nihilism

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

When you engage the world through proxies, or through another’s perspective, then why discuss anything with you and not read the text directly?
Text referring and deferring to another’s texts.

Dasein is not tabula rasa…nor is alethiea Heidegger’s…it is ancient Greek.
This s swhat he said about it:

• With regard to the Latin name for the true, verum, we shall keep two incidents in mind: 1. Verum, ver-, meant originally enclosing, covering. The Latin verum belongs to the same realm of meaning as the Greek αληθες, the uncovered – precisely by signifying the exact opposite of αληθες: the closed off. 2. But now because verum is counter to falsum, and because the essential domain of the imperium is decisive for verum and falsum and their opposites, the sense of ver-, namely enclosed and cover, becomes basically that of covering for security against. Ver is now the maintaining-oneself, the being-above; ver becomes the opposite of falling. Verum is the remaining constant, the upright that which is directed to what is superior because it is directing from above. Verum is rectum (regere, “the regime”), the right, iustum. For the Romans the realm of concealment and disconcealment does not at all come to be, although it strives in that direction in ver, the essential realm determining the essence of truth. Under the influence of the imperial, verum becomes forthwith “being-above,” directive for what is right; veritas is then rectitude, “correctness,” we would say.
The originally Roman stamp given to the essence of truth, which solidly establishes the all-pervading basic character of the essence of truth in the Occident, rejoins an unfolding of the essence of truth that begin already with the Greeks and that at the same time marks the inception of Western metaphysics.

The idea that ‘truth’ is something enclosed, or imposed by power…is based on the Roman corruption of aletheia, as veritas…and we moderns take it from there when we say ‘truth’.

Heidegger never said anything against objective reality…or how a man cannot question and test the ‘truths’ of his upbringing.
The idea that one is born into a time and a place and that he’s trapped there, is a product of a demented postmodern coward and hypocrite.

If it were so…then no culture would ever advance…change, evolve…all men would be trapped in a culture that magically appeared from nothing and nowhere indoctrinating those born in it, forever and ever enslaving them to its doctrines.
Evolution would be impossible.
Change, revolution, rejection of superstitions, would all be impossible.
All would be eternally trapped in their own private subjective, intersubjective universes.
If the truth about reality were fabricated and imposed by the power then the real world would be useless, of no value, no significance - a nil.
No need for perception or judgement…

The fact that there is an objective world, makes subjective value judgements possible…and also doubting them, and changing them, and adjusting them, and transcending them…poor Karen.
You are trapped by your own feeble mind…a typical follower.
You haven’t progressed, you tread… only adopting more updated versions of the same lies.
From Abrahamism to Marxism; from Marxism to Postmodernism…all you do is replace the metaphors, narratives, and the jargon associated with the exact same values - slave values; victim values.

All value judgments are triangulations in the world, in the objective world, in nature, in the cosmos…independent from all subjective perspectives.
A triangulation of:
Subject…an Object/Objective…both within a world that determined effort, distance, probability, work…to bring subject closer to object/objective.
The only thing that can be socially fabricated - via willful interventions - is helping subjects attain their objectives with minimal costs, effort, risks…or convincing a idiotic naïve gullible needy subjects that an imaginary object/objective exists in the real world…

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

Why society is ill

Morality evolved to preserve the collective from the choices of individuals.

Ethics developed to preserve a culture, and help it become a civilization.
Not all ethics produce the same kind of man, because every culture has its own ideals, i.e., objectives.
Nihilistic ideals cultivate a sickly type of man; sick with anxiety. A man who is anti-life, anti-nature, anti-self.
Nietzsche speaks of ‘slave morality’ and ‘master morality’.
Slave morality is nihilistic.
Master morality is in line with nature, with man’s nature.

I’ve divided evolved moral behaviours, that become encoded as ‘master morality’…from man-made, e.g., Mosaic Commandments, amendments to the previous: ethics.
Only ethical systems can be ‘slave morality’.

This suppression of primal instincts is not unique to man, as Nietzsche claims.
All social species must supress their impulses if they are to participate in a group.

