The lack of inherent meaning to the universe is taken by the mentally stunted among us to indicate that life itself is consequently futile.
The premise being that life requires a purpose to conform to before it can be thought worth the trouble. This assignation of purpose assumes a premise to which reality must be understood to follow, a final end or objective. In the manner of human ends and objectives; an intention with a clear goal in sight.
A universe with the quality of intent.
Thus, this purpose usually manifests iin the form of religious epiphany, where some particularily “special” individual comes under the impression that his perception of the universe is privileged in it’s ability to know and to understand the “purpose” for which the universe’s assumed “Creator” has intended it for.
When this error is committed, the human understanding of meaning as stemming from humanity and existing for human needs and purposes, becomes warped into a cosmic meaning which humans gradually discover or uncover around them.
This projection is a humanization of what is perceived in the interests of simplification and better understanding. Something which has a linear intent is more sympathetic than that which does not, after all; and above all else that which puts humanity, or perhaps one single human, at the centre of this intent is the most sympathetic of all …
So we see here a fear of the vastness of the universe and the growing realization of mankind’s small place within it. This is then a re-orientation of the apparent to place humanity at the centre of what is perceived. A coping mechanism. That this mechanism can be highly destructive, I will illustrate below.
I draw this parallel between nihilism and theism because both contain the assumption that the universe either contains or lacks inherent meaning itself and that our impression of the universe is determined by the presence or absence of such meaning - outside ourselves.
These minds crave the absolute to assign purpose to their existence and are upset at this lack. Such perspectives are the products of theistic upbringings and occurs amongst individuals who have been taught to look for meaning, purpose, commands or intent from sources outside themselves.
Thus is the human mind trained to look for direction only from legitimate authority, the Other; and to consequently denegrate and ignore it’s own creation of meaning. As a result, the individual looks to others for mutual self-assurance, supports only what is regarded as self-evident or populist, and generally retards it’s own mental faculty.
Why else is theism such a useful tool of governace?
The nihilist, therefore is an ex-theist; one who has rejected the lessons of his upbringing and come to regard an existence without a God as a meaningless, purposeless and indeed futile existence.
The reason being that there is no one to apply the opposite. Including themselves …
So, bereft of such commandments, these slaves without a master become consumed with despair. They become reactionary. They assign to a reality that cannot command their lives a value of emptiness, pointlessness, futility. Indeed, they come to view the universe as an outside force, an oppressor who forces the suffering of life upon them. They are Other to the universe, a victim deserving sympathy. (This, however, is Dualism)
What is in fact happening is the individual is decrying the lack of meaning inherent to reality and then assigning a negative value (meaning) to this object. The assignation of emptiness, pointlessness, futility is the expression of this slave’s own emptiness, pointlessness and futility in the face of an uncaring universe. It is an emotional reaction, a lashing out.
In other words, the creator of meaning is denouncing the world for lacking -in itself- what he cannot apply to it.
Is not then Nihilism another manifestation of the cripple’s philosophy?
Is not this yet another appeal to be spared?
i like the idea that the belief life is “futile” presumes a universe with the quality of intent - that is probably true
none of this would necessarily follow, however
i think you’re quite eloquently describing a specific form of nihilism and there are other forms besides that
yes, pointlessness assumes an object and so in that sense, nihilism contradicts itself
it’s not so much an outright error so much as it’s an indicator of intellectual adolescence - the avowed nihilist is stuck in a phase - most outgrow it, but there are always exceptions to the rule, In real life nihilism isn’t so much a philosophy as it’s a feeling, an emotion, like you say.
I take this to be your conclusion, an I agree. I’d add this however : we are all, or at least the vast majority of us, raised as theists. Not in the strict sense of the word, but in the sense that God can be seen as the symbol for a foundation of an objective morality. As infants we are educated to obey certain rules, mostly unconditionaly, by our parents, peer and society in general. Could it be any other way, really?
Nihilisme is then the phase some of us go through on the path to being an individual, a tool for dissolving objective morality.
Also,
we are teleological beings, we need some motivation to keep us going.
