Modern Civilization and Nihilism

　　1

　　After the emergence of the Renaissance movement in Europe in the 14th century, Western culture underwent earth-shaking tremendous changes. Ideological enlightenment and social revolution defeated the rule of God and his representatives in the world - priests, kings and nobles, and won the right to live freely and equally on the earth. The light of science and reason dispels the ignorance and darkness of the Middle Ages, and everything in the world is placed under the light of reason, becoming objects used and plundered by man. Anything that can meet people's material and spiritual needs is given corresponding value by others and becomes circulating and tradeable goods.

Milton

　　Man's subjective desires continue to expand, and there is a fierce conflict between man and nature, society and others. Because there is no God and the gods in the sky, everything in the world is allowed. In order to compete for possession of the earth and rule of mankind, the two world wars caused unprecedented material and spiritual disasters to mankind. This shows that people are not the masters of the world and themselves. On the contrary, people are dominated by the devil. When people succumb to the temptation of the devil, pick forbidden fruits, or curiously uncover Pandora's box, various disasters arise. People kill God in order to fight for freedom, but the hard-earned freedom is stolen by the devil.

　　2

　　In the early Renaissance, people who had just been liberated from God's shackles were healthy and free. But in the classical period, rationality gradually became the source of cognition under the promotion of empirical philosophy and experimental science. A rational man, independent of his equal relationship with all things, replaced God as the master of the earth, and the whole world became a measurable image in the objectified view of man. But this capital, subjective person is an abstraction of metaphysical concepts, which appears as the fictional nature of human beings, and this person does not exist in reality.

　　This man was a great hero and noble sage in the classical period of the 17th century. He was a pioneer of enterprising and revolutionary who pursued freedom in the Enlightenment era of the 18th century. By the 19th century, this man became a capitalist and an explosive household. For money and interests, he sold his soul to the devil, and eventually became a slave to material desires. They use the power of the devil to exploit and exploit the weaker people in society and turn them into slaves. At the end of the 19th century, several types of people appeared, declining nobles, who were nobles of the Middle Ages, and now they were redundant people and losers eliminated by the times. The bourgeoisie who become the masters of society are the winners of this era. The petty citizens and the lower class of workers, they are the objects of oppression and exploitation of the bourgeoisie.

　　The declining aristocrats were indifferent and decadent, losing the courage and glory of their ancestors, the medieval knights, and the bourgeoisie broke out in moral depravity and shamelessness. They were slaves of the devil and the embodiment of material desires. The petty citizens and clerks who are oppressed by bourgeoisie and bureaucracy, personal dignity is deprived, and the mind is numb and still dies even if it is numb. This is the state of survival in modern people after "God died". Generally speaking, there are two types of people, the slave of the devil and the slave of the slave. This is an era when human subjectivity is stripped off, which is specifically manifested as the loss of human self and personality.

　　3

　　Since the Renaissance, people have been constantly fighting against various external forces for their own liberation. This struggle is reflected in people's continuous understanding of their own existence and their unremitting pursuit of the ideal of freedom. The former has become a realistic literary tradition dominated by "reflection theory" over the centuries, while the latter has formed a romantic literary tradition dominated by "expression theory". The two influence each other, forming various colorful literary schools in modern times.

　　If modern philosophy has always inherited the Platonian rational tradition formed in the late Greek period, in order to continuously subvert theological dogmas and religious doctrines of the Middle Ages, and developed a huge rational philosophical system from Descartes to Hegel, thus providing a rationalized theoretical basis for the development of science and promoting human understanding of the natural material world. Modern literature from Dante to Zola inherited the poetic tradition since ancient Greece Homer, in order to continuously reveal the destruction of human nature by feudal rule and capital exploitation, form a modern humanitarian tradition, and promote people's clear understanding of social reality.

Rousseau

　　But by the end of the 19th century, when people were almost completely liberated from medieval religious and feudal hierarchies, they were trapped in the devil's palm and capital rule, which was the alienation of the man who had just killed God and thought he was the subject of the world's master. This alienation was revealed by Marx in the socio-economic aspect, by Freud in the psychological consciousness, and by Nietzsche in the spiritual and cultural aspect. The pathology shown by modern people at the end of the 19th century continued to intensify in the 20th century that followed, and the result was the "human death" that died as the subject. What followed was the "decline of the West", the "end of history", and human civilization fell into an unprecedented crisis.