This divides man to his personality - inherited - and his character ([size=80]caricature[/size]) - his social performance; private and public identity.
Personality is a product of organ proportionalities and hierarchies; arrangements and strengths/weaknesses.
Character begins to develop during adolescence when individuals begin to become aware that they cannot do or say whatever they want, as they did during their childhood, so they begin to cultivate their public identity, primarily from feedback, determined by his appearance and his charisma, his intellect.

As a rule…complex personalities have more to supress or sublimate, whereas simpler personalities, i.e., minds, have less, for them their public and private self is almost identical, because there is less to supress and sublimate - these last are usually conventional thinkers with believing in nothing but whatever their group’s beliefs and values are.
Across the ages and across cultures these are the individuals who echo the beliefs and judgments of the group’s they were born into.
With nothing controversial to say, they feel less repressed by political-correctness.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

Cult Language of Woke
Like Jew/Semite…sometimes it’s a racial designation; other times it is entirely spiritual.
Remember Strauss, and how he trained the neo-cons, Trotskyites…about double and triple meanings in texts.
Now they can deal with antagonists by fabricating “hidden meaning” in the their text.
Remember…numerology…every word can be converted to a number - math being another language…and now secret meanings can be read in the text.
Occult meanings, only they know.

Double meanings:
Like gender.
Like race.
Like woman.
Like choice.
Every word can be given a double and triple meaning.

Detach them from all external referents - the tangible, experienced limits their reinterpretations - and then invert them, or redefine them, reconnecting them to texts, scripture, ideology…
Language used to exploit and manipulate the needy, the desperate, the feeble…the lost.

Esoteric/Exoteric
All bullshit is placed in the esoteric…
The liar must place validation where nature cannot contradict it: in the mind…in a collective hive mind - intersubjectivity. Where emotion has power.
This is where magic has omnipotent powers.
Exoterically it is entirely impotent. Nonsense.

Learn the language of nihilism…Woke is but the most current variant.
Abrahamism is spiritual nihilism.
Marxism is political ideological, secular nihilism.
Postmodernism is an adjustment of Marxism because it failed to produce its Utopia.

The Structure of Cults
Karen, of ILP, is a cult member…and she doesn’t even know it.
She went from Abraham, to Marx, and now to Marcus…Frankfurt School…

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

Stephen Hicks: How Failed Marxist Predictions Led to the Postmodern Left

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

Postmodernism Explained by Professor Stephen Hicks

At 24:00 Karen’s position is defined.

---

Ideologies/Dogmas evolve, like people, like races…
Nihilism, in all its spiritual and/or secular variants, is unbound by existence.
It is partially or entirely - depending on the degree of its nullifying ideals - contrary to the real.
Its language liberated from the contraints of space/time all it must do is connect conventional definitions - which it shapes - with emotionally gratifying texts, existing entirely in the minds of its followers.
Increasing its followers increases the range of its effect - its power. Beyond this magical field of effect it remains impotent, therefore its survival depends on proselytizing and converting minds to its concepts, ideals ethics.
If there are no believers their concepts vanish.

---

Nihilism must contradict its own principles if it hopes to survie a world it negates or rejects.
Nihilism cultivates superficial divergence to conceal its uniform collectivizing thinking.
It appeals across ethnic, national, racial, gender, cultural boundaries because it appeals to human anxieties, fears - the lowest-common-denominator.
As such its first defensive reaction to any challenge is the accusation of fear: homophobe, xenophobe, transphobe…or its by-product hate.
Their hatred of existence and of themselves, their anxieties/fears are projected as accusation.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

Hegel, Wokeness, and the Dialectical Faith of Leftism

[iambiguous]

From PN:

Yo, AJ!

Got a challenge for you.

Saytr is bombarding my nihilism thread over at ILP with endless excerpts from folks he feels put me in my place: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.p … &start=650

Again, from my frame of mind, as a moral nihilist, I am only interested in nihilism as it pertains to conflicting goods. To conflicting value judgments.

Given a particular context.

So, please peruse the excerpts Satyr has dumped on my thread over there and note what you construe to be most powerful argument rebutting the points I raise on this thread.

