nihilism

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popeye1945
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Re: nihilism

Post by popeye1945 »

Any meaning/s whatsoever are biological dependent, thus Nihilism is either the knowledge that the physical world is utterly meaningless in the absence of a conscious subject or that the individual sees no value to the continuation of life. As Schopenhauer stated, life is something that should never have been. Life is however, and we must affirm it if we are to live a human life and not that of base survival. God is meaning without object content, an empty set other than that which conscious humanity has bestowed upon it.
Belinda
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Re: nihilism

Post by Belinda »

popeye1945 wrote: Fri Sep 09, 2022 2:57 am Any meaning/s whatsoever are biological dependent, thus Nihilism is either the knowledge that the physical world is utterly meaningless in the absence of a conscious subject or that the individual sees no value to the continuation of life. As Schopenhauer stated, life is something that should never have been. Life is however, and we must affirm it if we are to live a human life and not that of base survival. God is meaning without object content, an empty set other than that which conscious humanity has bestowed upon it.
Your Humanist and broadly religious attitude is one I agree with and hope to hold close to me.

I even hope that the word 'God' will be revived so it's both universally acceptable and individually meaningful.
popeye1945
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Re: nihilism

Post by popeye1945 »

Belinda wrote: Sat Sep 10, 2022 9:56 am
popeye1945 wrote: Fri Sep 09, 2022 2:57 am Any meaning/s whatsoever are biological dependent, thus Nihilism is either the knowledge that the physical world is utterly meaningless in the absence of a conscious subject or that the individual sees no value to the continuation of life. As Schopenhauer stated, life is something that should never have been. Life is however, and we must affirm it if we are to live a human life and not that of base survival. God is meaning without object content, an empty set other than that which conscious humanity has bestowed upon it.
Your Humanist and broadly religious attitude is one I agree with and hope to hold close to me.

I even hope that the word 'God' will be revived so it's both universally acceptable and individually meaningful.
Bedlinda,

Yes, the term god needs be reframed, but it has so much baggage egocentric anthropomorphic baggage. Young people becoming more enlightened than their predecessors is hope, but thus far they do not have a really intelligent humanistic context from which to draw inspiration. Nice to know there is another bird of a feather out there.
Belinda
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Re: nihilism

Post by Belinda »

popeye1945 wrote: Sun Sep 11, 2022 8:23 am
Belinda wrote: Sat Sep 10, 2022 9:56 am
popeye1945 wrote: Fri Sep 09, 2022 2:57 am Any meaning/s whatsoever are biological dependent, thus Nihilism is either the knowledge that the physical world is utterly meaningless in the absence of a conscious subject or that the individual sees no value to the continuation of life. As Schopenhauer stated, life is something that should never have been. Life is however, and we must affirm it if we are to live a human life and not that of base survival. God is meaning without object content, an empty set other than that which conscious humanity has bestowed upon it.
Your Humanist and broadly religious attitude is one I agree with and hope to hold close to me.

I even hope that the word 'God' will be revived so it's both universally acceptable and individually meaningful.
Bedlinda,

Yes, the term god needs be reframed, but it has so much baggage egocentric anthropomorphic baggage. Young people becoming more enlightened than their predecessors is hope, but thus far they do not have a really intelligent humanistic context from which to draw inspiration. Nice to know there is another bird of a feather out there.
It certainly is a worry that younger people have no moral or metaphysical compass, such as the old authoritarian God. The younger people I know have learned traditional morals from their families and similar peers, but that's simply the social circles I have inhabited. There are city gangs, and county lines
.Young people still have to contend with older men older influences who are bad men; not only identifiable personal criminals but also and more importantly criminals against humanity.

