This
This.
Lol : )
It isn’t the responsibility of the existential nihilist to decide who ought want or not want objective meaning.
There are many who do seek, or demand objective meaning - particular religious types.
From a scientific approach, it is relevant to establish the parameters of what one is evaluating - in this case: meaning.
If one is to establish a philosophy, one must lay the ground work (foundations) before building upon it.
One seeks solid foundations for which one can trust to be stable and have integrity.
The existential nihilist claims there wasn’t intent behind the origins of life.
- No larger entity to look towards for any guidance.
This is relevant in the face of claims to the contrary.
This leaves us in a position where any action can only be evaluated respective to a goal.
There is no inherently wrong action.
We can only attempt to make the case as to why an action isn’t in the interest of the actor -
or why it is in our interest to inhibit the actions of another.
Also, the possibility that a set of values/interests can be completely rational - yet at odds to our own.
I have my personal beliefs [cases that I’d make] in relation to these, but that’s besides the point.
It is an objective fact that unicorns exist in our imagination. Yet, our imagination does not correspond to reality beyond ourselves. There are objective reasons for how the concept of a unicorn came to be part of our collective imaginations, but it’s still not a tangible entity in reality beyond our minds. Unicorns have their place, but it is important to distinguish between facts and fiction / real and imaginary.
Again, there are multiple forms of nihilism. If your criticism is to general / global nihilism, then sure, but nihilism is an umbrella term - criticism of one type doesn’t apply to all.
The living create and project meaning that is absent beyond their own projections and actions. There are reasons for why events occur beyond the influence of the living, but these events lack intent or a purpose to be achieved - there is no overarching goal to these events.
Existential nihilists don’t deny subjective meaning.
It’s a strawman if directed so.
I don’t. All evidence supports this, so I strongly suspect it and respond accordingly.
If hypothetically there was a force immeasurably greater than ourselves that had intent for our existence, one reasonably should factor that into their decision making.
What is wanted of me, and ought I cooperate? These questions are deemed moot by the absence of such intent.
This term was not created by me and refers to concepts that have been around for centuries.
I do live my life, and as this is a philosophy forum, which I am partial to, I try to address misconceptions.
It isn’t critical that we reach an agreement - I’m simply making a case in good faith. Take of it as you will.
One needn’t know something with 100% certainty for it to have weight. It’s a theory / belief, and isn’t crucial to establish complete certainty.
If you reread my previous post, you’ll discover I was careful to not state the concepts were irrefutably established.
And if it wasn’t a given, unless otherwise stated, my posts are personal beliefs.
I became a nihilist on my search for meaning.
It is misleading to assess nihilism outside the context of where it first arose -
a world where meaning and intent was claimed in places, where science revealed not necessary.
A world where the majority were considered religious, and it was an insult to be otherwise.
You’ve made many assertions, friend. Hopefully I may have cleared some up.
You didn’t answer the question, my question was specifically about meaning itself. Why would meaning ITSELF need to be “objective”? I am not asking if or why some people might want to seek an “objective” meaning, so called. I am not even sure exactly what is supposed to be meant by the term ‘objective meaning’. Meaning is just meaning, it exists and is immediately relevant to, for, by and as a specific meaning-capable being such as ourselves.
Yes and no. Sometimes you need to have an understanding of what is going to come later in order to make the foundation properly. In fact that is often the case. People who build buildings already understand the entirety of the building before they lay the foundation. And philosophy is all about this kind of UNDERSTANDING.
It is just a platitude to say stuff like “must lay the ground work before building”. I avoid platitudes like the plague upon the mind that they are.
Moral nihilism and radical relativism/skepticism are boring. Please tell me you have more to say than that.
Sure, but I fail to see what the point is at all. Yes we try to understand, explain and sometimes convince others about why something is or is not in the best interest of themselves or another person. That is basic to moral consideration. I mean that is at the very basic level of it. So what are you saying exactly? I mean what is the point you are trying to make?
Yes it does. The imagination of a unicorn is a combination of two real aspects of existence, namely horses and horns. Our imagination took two existing things and combined them together in a way that (as far as we know) doesn’t happen to be the case in reality. So what? That proves my point about how subjectivity (“imagination” here) is related to, emerges and comes from what is more objective or beyond itself. And because people can look around in reality and see images of unicorns, drawn by other people for example. So in reality unicorns DO exist, as human ideas combining two independently real things together in a novel way as well as in drawings, movies, stories etc.