Also, given a particular context, encourage Satyr to do the same. How would, for example, his hero Stephen Hicks react to the points I make here – ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=176529 – given a particular set of circumstances.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

A plea for help from Karen.
Damsel in distress!
Will the cavalry cum-a runnin’?

[iambiguous]

What is Nihilism?
Curated by TheCollector

Nihilism Sometimes Overlaps with Existentialism and Absurdism

So, what is the difference?

How about this: Given a particular set of circumstances most here will be familiar with, let’s attempt to note how we might make a distinction between them. Where does one description end and another begin?

Towards the 20th century, the doom and gloom attitude of Nihilism softened. It eventually evolved into the less anarchic style of Existentialism. While Existentialists shared some of the skepticism about power systems and religion as their predecessors, they also believed the individual had the power to find their own purpose in life.

Doom and gloom if that’s where you construe nihilism takes us. But others embrace it instead as a liberating force in their lives. Why? Because unlike other Isms that anchor you to Good or Evil, Right or Wrong, True or False in regard to what you think, feel, say and do around others, nihilism opens the door to endless possible new options. You do what want to do because doing it will gratify you. And for whatever entirely personal reason. It’s not “what ought I to do?” but “can I get away with doing it?”

And this can revolve around whatever you come to construe [existentially] to be the right thing to do or around flat-out sociopathic behaviors.

From Existentialism, Absurdism emerged. The Absurdists argued that the world might well be chaotic, turbulent and absurd, but we could still celebrate it, or perhaps even laugh, but only in a wry, cynical way.

Absurdism seems particularly ambiguous to me. Sure, you can go in a constructive, life-affirming direction [re Nietzsche’s Übermensch] or in a destructive “fuck it all” direction. Whatever seems the most absurd to you.

[iambiguous]

For Friedrich Nietzsche, nihilism is a terrible psychological problem – a coping mechanism with deadly consequences
Kaitlyn Creasy

Friedrich Nietzsche’s well-known reputation as a philosophical provocateur is partly the result of his commitment to disabusing his readers of a variety of beliefs: their beliefs in a higher purpose, in an afterlife, in disinterested knowledge, in the absolute value of ‘virtues’ such as compassion, and more.

Not unlike me here. Only I take Nietzsche’s No God world “perspective” even farther out onto the nihilist limb. At least with respect to the is/ought world. In other words, I reject even his “will to power” Übermensch “masters” mentality as just another rooted existentially in dasein philosophical prejudice. I take the “self” pertaining to value judgments and argue that being fractured and fragmented in an essentially meaningless and purposeless No God world is a reasonable frame of mind.

And then I ask those who decry this perspective to note how, in a particular context, it is not applicable to them. Just as Nietzsche and others [such as Dostoevsky] suggested that in a No God world all things are permitted because all things can be rationalized. All the way up to and including genocide. And then the viewpoint of the sociopaths who argue that a Godless universe is one where it is not necessarily irrational to predicate morality on “me, myself and I”.

But he does not reject these beliefs merely because he believes they are false (he does) or because he hopes to disrupt the dominant belief system in 19th-century Europe (he does). He rejects these beliefs because he thinks they constitute a clear and present danger to his readers.

Did he? Well, you tell me. But clearly the death of God confronts mere mortals with a problem. If No God, what then can be used to anchor us to an objective morality? And, of course, down through the ages we were inundated with things that were argued to be the next best thing to God: political ideology, No God spiritual paths like Buddhism, deontological philosophies, Nature, New Age mystical paths. And the “human condition” was such that to make them true all one need do is to believe that they are true.

Then tell me “the rest is history” isn’t applicable here.

Such beliefs not only deny life and devalue human existence, they also imperil our psychological wellbeing. To understand why he thinks so requires us to understand his diagnosis of these beliefs as nihilistic.

Then back and forth we’ll go squabbling over what Nietzsche really meant by nihilism; and if what we ourselves think he really meant does reflect what all rational human beings are obligated to believe it means.