　　This crisis has spread far beyond Europe, where it originated, due to the global expansion of modern civilization, but has spread to the entire world. If the Middle Ages were the spirit of the Supreme God who dominated humanity, suppressed people's desire for material life in this world, overwhelmed human nature with divinity, and then replaced the daytime pursuit of the world with the other shore goal. In modern times, hundreds of years, the extremely evil devil controls human body, causing people's desire for material life to flood, destroy human nature with animal nature, and then replace the dark age of Eden on the other side with the present utopia.

　　4

　　Europeans were bound by God and the church in the Middle Ages, and their actions to fight for freedom were understandable. Because God has long given people the right to choose freely, but at the same time, people have to pay the price for the act of freely choosing. But people use their freedom to killEmperor cut off his connection with divinity and released the imprisoned devil, so he paid a heavy price. This price is that the person as the subject is alienated into the object, that is, "human death". In the modern discipline society where the "Twenty-Two Catch Rules" are everywhere, everyone is under the jurisdiction of the tree-shaped bureaucratic management system. In order to make daily bread, they must endure layers of oppression and exploitation and become a prisoner of freedom in a huge "technology-enterprise" society. In this strict tree-like social structure, individuals at all levels from tree roots to branches and leaves are encoded as a constantly running part. Personality and freedom are gradually destroyed and disappeared in the boring work day after day, and finally become one-dimensional people with double numbness of the spirit and flesh.

　　Such individuals live in a consumer society full of various material temptations, their minds are obscured by overwhelming commercial advertisements and movie posters, as well as endless practical news and entertainment scandals, and are sunk in the best-selling text imagination and virtual digital space of online games created by various super-real symbols. Modern people who are busy back and forth in extremely tired work and excessive relaxation leisure will eventually be unable to bear the mental and physical condition, which will lead to schizophrenia and various diseases, and will exhaust the work rewards earned by their youth and time in the high medical expenses. And when a person eventually loses his ability to work and social value, he will be ruthlessly eliminated by the consumer society into the unemployed army.

Dleuze

　　Schools are places for modern discipline society to cultivate various social service personnel and corporate employees in the future, and hospitals are specialized institutions to maintain people's social use value. "School-Enterprise-Hospital" forms a modern life survival system that integrates "production-use-maintenance". In such a tree-shaped society, all labor is for production and all production is for consumption. Commodity consumption stimulates people's various desires, which makes them more laborious and produce more goods. However, once this cycle has problems in the consumption process, it will lead to economic crisis and bankruptcy and unemployment. Everyone in a tree-shaped social structure will be affected to varying degrees.

Everyone living in such a society will be controlled and dominated by mysterious rules. Neither the roots, trunks, or branches and leaves are the center of the structure, and the real center is the structure itself. It can also be said that there is no center. It itself is closed, rigid and rigid, and it will govern everyone in a huge network. Modern people rely on the power of the devil to create such a tight cage for themselves and become their own prisoners. When a person betrays his soul to the devil, surrenders in the face of material temptation, and uses the power of the devil to pursue infinite sensory satisfaction and material desires, he enters the trap woven for his own desires. This is the trap of modernity, the abyss of nihilism, the huge mouth of the devil. The devil is the embodiment of the trinity of logic, reason and technology—a modern form of logic centering.

　　5

　　But we should see that the struggle with the devil has begun since the Renaissance. When philosophers began to reflect on metaphysics in the late 19th century, the field of literature and art had long begun to eliminate the influence of metaphysics through discovery of existence.

　　The Renaissance, ideological enlightenment and civilization reflection all began with the transformation of literature and art. From Dante, Shakespeare, Wu Cheng'en to Rousseau, Goethe, Cao Xueqin, from Lu Xun, Jois, Kafka Calvino, Kundera, and Wang Xiaobo, poets and novelists have been fighting hard against metaphysics. When Nietzsche and Heidegger realized that only art can save humanity from metaphysics, great poets and artists had fought against the devil for hundreds of years.

　　At the end of the 20th century, humans entered the postmodern landscape era, and the devil appeared in the form of a super-real maze. The true existence of human beings was once again obscured, and the human spirit and soul fell into the abyss of nihilism deeper than before. Therefore, we need a new ideological and cultural movement in the cultural fields of "literary and artistic innovation" as the beginning and "poetic residence" as the goal, including novels, poetry, prose, philosophy, film and television, painting, music, etc., to make the final struggle with the devil of nihilism.