[HN Gopher] The uncanny absence of nihilism
___________________________________________________________________
The uncanny absence of nihilism
Author : feross
Score : 110 points
Date : 2021-08-14 04:47 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (meaningness.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (meaningness.com)
| acituan wrote:
| I wish author got out of their self-referentiality a bit before
| going deep with their presuppositions into a book.
|
| > "Nihilizing" is a thing we all do at times: refusing to
| recognize meanings that are right in front of us.
|
| If there is a _refusal_ of recognition, it implies a pre-
| processing stage of estimating a lack of payoff for the cognitive
| work in that area, which itself is requires a meaning system we
| made that evaluation from! This is not nihilizing, it is merely
| not committing cognitive suicide by trying to make sense of
| _everything_ indiscriminately with a limited information
| processing capacity. By their definition, only a "god" would not
| be nihilizing.
|
| > Committing to nihilism, deciding that you "are a nihilist," is
| unusual, and typically a big deal. It's a conversion experience,
| and the adopted identity may persist for years. It's uncanny that
| you can go that long without noticing that there isn't an -ism.
| That's a feature of the peculiar cognitive distortions nihilism
| produces as a stance.
|
| Author asserts "true nihilism" is merely an existential state,
| and not a system. True nihilism is not a useful category though;
| dead matter would be the most "true nihilists" while a breathing
| human would always have a pre-supposition of meaning as they
| continued to breathe, since they are meaning making agents
| _strongly_ embedded to their bodies and within their environment.
| This is not a very useful way of diving things up.
|
| The pragmatic existence of nihilism is not a pure empty state; it
| is not even throwing noise to our meaning making machines, it is
| throwing "anti-meaning" patterns that take the deconstructing and
| dismantling to an extreme without any goal to put things back
| better. Certain post-modern thought can both _perform_ and
| _propagate_ nihilism in this way pretty well; an _assertion_ of
| non-existence of any meta-narrative that joins all narratives
| while scrambling all the puzzle pieces you 've tried to piece
| together and then throwing them into an acid vat as a proof is an
| -ism.
|
| Peculiarly, author is also a nihilist in the -ism sense; in
| addition to this article, their "No cosmic plan" article is
| subtitled "Great confusions about meaningness stem from the
| mistaken assumption that there must be some sort of eternal
| ordering principle.", or "Nihilism: denying meaning" with
| "Nihilism is the wrong idea that nothing is meaningful, based on
| the accurate realization that there is no external, eternal
| source of meaning."
|
| Those are serious (and in my opinion misleadingly incomplete)
| assumptions on first principles that also happens to be the WIP
| chapters of their book.
| smitty1e wrote:
| > And the nihilists they discuss are all fictional! They review
| novels that feature supposedly nihilistic characters. These are
| storytellers' attempts to imagine what it would be like to
| accomplish nihilism. A realistic portrayal would be boring and
| depressing: catatonia.
|
| Maybe.
|
| If philosophy is noodling about the past, present and future,
| rejecting philosophy as a nihilist would be focusing on the
| present tense.
|
| That is, living like an animal.
|
| Which gets at the point that ours is a most nihilistic age.
|
| "Nihilism: you're soaking in it." => https://youtu.be/dzmTtusvjR4
| [deleted]
| guerrilla wrote:
| > That is, living like an animal.
|
| Not sure why you'd assume animals don't have memory and
| predictive ability.
| xorfish wrote:
| Humans live like animals. Homo Sapiens is part of the group
| animals.
| smitty1e wrote:
| There isn't much going on past the next winter, no?
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Yes, it seems to me more like Nihilism would lead to Hedonism
| as much as catatonia.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| Author props up a straw nihilism so restrictive such that, if one
| held it, one would never communicate that fact (or anything else)
| to anyone.
|
| Author is then surprised that it has no proponents among
| academics.
|
| The reference to uncanniness is also kind of strange. That has a
| pretty specific meaning in philosophy (starting with Freud) which
| doesn't seem to apply here.
|
| Oh, well. The rest of the book might be an interesting read.
| floe wrote:
| I think the target audience is 'people who believe that they
| have to believe the strawman', if that makes sense.
|
| Pointing out that certain statements are self-defeating and (by
| definition) have no proponents can help someone escape a
| dangerous psychological process ('stance').
|
| As a personal example, when I deconverted from evangelical
| Christianity, I was disturbed for a long time by the idea that
| I now had no reason to act morally. Even though that's
| obviously self-defeating (being disturbed was in itself a sign
| of morality), I didn't realize that for quite some time.