If only “theoretically” in their heads.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

We’ll need a context…

[iambiguous]

From PN:

Yo, AJ, FJ and iwaanaplato:

Yet another classic substanceless post from the guy who is forever bitching about those who refuse to take philosophical discourse as seriously as he does:

ME:

@iambiguous

For Friedrich Nietzsche, nihilism is a terrible psychological problem – a coping mechanism with deadly consequences
Kaitlyn Creasy

Friedrich Nietzsche’s well-known reputation as a philosophical provocateur is partly the result of his commitment to disabusing his readers of a variety of beliefs: their beliefs in a higher purpose, in an afterlife, in disinterested knowledge, in the absolute value of ‘virtues’ such as compassion, and more.

Not unlike me here. Only I take Nietzsche’s No God world “perspective” even farther out onto the nihilist limb. At least with respect to the is/ought world. In other words, I reject even his “will to power” Übermensch “masters” mentality as just another rooted existentially in dasein philosophical prejudice. I take the “self” pertaining to value judgments and argue that being fractured and fragmented in an essentially meaningless and purposeless No God world is a reasonable frame of mind.

And then I ask those who decry this perspective to note how, in a particular context, it is not applicable to them. Just as Nietzsche and others [such as Dostoevsky] suggested that in a No God world all things are permitted because all things can be rationalized. All the way up to and including genocide. And then the viewpoint of the sociopaths who argue that a Godless universe is one where it is not necessarily irrational to predicate morality on “me, myself and I”.

But he does not reject these beliefs merely because he believes they are false (he does) or because he hopes to disrupt the dominant belief system in 19th-century Europe (he does). He rejects these beliefs because he thinks they constitute a clear and present danger to his readers.

Did he? Well, you tell me. But clearly the death of God confronts mere mortals with a problem. If No God, what then can be used to anchor us to an objective morality? And, of course, down through the ages we were inundated with things that were argued to be the next best thing to God: political ideology, No God spiritual paths like Buddhism, deontological philosophies, Nature, New Age mystical paths. And the “human condition” was such that to make them true all one need do is to believe that they are true.

Then tell me “the rest is history” isn’t applicable here.

Such beliefs not only deny life and devalue human existence, they also imperil our psychological wellbeing. To understand why he thinks so requires us to understand his diagnosis of these beliefs as nihilistic.

Then back and forth we’ll go squabbling over what Nietzsche really meant by nihilism; and if what we ourselves think he really meant does reflect what all rational human beings are obligated to believe it means.

If only “theoretically” in their heads.

HIM:

@Lorikeet/Satyr

We’ll need a context…

And here, he can’t even come up with “clever” repartee of his own. Instead, he has to lamely mimic me.

Note to phoneutria:

One thing for sure: he didn’t invent you at KT as he did so many others. You actually were a challenge. Both philosophically and in exchanging witticisms.

Hey, prom75 isn’t the only one who misses you dearly.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

Man…Karen is name dropping hoping to cause some kind of stir.
She luvs attention.
Now she brings up spider-woman hoping to instigate some kind of return…from the boys that come for her milkshake.

Such a female…to the core.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

Understanding Postmodernism: The 3 Stages to Today´s Insanity (Stephen Hicks)

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

karen has convinced herself that we do not exist ni a shared reality…since there is no one true way, and may be multiple ways some contradicting each other.
she’s single handily debunked the Scientific method.

For her, having heterosexual sex is just as good as having intercourse with an animal, or a cadaver, or an infant…or homosexual intercourse.
It’s all the same for her…no consequences…or rather, all consequences are the same.

For her an amoral system is feasible…in her imagination.
She reveals how clueless she is about what morality is and why it evolved.

She’s the equivalent to an anarchist that imagines a world with no authorities, no organization…she imagines a world with no morals…where anything goes.

Karen is the reason morals/ethics were attached to a god authority, because minds as retarded as her could not comprehend the far-ereaching negative consequences of incest, or paedophilia or homosexuality…or in providing free and easy abortions to all females.
These minds cannot foresee the long-term effects…like all manimals all they see are short-term gains, immediate satisfaction, immediate benefits.

As we see in the US when morals/ethics deteriorate, the entire system begins to fracture and fragment…like Karen’s mind.