The only way to “surpass” nihilism is to repress it, to ignore the question. Which is clearly what is being done here.
Merely pointing to the subjectivity of human meaning does nothing to surpass the nihilistic dilemma, nor does it work to simply dismiss the question, as you do above. . . . the universe is meaningless, nothing matters. There is no after-life, nothing of you or anyone else, or anything, will survive the passing of time and the turnings of the universe. Everything changes and fades away; all forms are surface phenomena which are totally false and, in addition, will dissolve out of existence anyway, completely vanish. Of you, nothing will remain, anywhere, ever - this is the nihilistic dilemma in its true form, and it is something that the human mind cannot well cope with - it is something that gets ignored or repressed rather than addressed, because to address it is to undo one’s very existence.
So the “best” way to “surpass” this problem is to ignore it, to tell yourself “well that may be true, but still what I do now is important to me”. Thats fine, of course - but it is merely a denial, psychological repression of the nihilistic dilemma. No, your values or meanings “now” do not matter, there is no value or meaning in anyways - humans tell themselves that things have meaning because we need to think and feel that way in order to live our lives; it is a survival strategy, nothing more.
All of your values and meanings and truths are lies, none of them are real. You are a psychotic deluded ape obeying the psychological programming that evolution hard-wired into you, there is no meaning or value in anything, life has no more purpose or significance than a rock or a photon. Yet life cannot deny itself, it must find a way to affirm its own existence, because life is merely an irrational vicious circle: life exists to live, thats it. “Why” is life here? To survive, to live. Why? Because that is what life is, because other organic forms that evolved without this survival obcession did not, obviously, survive. Thus over eons and eons there is you, an organic form based on innumerable layers, all of them superficial and false in that they appear to be something that they are not, they hide what is underneath and structurally primary. . . . that you have a “survival instinct” due to long evolution, that this survival instinct is covered up by the desire-instinct which is equally self-contradicting, you take to be some sort of important truth or meaning in your life. But it is not.
Nothing matters, not even the little subjective truths and values that you cling to. It isnt really that they dont matter, its that they dont even not matter - they are so insignificant that saying they do or do not matter is equally nonsensical.
So, you still want to live, eh? Your instincts compell you to create meanings, assign values, chase desires? Then you are ignoring the problem of nihilism, letting yourself get sucked back into the fantasy dream world of illusions that we call life. You cannot truly comprehend the problem of nihilism, because to do so would unravel your very existence, on every level and in every way. You must posit some value in order to survive, that is life’s self-contradiction: it must create some meaning to attach itself to, else it perishes of itself. We humans, through our evolved brains, can grasp this self-contradiction at the heart of all life, but not many of us are strong enough to face up to it. A few, like here, are a bit more intellectually endowed and so pretend like they address or even “surpass” the problem, when all you are doing is pushing the problem away and covering it up with more superficial lies and fantasies. No, your meanings are not meaningful, no your values are not valuable, not even to you: they are completely false and contrived, existing only on the surface of appearances. Life in this way exists as its own self-contradiction. You are not strong enough to face the utterly false nature that lies within you, the superficiality of all of your forms, be them your beliefs, thoughts, values, love, pain, truth, hopes, dreams, philosophies, reason - these are all fake, psychological constructions, because the human needs these, in some measure and degree, in order to continue to survive. You live to live, you survive to survive, it is a circle with no end, no meaning and no point. You are a self-contradiction. But at least you can console yourself that you are not alone - all life is such a contradiction.