Pop culture which among the 60s and 70s hippy generation was ethical is now commercialised, as far as I can see. I wish I could be shown this is not so.
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iambiguous
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Re: nihilism

Post by iambiguous »

Thomas Nagel
The Absurd
We take ourselves seriously whether we lead serious lives or not and whether we are concerned primarily with fame, pleasure, virtue, luxury, triumph, beauty, justice, knowledge, salvation, or mere survival. If we take other people seriously and devote ourselves to them, that only multiplies the problem. Human life is full of effort, plans, calculation, success and failure: we pursue our lives, with varying degrees of sloth and energy.
That's it in an existential nutshell. Human existence for most of us is teeming with options. Hundreds of pursuits we can engage relating to relationships or work or school or the arts or sports or countless other distractions from "the absurd". It's not for nothing that the vast majority of human beings go about the business of living their lives paying little or no attention whatsoever to "the agony of choice in the face of uncertainty". Let alone the travail of those like Sisyphus.
It would be different if we could not step back and reflect on the process, but were merely led from impulse to impulse without self-consciousness. But human beings do not act solely on impulse. They are prudent, they reflect, they weigh consequences, they ask whether what they are doing is worthwhile.
More to the point [mine] in an essentially absurd, meaningless and purposeless world, however far we step back and however deeply we reflect on the process, "I" in the is/ought world is no less entangled in the profoundly problematic labyrinth that is dasein.

What...like those on both sides of the moral conflagrations that plague us still aren't convinced that they are prudent, that they reflect, that they weigh the consequences, that they ask whether what they are doing is worthwhile?
Not only are their lives full of particular choices that hang together in larger activities with temporal structure: they also decide in the broadest terms what to pursue and what to avoid, what the priorities among their various aims should be, and what kind of people they want to be or become.
The "human condition" let's call it.

Your very own "rooted in dasein" rendition of this:
Some men are faced with such choices by the large decisions they make from time to time; some merely by reflection on the course their lives are taking as the product of countless small decisions. They decide whom to marry, what profession to follow, whether to join the Country Club, or the Resistance; or they may just wonder why they go on being salesmen or academics or taxi drivers, and then stop thinking about it after a certain period of inconclusive reflection.
Women too.

And then, historically, among the "surplus labor", the philosophers came into existence. Their job was was to make the reflection considerably less "inconclusive". For example, some became objectivists.

Right?

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

Post by iambiguous »

Philosophy Now wrote: Sun Sep 18, 2022 4:36 pm by Tim B-Gray

https://philosophynow.org/issues/137/Nietzsches_Hammer
Really, how am I all that different from Nietzsche himself?

I suggest that in a No God world, human existence is essentially meaningless and purposeless. That there is no secular font on this side of the grave from which to derive an objective morality. And that, in the end, we all tumble one by one into the abyss that is oblivion.

Only Nietzsche blinked in my view.

He "thought up" his Übermensch...the next best thing to God on this side of the grave. And he even imagined an "eternal return" so that there was at least the possibility of "I" continuing beyond the grave.

Nope, no one is near the "demolisher" that I am.

The only really "upbeat" spin I put on it is that at least for those who reject both God and Humanism, their options can increase dramatically. After all, if you no longer have to sustain your own rendition of "what would Jesus do" you are free to embody the suggestion that, "in the absence of God, all things are permitted".

On the other hand, tell that to the sociopaths?
popeye1945
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Re: nihilism

Post by popeye1945 »

"To god all things are right and good, only to man somethings are and somethings are not." Heraclitus
Belinda
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Re: nihilism

Post by Belinda »

popeye1945 wrote: Mon Sep 19, 2022 1:41 am "To god all things are right and good, only to man somethings are and somethings are not." Heraclitus
Thanks Popeye. I did not know Heraclitus had said that. I wonder if and at what stage in the development of Judaism and Christianity Greek philosophy was incorporated in it.

Or does the above from Heraclitus explain the essence of monotheism, and attributable to Axial Age enlightenment?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_human_thought

Excerpt:
The Axial Age was a period between 750 and 350 BCE during which major intellectual development happened around the world. This included the development of Chinese philosophy by Confucius, Mozi, and others; the Upanishads and Gautama Buddha in Indian philosophy; Zoroaster in Ancient Persia; the Jewish prophets Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Deutero-Isaiah in Palestine; Ancient Greek philosophy and literature, all independently of each other.[11]
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iambiguous
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Re: nihilism

Post by iambiguous »

Thomas Nagel
The Absurd
Each of us lives his own life-lives with himself twenty four hours a day. What else is he supposed to do---live someone else's life?
Of course, my point is always to note that the lives we live 24 hours a day [with ourselves and others] can be enormously different from the lives that others live. And yet somehow that doesn't strike some here as a reason why others still shouldn't think and feel exactly as they do about, for example, good and evil behavior.