| nathias wrote:
| as a philosopher I find this blog offensive
| danschumann wrote:
| How could one come to the conclusion to be nihilistic? They would
| need to experience enough, and then say "the meaning of all the
| events of my life led to believe there is no meaning". So, to
| come to that conclusion is a paradox, because reaching that
| conclusion is done through assigning "no" meaning.
| guerrilla wrote:
| You might get something out of this [1] article, especially
| it's section on nihilism but the preceding sections on
| requirements for their being meaning will probably be helpful
| to you. Who I really recommend is Camus and sartre who wrote
| quite a bit about it and how to live with it.
|
| 1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life-meaning/#Nihi
|
| 2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/camus/
|
| 3. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/
| acituan wrote:
| It is a failure in continuation from the ground of being to a
| view on the totality of the existence.
|
| No one has a problem finding meaning in the minutiae of their
| here and now; they avoid pain, they feed themselves, they
| breathe. They conform to the meaning of the signals (mostly
| pain) that demand we do these things. At this level, everything
| is meaningful.
|
| Then we scale up temporally (longer spans of times) and
| spatially (wider spans of space); we can think about tomorrow,
| we find it meaningful to go to grocery store and get our
| favorite ice cream etc.
|
| A couple of scale ups later sometimes, something wrong happens
| and we can find ourselves in the ultimate scale; totality of
| universe; (assumed) "creation" and "death" of the universe.
| Even only from a computation perspective; we don't fully
| 'understand' this scale, our intelligibility is limited in
| comparison to the 'objects' at hand (hyperobjects if you will);
| we're using symbolic processing to make sense of it but we
| can't frame the ultimate frame, we can't compress this
| information very accurately (yet).
|
| At that point some folks show up with their propositions that
| are harder to refute because everything is hard to compute to
| begin with. They shine light to certain possibilities (light
| bringer pun is intended), they conflate current state of not
| knowing with unknowability, or worse non-existence. They
| conflate our intelligence with intelligibility of the universe.
| They go "there is no single organizing principle, because that
| sounds a lot like god" and can't explain how multiple
| organizing principles can share the same space if they are not
| bound by a common one. They claim pure stochasticity and ignore
| the physical reality we have been conforming to through
| evolution; or principled approximation to its first principles;
| that we _can_ compress reality into formulas, while noise
| really wouldn 't compress. They have no good idea on how to
| relate to the existence of existence. Nihilism is the result of
| such cognitive distortions at this level.
|
| The problem is not actually about being at the top of the
| scale, it is to omit the continuity from our daily scale to it;
| it is skipping the intermediary steps that mislead us. That's
| why they can conceptualize complete stochasticity at top while
| perform perfect faith in meaningfulness of gravity. In
| neoplatonic tradition this is countered with practicing the
| anagogic ascent, in stoic traditions with the view from above
| practices.
|
| In modern times however we only have DIY spirituality without
| proper grounding in _what have been tried before_. Throw some
| McMindfulness, read a translation of Nietzche, performatively
| worship the god of market normativity and you 're already
| confused enough. Blog belongs to a person who has "founded,
| managed, grown, and sold a successful biotech informatics
| company.", this is their hobby (as they admit) and bunch of
| people talk about it. This is how new nihilists are made.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| causality0 wrote:
| That depends on how you define meaning and significance. A
| perfectly rational machine might decide that since the universe
| is going to run down and die a cold death regardless of
| anything the human race might do, everything is meaningless.
| Fortunately I'm not a perfectly rational being and I don't get
| a choice about whether temporary happiness and prosperity mean
| something.
| guerrilla wrote:
| It's not necessary that something ending implies that it is
| meaningless. A piece of pie can taste good even if you're
| going to run out of it. I'm not saying there's a meaning to
| life, I'm just saying that's not a reason that there isn't.
| croes wrote:
| Did you find any meaning in all of this. It's always the same
| circle of birth, reproduction, death until the end of mankind,
| nature, earth, sun, universe. Whatever comes first.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| We've got agency to decide which. And maybe, trillions of
| years in the future, we discover a way to reverse even
| entropy.
| pixl97 wrote:
| But why does having infinity suddenly give meaning?
|
| I like the following take on infinity
|
| https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-number.html
|
| >P.S. Writing this post made me much less likely to pick
| "infinity" as my answer to this week's dinner table
| question. Imagine living a Graham's number amount of
| years.8 Even if hypothetically, conditions stayed the same
| in the universe, in the solar system, and on Earth forever,
| there is no way the human brain is built to withstand spans
| of time like that. I'm horrified thinking about it. I think
| it would be the gravest of grave errors to punch infinity
| into the calculator--and this is from someone who's openly
| terrified of death. Weirdly, thinking about Graham's number
| has actually made me feel a little bit calmer about death,
| because it's a reminder that I don't actually want to live
| forever--I do want to die at some point, because remaining
| conscious for eternity is even scarier. Yes, death comes
| way, way too quickly, but the thought "I do want to die at
| some point" is a very novel concept to me and actually
| makes me more relaxed than usual about our mortality.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Is there some possible world where there is meaning?