[iambiguous]

For Friedrich Nietzsche, nihilism is a terrible psychological problem – a coping mechanism with deadly consequences
Kaitlyn Creasy

Nihilism’ is used today to designate a wide range of attitudes. Nihilists are often typified as those who hold certain beliefs about life’s purpose or significance: they believe that there is no purpose or ‘point’ to life, or that nothing matters.

Again, to be clear, this nihilist makes a crucial distinction between 1] existential meaning and purpose and significance and 2] essential meaning and purpose and significance.

Once God is presumed to be out of the picture.

The only way in which the existential components of one’s life become moot is when, for whatever reason, you separate yourself completely from others. You live in a cabin somewhere out in the wilderness, a survivalist sustaining your own subsistence and interacting with no one.

Instead, the extent that others are involved in your life is the extent to which meaning and purpose and significance come into play. Why? Because one way or another you have to devise rules of behavior regarding any number of aspects that might crop up when you live with or around others. Unless you are actually able to find someone who thinks and feels and says and does everything exactly as you do.

Good luck with that.

But even here, given some measure of social interaction, you might construe the existential nature of those interactions from a more or less splintered frame of mind. After all, not all nihilists are as fractured and fragmented as “I” am.

Alternatively, nihilists might be distinguished from non-nihilists by their alleged lack of any belief whatsoever: as represented by the Coen Brothers in their film The Big Lebowski, nihilists might ‘believe in nothing’.

Well, that’s ridiculous. If you believe in nothing you believe in that. And, however tongue in cheek these characters were depicted in the film, they still went about the business of defrauding the other Jeffery Lebowski in the Bunny caper. They were actually more like sociopaths to me. The only thing the Dude actually had to fear from them was losing his johnson to their inept stupidity.

Other times, nihilism is characterised as involving an absence of commitment to moral values, like the character of Anton Chigurh from Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men who rejects all notions of right and wrong.

Same thing. When push comes to shove he is just another sociopath to me. It was all about the fucking money. The only time philosophy really came into play was when he’d flip that coin. And that seems more in sync with a particularly ominous rendition of the Benjamin Button Syndrome than, say, Nietzsche?

According to these popular understandings, nihilism involves the disavowal of various beliefs and values. It is a cognitive phenomenon involving abstract and highly intellectual stances.

Right. A “cognitive phenomenon involving abstract and highly intellectual stances.” That was strewn everywhere in those two films.

But forget the Hollywood renditions here. Even when pursued by the Coen Brothers and Cormac McCarthy. What intrigues me are still the points I make in my signature threads above. And the extent to which in a No God world philosophers might come at least close to an equivalent.

[iambiguous]

For Friedrich Nietzsche, nihilism is a terrible psychological problem – a coping mechanism with deadly consequences
Kaitlyn Creasy

According to Nietzsche, however, these intellectual stances [above] do not by themselves count as manifestations of nihilism. As presented so far, there is a key element missing. On Nietzsche’s view, the beliefs that there is no point to life or that there are no moral values become nihilistic only when the individual holding such beliefs finds in them a reason for rejecting life and existence as a whole, for disavowing or disengaging with life itself. Nihilism involves a fundamental repudiation of life itself. It is life-denial, the negation of life.

Those who conclude that in a No God world there is no essential meaning and purpose to life may come to conclude as well that in the absence of some ultimate meaning and purpose there is no reason to go on living.

And, for some, this is a perfectly reasonable frame of mind. And, sure, no doubt about it, some have probably taken their own life as a result of it…disengaging forevermore from the despair this can trigger in particular individuals.

But I suspect that far, far, far more nihilists of this sort end it all because their actual day to day existence itself becomes insufferably bleak.

After all, as I like to point out, even if there is no essential meaning and purpose to human existence, that doesn’t make all of the countless experiences you can have any less fulfilling and satisfying. The food you eat, the music you love, the relationships you share, the arts you explore, the sex you enjoy, the sports you play, the jobs you savor.

Existentially, meaning is often bursting at the seams in the lives of many of us live. And that hardly excludes nihilists.

