Why this book?
- For a philosophical engagement with nihilism and the collapse of the foundations of meaning and value.
- To explore whether meaningful life remains possible without the secure foundations of the past.
- To understand the relationship between nihilism and epistemology, ontology, axiology, ethics, and politics.
- To become acquainted with Ardabili’s broader project on the possibility and methods of struggling against meaninglessness.
- To consider “struggle” as a point of departure for hope in an age dominated by despair.
About the book
Principles of Struggle in the Age of Nihilism begins with a radical diagnosis: the crisis of foundations is no longer confined to a single philosophical domain but encompasses politics, ethics, science, religion, and other pillars of culture and civilization. Mohammad-Mehdi Ardabili frames this condition in terms of the ascendancy of nihilism—a situation in which the epistemological, ontological, and axiological foundations of the past no longer provide their former assurance.
The book’s central question emerges from this condition: if religions, sciences, philosophies, and various ideologies can no longer provide human beings with a secure and indubitable foundation, can we still hope for a meaningful and valuable life? The book is therefore concerned not merely with describing nihilism or mourning the loss of foundations, but with the possibility of hope and with finding or making a path toward meaningful existence within this very condition.
One of the work’s defining ideas is that the first response to meaninglessness may not be the immediate discovery of a new foundation, but the struggle against meaninglessness itself. Ardabili asks whether, in an age dominated by profound theoretical and practical doubts, this struggle might itself constitute the most meaningful and justifiable first step. “Struggle,” then, is not merely a political concept in the book; it becomes a philosophical question concerning how to live and how meaning remains possible under nihilistic conditions.
This book is the first volume of a broader project intended to examine the possibility and methods of such a struggle from multiple perspectives: from logic and epistemology to ontology and teleology, from axiology and the study of belief to its ethical and political consequences for the subject. In this respect, the book also serves as an introduction to a larger project of an “all-encompassing struggle in the age of nihilism.”
Principles of Struggle in the Age of Nihilism is suited to readers interested in nihilism, the crisis of meaning, the possibility of hope, and the relationship between philosophy and ways of living—especially those who wish to approach nihilism not merely as a topic in the history of philosophy but as a living problem in contemporary ethics, politics, knowledge, and life.
Today, the crisis of foundations has advanced to a degree that even the most pessimistic sceptics in history could scarcely have imagined. No defensible possibility of escaping this nihilism, whether at the theoretical or civilizational level, is in sight. The emergence of fuzzy and many-valued logics and radical relativism, alongside analogous theories in physics (from uncertainty onward) and mathematics (from the incompleteness theorems onward), are further manifestations of the same phenomenon. On the other hand, the problem has by no means remained at the level of epistemology. All the pillars of culture and civilization, from politics and ethics to science and religion, have been affected by this fundamental collapse, and their perceptive adherents have realized that until now they too had built their houses upon water. The corrosiveness of the acid of nihilism is so great that it eats away and destroys even the steeliest intellectual foundations placed before it. Given all this, the central problematic of the present work is precisely this: in an age of the complete ascendancy of nihilism, when all epistemological, ontological, and axiological criteria and foundations have collapsed, and the perceptive human being has found all the secure supports of the past—including religions, sciences, philosophies, and various ideologies—unreliable, can one still hope for a meaningful and valuable life? In a word, the subject of this work is the possibility of hope in an age dominated by absolute despair: the hope of finding, or even making, a path toward giving meaning to the subject’s life and escaping the prevailing nihilism and absolute meaninglessness. And, as a first step, in an age dominated by meaninglessness and profound and inescapable theoretical and practical doubts, is not the struggle against meaninglessness itself the most meaningful and justifiable step? As a general outline, this work is the first volume of a broader project that addresses the possibility and manner of this struggle from various perspectives (from logic and epistemology to ontology and teleology, and from axiology to the study of belief, and ultimately its ethical and political consequences for the subject): an all-encompassing struggle in the age of nihilism.
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