nihilism

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Belinda
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Re: nihilism

Post by Belinda »

popeye1945 wrote: Tue Aug 02, 2022 1:33 am Belinda,
What is he reacting to is it in a nutshell, excellent, we are definitely on the same page. After you've spent some time with it I think you are perhaps more able to expand upon that human theme. Like you have already underlined, perhaps it might be best to start with the somewhat less complex behaviors of our animal cousins. Here the concept is more straightforward forward like you said, not different in kind different in degree of complexity.
Problem! Expensive psychoanalysts may take years to answer that question. Good novelists work quicker. Even though the difference between men and other animals is one of degree the degree is a big one.

We need first of all to establish criteria (first principles).Taking into account the humility and hindsight of postmodernism, I propose ordinary human kindness is the best principle to establish first. And "What is he reacting to?" implies ordinary human kindness . Actually, the preservation of life on Earth comes a close second and I'd have a lot of time for those who would make that the first principle. I can see I have slid from the truth of behaviours into the goodness of behaviours. I'm justified in so doing as truth and goodness are aspects of what men have aimed for, for two and a half thousand years.
popeye1945
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Re: nihilism

Post by popeye1945 »

Belinda wrote: Tue Aug 02, 2022 10:40 am
popeye1945 wrote: Tue Aug 02, 2022 1:33 am Belinda,
What is he reacting to is it in a nutshell, excellent, we are definitely on the same page. After you've spent some time with it I think you are perhaps more able to expand upon that human theme. Like you have already underlined, perhaps it might be best to start with the somewhat less complex behaviors of our animal cousins. Here the concept is more straightforward forward like you said, not different in kind different in degree of complexity.
Problem! Expensive psychoanalysts may take years to answer that question. Good novelists work quicker. Even though the difference between men and other animals is one of degree the degree is a big one.

We need first of all to establish criteria (first principles).Taking into account the humility and hindsight of postmodernism, I propose ordinary human kindness is the best principle to establish first. And "What is he reacting to?" implies ordinary human kindness . Actually, the preservation of life on Earth comes a close second and I'd have a lot of time for those who would make that the first principle. I can see I have slid from the truth of behaviours into the goodness of behaviours. I'm justified in so doing as truth and goodness are aspects of what men have aimed for, for two and a half thousand years.
Belinda,
Well, I do not think it is so much for the present, although a new perspective certainly should make some difference to the individual in the here and now. Our present has largely been created by our past, we in turn create the past of our future prodigy in our present. This insight could change the way humanity goes about being in the world to a more reality-based situation, it cannot be other than good for humanity and good for the environment. Your right though I think literature is the perfect medium for creating reality out of fiction which we do anyway in an uncontrolled manner for the present is the garden of the future. The difference not in kind but in degree is perhaps not as high a degree as many like to beleive. The essence of life is the same across the board differing only in structure and form and dictated be the niches life has found for itself. At any rate this new perspective should be interesting to explore. You will have to fill me in on the humility and hindsight of postmodernism as it pertains here.
Belinda
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Re: nihilism

Post by Belinda »

popeye1945 wrote: Tue Aug 02, 2022 9:04 pm
Belinda wrote: Tue Aug 02, 2022 10:40 am
popeye1945 wrote: Tue Aug 02, 2022 1:33 am Belinda,
What is he reacting to is it in a nutshell, excellent, we are definitely on the same page. After you've spent some time with it I think you are perhaps more able to expand upon that human theme. Like you have already underlined, perhaps it might be best to start with the somewhat less complex behaviors of our animal cousins. Here the concept is more straightforward forward like you said, not different in kind different in degree of complexity.
Problem! Expensive psychoanalysts may take years to answer that question. Good novelists work quicker. Even though the difference between men and other animals is one of degree the degree is a big one.