Pretty sure people are able to understand that they can have an imagination of a unicorn without there needing to be a physically really existing unicorn in reality as part of the animal kingdom. I think people are able to understand that we can create imaginative things that don’t need to literally exist. No one thinks Spongebob needs to be real somewhere in the ocean in order for someone to come up with the idea of Spongebob.
ALL forms of nihilism involved the deliberate denial of some meaning(s). Fact. And I focus on it being located at the level of meaning primarily as opposed to say at the level of factual claims or beliefs because that is where I see nihilists are operating, where they are distorting and conflicting and denying things is primarily having to do with not just their factual claims or beliefs but really has more to do with their actual meanings. So nihilism is less a cognitive illness and more an illness of meaning, a kind of soul-sickness similar to suicidality. They have an urge or desire to suicide parts of themselves, of their own meanings and realities. That is where nihilism comes from, that kind of desire.
I never said there was or needed to be. I am talking about meaning ITSELF, you are ignoring that continually and just talking about people or reasons or events/things in the world. Try to address what I am actually saying as pertains to the nature of meaning itself.
Where did I use the term “subjective meaning” in that? I didn’t.
Why do you constantly change the focus of what I am saying? It is a fallacy to change the topic in the middle of an argument, especially without declaring that is what you are doing.
Yes it matters, and yet no one knows which is the case. Is there a God, does the universe have some greater purpose in which humans participate or is it all just random particles with no higher meaning and no God? We all believe certain things about it but no one knows for sure, at least not as far as I can tell.
You didn’t answer the question. Why bother creating (or using/adopting) something like existential nihilism as even a basic concept or ideology/position? The move from “I don’t know for sure but I believe that the universe doesn’t have a purpose or larger meaning and there is no God” to “I am an existential nihilist” is grossly unjustified and unwarranted. Nihilism, about existential issues or anything else, does not follow from the belief professed regarding universal purpose/meaning or God. These are different contexts, scopes and categories of things.
This is why it is funny how nihilists and atheists secretly long for the God they think isn’t there. It is their longing for this missing God or missing ‘greater meaning’ that causes them to jump from no universal meaning/purpose/God all the way to nihilism or atheism as ideologies and philosophies. If they didn’t secretly long for God and higher meaning then they would be able to easily state their belief in the lack of such things and move on, without needing to elevate this belief into such a high stature as to construct entire ideologies and philosophies out of it.
“God” is equally as meaningful to the theist as to the atheist, it’s just that only one of them is honest about this fact.
I never said otherwise. Once again you completely ignore the point I actually made.
That doesn’t contradict what I said. I already said nihilists were operating within meaning, their own nihilism is meaningful to themselves for example. Certainly nihilists are searching for meaning in some ways while at the same time attempting to subvert and destroy it in other ways. Else they wouldn’t have this nihilistic impulse or the weird super-need to elevate the significance of things they don’t even believe in.
Like I said, you long for the God you think isn’t there. That is nihilism. Denying something but not being able to let go, because in fact the denial itself is inauthentic.
Right back at you. I made many very clear points, most of which you dodged.
We are fully satisfied when we recognize three things at once:
Justified (ought to be believed & lived)
True (is real regardless of context — in every context)
Meaning (that worth living/dying for)
Thomas Nagel
The Absurd
In other words, in ordinary life we interact with others socially, politically and economically. And, so, as a “for all practical purposes” consequence of that, we can find ourselves in situations where, based on our own rooted subjectively in dasein moral convictions, we come to judge the convictions of others as absurd.
For example, some here insist it would be absurd to reelect Donald Trump to the White House in 2024. Others, however, insist it would be absurd for Jack Smith to recommend to the Justice Department that Donald Trump be indicted on criminal charges.
But that is entirely different from the manner in which the absurd is understood by those like me. From my frame of mind, value judgments related to Trump are derived existentially. And in a No God world there appear to be no fonts mere mortals can turn to in order to establish whether all rational and virtuous men and women are obligated “categorically and imperatively” to oppose either Trump’s campaign or Trump’s indictment.
No, absurdity for the moral nihilists of my ilk rests on the assumption that human interactions themselves are essentially meaningless ontologically and essentially purposeless teleologically. And that whatever the outcome for Trump, each of us one by one tumbles over into the abyss that is oblivion.
From the cradle to the grave we are all Sisyphus. Our lives themselves being that “immense boulder”.
Then “intellectually” whatever this…
…means.
So, what does it mean to you, Mr. Serious Philosopher?
Nagel is dumb.
No, seriously.
ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.p … &start=425
Brought back to the above source, can a relative comparability be established, as between Nagel and those who excercise judgment over him?