Or, you can just ignore the problem, or pretend that by inventing more deluded fantasies that you are “surpassing” it. But I suppose you’ll sleep better at night, at least - the sleep of an ignorant child.
something must be true in order for anything else to be a lie
if instead you’re saying the only truth is that everything is meaningless, that’s fine, but then we can arbitrarily decide that anything we want to matter actually matters, and that is no cause for despair - If there is no absolute truth, then why should the arbitrary nature of values undo anyone’s existence? it might as well be liberating.
to say that values are insignificant in any sense that would cause somebody distress is to make a value judgment, if the only truth is that there are no other truths besides the fact that there is no truth, then there is no basis on which to declare any value as insignificant because there is no ultimate broader perspective nor objective stance from which that could possibly be true - if any of what you said in your post causes you despair or unravels you intellectually or emotionally, that is NECESSARILY because you are making value judgments about those facts - it’s your choice if you find yourself unsettled by a valueless universe,
Nihilism, insofar as it could in any sense be true, is just a perspective, and there is no necessary logical reason to be upset by it or to have to repress it in order to go on living - why not just switch the perspective when it suits you and be pragmatic about the whole thing? we can be actively aware that from a certain perspective nothing matters, while at the same time adopting other perspectives because it pleases us to do so, and because, if nothing matters, then that is totally justifiable
values are significant whether we ascribe to them personally or not, whether we think they are objective or think they are subjective, they are THERE, and they affect our lives in very real ways, to simply dismiss them because they are not written in the cosmos or somehow divinely determined (and i think we can agree that they are not) isn’t very pragmatic if we’re at all involved in the process of living - the fact that they aren’t real in an absolute sense because nothing is could just as well be a source of cosmic freedom - why repress it?
Notice that I recognise the lack of meaning inherent to the universe. Notice that I regard meaning as an invention and tool of mankind.
That this invention and tool is peculiar to mankind is what is causing your retardation.
You still yearn for the higher authority and are utterly dismayed when you regard the universe as what it is.
Because there is no purpose assigned to your life, you will regard any purpose you create for yourself as delusional. Because you cannot accept the validity of your own purposes. Purposes have too often been imposed upon you.
To surpass nihilism is to surpass this need within yourself for an outside force to give your life meaning.
The dilemna you face here is freeing yourself from this need.
You give your life meaning.
I am a phenomena; a distinct manifestation of the material. Consequently I am part of reality.
And that is all I am.
When I die, I will decompose and my parts will dissolve within the flux of becoming.
“I” am a temporary coincidence of phenomena. When “I” end… it is merely a change. All beginnings and endings are simply change.
Consider the notions of cause and effect.
Cannot a cause be an effect?
Define the gap between the cause and the effect. Does it really exist?
Or are these terms, like beginning and ending, simply human inventions, abstractions, applied upon flux to orientate it into a perspective more easily comprehensible? A linear progression?
In short when I die - does my body become non-existent? Do you assert that a soul migrates? Vanishes?
But the mind is the manifestation of organic processes, so this is not the case, is it?
What am “I” then, but a temporary coincidence of phenomena, a condition of matter/energy which is -temporarily- producing the effect “I”?
Every action, every “cause” I cause to occur, has consequences, effects forever after the effect, irregardless of what perspective you are using.
Similarly, I am the consequence of past events which contributed to my existence and which it is not possible for me to escape.
Causality is not a pick and choose affair. I am a direct consequence of past events, Therefore I am a demonstration of causality - that actions can have future consequences, future effects.
So you are incorrect in your opinion that my existence will come to nothing. That is impossible.
Nothing comes to nothing.
Or perhaps you will run the risk of defining nothing? I would like to see that.
Further to that, I would like to see you define one single static unchanging Thing known to humankind. Illustrate for me the something/nothing dichotomy, and how either have anything to do with reality…
Everything changes, everything passes away. This is reality. Not a fantasy land. You construct a fantasy and decry reality when this fantasy does not exist.
Again your nihiliistic need for solidity, stability, something to lean against, exposes itself.
You want a crutch, untermensch, and you are dismayed when it is not offered to you? When it is not… provided?
What is the value of something that is imperishable, everlasting, immortal? Such a thing does not have a value because such a thing does not exist. It is the mutability and instability of existence that upsets you… and this emotional drivel is the result.
The problem here is that we both perceive the same thing, yet come to different interpretations of this perception.
My interpretation is to take it for what it is.
Yours is to despair when the subject of your imaginings is nowhere to be found.