| [deleted]
| mmazing wrote:
| I mean, wouldn't a true nihilist simply not care to spread
| awareness of their position?
|
| Maybe there are plenty and they just don't give a shit.
| __s wrote:
| Yep. Lots of philosophies which by their nature aren't
| successful on the basis of memetic evolution preferring ideas
| that encourage their hosts to propagate them more. Rather than
| being actively taught they're something which either have to be
| observed or deduced
|
| Like minimalism. Sure, there's the minimalism that's being
| sold, but that's some mutant strain made to be able to market
|
| The Index Card is a bit amusing
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Index_Card where it's rooted
| on something free (the content of the index card), yet somehow
| they've tried to expand on it enough to be able to have
| something to sell
|
| I think this also shows up with corrupt people reaching places
| of power, where you can't blame them so much as the power
| structure selecting corrupt people for its own self propagation
| (the idea that "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand
| Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding
| It" can arise without the man being willfully ignorant when
| there was a selection process for someone capable of that
| ignorance)
| mmazing wrote:
| I think another good example is psychopaths.
|
| There are plenty floating around, but it's sort of the prime
| feature of their behavior - they really only care about
| themselves. So, why would they write a book to give society a
| glimpse?
|
| Their motives simply don't align with that goal, because it's
| the literal definition of their behavior.
| [deleted]
| mrweasel wrote:
| A few of the open Danish nihilist declared their intention to
| run for parliament a few years back, with The Nihilists People
| Party (or something like that). The thing is, you need around
| 20.000 signatures to get you party listed at the next election.
| The Nihilists party knew this, but didn't really cared to
| collect the signatures.
| simonh wrote:
| Apathetics of the world unite!
|
| Or not, whatever.
| cryptica wrote:
| Nihilism can be a positive force in people's lives.
|
| Nihilism allows me to not take anything too seriously because I
| know that nothing is important and everything will end
| eventually.
|
| Surprisingly, it can also be a source of altruism. For example, I
| know that once I'm dead, I will be nothing. My consciousness will
| be destroyed permanently and all my achievements will cease to be
| my own since I will have no connection at all to the universe or
| my former identity. Any trace I leave behind in the universe
| might as well have been left behind my someone else who is not
| me.
|
| The fact that when we die, we all end up in exactly the same
| state of absolute nothingness gives me compassion towards fellow
| humans and other conscious creatures. We are all the same in the
| end; nothing.
|
| It also helps me to enjoy life more because from a nihilist
| perspective, every second of my life seems to defy the foundation
| of my belief system. Even though I know consciously that this
| sense of meaning is just an illusion in my primal brain.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> Any trace I leave behind in the universe might as well have
| been left behind my someone else who is not me
|
| You are making a value judgement there. Rookie mistake in this
| nihilism business.
| georgewsinger wrote:
| > Nihilism can be a positive force in people's lives.
|
| Also another value judgment. Two rookie mistakes.
|
| OP seems to be implicitly arguing that nihilism is morally
| justified (incoherent) because it can cause altruistic
| behavior (but who cares, if you're a nihilist?).
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| Good catch.
| Notkel wrote:
| If value judgement is incorrect. What is the proper way to
| judge a system of thinking?
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| It doesn't matter.
| [deleted]
| boogusbdg wrote:
| Existence the way you put it, is quite beautiful like that,
| isn't it. The senselessness as a fundamental feature of cold
| and beautiful austerity.
| farmerstan wrote:
| That must be exhausting.
| fzzzy wrote:
| This is a big lebowski quote about nihilism.
|
| "Ulle doesn't care about anything, he's a nihilist." "Ooh, that
| must be exhausting."
|
| Definitely a good movie to watch if you are interested in
| nihilism. (Spoilers) Nothing matters in that movie.
| krylon wrote:
| The first time I watched the Big Lebowski, I hated it and
| found it really annoying, but I have re-watched it plenty of
| times by now, and it does get better every time. A Classic.
|
| EDIT: Also, thank you for pointing that out, I would not have
| caught that reference otherwise. I think it's a sign I need
| to re-watch The Big Lebowski again.
| georgewsinger wrote:
| Here's a simple proof that moral nihilism is false.
|
| 1. Suppose moral nihilism is true.
|
| 2. Then it would be incorrect to think that boiling a human child
| alive for pleasure is morally wrong.
