Meaninglessness: The Solutions of Nietzsche, Freud and Rorty / Michael Casey

Imagine a world where the need for meaning no longer occurs; where we are no longer driven to ask why we exist, or how right differs from wrong. What would it be like to live in such a world? Could such a thing be possible?

The need for meaning and the experience of meaninglessness are an inescapable part of being human. Or so we assume. Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Richard Rorty take a different view. They see the waning of the Christian dispensation as an unprecedented opportunity to remake ourselves and to solve the problem of meaninglessness by abolishing the need for meaning.

In this important book, Michael Casey analyses the solutions that Nietzsche, Freud and Rorty provide for meaninglessness, and the new world they would bring into being. Far from being a futuristic fantasy, it may well be the emerging culture of the present.

“A world without meaning—a world without windows and doors—is uncomfortable, then stifling, and finally dehumanizing. Dissecting the modern academic penchant for declaring our world inherently ‘meaningless,’ Michael Casey points the way toward a truer, nobler humanism.” GEORGE WEIGEL: Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington DC.

“Fascinating . . . Casey’s critique of Rorty is one of the most pungent and compelling I’ve run across... It is also an enormous relief to find Freud discussed intelligently rather than reductively.” JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN: Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the
University of Chicago

"Casey writes with acuity and clarity which enables us to be taken with ease and with much illumination through a succession of complex and often ambiguous philosophical puzzles and stand-offs. He treats his writers and a mass of accompanying material with enviable skill and lucidity, and has made an important and original contribution to metaphysical analysis and exposition." MAX TEICHMANN, Formerly Senior Lecturer in Politics, Monash University

Michael Casey is a sociologist on the staff of the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, and Permanent Fellow in Sociology and Politics at the Australian campus of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family.

Read the review in News Weekly here.