The distinction is that you are first assuming a reason or purpose for what is perceived, according to human needs and human understanding, projecting this need onto existence (linearity; a direction which leads to an end - Reason, purpose, intention), and then come to regard reality as deficient when this projection is nowhere to be found.
All the while you are casually unaware that this is all your invention, an invention you are applying upon directionless mutability which has no relation to such humanisations as “reason”, “purpose” and “intention”.
The point of this thread is to highlight this fact and to draw parallels between this behaviour and theism, where the same lack that destroys you is seen as God’s unknowability, or mysterious ways, or whatever …
When there is no one and nothing to validate you, when you are alone, when what you crave above all else to prop up your flitting, directionless, helpless little life… is absent, this is true.
But this is only when you first accept the premise that your life requires such validation. But to require such validation is need; emotion. You crave direction, thus are unable to provide, thus cannot find an authority to provide it for you, and thus devalue existence as a result…
You commit the same fallacy again and again, untermensch. Can you not see it?
Do you want to see it?
Do you want not to see it?
My values and meanings are devised by me to suit my desires. They are real and true as a result.
“Truth” is merely the accuracy of a premise: there is a car over there, can this be verified by perception? Yea/Nay determines the premises validity. Truth therefore is a measure of human perception when such perception is set against the standard, reality.
That our ability to verify our perceptions with regard to our premises is so often impaired is what leads to much stupidity in the world …
But to further analyse the above absurdity: truth and lies, reality and unreality - these are both dualities which are not mutually exclusive.
By this I mean that it is not consistent to encapsulate a concept within one category when this categories’ antithesis is regarded as unacceptable or non-existent.
There is no truth, there are only lies? is not this statement meaningless?
Indeed, because “I” am the thing-in-itself subject, the victim, upon which the woes of existence are inflicted.
“I” am separate from psychological programming, from evolution and existence… rather than being a manifestation of it.
What is essence, darling? It is me. It is the sum-total of all the phenomena which produced the current manifestation which you are reading at this moment.
“I” am psychological programming, evolution and existence.
I cannot escape my past, or conceal it, or separate myself from it. I am a result of it.
Consequently, life is not an affliction - it is what I am.
Again you show your dismay when a reason and purpose is not provided for you.
Oh, the seductiveness of beliefs that orientate the universe into a perspective conceivable and sympathetic to you…
And how terrible and lamentable it is when this is not the case…
Ask yourself why you assume that there should be a reason for existence. Consider what a “reason” is.
Then ask yourself again why this concept should be applied to reality and what need, in you, is expressing itself through this question.
Or, I could purposefully remain a child, crying that’s it’s daydreams are not real, maintaining a white-knuckled grip on my need for an Other, an arbitrator, a parent, a carer, a steersman for my life who will pilot the vessel of my body, of which I am an unwilling occupant, upon a path determined by this steersman - but never me.
I don’t know how to steer and am, after all, to short to man the wheel.
The seas of the universe are too rough and choppy for my like. I am too often strapped in the backseat, watching.
You cannot ask me this second question. However, as I have answered one question for you, you must do me the favour of reading this one quote:
[size=95]Why did I startle in my dream, so that I awoke? Did not a child come to me, carrying a mirror?
“O Zarathustra”—said the child unto me—“look at thyself in the mirror!”
But when I looked into the mirror, I shrieked, and my heart throbbed: for not myself did I see therein, but a devil’s grimace and derision.
Verily, all too well do I understand the dream’s portent and monition: my doctrine is in danger; tares want to be called wheat!
[Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, ‘The Child with the Mirror’.][/size]
You think you’re Nietzschean for heeding Zarathustra’s bid to lose him and find yourself, at the end of Part 1. The quote I gave you is from the beginning of Part 2. But apparently you’ve never read that; you left him behind and never looked back. And look what has become of you, with your ‘crool’ picture of Venom or Carnage from Spiderman. You’ve become a caricature.
Most forms of supposed nihilism aren’t completely nihilistic.
For example, a nihilist gets up and eats a sandwich.
If like had absolutely no value or meaning to him, he wouldn’t eat, but he does.
Nihilists are decieving themselves and others into thinking that they are nihilistic, when in fact they are merely being minimalistic with their values.
