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Born for opposition: Byron and British nihilism

Charles LaChance, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Abstract

In his Treatise of Human Nature, the eighteenth-century British skeptic David Hume writes that he is "ready to reject all belief and reasoning." He opines no "opinion" of his day is "more probable or likely than another." His enlightenment skepticism conceives the birth of modern nihilism, an event that redefines intellectual poetry and prose. Most notably, Lord Byron's verse masterpiece, Don Juan, fulfills Hume's discovery and creation of skeptical nihilism. Don Juan is the world's first instance of mature, unmitigated nihilism. In this work that reverberates with Hume's violent doubt, Byron insists that each "philosophy" or "system eats another up." He avows that he "know (s) nought" and "admit (s) " naught. Like the neoclassical thinker Hume, the romantic bard Byron pushes skepticism over the edge. In many poems and in Don Juan especially, Byron's chaotic doubt challenges and disables a wide array of major belier-systems or ideologies. This philosophical subversion is nihilism: the destabilization of all traditional morals and beliefs, with the implication that no universal or objective basis is knowable by which any "system" can be ultimately justified and privileged. In Don Juan, then, Byron voices in order to subvert seven ideologies central to the Western tradition: Roman Catholic Christianity, Protestant Christianity, sentimentalism, liberalism, rationalism, heroics or chivalry, and materialism or naturalism. Although naturalism predominates in numerous episodes of Don Juan, at times even this "system" is undercut or "eaten up" by opposing ideologies like Christianity and liberalism. Likewise, in other episodes, Christianity, liberalism, heroics, sentimentalism or rationalism is "consumed" by naturalism. Consequently, Byron's contradictory themes of naturalism, liberalism, and so on do devour each other in a kind of intellectual cannibalism that delights in conflict and opposition. Most controversially, in Don Juan, Byron's governing tropes of feminine sexual rapacity and the vagina serve as metaphors for his nihilistic opposition. Yes--as he confesses and boasts in his masterpiece--Byron is "born for opposition."

Subject Area

British and Irish literature|Philosophy|European history

Recommended Citation

LaChance, Charles, "Born for opposition: Byron and British nihilism" (1995). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9614991.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9614991

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