Instead, nihilism is examined by some philosophers in a way that is not really applicable at all to the lives we live. Whereas Nietzsche’s own reaction to it is often deemed to have revolved around a basically constructive frame of mind:

What does it mean to deny or negate life? To flesh out one sense of nihilistic life-denial, let us take the abovementioned belief that there is no overarching purpose to this life and world. On Nietzsche’s view, it’s quite possible to believe in the purposelessness of life as a whole without taking this belief as a reason to negatively evaluate life. In fact, Nietzsche himself both holds this belief and positively evaluates life; he thinks that, even without an overarching purpose in which all human beings participate, life is well worth living!

Instead, the travail in his own life often revolved around one or another medical affliction. From childhood on. Some of which were said to be entirely psychosomatic. Then the bouts of depression. Then his descent into madness. Again, however, each of us as individuals may live lives that others have no real understanding of at all. Endless “failures to communicate” in other words. And that has almost nothing at all to do with nihilism. Especially in places like this. Instead, we are often confronted over and again with the insufferable objectivists. Human existence must have an essential meaning and purpose, they tell us, because they have already found it.

On the other hand…

But if an individual thinks that life is worthwhile only if there is some higher purpose to it, and they come to believe that there is no such purpose, this latter belief will serve as a reason for finding life not worth living. In this case, since the individual’s belief in the purposelessness of life leads to a negative evaluation of life itself – thus serving as a reason to deny life – Nietzsche would designate the belief nihilistic. In this first sense, then, nihilistic life-denial involves negative judgments of life and existence: that existence is not worthwhile, that life is not worth living, or that it would be better not to exist.

So, by all means, fit yourself in there somewhere. Philosophically or otherwise.

[HumAnIze]

I did, I tried my absolute hardest. But I just couldnt imagine someone who gives a fuck.

[iambiguous]

No, seriously.

[iambiguous]

From PN:

Joker
Ștefan Bolea meditates on madness at the movies.

Most of us possess a sense of reality, but what if our senses deceive us? Would I still know what was real if, for instance, I had a microscopic brain tumor that made me hallucinate that the people around me were devils, or that a beautiful sunny day was a dark nightmare? What if I then felt the urge to start shooting people?

Okay, was the Joker a madman? Seriously, was he clinically insane?

At the cambridge.org site, he is described as someone afflicted with “antisocial personality disorder”.

Okay, but…

Is that more a manifestation of genes or memes? Nature or nurture? And doesn’t that make all the difference in the world? After all, in a free will world, if someone behaves as they do because of a brain tumor or because they are afflicted with some serious mental illness, how then can we really hold them responsible for what the do? Morally or otherwise.

Or, instead, is Joker a sociopath? In other words, for any number of reasons given the life he lived – he was abused as a child, he was raised by sociopaths, he lived a grim and brutal life largely beyond his control – he simply came to view the world as revolving solely around gratifying his own selfish wants and needs.

Joker, a psychological thriller directed and co-written by Todd Phillips, is a meditation on this disassociative sort of madness. It emphasizes the philosophical problem of the ‘liquid’ divide between perception and reality: if my perception is biased, then my reality transforms as well.

Again, that’s why it’s so crucial [if possible] to pin down the etiological components of someone who chooses the behaviors as he does. If his perception of the world around him is largely “beyond his control” then the only realistic option is to separate him from the rest of us and try to treat him as a “mental patient” rather than as a “criminal”.

On the other hand, if Joker is a sociopath and/or a moral nihilist who rationalizes his selfish and at times destructive behavior, say, philosophically, we may or may not be able to offer him a new philosophical narrative that prompts him to change his behaviors.

With actual madness however…

A second, connected, problem of madness, is the dissolution of the distinction between inside and outside. I can project my inner being onto the world, changing its color and tone. If I can’t tell that I’m doing this then I’ll live in a labyrinthine inferno, a prison of my own projections. No one can reach out to somebody with this kind of insanity. No one really exists for them, and after a while their own broken mirror reflects no one. The subject devours the world, also disintegrating in the process.

…how much of this is so engrained physiologically in Joker, that all we can do is to stop him from devouring our world along with his own.