All life is a self-contradiction because all life is a vicious circle - it exists to live, nothing more. Life must constantly affirm itself by reacting against its material conditions of want and need, else it perishes - this is the “life instinct” itself, which is only an instinct insofar as all life without this specific organizational form has not survived, obviously. Thus over time all life becomes ingrained with this “instinct” to survive, but the instinct itself is nonsensical, not because it is without value, which it is, but because it is circular and based on a contradiction: that life cannot deny itself, it must constantly affirm itself, it has no other choice as life, it cannot even address the question of “affirm or deny?”, it cannot acknowledge it - yes it goes without saying that life has no value, even the point at which life can be said to arise from unliving inorganic matters, whatever that point is, this is not the creation of anything, it is a mere organization of that material into a form which begins to interact with its surroundings in new ways, forming new sensational-energetic relations to things outside, and eventually inside, of itself.
The point is that yes, there is no meaning, “meaning” exists in human minds. But I also went on to state that human meaning itself is false and imaginary, even the subjective meanings that we “create” in our “minds” are superficialities and have no permanence or reality. They are mere psychological constructs and reactive devices that exist based on the nature of the human organism and its deeper instincts, which are just rote programming based on that same self-contradiction at the heart of all living things. Humans merely gain the “advantage” of being able to conceptualize this and understand this self-contradiction, this lack of meaning, and thus we suffer of this realization. Hence all the never-ending repression that the human animal does to itself: all human activity exists to repress away this realization of the meaninglessness of all life, not just human life but everthing, as well as to repress the knowledge that all human forms, all that is human is false and superficial, a mere surface phenomenon. Nothing of man matter, nothing of man will survive, and nothing even of what man “is” right now, despite all that, has any reality. Forms can only be understood as forms by affirming them as Being, when in reality there is no such thing and all that exists is pure energy in a state of constant flux and change in time, nothing permanent can ever, by definition, be real. The human organism exists to repress this knowledge from itself, because all human reality and forms and values are based on the premise that they are permanent in some manner.
You misunderstand me, which is alright, because likely you have never encountered a person with the conceptions here that I have. But read this message here, and then form your opinions of what I am saying based on it.
Of course, there is no such thing as “purpose”, all things are nonexistent to begin with. Forms are false, self-deceptive lies; the human is an imagination, nothing that we think of as of ourselves is real, it is all illusive formal images based on smoke and mirrors, repressions based on psychological unconscious instincts which only exist because life has continue to evolve in its own self-contradiction with itself - life must exist and persist as life by affirming that what it experiences, thinks, feels, affirms is real, it has no other choice. Life must posit a meaning and permanence for itself and to its forms of experience, even non-human life at the point where it can properly be said to possess a “consciousness”. Consciousness is just a set of unknown instincts, the singularity of the sum of lesser relations of sensations or conceptions into one emergent whole which is the totality of all these prior, relations. But consciousness is no less reactive, fleeting, or instinctual - it is merely a summation of the inter-relations of countless other individual or bundled relations, thus it gains a form of a totality, it subsumes other relations to itself and thus “becomes aware” of them in a manner which is not strictly determined by any single instinct or relations.
All human “purposes” are fleeting and meaningless illusions, self-deceptive lies, hallucinations. Nothing more. Sometimes we are imprinted with these images from outside, but the basic generating mechanism of production in the human psyche exists in the individual human brain, which must affirm itself as itself, must affirm its forms as forms (ie. as lies, as beings, as existing with some permanence or reality or meaning), else it cannot survive.
That is impossible. All that is human is of this need, this basic self-contradiction at the heart of all life, not just human life. Life is a vicious circle, life exists to survive, it survives to exist, not based on any reason but because it must, else it perishes. Life cannot see itself in entirety because to do so is to see this circularity, which would undo the forms that life experiences as reality.
Anyone who thinks they can surpass nihilism by accepting that life has no meaning is merely creating another meaning for themselves, one more self-deception on top of everything else.
