iambiguous wrote: ↑Mon Aug 22, 2022 6:00 pm Nietzsche and Moral Nihilism
Dr W Large
Nothing and everything. When, in actuality, over and over and over again, it's almost never either one of them in regard to connecting the dots between a philosophical assessment of nihilism like the one above and the existential parameters of the lives we live from day to day to day. Is it any wonder then that so many have little or no use for such abstract intellectual conjectures?Nothing is worth much anymore, everything comes down to the same thing, everything is equalized. Everything is the same and equivalent: the true and the false, the good and the bad. Everything is outdated, used up, old dilapidated, dying: an undefined agony of meaning, an unending twilight: not a definite annihilation of significations, but their indefinite collapse.
No, it appears that what Nietzsche was aiming to accomplish was to replace the God font with the "will to power" Übermensch font.It would be quite absurd, therefore, to claim that this is what Nietzsche actually desires. On the contrary, he wants to diagnose how we got there. Our culture is like the character God in Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy: old and worn out, barely alive, and certainly nothing to really believe in anymore.
Whatever that means.
But that's my point. In the absence of the God font "up there" to settle conflicts of this sort, we mere mortals have managed to come up with any number of hopelessly conflicting secular narratives to take His place.
Is yours perhaps the optimal assessment?
Says who? And those who do say so...what exactly are they intent on putting in its place? There are, of course, the amoral capitalists, the amoral sociopaths, the amoral libertines.The most dangerous side of this nihilism, however, is that in the end it becomes happy and satisfied with itself. Once we used to feel horror and terror at the fact that religion, morality and philosophy don’t really have any meaning, but now we’re quite happy to live in a world without meaning.
What of your own amoral foundation? What are you intent on doing with it?
And then the part here that always comes back around to God:
In our modern world of course this basically revolves around all of the millions upon millions of "lost souls" who spend their days mindlessly preoccupied with pop culture, social media, mass consumption, and the pursuit of celebrity.One example of this satisfaction is the death of God. Again we have to remind ourselves of the passage in the Gay Science, where Nietzsche writes of the madman who rushes into the marketplace and declares that God is dead. Many people read this as Nietzsche is simply celebrating atheism, but if we read this passage more carefully we can see that what it really describes is how the ordinary people don’t really care at all whether God is dead or not. This is what is truly terrifying. Not that God is dead, but that no-one even noticed that he had died:
"Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: ‘I seek God! I seek God!’ – As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, the provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Emigrated? – Thus they yelled and laughed."
God doesn't stand a chance there.
And, come to think of it, neither does philosophy. Or, rather, what's left of it these days.
https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=175121
Popular culture includes people who seek truth, good, and beauty. We need only good teachers.
The old worn out God that Pullman refers to in His Dark Materials is Authority, where Lyra represents rebellion against Authority, and is herself partisan to friendship, love, affection, courage, loyalty, science, individuality, curiosity, and finally self abnegation for the sake of others.