Nietzsche delcares dogmatically that this other world does not exist. Hence Christianity=nihilism. What evidence does Nietzsche have? To believe in the existence of something and value something does not equal nihilism. Thanks for this info, but it only demonstrates how Nietzsche can often be nonsensical.
If Nietzsche is simply making a cultural observation, that old values are dying, he is doing sociology and not philosophy. This very well may be true. I’m not sure how history is “multifaceted”. Does this mean that time is not headed in a straight line? That is goes backwards and then forwards? Or are you saying that historians are only telling stories and don’t get at the whole truth from their individual perspectives? I believe you correct about existentialism, in that it romanticizes choice and human freedom as a belief system.
So the nihilits argue that an individual should “become infinite”? I’m not sure what this means, but I suspect it is nonsensical.
Ahh thank you! Now I understand. It’s so clear. The nihilists (like the post-modernists) speak in complete and utter nonsense!
Well, one should also try to emphasise the varying definitions of nihilism. For Nietzsche, (as far as I know) nihilism was the belief in nothing and since, to him, Christian belief amounted to nothing (objectively), it was essentially nihilism.
Yes, I agree, Nietzsche’s ambiguity can be very nonsensical.
It is highly disputed when modernity ended and psotmodernity began, let alone whether such epochs even exist, but, for simplicity’s sake, I like to guesstimate it at being around the Roaring Twenties. Industrial war had produced a “Lost Generation” of existentially distraught individuals (who m could be considered nihilistic), consumer products were introduced to a flamboyant society, and not to mention the Scopes trials and new technologies were threatening the very legitimacy of Christian hegemony.
Now imagine, you’re a school child living in, say, Kentucky. For years you’ve been learning about Adam and Eve in school until one day, the teacher suddenly changes the curriculum to teach Darwin’s theories. Histoy’s very foundation, as you know it, has been shattered. Not only that, but these “gosh darn niggers” are wanting civil rights, and making these claims on the basis of a black history that clearly diverges from that of the white history.
Thus, within any cultural system or sociological structure, history is relative (with varying degrees of blatant objectivity) to a certain people, particularly the ruling class of that people. History is, therefore, not some sort of narrow river or creek heading in one direction but rather an entire lake or sea swaying in random directions, with some disposition to circumstancial temperature flows and the ebbing tide.
Sort of. I wouln’t quite say ‘should’. Think of that veneer that so tautly compressed your mental framework of the world. Everything was so definiteive. Then, you found philosophy. At first you thought it would quell those pesky curious questions. Little did you realize it would totally ruin this framework, obliterate your aesthetic palette, and leave more questions than answers racing through your mind; resulting in what can be considered by some as an obsession. Existentialism poked holes through that mental veneer, then tried to repair them with flimsy tape. Nihilism set s that veneer on fire.
Nihilism is not a state of being nor an ideology, it is a characteristic of other philosophies and idelogoies. Certain ideologies have varying degrees of nihilism, existentialism being the most nihilistic. Theistic existentialism, like Kierkegaard’s, is far less nihilistic than Sartre’s and WAY less than Nietzsche’s. Either way, as so long as a nihilist exists, he is just a very pessimistic existentialist. But for the sake off efficiency, it is just better to call someone who is as nihilistic as humanly possible a nihilist, even though they aren’t.
Well here’s the thing: active nihilism is simply the act of iconoclasm. So guess what? Protestants were nihilistic in their day. They were disposing of Catholic values. The only difference is what you replace these destroyed values with.
But then, you come to the realization that any humanistic ideals are manifested by a brain that’s been crafted for millenia by evolution. It is instictual for human beings to wince at the thought of humankind’s destruction. Hell, on a primal level, even I do, and I consciously embrace apocalyptic crises. Replacing lost foundations with a foundation based on the conscious persistence of unconscious thought patterns, merely for the sake having a foundation, is refutable. You can’t resort to primal forces to determine the non-primal aspects of our minds.
People happen to think that because of the immense computational power of our brains, we are the most genetically advanced creatures around. I happen to thinkthat we are just genetic loopholes in a system. We are taking thousands of years to realize the same nothingness that we could realize at the point of death. Consciousness needs the unconscious to thrive. Otherwise, we’d be machines. And since postmodern nihilism is becoming an inevitability and technology is heading the way its heading, we ARE becoming more machine-like. We make feable attempts to reinvigorate old Pagan religions to cling on to our unconsciousness but nihilismm continually rips us away into lucidity.
In the Matrix and Terminator, machines overthrow mankind. My question is, without those underlying instincts, how are machines so aggressive? What would machines have to live for? What would thos e machine cities be dedicated towards? Without something to compute, what use is a computer.
We are fleshy, complicated, in-put out-put robots who are only just now realizing that there was nothing to in-put in the first place.
We were designed to survive, not to live.
I don’t use primal forces to determine the non-primal aspects of our minds .
I just realize that primal forces maybe necessary skills needed if the non-primal fail . the primitive forces are a last line of defence . the will to survive
I think humanity has been succeeding at survival (due to our exponential growth), yet failing at living, because we have yet to understand how to truly live.