To be alive is to give life meaning falsely, to affirm that which is unreal as real, to treat our forms as real despite the fact that they are merely relative and imaginary surface phenomenon with no permanence or reality whatsoever. The only way to truly strip human life of all meaning would be to progressively destroy each layer of oneself, exposing the falseness of it, until one suffers so much from this self-contradiction that he either A) posits a new value and meaning in order to survive this suffering (what people do by “accepting” the meaninglessness of life), or B) commit suicide.
There is no other way to exist as life. Life is a contradiction, it cannot exist as itself but must exist as not-itself, must affirm unrealities as reality. If you were to truly understand the unreality of everything human, everything about you, even your memories, your emotions, your thoughts, you reason and will itself, you would either immediately posit a new meaning and value in order to avoid psychial disintegration, or, if you were one of those rare self-honest souls which cannot stand to exist as a contradiction and cannot bear to sustain self-deceptions with themselves, you would kill yourself. There is no third option. Repression, or suicide.
No, because every single thing that you think you “are” in this manner is utterly false, a surface phenomenon on top of pure universal energy of flux, pure entropy that is never static. Forms are perceived as static, permanent even if only in a brief span of time - but even this brief existence-as-permanence is completely false, unreal. What you are, as you say here, is not a part of reality, but a mere self-delusion you must tell yourself, based on your human psyche, in order to continue to survive.
Everything is simply change - nothing but pure change can ever exist. All that exists anywhere, ever, is pure energy in a state of absolute “becoming”, motion. All motionlessness, stasis, permanence is and must be, of necessity, false and unreal.
No, your existence now is nothing, that is the point. Saying you will “live on” as a ripple of effects throughout eternity is nothing more than another repression, a denial based on the psychological need to posit some sort of permanence to things. You are not even meaningless, you are nothing. Nothing about you, anywhere, ever, in any way whatsoever, is real. All that exists is a formal set of relations which are, structurally and in essence, absolutely and totally different from anything that you think of as “you”. The world you experience, the you that you think you know, is nothing, it does not and cannot exist in a universe where the only existent is universal flux of pure energy in a state of constant motion. Consider that even a single form, a single image or thought or perception or idea or sensation you have, is experienced as permanent, real, isolate, static - this alone proves the impossibility of this act. “You” are nothing more than a set of relations of energies which have, over long long time, come to a state of comprehensive enough self-relation to its parts, and subsumed these relations underneath a singular relation, that you “know” or “experience” yourself; but this is also an illusion, merely a consequence of the fact that the human mind is such a self-relation, a sum and totality of other relations… each of these relations itself is just as false in how you experience it.
There is no such dichotomy, all that can exist is pure motion, pure change of time, energy of becoming that never stops or ceases or “becomes” anything. There is no being anywhere. All forms are illusive and unreal.
No, everything is a change, everything is a passing-away. All else is mere human delusion and repression.
All human experience is a fantasy, it is not reality. Calling a hallucination, a complete false self-deception which presents itself in a way that is entirely opposed to what it actually is in essence, structurally and formatively, a “reality” does not make it reality, it is still utterly unreal.
I am not dismayed. I am human and thus, as I exist as human, I must of necessity experience the falseness of myself as if it were a truth, I must experience the forms of myself and the world as permanence, reality, static, even when I understand on a conceptual level that these experiences are utterly false. Likewise with all human meaning, which is simply repression and denial for the sake of sustaining the vicious circle of life-as-life.
I am not upset, I am in repression and denial as is every other human being. I live and experience life as forms and images, which are completely false and superficial, with no reality at all. There is no value, even the question of value itself is a repression, a denial.
This is impossible, because to think, to feel, to will, to be human is to be of forms, to experience formally, to be on the surface, a superficiality - to posit necessarily a permanence and reality to your experiences and self. That these are impossible does not bother you, because you cannot truly face the fact of your own self-denial, self-deception that exists at every stage and step and level of your existence and self. Nothing about you is real. It is all a deception, a false form, a superficiality concealing the deeper layers underneath, which are the formative structures upon which your self-lies are based.