It's just that some become philosophers and attempt to pin down this distinction...technically?
Yet humans have the special capacity to step back and survey themselves, and the lives to which they are committed, with that detached amazement which comes from watching an ant struggle up a heap of sand. Without developing the illusion that they are able to escape from their highly specific and idiosyncratic position, they can view it sub specie aeternitatis---and the view is at once sobering and comical.
Okay, but what still remains the same is that each individual human being steps back out in a particular world historically and culturally...and while embedded in particular sets of circumstances. Same problem then. Given these at times vastly different existential trajectories precipitating vastly different moral, political and spiritual perspectives how are the deontologists among us to "name" [as Ayn Rand put it] those things that are in fact, objectively Good and those things that are in fact, objectively Evil? How is not the unique perspective of individuals of vital importance here?
The crucial backward step is not taken by asking for still another justification in the chain, and failing to get it. The objections to that line of attack have already been stated; justifications come to an end. But this is precisely what provides universal doubt with its object. We step back to find that the whole system of justification and criticism, which controls our choices and supports our claims to rationality, rests on responses and habits that we never question, that we should not know how to defend without circularity, and to which we shall continue to adhere even after they are called into question.
Yes, but the objectivists among us, in my view, aren't really going about this objectively at all. They merely convince themselves that they are. And this convincing has less to do with the rigors of a philosophical investigation and more to do with the manner in which human psychology seems to prefer circularity if that is what it takes to establish the One True Path. That you are on one, that you are comforted and consoled in being on one [in the is/ought world] is the main motivation in my view.

The path itself for the God World folks can be any one of these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions

Depending on when and where you are "thrown" into this world at birth.

While the political/ideological path for the generally secular, Humanist No God folks can be any one of these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p ... ideologies

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
The things we do or want without reasons, and without requiring reasons---the things that define what is a reason for us and what is not---are the starting points of our skepticism.
And what might they be? What particular things do you do or want without a reason...without requiring a reason? Some things we need to do in order to subsist. And here the squabbles often pertain to what are construed to be nihilistic means. Like the super rich and powerful men and women who own and operate the global economy. Those "show me the money" oligarchs who divide up the world by rooting their decisions solely in "what's in it for me"? Exploiting people -- sometimes all but enslaving them in sweatshops -- in order that they themselves might "live long and prosper".
We see ourselves from outside, and all the contingency and specificity of our aims and pursuits become clear. Yet when we take this view and recognize what we do as arbitrary, it does not disengage us from life, and there lies our absurdity: not in the fact that such an external view can be taken of us, but in the fact that we ourselves can take it, without ceasing to be the persons whose ultimate concerns are so coolly regarded.
How on earth can we really see our lives from the outside? What does that even mean? And whatever "contingency, chance and change" embedded in our own specific existential trajectory we might contemplate, it is almost always going to be anchored subjectively -- or in one or another "subjunctive mood" -- out in a particular world understood in a particular manner.

And there are countless mere mortals who are, in turn, anchored to one or another God and No God moral and political font. Those whose ultimate concerns are coolly wrapped around one or another objectivist dogma. Ask them to remark on nihilism.

To wit...
One may try to escape the position by seeking broader ultimate concerns, from which it is impossible to step back---the idea being that absurdity results because what we take seriously is something small and insignificant and individual. Those seeking to supply their lives with meaning usually envision a role or function in something larger than themselves. They therefore seek fulfillment in service to society, the state, the revolution, the progress of history, the advance of science, or religion and the glory of God.
Lots of them here, right? And even though their individual convictions might pop up anywhere along the moral and political spectrum, to an "ism" they will all insist their own path is the one all truly rational and virtuous men and women should be on.

https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop ... 1&t=195600
popeye1945
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Re: nihilism

Post by popeye1945 »

Nihilism is our apparent reality, for the physical world only gains meaning when it is bestowed upon it by a conscious subject. The energies of the cosmos have their effect upon the biology of all life forms in the way of alterations to those biological systems, this is meaning, is your apparent reality.
promethean75
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Re: nihilism

Post by promethean75 »

yes, and i ask; even if our most ambitious platonic dreams are true and we do live on after death somehow, somewhere, what is to give that any meaning?

this is where u ask well what do u mean by the word 'meaning'. for the purposes here it's easier just to say what 'meaning' doesn't mean. it's not some transcendental, existential quality that things, events and purposes have... and even if they did, as i suggest, that wouldn't matter... wouldn't seem to matter, i mean. think about it. what if you have lived a thousand times before this life and are really involved in some hegelian process of evolution into absolute spirit... or what if this is the first life and if you do it right, you live again in heaven. in either case, nothing about those kinds of existences are more meaningful than any other; there u are, existing at that moment, having experiences.

even some hypothetical state of absolute bliss in heaven, say, wouldn't be especially meaningful I don't think.