|
| 3. But clearly (2) is false.
|
| 4. Therefore (1) is false.
|
| You might wonder how we can know (3). The answer is that (3)
| appears to us to be true, _and_ we have no good reason to think
| it is not true. This has been called the "Principle of
| Phenomenal Conservatism" in philosophy books, and it's the same
| principle that justifies our belief in physical/scientific facts
| (e.g., that tables exist, or that evolution is true). But it
| _also_ implies that moral facts exist as well!
|
| Of course, sometimes things appear to us to be true, but we
| eventually discover reasons strong enough override those
| appearances. For example, if you stick a pencil in a cup of
| water, it appears to us that the pencil is broken in half. But
| through scientific rigor, we have learned that this appearance is
| just an illusion. But this is not the case with (3). It both
| appears us that it is wrong to cause needless harm to children
| for fun, _and_ any reason we might consider to doubt this fails
| to be strong enough to persuade us otherwise.
| Retric wrote:
| Your argument boils down to saying I believe something
| therefore I am correct. Which isn't an argument as someone else
| saying they have a different belief provides exactly as much
| evidence. In other words the mere existence of nihilism
| inherently disproves your argument.
|
| Also, that's really not why scientific facts are considered
| true. Science is based on positive evidence as in a prediction
| is made and it turns out the prediction was accurate. Simply
| presupposing something is true isn't considered evidence that
| it is true.
| georgewsinger wrote:
| > Your argument boils down to saying I believe something
| therefore I am correct.
|
| No it doesn't. It boils down to something _appearing_ to be
| true to me (or "us") _and_ there being actually no good
| reasons to think that it is not true.
|
| > Also, that's really not why scientific facts are considered
| true. Science is based on positive evidence as in a
| prediction is made and it turns out the prediction was
| accurate.
|
| You're wrong, and here is why: first I would ask you what
| counts as positive evidence that a prediction made was
| verified. You would give me some theoretical explanation
| (depending upon the context), and _then_ I would keep asking
| you more detailed questions about your explanation.
| Eventually I would ask a question that you wouldn 't really
| be able to answer, other than "look, it just _appears_ to me
| that such-and-such counts as predictive evidence! " (or
| something like that).
|
| So for example if we had a scientific theory that all red
| cars cannot exceed 100mph, and you said "that's not true, for
| look at my red car going 105mph!", I could ask you "well,
| yeah, your speedometer reads 105mph, but how do you know
| you're actually going faster than 100mph?" You would give me
| an explanation about how speedometers work, and I would say
| "well yeah, but how do you know that theory can be
| generalized to this particular case <blah blah blah>".
| Eventually after this chain of questioning you would be left
| relying on some sort of mere appearance being true. And of
| course that is rational. The problem is that this chain of
| reasoning can also be applied to moral theories as well.
|
| > Simply presupposing something is true isn't considered
| evidence that it is true.
|
| I'm not merely presupposing something is true. I'm observing
| that something first appears to be true, asserting there are
| no good reasons to think it is not true, and _then_ supposing
| it is true.
|
| Contrast these two cases:
|
| 1. It appears to me that 2+2 = 4, and I can think of no good
| reasons at this moment to doubt otherwise. I guess,
| therefore, that 2+2 really is 4.
|
| 2. I shall pressuppose that 2+2=5!
|
| You're acting as if I'm taking the strategy of (2), but I am
| actually taking the strategy of (1). And in fact you are as
| well. Here's a really simple way to see why.
|
| Suppose you thought of some argument that showed that the
| Principle of Phenomenal Conservativism was false. But why
| should you, after pondering that argument, believe that
| argument? Because it _appears_ to you to be true, and you can
| give no plausible retort for why it 's false. Thus in
| "refuting" the Principle of Phenomenal Conservatism, you must
| use it! This shows that it is self-defeating to argue against
| the Principle.
|
| The Principle of Phenomenal Conservatism has to be true for
| other reasons as well. For example, the following are all
| statements that I'm sure you agree are true:
|
| 1. 1 = 1.
|
| 2. The law of non-contradiction is true.
|
| 3. Empirical theories which make testable predictions are
| more likely to be true than empirical theories which can't.
|
| 4. The keyboard in front of you actually exists.
|
| But why do you believe these statements? You won't be able to
| insert some other empirical theory to justify them. They are
| instead just sort of raw appearances that we suppose are true
| (because we can't think of any good reasons to doubt them).
| We make use of our sensory instruments to do this (e.g, our
| eyes, our non-moral intuitions, etc). But this is exactly
| like me asserting that "it's wrong to torture children for
| fun", which relies on a moral intuition that it is wrong
| (plus the fact that we can't think of any good reason to
| think otherwise).
