the person who lacks belief will not survive long, every action would be randomly chosen. And then if one’s lack of belief is built on a case for what reality is like, then at the very least there is a whole set of beliefs about what reality is like - sort of like other people have. One can have a meta-belief that one cannot be sure of any first order beliefs. But one must take this as an apriori truth or just trust it as a gut feeling, otherwise we are back to basing this metabelief on a whole set of first order beliefs. And then, any action, even posting, indicates beliefs, unless it was something akin to a Tourette’s twitch. Even the action of stating one cannot be fully sure any belief is an action in the world and in fact this can have concrete consequences. Absolute ones. By absolute I mean they happen. If stating this is true, that one cannot sure of beliefs, pushes a depressed person over the edge and they kill themselves, well, that was an effect. It is not a quasi effect, it is an effect. Even if one believes that one cannot be sure of any belief even the belief that one cannot be sure of any beliefs
saying this will have concrete non-quasi effects.
Let alone if the person in question votes, defends the oppressed, a kind father and so on. Which all entails millions of actions that will not simply have quasi effects but full ones.
None of which means that this idea is wrong, but what it does mean is that there is no lack of beliefs possible for the living. There can be these complicated self-relating beliefs, included in the sea of other beliefs.
That’s an irony.
(and note: I am not making the claim that this belief leads to suicide. I used a strong example to highlight what I meant by absoluteness. I could have used smaller examples, where people believe this and argue for their positions less strongly, or negotiate from a weaker position. Or it could be positive effects like they are received better by people who are different from them because the other person feels there is more slack. Whatever the effects, positive or negative, they are absolute in the sense I mean them. And one is choosing this act to communicate this belief as very likely to be true, but one cannot know for sure…etc.)
You’re speaking of effects outside of one’s own personal knowledge or experience. From an existential perspective those events are not defined and therefore are simply undifferentiaited being. If one is a nihilist and then one day ‘wakes up’, then they would very much see the effects of there nihilistic perspective as factual and well defined.
I’m not yet used to the term nihilist. And perhaps when I use it to describe myself I sound overdramatic. Perhaps a more down to earth way of looking at it is that I’ve seen so many positions from so many angles (or vice-versa!) that I no longer can hold to any opinion or fact. I may speak in terms of opinion more than in terms of fact and I may be more open minded than most, but I could easily be the opposite of all that. What it comes down to is that if one asks me to step outside of the specific subject matter and remind me that I’m a nihilist, then I will mention the ambiguity of anything I may say. And that is true for myself as well, I think about things and form opinions, but I always remind myself of their ambiguity, I really can’t help it, the knowledge of such ambiguity is always just under the surface.
So let my actions (which include my words to some extent) show where and on what place meaning or value, but for the most part my I’ll always let one caste any opinion of mine into the wind with a few simple words and no objection from me.
I need answers. Specific ones that you seem to have. I’ll find them elsewhere. Needless to say, the best way to stop bothering someone is to do so, but I simply want to make it easier on myself by burning my bridges.
As near as I come to an “answer”? There is no way [objectively, essentially, definitively etc.] to determine how one ought to live his or her life. Sans God, that is rooted in dasein. At best we can pursue democracy – the rule of law – rooted in moderation, negotiation and compromise.
But even in this [supposed] “best of all possible worlds” political economy prevails. The stuff of Marx and Engels. In the end, insisting we ought to behave in one manner rather than another means little if you don’t have the capacity to enforce it out in the world of actual human interaction.
But I propose this as an ironist. And here I invoke Richard Rorty:
1.She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered;
2.She realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts;
3.Insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself.
In other words, I seem to be proposing something that quickly implodes given the very manner in which I understand the meaning of the words encompassing it. I’m “stuck”. And I’m stuck because there are limitations to what we can propose [and then demonstrate as being true] using the tool of language.
To wit: There are words applicable objectively to all daseins and there are words that express only an inter-subjective/subjunctive point of view. At best philosophers can make these distinctions. But I am basically interested only in distinctions revolving around value judgments and identity “out in the world”.
Stuart: if a man be stuck or not, doesen’t it presuppose gravity? Isn’t that we are fighting all our lives against? To overcome is to overcome this primal force. It is this we fear. The imposition of not being able to overcome, and we develop the will to.
But what is it we are trying to overcome against this force? That which is primal It is not the unknown we fear, it is the fear itself. That we may be not up to the job. We are angry because we need to harness the force, but we are not the force itself.
At the end of the day, we have to let it go, and let it fall back, because we instinctivly know, and really find out, that there is no top of the hill, we can never reach it. If we did, we would become the force, we are pusing with, and against.
We fear the eternity, that’s why we were kicked out.
We fear the one-ness, while coveting it.
The final thing is, even this is just a drop in an ocean whose depth meets your gaze. Both the depth, and You, instinctively know this. It’s the same. You are the ocean. You are who came out of the primal depth, by the force of your will to overcome.
And your pragmatic approach to overcome even this nihilism, has been the task all these futurist philosophers have been grappling with. So we are in the same boat, I think you are right, if I read You correctly, there is not just one approach.
I guess some people push a boulder up a hill who’s top never comes, others just let it roll back everytime they push it a couple hundred feet. I guess ‘contrived’ is the key word here, ‘subjunctive’ too.
Sure, go ahead. But how exactly does the crane [sky hook?] function here:
There are words applicable objectively to all daseins and there are words that express only an inter-subjective/subjunctive point of view. At best philosophers can make these distinctions. But I am basically interested only in distinctions revolving around value judgments and identity “out in the world”.
