Is Attoe’s Neutral Nihilism Neutral enough?

Abstract

In this paper, I analyse and critique Aribiah David Attoe’s position in The Question of Life’s Meaning: An African Perspective. While highly sympathetic to his project, since I also defend an evaluatively neutral form of nihilism, I argue that the role of death and indifference within his theory is incompatible with thinking of nihilism in a neutral manner, and that his position wavers between the traditional view of Negative Nihilism and the Neutral Nihilism I recommend. In reconstructing his position, I begin by arguing, on historicist grounds, that the meaning-realism Attoe has adopted from Thaddeus Metz and others is implausible, and that Attoe’s account of meaning in life appears in a much more favourable light when construed as a project of conceptual engineering. After explaining why Attoe thinks that death establishes nihilism and undermines the significance of meaning in life, I argue that the only real connection between nihilism and death is a historical one. I conclude that Attoe’s neutrality about nihilism should not lead him to indifference about life, since it is only nihilism that he should be neutral about.