|
| All of this is to say: you can't be a scientific realist
| without also being a moral realist at the same time, or at
| least if you can, it's because of some argument I haven't yet
| considered :]
| Retric wrote:
| > Eventually you are left relying on mere appearances. And
| of course that is rational.
|
| No, I am relying on a prediction of appearances. If I
| predict an instrument will show blue I don't need to go
| through anything below that level. It's now on someone else
| to make a different prediction _and show new evidence._
|
| > Contrast these two cases:
|
| There is zero difference between them 2 + 2 = 5! could be
| true. 2 + 2 = 4 could be true, or they could both be false
| and 2 + 2 = 7.629.
|
| We define math as things that follow from assumptions. 2 +
| 2 alone doesn't have a definite answer, it only has a
| specific answer in a specific context. We generally don't
| need to list the underlying assumptions to build a chain
| like 2 + 2 = 2 + 1 + 1 = 3 + 1 = 4, but that's simply based
| on an assumed context.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Imagine that we are lobsters having this conversation, and they
| got to
|
| 2) Then it would be incorrect to think that boiling a lobster
| child alive for pleasure is morally wrong.
|
| They would probably get through 3 and 4, but many humans would
| not agree with them. So the proof is not universally
| applicable.
| georgewsinger wrote:
| I actually side with the lobsters in this example (e.g., I
| believe it is wrong to boil a lobster alive for the mere
| sensory enjoyment of eating the lobster). But yes, many other
| humans don't.
|
| But that doesn't mean there aren't moral facts. It could
| instead mean that either the humans or the lobsters are
| wrong, and there is a good argument that one of them hasn't
| considered as to why they are wrong.
|
| If you disagree, then you must not believe that there are
| scientific facts either? After all, two separate people can
| disagree over which scientific theory is true/best fits the
| evidence (which is a process that boils down to asking which
| theories best comport with our raw sensory appearances, BTW).
| But if mere disagreement implies that there can't be truths
| in a domain, then this would mean there are no scientific
| facts, which is of course absurd.
|
| It's a much more plausible position to think that there are
| controversial scientific theories which we are less certain
| of, that one (or both) parties to scientific disagreements
| are just mistaken, but that there are after all scientific
| facts. Similarly, it is much more plausible position to think
| that there are controversial moral theories which we are less
| certain of, that one (or both) parties to moral disagreements
| are just mistaken, but that there are after all moral facts.
| HKH2 wrote:
| Not the GP, but I don't see a problem with rejecting
| scientific absolutism as readily as moral absolutism. Is
| not skepticism part of science?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| This isn't convincing because the power of the argument comes
| from conflating different ways in which things are true.
|
| Intuitively some moral claims are 'true' yes. But they're
| psychologically or socially true. All normative statements are
| only 'true' or 'false' to us in a cultural sense, they're not
| claims about facts in the world. That's simple to show. Proof
| to me that your moral claim is true in the same way you proof a
| scientific fact, you can't, in fact there's no way to even make
| sense 'where' that truth or false property of any moral claim
| is supposed to be located, or how one would go about proving
| it.
|
| Moral nihilism is not the claim that authority or intuitive
| values or consensus does not exist, moral nihilism is the claim
| that there are no moral values _as such_ , that there is no
| finality or meaning to them beyond the one we imprint on it.
|
| The moral nihilist may be perfectly fine with accepting that
| boiling children is wrong the same way not paying your car
| insurance or cheating at chess is wrong, the world's a more
| orderly place if people aren't going around boiling kids. What
| the moral nihilist denies is that this has any meaning beyond
| that conventional sense, that it is simply a useful fiction.
| Josteniok wrote:
| For #2 if we say "Then it would be incorrect to think that X is
| morally wrong" is there an "X" that is always true in all
| places and for all times? I ask because "boiling a human child
| alive for pleasure" seems to be safely chosen to be something
| that everyone in all places ought to be able to agree is wrong
| but there have been other chosen Xs at other times in our own
| culture that have changed and are now no longer considered
| "morally wrong". This would seem to indicate that the X is
| subjective. How subjective is it? What is it a function of?
| georgewsinger wrote:
| Scientists disagree with each other on whether scientific
| theories are true. In fact the history of science is the
| history of overturning well-established theories for better
| theories that best fit the body of available evidence.
|
| But it would be absurd to think that scientific disagreement
| implies that there are _no_ scientific facts. Analogously, it
| is absurd to think that moral disagreement implies that are
| _no_ moral facts.
| Josteniok wrote:
| I happen to agree with you. But I still wonder, can we
| figure out what these moral facts are and what the criteria
| are for them or are they worse than the n-body problem
| referred to in another front page article and impossibly
| complex with no closed solution?