We need first of all to establish criteria (first principles).Taking into account the humility and hindsight of postmodernism, I propose ordinary human kindness is the best principle to establish first. And "What is he reacting to?" implies ordinary human kindness . Actually, the preservation of life on Earth comes a close second and I'd have a lot of time for those who would make that the first principle. I can see I have slid from the truth of behaviours into the goodness of behaviours. I'm justified in so doing as truth and goodness are aspects of what men have aimed for, for two and a half thousand years.
Belinda,
Well, I do not think it is so much for the present, although a new perspective certainly should make some difference to the individual in the here and now. Our present has largely been created by our past, we in turn create the past of our future prodigy in our present. This insight could change the way humanity goes about being in the world to a more reality-based situation, it cannot be other than good for humanity and good for the environment. Your right though I think literature is the perfect medium for creating reality out of fiction which we do anyway in an uncontrolled manner for the present is the garden of the future. The difference not in kind but in degree is perhaps not as high a degree as many like to beleive. The essence of life is the same across the board differing only in structure and form and dictated be the niches life has found for itself. At any rate this new perspective should be interesting to explore. You will have to fill me in on the humility and hindsight of postmodernism as it pertains here.
Popeye, by "the humility and hindsight of postmodernism" I mean that modernists' virtues of reason and causation are limited as a ladder to truth. Constant conjunction is all we know or can know.

Postmodernists would say that even constant conjunction is subject to the medium of its expression. That's maybe true for all we know, but we actually need to jump off from a faith stance, the more sceptical the better.
popeye1945
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Re: nihilism

Post by popeye1945 »

Belinda wrote: Thu Aug 04, 2022 1:07 pm
popeye1945 wrote: Tue Aug 02, 2022 9:04 pm
Belinda wrote: Tue Aug 02, 2022 10:40 am

Problem! Expensive psychoanalysts may take years to answer that question. Good novelists work quicker. Even though the difference between men and other animals is one of degree the degree is a big one.

We need first of all to establish criteria (first principles).Taking into account the humility and hindsight of postmodernism, I propose ordinary human kindness is the best principle to establish first. And "What is he reacting to?" implies ordinary human kindness . Actually, the preservation of life on Earth comes a close second and I'd have a lot of time for those who would make that the first principle. I can see I have slid from the truth of behaviours into the goodness of behaviours. I'm justified in so doing as truth and goodness are aspects of what men have aimed for, for two and a half thousand years.
Belinda,
Well, I do not think it is so much for the present, although a new perspective certainly should make some difference to the individual in the here and now. Our present has largely been created by our past, we in turn create the past of our future prodigy in our present. This insight could change the way humanity goes about being in the world to a more reality-based situation, it cannot be other than good for humanity and good for the environment. Your right though I think literature is the perfect medium for creating reality out of fiction which we do anyway in an uncontrolled manner for the present is the garden of the future. The difference not in kind but in degree is perhaps not as high a degree as many like to beleive. The essence of life is the same across the board differing only in structure and form and dictated be the niches life has found for itself. At any rate this new perspective should be interesting to explore. You will have to fill me in on the humility and hindsight of postmodernism as it pertains here.
Popeye, by "the humility and hindsight of postmodernism" I mean that modernists' virtues of reason and causation are limited as a ladder to truth. Constant conjunction is all we know or can know.

Postmodernists would say that even constant conjunction is subject to the medium of its expression. That's maybe true for all we know, but we actually need to jump off from a faith stance, the more sceptical the better.
Belinda,

Sounds a bit like a reiteration of David Hume's one cannot know cause and effect but simply as conjunction through habit. Conjunction subject to the medium of its expression, or context defines? I have a bit of difficulty with the use of the term faith, as is has to much baggage but I do get your meaning.
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iambiguous
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Re: nihilism

Post by iambiguous »

Thomas Nagel
The Absurd
In ordinary life a situation is absurd when it includes a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality: someone gives a complicated speech in support of a motion that has already been passed; a notorious criminal is made president of a major philanthropic foundation; you declare your love over the telephone to a recorded announcement; as you are being knighted, your pants fall down.
Absurd, or just plain silly. Or embarrassing. Or entirely ironic. The sort of absurdity that, depending on how it impacts you personally, you may well be able to live with. Or even take advantage of.

