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“Nihilism is OK” is not OK

meaningness.com

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Re: “Nihilism is OK” is not OK

#21

Post by ToJans »

causasui wrote: post #14

I generally consider myself a nihilist, but only because it's the very last stop on the bus ride of my failed attempts at religion and other philosophies. I grew up very religious and when I lost my faith in my 20s, I tried to replace it w/ absurdism and existentialism, but couldn't shake the notion that lives deep in me that ultimately, even if humanity spreads across the cosmos and we're able to find meaning in our…

Might I suggest you to take a look at "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius?

It might be a long shot, not maybe you can find some peace in it...

Update: ...and if stoicism isn't your thing, maybe epicurism is...

Re: “Nihilism is OK” is not OK

#23

Post by Barrin92 »

WatchDog wrote: post #19
Barrin92 wrote: post #15

the article is purely didactic and pedagogical. Nihilism is bad for society, therefore it's not okay, without nihilism there's no morality, therefore it's not okay, and so on. It's a sort of finger-wagging attitude of a parent. This purely instrumental stance of viewing the world is basically just cope. A more mature and real approach is what you could call having an honest stance towards the world. If you come to th…

I think a lot of people would rather have a functioning society, built on a lie, than the alternative. I don't think Nietzsche was ever really able to come up with a great alternative to religion, and he certainly didn't seem happy about its end. > God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world…

But it's also not really functioning is it? Once you've eaten the forbidden fruit, taken the redpill (the movie one, not the political one), you can't go back, you're screwed.

Living on a lie that you know to solely exist for comfort is not the same as genuine belief, and it is fundamentally broke. If you just run back into the matrix and pretend it's real because it's pleasant, in a sense you've managed to be more nihilistic than the nihilist and in a way schizophrenic because you have to live something you actually know not to be authentic.

There is a lot of figures in our culture today who basically advocate this. People who declare themselves to be atheists but tell disoriented youth to just 'pretend to believe'. And it really has the quality of LARPing. It will not move anyone forward philosophically.

Re: “Nihilism is OK” is not OK

#24

Post by hug »

causasui wrote: post #14

I generally consider myself a nihilist, but only because it's the very last stop on the bus ride of my failed attempts at religion and other philosophies. I grew up very religious and when I lost my faith in my 20s, I tried to replace it w/ absurdism and existentialism, but couldn't shake the notion that lives deep in me that ultimately, even if humanity spreads across the cosmos and we're able to find meaning in our…

I'm an existentialist, not a nihilist. Not even at my core. I never, really, believed in God despite being the son of a religious couple and the grandfather of a preacher.

I don't know that there's a way to escape heat death either, but my answer to that is: So what? I don't see why that should make me a nihilist. Nor do I really see why deciding to try to prevent suffering through veganism should follow from any of the above.

Instead I'd rather continue to muddle along my path. Leveraging what ability I can to make enough money that I can do whatever it is I feel like doing and end up going to bed happy. And that involves eating delicious things and having good times with the ones I love and doing drugs and drinking and contributing to charity and whatever else.

It doesn't, really, solve any of my problems. It doesn't, in and of itself, make me 'happy'. But I'm okay with it.

What makes me happy is the drugs.

Re: “Nihilism is OK” is not OK

#25

Post by jm__87 »

nimvlaj30 wrote: post #3
jhanschoo wrote: post #2

I see a lot of declamation in this article and a lack of argument and reasoning behind those claims.

I know right, lots of opinionated statements and very little to back it up. Here is just one paragraph in the intro: > Nihilism makes you miserable and ineffective. Why? > That is not OK. Why? > It also erodes our cultures’ and societies’ ability to improve lives and tackle urgent problems. Why? > That is also not OK. Why? ---- None of this is answered in the rest of the blog post.

I am not an expert in philosophy by any stretch so feel free to poke holes in what I'm about to say, but I somewhat agree with the author's points here, assuming we take nihilism to mean "to both believe and feel nothing has meaning". I think the author may have the causation in the first point backwards though. To truly feel like nothing has any meaning, I think you must first be quite miserable - I doubt anyone first chooses nihilism and then becomes miserable because of that choice. Imagine all of your relationships, your career and all of the other things people usually care about feel meaningless - you would probably be miserable and depressed. It is one thing to believe that life is objectively devoid of meaning. It is a different thing to subjectively feel that nothing in life has meaning.

If you accept that a true nihilist has to be depressed, I would agree that the third point follows. Acknowledging a depressed individual's viewpoint that it is okay to feel everything is meaningless - that this viewpoint is not indicative of a mental health issue that should be addressed - would probably erode societies ability to improve the lives of depressed individuals (assuming improvement means they suffer less).