Forms are, by definition, falsehoods. Consider that everything you will ever experience, in any way, is a form, is a self-lie. All you know are delusions and deceptions. Life itself is such a self-deception, a self-contradiciton and circularity without meaning or substance. So how do you propose to “take it for what it is”? This is merely another positing of value, by you, a value where you act as if you accept this nihilism for the sake of repressing it.
I do not despair. I repress, like everyone else. I merely repress in a different way, because I do not trick myself into thinking that I can ever “accept” the utter unreality of all that is human without immediately either positing a value of substance with which to cling to, or committing suicide in light of this realization of the utter unreality and falsenes, the self-contradiction and self-deception and falseness, of everything I will ever know, feel, experience.
All human life necessarily posits meanings and values, purposes and permanences everywhere. There is no way to be alive and not do this, because nothing that man can experience can ever attain any reality or permanence or meaning in any way, it is all false, surface phenomena, unreality. What you think, feel, experience, believe, does not exist, it, by definition, cannot exist other than as a self-deceptive hallucination springing from the repression of the self-conradiction that is at the heart of everything that is “you”.
All human reason, purpose, intention is false and unreal. What you experience, how you experience these experiences, is an illusion and, more so, a necessary lie and self-deception, a repression.
Yes, those who posit nihilism as a “value”, like you do, who “take it for what it is”, who “accept it” and will it as value, are committing the very same repression and self-deception as the theist.
But this is necessary, because the true understanding, without repression or denial, of the absolute self-deception and total extent of self-contradiction and unreality that is “you” would lead you to immediately kill yourself, unless you are mentally capable of sustaining your existence-as-contradiction, as literally absolute self-deception, in which case you will simply posit a new value upon which to base your psychological self and existence, thus, again, further denying and repressing the very issue of nihilism itself, ie. the issue of the absolute and complete self-deception and unreality of all that is “you”.
I do not know what an untermensch is.
Yes I commit repression and denial, because all humanity is such a repression and denial, it cannot be otherwise. I simply push this a bit further down the existential chain than other, to expose their repressions and denials. At some point, if I am self-honest enough (that is, possess sufficiently strong instincts that resist self-deception, resist living with the immediate knowledge of my own self-contradiction and unreality) then eventually I will either continue to posit false values in order to survive, or I will commit suicide to escape my own complete self-deception and unreality as human, to reject existence-as-contradiction.
Suicide is the necessity of only the most self-honest instincts - most people, even if they were to become aware, truly aware, of the total falseness and self-deception of everything about themselves, would merely repress this over again, deny it again, and thus continue to live as a self-contradiction, like everyone else. Only the most rare instinct which of necessity cannot stand the knowledge of its own self-contradiction, and is psychologically incapable of further repressing away this understanding, will commit suicide. And it will not be a suicide of depression or angst or emotions, but one of pure reason, one of the utter necessity of this self-honest instinct which cannot exist as a contradiction, as a self-deception. This would be the most noble act in all the universe, because it would be the only act, if taken in this way, that is capable of truly rejecting, saying no, to the self-contradiction itself.
They are not, they are surface phenomena, superficialities and self-lies which necessarily cover up their formative structures, their deeper essences, from view. They exist to further your self-repression, nothing more.
Yes this is one aspect of what humans mean when they say the word “truth” - but the philosophical meaning of truth is a logical meaning, in that only that which does not exist as a self-deception or self-contradiction could ever be “true”, all else is and must be false.
Yes most “truths” are like this, but not the highest philosophical truth which is an instinct of pure reason based only in the rejection of all that is self-contradictive.
There is no thing-in-itself, being or Being is an utter impossibility and self-deception, a hallucination. No such “things” exist, all that exist is “thinglessness”, ie. universal pure energy of formlessness.
Yes, you “accept” life in this way, and in this way you repress it from yourself, you escape from it because you convince yourself that the lack of all value is itself a value, something for you to “accept”. That you do not realise how you value this “valuelesness” is because what you are operating on is the psychological structure of repression and will-to-unreality, to hallucination and illusion. You must affirm your forms as forms insofar as they are as permanent as they appear to you - you accept that reality is real, you must - and you do this by tricking yourself, lying to yourself, that in fact you are doing the opposite of this.