Not at all the absurdity that preoccupies those like me.

Here there are options available to you to mitigate it...or even to make it go away altogether. Or you can always just ignore it.

Thus...
When a person finds himself in an absurd situation, he will usually attempt to change it, by modifying his aspirations, or by trying to bring reality into better accord with them, or by removing himself from the situation entirely. We are not always willing or able to extricate ourselves from a position whose absurdity has become clear to us. Nevertheless, it is usually possible to imagine some change that would remove the absurdity-whether or not we can or will implement it.
On the other hand, when you come to construe your own existence itself as essentially absurd...essentially meaningless and purposeless...there's no getting around being you.

Here the only viable option seems to revolve around distractions. Immersing yourself in the things that you enjoy...the things that take your mind off of your ultimately absurd existence. The things that take you away from the frame of mind encompassed by, say, Sartre in Nausea.

Or this option...
The sense that life as a whole is absurd arises when we perceive, perhaps dimly, an inflated pretension or aspiration which is inseparable from the continuation of human life and which makes its absurdity inescapable, short of escape from life itself.
https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=195600
puto
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Re: nihilism

Post by puto »

Nihil, not being a philosophical theory officially. As I was taught, “You can only think of the concept of nothingness…”
Iwannaplato
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Re: nihilism

Post by Iwannaplato »

iambiguous wrote: Sat Aug 13, 2022 5:17 pm Thomas Nagel
I've always liked Nagel though often I land somewhere else than he does.
When I read your post on Nagel, I was struck that the idea of absurdity assumes meaning, some kind of meaning. And if one refers to a situation as absurd it is as if it might be otherwise. We have a sense of what meaning ought to be. Otherwise the word has no meaning. This holds in the specific - pants fall down while proposing - and in general in relation to life.

I think Nagel is heading there in the essay also when he argues in the article that one hasn't really gotten that the kind of significance we expected is confused. IOW we may bemoan that our lives are insignificant (given death, endless time, our smallness) but this is us believing, still, that our sense of significance is objective. Part of us sees that this sense will not be confirmed by the universe, but part of us believes it is real.

When one fully realizes this sense of significance it false, then one can move through life enjoying the irony. This resembles some Buddhist ideas/accounts/stories/interpretations.

I think he is right that the idea of absurdity entails one believes in objective significance (of our lives, for example). We may also believe that there is no significance.

We generally think that we have one belief on a topic, but I don't think this is correct. I see people with contradictory beliefs all the time.

But I disagree with his conclusion. No thinking mammal can unmammal itself and smile. Which is why Buddhism, for example, goes after brain connections to the limbic system.

The last paragraph in Nagel's essay gives some of the ideas I mention. I can't copy it in the version I found.
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iambiguous
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Re: nihilism

Post by iambiguous »

Thomas Nagel
The Absurd
Many people's lives are absurd, temporarily or permanently, for conventional reasons having to do with their particular ambitions, circumstances, and personal relations.
Here, however, what does this actually convey but each of our own individual assumptions about what is deemed to be absurd in life. Whose ambitions, whose circumstances, whose personal relations? In situations that others either are or are not familiar with. In other words, the part where, in places like this, the communication breaks down time and again.
If there is a philosophical sense of absurdity, however, it must arise from the perception of something universal---some respect in which pretension and reality inevitably clash for us all.
Here I tend to disagree. Whether the sense of absurdity is philosophical or pertaining to our day-to-day interactions with others, there are going to be endless clashes. It's just that the closer we get to philosophy, the closer we get to more abstract assessments that revolve around assumptions pertaining to God and religion...and to The Big Questions, out on the metaphysical limb where "there are also unknown unknowns...there are things we don't know we don't know."
This condition is supplied, I shall argue, by the collision between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of regarding everything about which we are serious as arbitrary, or open to doubt.
Exactly. But tell me this isn't true both existentially and essentially.