|
| I don't like the answer of "Because this X is obviously
| true" since the "obviously true" part changes so much. Do
| we think that morals that are "obviously true" are
| proceeding forward, like science, and are based on an
| increasing body of knowledge? There certainly doesn't seem
| to be the same kind of rigor applied to moral knowledge as
| there is to scientific knowledge.
| georgewsinger wrote:
| 1. Yes, we can use our moral intuitions + philosophical
| analysis (just as we use our sense data + scientific
| analysis in science).
|
| 2. I believe we can resolve a lot of moral questions, as
| well as a lot of scientific questions. Some might be out
| of our grasp (just as some scientific theories might be
| out of our grasp of testing, given technological
| limitations over time, or what have you).
|
| 3. There is evidence that we have an increasing body of
| moral knowledge (aka "moral progress"). For example, 500
| years ago it would have been an insane position to think
| that a society should be governed by a non-King, that
| slavery was unjustified, that women should have the right
| to work in all fields, etc. If you zoom out, moral
| positions across all cultures on earth seem to be
| converging to something. This is evidence that that
| something is actual moral truth.
|
| 4. Things seeming "obvious" to one but not "obvious" to
| another is just moral disagreement. But moral
| disagreement doesn't imply moral nihilism, just as
| scientific disagreement doesn't imply scientific
| nihilism. All we can do is keep better watch over our
| moral intuitions, explore counter-arguments/thought
| experiments, etc, and try to converge to reflective
| equilibrium/moral truth. Just as all we can do in science
| is to make better/simpler theories that best fit our
| sense data, and keep conducting scientific experiments.
| HKH2 wrote:
| As far as I see, Nietzsche was about embodying meaning - doing!
| Which is why he was an existentialist.
|
| I think people are far more likely to declare themselves as
| depressed or even antinatalist than nihilist.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Nihilism is probably not a very helpful evolutionary strategy for
| an individual or group so no surprises there isn't much of it
| around.
|
| Better to believe in anything however pointless and get doing
| something productive.
| im3w1l wrote:
| I love how this basically turns the paperclip optimizer on its
| head. Traditionally "optimizing paperclips" is seen as a
| metaphor for some useful industrial process and taking over the
| universe is seen as a catastrophe. But your argument is
| basically that humans are in the same situation except for us
| the paperclips are pointless and their only purpose is to
| motivate us to take over the universe.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence
| weatherlight wrote:
| Our consciousness is the "parent of all horrors, an
| evolutionary defect that has doomed us to a futile search for
| meaning while our survival hinges on the response to pain, the
| fear of death, and the instinct to procreate. Awareness of this
| absurdity pushes us to shut it out, trapping us on a proverbial
| hamster wheel where we busy ourselves with whatever will keep
| those thoughts away--religion, hedonism, even the distractions
| of art and music.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I consider myself a nihilist in that I take a side eye whenever
| anything is described as "truly" something. I find it much easier
| to see the world with no universal meaning and instead its
| something we each find personal meaning in. Most (if not all)
| things are just concepts. No tables exist, there's just a lot of
| matter arranged in a way that fits my concept of a table and I
| have breakfast on that.
|
| People often find the term nihilist detestable though. It seems
| like most people get frustrated or anxious thinking this way.
|
| That said it _is_ mildly frustrating to talk about. The arguments
| on both sides are very unconvincing to the other.
| Borrible wrote:
| Isn't absence the default for nothingness?
| drops wrote:
| Did not read past the first bold paragraph. 'Nihilo' means "out
| of nothing, nothing is produced"; why does the author think that
| nihilism needs to have a famous proponent? A linguistic quibble
| far off the mark.
|
| UPD: I tried reading further, and it did not take long for the
| author to convince the readers that he is an idiot.
|
| Quote: "Committing to nihilism, deciding that you "are a
| nihilist," is unusual, and typically a big deal." No, it's not.
| Most people in this world are in search of meaning: it is
| probably the most common source of suffering in the modern times
| - feeling lost, not having a purpose, etc. The fact that people
| don't brand themselves as nihilists doesn't mean that they
| aren't.
|
| Cue the downvotes from pseudo-intellectuals.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| Most people aren't nihilists, in so much as the fact they're
| searching for meaning by your own admission. If they were
| nihilists they wouldn't be looking. Most people believe there
| is or should be inherent meaning in things.