What is “you”, the “I” is nothing more than a singularity of innumerable lesser sensational (energetic) relations, which over time formed more and more complex and subtle inter-relations to each other until the “totality” of all these relations to each other became a singular “image of itself”, and thus one single relation emerged as an incorporated and emergent sum of all these individual lesser relations. There is absolutely nothing more to the human consciousness, its “I” than this singularity of relations, this sum. It is purely illusive and false, all that it experiences via other energetic relations it experiences as forms, images, which are themselves unreal and false down to their most essential natures.
I am not dismayed. I am stating the fact that life is a self-contradiction, and that it can continue to survive as life only insofar as it continues to affirm its self-lies, to delude itself and repress the encounter with this basic self-contradiction at the heart of all life, indeed of all forms.
I do not assume that there should be a reason for existence. I assume that humans must assume a reason, ultimately and at some point no matter how far removed, even if only in the repressed unconscious. To do otherwise would be to will away the unreality and self-contradiction itself, that is, to cease to affirm life-as-life, that is, to perish of this contradiction.
I am not crying, I am pointing out that all that is human, all that is “you” in every possible form or experience, is false, self-deceptive, impermanent and unreal, and based on the instinctive need to repress the self-contradiction, the vicious circle, at the heart of humanity.
If you were truly not affirming this universal existence of becoming, pure energy of formlessness, if you truly rejected the self-contradiction and self-deception that is you in every conceivable way, you would immediately perish of this contradiction, because, in exposing it, you cannot sustain it any longer. A self-contradiction can only be sustained through repression and denial, it cannot be affirmed as itself, because as soon as it is affirmed it negates itself and thus perishes of itself.
You effect as much repression as any other human being, you just do it in a slightly different way than most. Either a human is a set of instincts such that he will forever posit more imaginary values and forever further repress encounter with the self-deception, falseness and unreality that is all he is and ever will be or experience, or, more rarely, this human instinct(s) will be of such a form that for one reason or another this human is not capable of repressing this understanding, once he reaches it in sufficient degree - that this human, more self-honest, cannot live as a contradiction but must acknowledge this falseness and unreality, this pure formlessness of all that he is, and the only way to survive such an encounter is to absolutely affirm it, that is, affirm the self-contradiction, which means to commit suicide, to perish of it, because this necessary and self-honest soul literally cannot, is incapable of, continuing to exist with this self-delusion and falseness of all that he is, experiences and will ever experience.
Yeah, being completely nihilistic is a contradiction. The term only really makes sense when it stands for the loss of objective or transcendental meaning/value… how Nietzsche used it basicly. And in that sense it can have very real effects, on individuals and a society. One has to come to terms with that loss, and make a shift in thinking, from the universal to the particular. It’s not for everybody. But that’s all what overcoming nihilism means I think, reëvaluating the values one has inherited.
Nihilism is often thought of as a depressing outlook on life because it is usually accompanied by feelings of despair, but strictly speaking there is nothing essentially depressing about it. That there is no inherent meaning or value in life does not mean that life is without meaning or value. Nihilism can be freeing, but more often it is frightening.
I don’t understand the idea that nihilism can be surpassed. Just because you recognize it is you who gives your life meaning and purpose does not mean that you are no longer a nihilist.
Matter to whom? The problem I have with what you’re saying is that the idea of meaning, of something mattering to somebody, implies somebody. You cannot say “nothing matters” without implying a being for whom nothing matters. So my question is: to whom does nothing matter?
I draw this parallel between nihilism and theism because both contain the assumption that b[/b] the universe either contains or lacks inherent meaning itself and b that our impression of the universe is determined by the presence or absence of such meaning - outside ourselves.[/b]
Does nihilism actually contain this second assumption?
I acknowledge that this assumption is often paired and associated with nihilism, but I do not know that it is essential to nihilism. This is why I don’t quite understand the idea of surpassing nihilism.
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