The absurd, in other words, is interwoven throughout the "human condition". There's what we think we know is true about any number of things. And there's that fact that any number of others will insist it's absurd to think that's true.

https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=195600
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iambiguous
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Re: nihilism

Post by iambiguous »

Thomas Nagel
The Absurd
We cannot live human lives without energy and attention, nor without making choices which show that we take some things more seriously than others. Yet we have always available a point of view outside the particular form of our lives, from which the seriousness appears gratuitous. These two inescapable viewpoints collide in us, and that is what makes life absurd.
No one would or could -- or should? -- doubt that this is a philosophical assessment of the absurd. For one thing, it can be argued that it is applicable to all of us. After all, it is suggested, if we cannot as individuals find an essential form into which we can subsume our existential lives, what's the point?

Ultimately, anyway.

So, without an essential foundation -- ecclesiastic or secular -- what then are we to make of our existentially absurd lives?

You tell me.
It is absurd because we ignore the doubts that we know cannot be settled, continuing to live with nearly undiminished seriousness in spite of them. This analysis requires defense in two respects: first as regards the unavoidability of seriousness; second as regards the inescapability of doubt.
On the other hand, once you conclude that the doubts cannot be settled, what real choice is left but to fucus in on the existential meaning? It's just that some of us conclude as well that just because we can't settled them does not mean that they cannot be settled. That's why we come to places like this. To explore the narratives of those who insist that all doubts can be subsumed in an essential truth. How do they know this? Because they have already settled them themselves. I call them the objectivists. And they insist that of all the hundreds and hundreds of "one true paths" there are from which to choose, their own really is the one true path.

We have many folks with any number of hopelessly conflicting paths right here.

They argue that human existence is, in any number of ways, unavoidably serious. But that doubt is not at all inescapable.

In other words, if you too will become "one of us", you too can escape all doubt.

And what of "one of them"? Well, that can range from simply ignoring them all the way up to the "final solution".

https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=195600
Belinda
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Re: nihilism

Post by Belinda »

Iambiguous wrote:
So, without an essential foundation -- ecclesiastic or secular -- what then are we to make of our existentially absurd lives?
It depends on who one is on the occasion of the decision. In other words existence precedes essence.
Unless a man is moribund or otherwise quiescent he can't avoid making decisions.
popeye1945
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Re: nihilism

Post by popeye1945 »

Nihilism, if Nihilism is to mean that the physical world is meaningless in the absence of a conscious subject, then it is the most profound reality of our existence. All meaning/s are the experiences of biological consciousness and it is never the property of the physical world until the conscious subject bestows its experienced meanings upon a meaningless world. Biology is the measure and meaning of all things. The world is biological experience, not necessarily, indeed not probably ultimate reality.
Belinda
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Re: nihilism

Post by Belinda »

popeye1945 wrote: Thu Sep 01, 2022 11:24 pm Nihilism, if Nihilism is to mean that the physical world is meaningless in the absence of a conscious subject, then it is the most profound reality of our existence. All meaning/s are the experiences of biological consciousness and it is never the property of the physical world until the conscious subject bestows its experienced meanings upon a meaningless world. Biology is the measure and meaning of all things. The world is biological experience, not necessarily, indeed not probably ultimate reality.
Yes, I think when you apply unrelenting scepticism to the question what remains is the philosopher's stone ,
experience.
popeye1945
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Re: nihilism

Post by popeye1945 »

Belinda wrote: Fri Sep 02, 2022 10:20 am
popeye1945 wrote: Thu Sep 01, 2022 11:24 pm Nihilism, if Nihilism is to mean that the physical world is meaningless in the absence of a conscious subject, then it is the most profound reality of our existence. All meaning/s are the experiences of biological consciousness and it is never the property of the physical world until the conscious subject bestows its experienced meanings upon a meaningless world. Biology is the measure and meaning of all things. The world is biological experience, not necessarily, indeed not probably ultimate reality.
Yes, I think when you apply unrelenting skepticism to the question what remains is the philosopher's stone ,
experience.
Thanks Belinda, nice to get some positive feedback!
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iambiguous
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Re: nihilism

