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A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning

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Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning

#41

Post by gnaritas »

dublinben wrote: post #11
ebbv wrote: post #2

I've never read this guy's writing before but in this article I think he is way over-intellectualizing things. Meaning is whatever you want it to be. Some people find meaning in easing the suffering of others. Some people find meaning in raising children who will raise children, etc. even if in the fullness of time they will all cease to exist. Some people find meaning in really good sushi. It doesn't need to be any…

>Meaning is whatever you want it to be. That is basically the post-modern absurdist position on the meaning of life. Most people still believe in an external source of meaning (religion) that exists regardless of your personal opinion.

What most people believe has no bearing on the truth; truth isn't a democracy, so your point lacks meaning. His point, was truth, you make your own meaning in this world.

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning

#42

Post by ZenoArrow »

nibs wrote: post #13

Meaning is what you feel when you act and others benefit, regardless of the effect that action has on you. Happiness is when you benefit, regardless of who acted or why. In order to have a happy, meaningful life, you have to contribute to people who accept you and have those efforts reciprocated. Lots of smart people find survival in the selfish sense very trivially easy. If you do not seek out opportunities to contr…

> "In order to have a happy, meaningful life, you have to contribute to people who accept you and have those efforts reciprocated."

I'd say finding meaning is broader than that. "Life is what you make it" rings true for me. It's possible to live a fulfilling life as a hermit if that's what you prefer, it's not always about finding meaning through relationships with other humans.

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning

#43

Post by sliverstorm »

sjwright wrote: post #8

I've never had an issue valuing my life knowing that it has no eternally persistent meaning. A poor analogy, but I like to explain a finite life's meaning by asking if a movie is any less enjoyable knowing that it's going to end. Sure, eventually our existence is rendered meaningless but that doesn't make it meaningless for me, now. Call that an illusion if you want, but it's as concrete as anything you can prove. Be…

Besides, what would a "not-ultimately-meaningless" existence look like? I haven't heard any proposals that sound appealing to me.

Edward Jenner, perhaps?

If humanity fizzles out it's all moot, but if it lasts in perpetuity, Jenner's work will have done incalculable good, for the rest of time.

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning

#44

Post by ZenoArrow »

ctrlalt_g wrote: post #31
CompelTechnic wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ain't nothin' wrong with Hedonism.

There are many fundamental problems with hedonism, but hedonism avoids dealing with the problems because that's its nature.

What are the inherent problems with hedonism?

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning

#45

Post by ewzimm »

Ntrails wrote: post #38
ewzimm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a certian way of thinking, an externally persistent meaning is just an enforcement mechanism for slavery. When people talk about wanting to serve something bigger than themselves, they are implying that they aren't worth serving, that they can only achieve value by contributing to something, anything which is not like themselves. Is this personal devaulation necessary for a satisfying life? Another attitude is to…

>Selfish behavior is almost always short-sighted behavior. Only with the assumption that leaving the world in a "better" state (and bearing in mind opinions differ wildly on what that means) is the correct thing to do in terms of value/meaning. Like, to the extremist - violent pursuit of their ideology gives their lives meaning. Vilifying selfishness is a weird position to my mind.

I'm not trying to villify selfishness, only address the criticism that usually follows this kind of statement. People look at any philosophy that says love yourself first and say it's just embelished selfishness, self-worship, narcisissm. They imagine it might lead to a Mad Max style dystopia of perpetual war.

There's a time for destroying and rebuilding things, but the kind of hostility that people usually associate with selfishness like corporations prioritizing short-term profits over the well-being of their workers is more a symptom of lack of long-term planning. What I'm saying is that it's possible to love yourself and serve yourself while still making things better for everyone without any kind of contradiction in motivation.

If I'm the richest person in the world and everyone else is fighting for survival, I still have to live in that world and suffer the consequences. If I contribute to my environment, I'm improving my own situation. There's no need to choose one or the other.

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning

#47

Post by jonstaab »

Really enjoyed this. I love how practical, humble, and respectful (even of religions, which I really appreciate) uncompromising nihilists tend to be. I happen to be a Christian, so I could go on all day about meaning, but if I could say one thing, it's this:

We all die, and it's more than likely even humanity will die out as well (even if it's at the heat death of the universe). You've pretty much rejected the possibility of true objective meaning, focusing instead on various ways of measuring subjective meaning. But at the end of the day, anything times zero is zero, which is fine if you're a nihilist, I guess. The focus in this framework is on you and your "meaning graph", but cool thing about knowing an ultimate God, is that he's a connection to your graph (both investing in your meaning, and pulling from your meaning via worship), that sticks in a way nothing else can. Christians believe that for folks who don't know Jesus, nihilism is essentially true; Romans 4:17 says, God "gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist." From what I can see, He's the only thing/idea/person that has the potential to provide any kind of objective meaning, so however delusional religion may appear (and I'll admit lots of it is deluded), there's only one God, and he is "the rock that is higher than I".

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning

#48

Post by gglitch »

The older I get, the more deeply weird and mystical this whole range of questions feels to me. It only recently occurred to me, for example, while reading about Whitehead's process philosophy, that even if he was right, and that by learning about process philosophy I'd discovered a radically different and more energizing explanation for what the fundamental nature of reality is, it just wouldn't matter; I couldn't produce a single example of how it would materially affect my life or my relationships, except possibly by making me one of those cocktail party bores who constantly talks about how amazing process philosophy is. Maybe someone else could/did produce something "meaningful," out of process philosophy, but for me, getting excited about process philosophy turned out to be fairly meaningless even if the idea itself is possibly-meaningful. Corollary: this may be one of the principle advantages to being able to make art, and especially narrative art: if I were a novelist, I might have been able to boil these process philosophy ideas down into some more humanistic narratives that actually would have some impact on some people. But I'm not, so the conclusion here is, the search for meaning may just be a red herring for me. Unfortunately, it may actually not be; hence the weirdness of it all: how would I know the difference, and what would happen then? And weirdest of all: what is happening in my mind that makes all of these questions feel so urgent all the time?

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning

#49

Post by ewzimm »

sliverstorm wrote: post #40
ewzimm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a certian way of thinking, an externally persistent meaning is just an enforcement mechanism for slavery. When people talk about wanting to serve something bigger than themselves, they are implying that they aren't worth serving, that they can only achieve value by contributing to something, anything which is not like themselves. Is this personal devaulation necessary for a satisfying life? Another attitude is to…

Serving something bigger than yourself lets you be part of something greater than you could achieve on your own. No one man could have built the Golden Gate Bridge, or the IBM PC.

This isn't an argument against collaboration. It's an argument against the idea that you are inherently worthless until you contribute to something greater than yourself. We can work together because we feel meaningless on our own or we can work together because we are confident in our ability to contribute and appreciate that ability in others as well. They might lead to the same result, but one is starting from a position of shame and the other is starting from a position of self-respect.

Re: A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning

#50

Post by AndrewKemendo »

Nihilism is a question about meaning, not an answer, so this author starts off in the wrong place by trying to find a meaning - as most do who take the moniker of "Nihilist."

Seems like the author is taking the absurdist/existentialist solution of choosing what is valuable. In this case trying to tie a more complex understanding of individualist hedonism ("feeling" meaning) with some kind of combinatorial pluralistic hedonism.

Pretty simply this is just a more verbose version of the existentialist hedonistic answer to the question of meaninglessness.

To quote the author:

I'm almost certainly reinventing the wheel

Pretty typical really. Most people who truly embrace the absurd either don't seek meaning or have already killed themselves.

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