|
| You're getting downvotes because you yourself put out a surface
| level thought that is easily demonstrably wrong with half a
| second of thought and then insulted people, nothing to do with
| pseudo intellectualism.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _The fact that people don 't brand themselves as nihilists
| doesn't mean that they aren't._
|
| ... Not a rebuttal to:
|
| > _Committing to nihilism, deciding that you "are a nihilist,"
| is unusual, and typically a big deal._
|
| Do you see how these are different? You're talking past the
| author.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Ignorance isn't evidence of absence. Epistemic nihilists call
| themselves skeptics and there have been plenty throughout
| history, the earliest I know of being Pyrrho. Moral nihilists
| call themselves hedonists (or if you're being really strict,
| moral skeptics) and they are legion, many here in this very
| forum, plenty in the history of philosophy. There were a dozen or
| so Russian political nihilists for a while and you could probably
| argue that all anarchists are political nihilists in a sense
| (especially Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Max Stirner). Then there
| are many really niche ones like mereorological nihilists who, I'd
| argue, call themselves monists. Existential nihilists, who deny a
| meaning to life and/or value, call themselves existentialists and
| absurdists and reigned in continental philosophy for half a
| century (the blog is vague but seems to mainly be referring to
| these.)
|
| I'll give the author that I've never heard of a serious
| metaphysical nihilist. It's hard to deny that something does
| exist and that it does work in some way.
|
| There's another flaw in the analysis too: Why would people write
| about things they don't believe in and don't care about? Anti-
| theists do that, but what if they're the exception rather than
| the rule (because of a certain oppressive history in the area
| there.)
| enkid wrote:
| I don't think it's appropriate to consider "Existentialists" or
| "Absurdists" like Sartre or Camus as nihilists. Rather, they
| developed techniques specifically to avoid nihilism even if
| life does not have a prescribed meaning by making your own.
| guerrilla wrote:
| It depends on your definition. They certainly did not believe
| in any objective or universal values or meaning to life. Your
| criticism applies to most hedonists, moral relativists, etc.
| too.
| enkid wrote:
| I don't think the common understanding of either moral
| relativism or hedonism categorizes them as nihilism. For
| example, hedonism is just a specific form of
| consequentialism.
| gremloni wrote:
| I mean it's true that nothing really matters unless you assign an
| arbitrary baseline that you as an individual are trying to
| optimize for.
|
| What's there to write about. It's categorically true.
| dvt wrote:
| > Nietzsche is easy and fun to read: straightforward, vivid, and
| outrageous. He was brilliant; the best philosopher of all time,
| in my opinion.
|
| I've read almost everything by him, and, cards on the table, I
| don't really like Nietzsche, but calling him the best philosopher
| of all time is a bit of a stretch. With that said, this idea that
| his philosophical writings are deeply nihilistic just needs to go
| away. His entire corpus basically deals with how to _escape_
| nihilism--how to find purpose in purposelessness.
|
| The will to power is not nihilistic at all. Sure, it's extremely
| amoral and probably wrong, but it's certainly not nihilistic. The
| eternal recurrence is brought up as a way to cope with
| meaninglessness and as a way to find purpose in ones life. Other
| ideas are purely rationalist, like the subject-predicate
| (non-)distinction (in his famous lightning flash example). Sure,
| _Genealogy of Morals_ is probably all wrong, but its purpose is
| to re-intuit a moral system without socio-religious
| underpinnings.
|
| The idea behind nihilism is that it's _valueless_ , whereas
| Nietzsche tries to find _new_ values.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| >> Nietzsche is easy and fun to read: straightforward, vivid,
| and outrageous. He was brilliant; the best philosopher of all
| time, in my opinion.
|
| > I've read almost everything by him, and, cards on the table,
| I don't really like Nietzsche, but calling him the best
| philosopher of all time is a bit of a stretch.
|
| IMHO: A few years ago, "straightforward, vivid, and outrageous"
| was exciting, transgressing. Now it's very tired and a bit
| aggravating - who wants to deal with more of it?
| Fellshard wrote:
| That's still nihilism, it's just trying to build new values ex
| nihilo.
| fruffy wrote:
| Are there any (continental) philosophers you would recommend
| over Nietzsche? I keep trying to move past him and Stirner, but
| have not managed so far.
| Errancer wrote:
| Deleuze's books on history of philosophy are interesting and
| approachable. Although they are more about his own philosophy
| over people he write about they're still very valuable.
| Deleuze gets bad reputation for his other writings as they
| are difficult to read but that's not the case with books on
| history. He also have books on Nietzsche so that might be a
| nice starting point. Other continental philosophers that you
| could try are Heidegger, Foucault or Bataille. Everything
| depends on what you're looking for, but if you're coming from
| Nietzsche and Stirner they might be interesting for you.
|
| Edit: As someone else mentioned, Walter Benjamin is also very
| interesting!