This is why we are nihilists, Lebowski. not that the world isn't full of splendor and magic. It certainly is. It's just that it's all meaningless.

yahme tell u what philosophers really mean when they use the word 'meaning' in most existential contexts (as opposed to epistemological contexts)? they don't know they mean this, but they do.

power.

it's not absolution or eternal bliss or purpose that drives us, but the anticipation of some kind of progress, improvement, enhancement, capacity to act (spinoza), that intrigues an otherwise and ultimately banal existence... when and wherever you exist.

you don't really care if you exist a million times unless you can be assured there will be something to do, something to overcome, something that challenges you and forces you to struggle and resolve.

on that note then, who in the heck would want to go to heaven?

"in heaven, all the interesting people are missing" - FN
Last edited by promethean75 on Wed Oct 05, 2022 4:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
promethean75
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Re: nihilism

Post by promethean75 »

unfortunately genuine struggle can't be staged, and since finding and having struggles is essential to living a meaningful life, it's good that the various (tho not all) forms of inequality exist in life so that life has that essential stimulus for self improvement, etc.

now wait I didn't say a pleasurable life, I said a meaningful life, and not all pleasurable lives are meaningful. wait I'm getting into some kind of a fallacy here accidentally; am I saying that people with pleasurable lives can't experience struggle and self improvement, then?

lemme try this. take a hypothetical hyper-hedonistic drug addict that is so filthy rich they don't have to do anything ever. all this guy does is narcotics, constantly, and is for the vast majority of his waking day blasted by a flood of neurotransmitter cocktails. indeed he anticipates and has that sense of self improving every time he prepares to get high... but because this is so simple for him, he is reduced to a kind of lethargic and apathetic aesthete who is unable to experience character building struggle, to make effort, to be challenged, to have a fight... or at least something that resists and opposes him, threatens him, etc.

he enjoys his life but let's say there wuz no story to it and that it's always been meaningless utopian pleasure and privilege. anyway I'm rambling.

i wish only to point out that a fundamental part of the dynamic of evolution and the human behavior it produces... that constant field of conflict and struggle that creates intelligent problem-solvers that can, and end up, self-improving or finally degenerating; this is incredibly ironic if only because the driving stimulus to life is that conflict and struggle between people and environments that we want to solve, to prevent.

hence the problem. how does one manufacturer struggle and conflict with and for the purposes of improving the species man?  intentionally i mean, as a kind of controlled experiment.

contrarily, if this is not done, we submit that the natural struggle and conflict we currently experience is necessary and fundamental, and shouldn't want to change it, etc. say the yuge wealth disparity in the world, for instance. we should not want to disturb that then?

I'm so confused. Little help here.
popeye1945
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Re: nihilism

Post by popeye1945 »

Life is struggle, only death is no trouble, but perhaps on a material level the struggle for the necessities of life could find greater balance. It is true, a soft life, particularly over generations makes for soft/weak people. Think now of the richest of countries whose great wealth comes from enslaving weaker nations and the mentality of its average citizen.
Belinda
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Re: nihilism

Post by Belinda »

popeye1945 wrote: Sat Oct 08, 2022 5:19 am Life is struggle, only death is no trouble, but perhaps on a material level the struggle for the necessities of life could find greater balance. It is true, a soft life, particularly over generations makes for soft/weak people. Think now of the richest of countries whose great wealth comes from enslaving weaker nations and the mentality of its average citizen.
There's something to be said in support of educational strategies that immerse children and adults in potentially dangerous physical situations among wild nature, or among peoples who must forge their livings from dangerous environments such as mining, slavehood, and poverty.

However can we not also learn vicariously about risk and danger, say via meaningful novels and plays ?
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