As to whether other people's suffering matters to you or not, I suppose that depends on the individual. The author seems to think it is not ok for people to suffer, but obviously not everyone would agree with them here.

Re: “Nihilism is OK” is not OK

#26

Post by WatchDog »

Barrin92 wrote: post #23
WatchDog wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of people would rather have a functioning society, built on a lie, than the alternative. I don't think Nietzsche was ever really able to come up with a great alternative to religion, and he certainly didn't seem happy about its end. > God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world…

But it's also not really functioning is it? Once you've eaten the forbidden fruit, taken the redpill (the movie one, not the political one), you can't go back, you're screwed. Living on a lie that you know to solely exist for comfort is not the same as genuine belief, and it is fundamentally broke. If you just run back into the matrix and pretend it's real because it's pleasant, in a sense you've managed to be more n…

> There is a lot of figures in our culture today who basically advocate this. People who declare themselves to be atheists but tell disoriented youth to just 'pretend to believe'. And it really has the quality of LARPing. It will not move anyone forward philosophically.

I think you can come up with your own (stretched) interpretation of Christianity that doesn't require belief in the divine, and I think that approach, taking an existing societal value system that works pretty well, makes a lot more sense than trying to build a new one from scratch and getting everyone to buy into it.

Personally speaking, I used to be somewhat of a militant atheist. I was really engaged with the whole new athiest movement of 00's.

But I've distanced myself from that, I certainly don't try anymore to persuade people away from their belief. I don't describe myself as a Christian, although I do think that western society is built upon it's values.

Maybe that's LARPing, inauthentic, not philosophically rigorous, but it's good enough for me.

Re: “Nihilism is OK” is not OK

#27

Post by benjaminjosephw »

causasui wrote: post #14

I generally consider myself a nihilist, but only because it's the very last stop on the bus ride of my failed attempts at religion and other philosophies. I grew up very religious and when I lost my faith in my 20s, I tried to replace it w/ absurdism and existentialism, but couldn't shake the notion that lives deep in me that ultimately, even if humanity spreads across the cosmos and we're able to find meaning in our…

Individualism is a closed system. Any attempt to find meaning in isolation as a lone consciousness is subject to the same kind of force as the entropy of closed physical systems. It becomes almost impossible to pattern match on significance because the dataset is too small and the variance in factors that might influence our thinking is too great. All Nihilists are focused only on their own existence because they fail to see reality as having meaning beyond the meaning they can individually make sense of.

I think we can only ever really understand ourselves as humans in relation to other humans. Our individual ideas about who we are can only form in context of our ideas about who other people are and in relationship with them. This is an open system where meaning is an emergent property. Life create meaning, order and structure in the context of complex systems. This is a force as powerful and pervasive as entropy but much less understood.

Meaning exists outside of ourselves.

Re: “Nihilism is OK” is not OK

#28

Post by rramadass »

croes wrote: post #5

"In popular use, the term commonly refers to forms of existential nihilism, according to which life is without intrinsic value, meaning, or purpose." So the whole post argues against something that most probably isn't even meant.

Exactly! The word "Nihilism" has so many aspects to its meaning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism) that the author's choice of one, just smacks of intellectual laziness. He/She has a preconceived notion against which they trot out the same old untenable arguments (for deriving "Meaning") which have been effectively demolished with the rise of the "Scientific Age".

Re: “Nihilism is OK” is not OK

#29

Post by akvadrako »

jhbadger wrote: post #13
stale2002 wrote: post #4

Its not really clear what the author is arguing. I am not sure why if someone simply believes that they cannot prove, with the fundamental aspects of reality, that there is provable "meaning", that this automatically means that such a person will slide into some sort of existential "Catatonia". Whats wrong with just accepting that we could have unprovable axioms, that we simply take for granted? For example, I think…

A lot of "moral" codes can simply be justified by practicality. I think killing should be illegal, not because of some lofty ideas of the sacredness of human life, but because I don't want to be killed by somebody else. Same argument against theft -- I don't want my stuff robbed.

Most commonly accepted morals come down to one thing: they contribute to the survival of that moral.

Societies with a moral against killing thrive and spread compared to those without.

Re: “Nihilism is OK” is not OK

#30

Post by gremloni »

Of course nihilism is bad for society but it’s the undeniable truth. Meaning is a made up word. It’s a random cocktail of hormones as a reaction to a story you tell yourself.

I don’t even know why people need a “meaning” or purpose to life. Just waking up and existing is incredibly fun.

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