Instead, I use distractions on the boulder: music, art, film, poetry etc.
Whatever works.
I’ve been trying to come up with a good responce for that, I guess I could say that it can be a crane connected to a truck, but what does that even mean?
Analogies aside, meaning is of no use for me, meaninglessness isn’t either, so I don’t know where use may be. You have similar ideas as me, I spoke as you do before I knew you, do you disagree that we have so much in common, and if not then do you have still no interest in having conversations, and if yes, then is their anymore details that you can go into as why. Now for an anology it’s like I’m freezing in the cold but no one with a heated house will open their door.
“I” as a narrative. “I” as a wave out in the ocean.
I particularly liked this observation:
I gave up years ago believing that this could be captured in words. It’s like trying to capture water in a fishing net. The best we can do is point and know that we are only pointing.
You finally came back to this thread. I could say that I found your philosophy to be worthwhile and then now find your philosophy to be tiresome, but what would that really mean. To say I’ve surpassed such a form of nihilism would be to show I never understood it at all, but then what irony to suggest that anyone could understand it to begin with. I could say that your philosophy is not one to live by and mean that in a more literal sense, but then I would be mistaking you for one who automatically places value in what one can or can’t live by, and myself. How though, do you live by it. Seriously, maybe I can understand how you can for a while, the last few years, but could you have always sustained it. Or are even those questions missing something; rhetorically speaking, of course.
I would say the odds that you understand nihilism, identity and value judgments – and the existential relationship between them – as I do [here and now] are rather remote. But then isn’t this the point behind the conjecture that capturing these things in language is almost futile. They are no less embodied in dasein.
It’s true however that I am more or less preoccupied only with this: How ought I to live in a world sans God and immortality? And the extent to which philosophy either is or is not of limited value [use] in answering it.
So, sure, I can certainly understand why some would grow weary of the same points being repeated over and over again. On the other hand, new folks pop into ILP everyday. So I figure what the hell: there is always the slim possibility that one of them may actually come much closer to my own frame of mind than you have. And a few have.
And one “lives by it” in part by recognizing that human interaction revolves far more around other things: actually living your life from day to day to day. Eating, drinking, securing [and then sistaining] shelter. Securing and then sustaining employment – a source of income, the capacity to pay your bills. Forming relationships. Interacting with others socially, politically and economically. And then there are countless distractions: art, music, sex, sports, games, hobbies etc… Even philosophy.
I only probe the implications of doing this in the world as dasein. A world in other words of conflicting goods in which “I” is merely the embodiment of a particular existential narrative fabricated and then refabricated over and over and over again amidst the mindboggling complexity of contingency, chance and change.
I don’t Think so. Some of these one would experience. Even responses from other posters are directly experienced. Effects on those one is in Contact with. Anyone one communicates with. And, of course, if one has the beliefs, and these beliefs affect how one feels, this will also affect other people. My Point was mainly that having a philosophical position that there is a large set of things one cannot know does not, due to its content, have only quasi effects. It has full on effects just like beliefs one can know things in that set. There is no quasi, semi-being in the World. One is here, one has effects.
Good chance we are talking past each other because I can’t connect this to what I meant.
I like this form of nihilism - my apologies for labelling it, but in this instance I want to emphasize that I react to it differently than other nihilisms, even Iambs. It undermines itself.
I don’t Think it avoids the kind of causation I am talking about in the post above, but nothing can. You are stuart, stuarting and your beliefs and metabeliefs and lack of these and shifting and tentativenss of these, will have effects and complete ones. That is part of being alive.
But I don’t feel like I am being told to either Believe or not Believe anything (by your version of N, or whatever it is and isn’t. I also do not feel judged as if you had extricated yourself from some ugly thing but some of those you address have not. You may feel that way at times, I can only react to what I read as far as you.
Yes, there is a kind of Buddhist about you. I don’t know if that is ironic or not. And I am not attributing Buddhist beliefs to you. But anyway, there is a tremendous internal focus.
I dunno but it seems to me you keep a pretty tight focus… viewtopic.php?f=2&t=179454
But maybe this works also, some sort of see-sawing from distraction to utter focus.
That's sometimes a comforting thing, as much as you can bundle all those, you can dispense with them for the time being: while sustaining the undercurrent of thought, that it's always there if you need to bring it up, in it's essential Dasain, as needed.
I was just trying to be technical, I don’t think we really disagree on the issue; or at least we don’t anymore.
Thank you, I had put a lot of time and energy into it.
It seems I’m always extricating myself from something. First it was those unfortunate beliefs, then it was nihilism itself, which was what I considered to be the original source of that extrication.
I’m surprised that you still find me to be that way; recently Phyllo mentioned a negative change in my demeanor. Choosing between the nihilistic philosophy I had months ago and my new “naturalistic” philosophy was a matter of choosing the lesser evil. Obviously six relatively uneventful months can only change a person so much, but I wonder how much different I seem to you.
Not really sure what you mean. The mundane ironist thread is one particular focus for me here. So is the film thread. The focus being experiences that prompt me to think about ideas and the meaning of my reactions to the world around me. The music thread used to be but I more or less abandoned the part about philosophy and now it is more of a “my favorite music” thing. A distraction from ideas and meaning in other words. But that still leaves me with plenty of other activities that take me away from thinking about “how ought I to live my life?”. Everything from the films I view only for entertainment to crostic puzzles to scouring the web for the funniest jokes and comedy bits.