If so, then iPod facto there can evolve a moral relativism satisfactory a reasonable facsimile of the original.
And that will elliviate much concerned guilt over the image and it’s hypothesized original.
Yeah, HumAnIze, what about that!!! 
Then I’ll double the motion.
Just say’n
and off the wall reason is that a dynamic movement toward establishing contability betters the division which absolute Dasein willfully achieves to maintain, because it precludes an existential jump into ‘otherness’
That turnaround can be resisted, but ultimately is bound for defeat.
Unless I am mistaken, and the will to power excluded any residual power sharing to will ubiquistly
Our Nietzschean Future
Paul O’Mahoney considers the awful fate Nietzsche predicts for humanity.
Given the extent to which both God and religion still managed to play a bigger role in human interactions back when he was around, that was pretty much a certainty. This and the historical fact that, more and more, the capitalist political economy was laying a foundation for a " modern" and then a “postmodern” assessment of human interactions. The spotlight shifting from Catholicism to Protestantism…from an “other worldly” perspective to the here and now. And especially from “we” to “I”.
Many more options from which to choose.
Nietzsche died in 1900. Right at the very beginning of the century that was far more amenable to the death of God, to the rise of the rich and powerful Ubermen who came to own and operate what was fast becoming the global economy. And, of course, the advent of existentialism and nihilism.
Clearly a No God world is rife with endless possibilities. Once the common denominator Gods give way to mere mortals “thinking up” their own objectivist fonts how far away can calamity be? I quote the 20th Century for example. And now this one. This coupled with Nitzsche’s own Uberman philosophy. After all, once the powerful get it in their head that they can justify their “my way or the highway” moral and political agendas philosophically then they can readily switch from “might makes right” to “right makes might”.
Right?
Right , but then questions come up, what is the goal and source of evolution both mind and body and do they correlate or parallel ‘ on the way up’ where the mind reavaluates the concept of God and his mind falters , and he forgets why he needed God, and what It means to him before he could conceive Him
Then AZi said yes Hr is not dead, i can help man get back up there by remembering how and why we simulated Him , as a symbolic necessity to tie the sources of the philosophical problem which has been associated with it as religion.
Later sans philosophy theology took it’s place, therefore, the from that point on logical presuppositions have devolved into logical ontology as epistemology took another route, and the division between them grew wider, but neither one lost it’s ground, as sustained forms pertaining to the mind of man.
Even the most extreme atheist germinates a form of logical positivism which has to be accounted for.
This is what Heidegger’s formulation with the Dasein had to deal with: thus the ‘Turn toward a methodical shift .
And as I could be wrong as well, but if not totally, than it can be affirmed, that the hidden , unknown forms of their essential idea, partake in both views.
Questions such as an evolutionary progression in God’s image, as relational to AI simulation of a comparability wit this idea, may be seen as equally evolutionary, as a parallel of both, through the philosophy of mind, and it’s progression.
Now I don’t know humanize’ position, but I do know that as my thinking goes, there is no essential difference, and I feel we are pretty much on the same level. I felt that way before and feel the same now.
Yes… our thinking (d)evolves in a dialectical Linnaean sort of taxonomy just like matter bonds and genes synthesize proteins. God allows wiggle room & interacts with both. It meshes.
Thomas Nagel
The Absurd
You know what’s coming [from me]:
Of course, philosophers contemplating the absurd epistemologically much like me contemplating it existentially have to just shrug that part off…and carry on.
As Rumsfeld reminded us, whether in regard to the war in Iraq or the existence of existence itself, there are those things we don’t even know that we don’t even know.
And the beauty of contemplating philosophical knowledge for many philosophers is that the discussion itself can be confined to pinning down the correct definition of the words to be used in the dueling deductions.
For instance:
Do your own deductions here line up with that?
Indeed, as soon as I include myself here, then [sooner or later] I’ll begin to ponder the extent to which my philosophical assessment of the absurd can be intertwined with those things that “I” construe to be absurd given “my” understanding of the world around me. The parts that revolves around “conflicting goods” for example.
How about you? Given a particular context in which you seek to intertwine the essential, philosophical absurdity of existence with your own existential, rooted in dasein assessments of it – reelecting Trump, indicting Trump – what of the absurd then?
ikr?
Pick one:
1] she follows me around like a little yapping puppy dog
2] she follows me around like a snarling pitbull
No, seriously.
Whoever she is, she learned from the best!
Sorry I don’t know what ipod factos are.
iPod facto? Sorry