Post by iambiguous »

popeye1945 wrote: Thu Sep 01, 2022 11:24 pm Nihilism, if Nihilism is to mean that the physical world is meaningless in the absence of a conscious subject, then it is the most profound reality of our existence.
The physical world, however, is anchored [mathematically and otherwise] to the physical, chemical, biological, etc., laws of nature. To the "standard model", to the four "fundamental forces".

What does that mean? It means that's the starting point in discussions regarding what everything else means. Take trees for example. There's everything a botanist can tell us about them. But after that there's how this objective knowledge is understood subjectively by the tree hugger and by the lumber industry.

In regard to the physical world, the word nihilism doesn't pop up much.

And, sure, this part...
popeye1945 wrote: Thu Sep 01, 2022 11:24 pmAll meaning/s are the experiences of biological consciousness and it is never the property of the physical world until the conscious subject bestows its experienced meanings upon a meaningless world. Biology is the measure and meaning of all things. The world is biological experience, not necessarily, indeed not probably ultimate reality.
Yes, when the evolution of biological life on Earth finally gets around to us, then, in any number of contexts, all bets are off. But even here nihilism isn't likely to stick around other than in discussions that revolve around questions like this:

1] "what does it mean to do the right thing?"
2] "what does it mean to be evil?"
3] "what does it mean to describe and to defend objective morality?"

In philosophy, deontology...moral obligations. And then of course the part where God and religion becomes factors.

Me, I'm a moral nihilist. And that [to me] means that in the absence of God, all things are permitted. And that [to me] means from one or another existential perspective, all things can be rationalized. And that [to me] means that there does not appear to be the secular equivalent of God around that mere mortals can turn to to resolve "conflicting goods".

Then the parts that revolve around political economy and sociopathic behaviors.
Belinda
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Re: nihilism

Post by Belinda »

iambiguous wrote: Tue Sep 06, 2022 6:28 pm
popeye1945 wrote: Thu Sep 01, 2022 11:24 pm Nihilism, if Nihilism is to mean that the physical world is meaningless in the absence of a conscious subject, then it is the most profound reality of our existence.
The physical world, however, is anchored [mathematically and otherwise] to the physical, chemical, biological, etc., laws of nature. To the "standard model", to the four "fundamental forces".

What does that mean? It means that's the starting point in discussions regarding what everything else means. Take trees for example. There's everything a botanist can tell us about them. But after that there's how this objective knowledge is understood subjectively by the tree hugger and by the lumber industry.

In regard to the physical world, the word nihilism doesn't pop up much.

And, sure, this part...
popeye1945 wrote: Thu Sep 01, 2022 11:24 pmAll meaning/s are the experiences of biological consciousness and it is never the property of the physical world until the conscious subject bestows its experienced meanings upon a meaningless world. Biology is the measure and meaning of all things. The world is biological experience, not necessarily, indeed not probably ultimate reality.
Yes, when the evolution of biological life on Earth finally gets around to us, then, in any number of contexts, all bets are off. But even here nihilism isn't likely to stick around other than in discussions that revolve around questions like this:

1] "what does it mean to do the right thing?"
2] "what does it mean to be evil?"
3] "what does it mean to describe and to defend objective morality?"

In philosophy, deontology...moral obligations. And then of course the part where God and religion becomes factors.

Me, I'm a moral nihilist. And that [to me] means that in the absence of God, all things are permitted. And that [to me] means from one or another existential perspective, all things can be rationalized. And that [to me] means that there does not appear to be the secular equivalent of God around that mere mortals can turn to to resolve "conflicting goods".

Then the parts that revolve around political economy and sociopathic behaviors.
But God as a cultural event has not been absent possibly as long as sapiens spoke language.
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