Atla wrote: ↑Thu Feb 01, 2024 9:40 am
Realism isn't all rainbows and lollipops. You exist in an objective reality that you have very little influence over. You are insignificant. Your existence carries little to no meaning. The world was there before you, and the world will be there after you, your short existence never really mattered in the grand scheme of things.
That can make the inherent existential crisis worse.
This is an interesting exploration, an interesting attempt to turn things upside down, which is something that philosophy frequently does. But it just doesn’t work, it is hard to believe.
Those who have absolute certainty that existence has no meaning do not need any escapism, because they know perfectly how things are. You cannot escape certainty and there is no reason to escape certainty. If meaning does not exist, there is no reason to look for one and there is no reason to build a false one, it doesn’t make sense.
There cannot be any existential crisis for those who have absolute certainty that existence doesn’t have any sense.
Animals do not believe in any sense of existence and they do not enter any existential crisis because of that.
Science and technology can make people masters of a lot of things, so realism, science and technology are all good reasons to live and die peacefully without any existential crisis.
In the realist perspective, even when we face suffering, tragedies, violence, what we need to do is just to exploit all the resources that science, psychology, technology, medicine are able to give us. There is no reason to cultivate despair, sadness, existential crisis, pessimism: things are just what they are.
Atla wrote: ↑Thu Feb 01, 2024 9:40 am
So people tried a thousand different kinds of escapisms, one of them being the anti-realism. Now in a strange sense, you have placed yourself into a central position within existence. The world somehow depends on you and maybe other beings. Without you, there is no world. Without you, there are no features of the world. You are significant, what you do and what you are is meaningful. You get to write the rules, at least to same degree.
This is anti-realism seen from the realist perspective, which is a misintepretation. Anti-realist cannot place themselves into a central position within existence, because this would be a realist way of conceiving ourselves and our central position. In anti-realism there is not a central self from which everything comes from. When anti-realists say that everything is subjective, it is a misinterpretation to interpret it in a realist way, as if this was the new certainty. Once we realize that everything is subjective, is goes without saying that the statement needs to be applied to itself as well: applying everything to itself is one of the most elementary and obvious operations on philosophy.
In anti-realim there is no certainty, no truth: this is what really makes existence problematic. You cannot even be pessimist, because pessimism would mean relying on a negative certainty, but we have no certainty. This is the real existential crisis, sadness, despair: in anti-realism you are forced to face the absolute lack of certainty, you don’t know what to do, what to think, what to criticise, how to criticise, you don’t even know what is that you don’t know, so that you cannot even say that you know that you don’t know. That’t the crisis, the really fruitful crisis.