| waingake wrote:
| Try Simone de Beauvoir's the ethics of ambiguity. It's deals
| with many of the concerns Neitzsche raises in the area of
| ethics and moralality and provides some convincing arguments
| in a short accessible book.
| krylon wrote:
| Personally, I like Albert Camus very much.
|
| Like Nietzsche, he has a bad reputation for being moody and
| depressing, but the way I see it, he is really liberating and
| optimistic. A true humanist.
| HKH2 wrote:
| Where does either of them have that reputation?
| pasabagi wrote:
| Maybe Adorno's Minima Moralia might be nice? It's well
| written, in the sense Nietzsche is well written. Can also
| recommend Walter Benjamin.
|
| In terms of interpreters of Nietzsche, it's considerably more
| difficult, but Deleuze wrote a really good book on Nietzsche
| that's worth reading.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Schopenhauer!
| andi999 wrote:
| If you like depressed mood then have a look at Schopenhauer?
| m_a_g wrote:
| Soren Kierkegaard could be a good candidate.
| HKH2 wrote:
| I think Dostoyevsky and Camus are more accessible.
| _red wrote:
| >His entire corpus basically deals with how to escape nihilism
|
| You must admit there is some sort of grand comedy in this:
| Nietzsche's one 'novel', "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" entire plot
| line is about a man who tries to warn society of the evils of
| nihilism and instead of being scared-off by it, all the people
| he warns fall in love with the idea (ie. willing trade their
| dangerous freedom to gain safety).
|
| Its a deeply ironic that the current pedestrian understanding
| of him is that he advocated "atheism and nihilism". You almost
| couldn't make it up.
| scott_s wrote:
| I think it's worth noting that dvt's post agrees with the
| submitted essay. Quoting more:
|
| > At times he described himself as "a nihilist," by which he
| meant not that everything is meaningless, but that he actively
| rejected the available eternalisms. He also condemned
| "nihilism," understood as apathetic unwillingness to take
| problems of meaningness seriously. He particularly included
| Christianity and "Apollonian" rationalism in that. Nietzsche's
| intention was to develop a new, positive alternative.
| platz wrote:
| Then the author's use of the word nihilism in this article is
| a redefinition of what is the accepted definition of the
| term.
| smhost wrote:
| Rejecting accepted definitions is fine if you have a
| purpose for doing it. The problem with Chapman is more that
| he's very sloppy with his langauge. If you read his blog,
| you might be left with the impression that Nietzsche is
| just some simple pseudo-mystical bullshitter, because
| Chapman doesn't explain Nietzsche's double movement from
| knowing to unknowing and vice versa. To use Chapman's own
| taxonomy, what Chapman thinks he's doing is dwelling in the
| space between meaningfulness and meaninglessness, but he's
| just being meaningless while expecting Nietzsche to somehow
| do the heavy lifting. Nietzsche probably would've hated
| this guy.
| scott_s wrote:
| I think the point this author is making is that
| _Nietzsche's_ use of word "nihilism" does not match our
| accepted definition.
| jonnyone wrote:
| >Sure, Genealogy of Morals is probably all wrong
|
| All wrong according to what exactly?
| dvt wrote:
| > All wrong according to what exactly?
|
| All wrong as a viable moral theory. It gained a bit of
| popularity in the "evolutionary ethics" crowd (i.e. those
| that might think _The Selfish Gene_ is a profound piece of
| work), but no one really takes it seriously when compared to
| utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics, etc.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| Had Nietzsche existed today, he'd just be written off as some
| edgy 4chan troll. I'm glad he was able to get his ideas on paper
| in the time period that he did.
| weatherlight wrote:
| there's different types of nihilism, Epistemological Nihilism,
| Moral Nihilism, Political Nihilism, Existential Nihilism, etc.
| It's the latter that the author seems to be engrossed in.
|
| I'll leave you with a quote. "This is the great
| lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently
| compelling. Whatever may be really "out there" cannot project
| itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair
| with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad,
| desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made
| so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we
| live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily,
| inaccurately--imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet
| what other way is there to live? Without the ever-clanking
| machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill.
| There would be nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and
| no one to know. The alternatives are clear: to live falsely as
| pawns of affect, or to live factually as depressives, or as
| individuals who know what is known to the depressive. How
| advantageous that we are not coerced into choosing one or the
| other, neither choice being excellent. One look at human
| existence is proof enough that our species will not be released
| from the stranglehold of emotionalism that anchors it to
| hallucinations. That may be no way to live, but to opt for
| depression would be to opt out of existence as we consciously
| know it."
|
| -- Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
| itsdsmurrell wrote:
| Is there a point to this article?
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