1, 4 n.8 (1984).

A friend once asked me a question that was premised on this very dilemma -- she feared that without rational foundations everything ceases to have meaning. The premise, as Singer shows, is not necessarily correct: we don't need objective foundations to engage in meaningful lives. Hence, his epigraph, which I offer as a bonus quote:

After they had explored all the suns in the universe, and all the planets of all the suns, they realized that there was no other life in the universe, and that they were alone. And they were very happy, because then they knew it was up to them to become all the things they had imagined they would find.

Lanford Wilson, 5th of July 127 (1978)