Is this arbitrarily decided by your primal referenda? Humans need referenda and schemas to make sense of the world. These schemas range from religious fervor to scientific curiousity. Even my so-called “philosophy of nihilism” (of which I myself don’t consider an affirming philosophy) is my personal referenda of the world. The thing is, I admit it. I’m constantly destroying my framework of the world.
It is hypocritical for a self-attributed nihilist to practice actively the pure and unadulterated iconoclasm of society’s values, without at the same time continually destroying his own affirmations. If you just commit yourself to extrospective nihilism without also committing to reflective introspective nihilism, you simply become another Nietzsche-bot; resorting to the last primal referenda within the human mind: the will to power.
Nietzsche revelled in his obliteration of meaning, up until the implications of his actions came to light. He went far into the abyss, and courageously so. But he soon saw no end to this nihilism and grew spiteful of it. He saw what it would become. So he had to make some last ditch effort. Of course, he couldn’t do like Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky and resort to blind faith to patch together the damage he delt; he dug himself too deep. So he looked elsewhere, into the gut of humanity, smashing his way through all the layers of meaning to find the core of our very being. He called this primal force the will to power and proclaimed it as the only thing left to live for, to abide by. That, in all its subjectivity, it was as close to objectivity a referenda as such could get.
Sartre suffered from a similar dilemma, though he didn’t get nearly as carried away in his active nihilism. He resorted to things such as humanism, liberalism, and notions of freedom and responsibilty.
Those of us whom are brave and intelligent enough to do as they did, practice in active nihilism, are eventually, through our own foresight confronted with complete nihilism. When this happens, we all, on an individual basis, do one of two things: we either barricade ourselves with what values we haven’t yet destroyed in our rampaging, or we read existential authors like Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus and quickly ascribe to their promulgations, taking pride in the ‘creation of new values’ so as to quell our uneasy minds. I for one, used to do the latter, being quite the Nietzschean, but have now evolved into the former, using the same primal forces you yourself have wrongfully coagulated into a conscious, full-fledged ideology, to simply serve me on a personal level. Might I add that these personal values are in no way built on steady ground, at any instant I feel as though I can drop them from my frame of reference.
Once again, that is arbitrarily decided by what you have accumulated as an ideology (one that seems quite humanistic, resorting to primal levels of evaluation). What makes me different is that I don’t embrace primordial values wholly, becasue to do as such, as you have done, means to replicate unconscious schemas on a conscious level. The will to power and all other evolutionary mechanisms that are ingrained in our psyches are unconscious faculties, and thus, unknowable on a conscious level. In order to get to know these things, we try to observe them and duplicate them into a conscious order of meaning. The fallacy with this occurs when the conscious duplicates mutate into harder, more rigid concepts (like humanism) making them look nothing like the original value they were meant to portray.
Even Sartre knew this when he criticized (certain versions of) humanism in his novel, Nausea where Roquentin has a discussion the the Self-Taught Man on the Self-Taught Man’s recourse for his love of humanity. Roquentin simply points out that all the Self-Taught Man has done is melt down human characteristics into more digestable, more applicable forms, like ‘Youthful Love’ and ‘The Wisdom Of Old Age’.
Okay, I’ll buy that. My problem is you say, “I just realize that primal forces maybe necessary skills needed if the non-primal fail.” You say these primal forces are needed, but for what exactly? Survival? That’d be great if we could devolve either our minds or our so-called civilizations into surviving systems. Are you suggesting neo-tribalism, then? If so, then I would whole-heartedly agree with you if it weren’t for the fact that we’d first have to devolve, which is counterintuitive to a.) a psyche built by evolution and b.) the will to power (which may very well be the manifestation of the former), rendering such a philosophy contentious with itself.
When I say that I live on primordial feelings, I mean I live on the unconscious responses my brain triggers when an action is deemed preferable by it (unconsciously), not when I deem it preferable (consciously). You can call that hedonism, but it’s not simply what feels good most and when; that is a philosophy delineated by conscious activity; rather, it is simple preoccupation. I like writing and art, so I preoccupy myself with the unconscious feelings of fulfillment I recieve when I partakte in these activities. If, for whatever reason I stop recieving warm fuzzy feelings, in all liikelihood, I will stop doing them. The algebraic input-output function of my brain is absolute only in its primordialness.
Depends on the context. If, as they say, cock roaches will out live us in nuclear holocaust, then that makes them genetically superior. If you pull a hominin from its tribe and place it in the midst of extremely unfamiliar surroundings, it could very well die, rendering the surrounding creatures of that habitat genetically superior. Consciousness makes us psychologically superior, this doesn’t necessarily make us genetically superior too. Superiority is a measure of success. Success is a measure of consciousness. Consciousness is a measure of referenda and schemas. Such referenda are merely measures of genetic predisposition. The conscious measurement of our evolutionary success is, therefore, provisional upon the very genetic predispositions we have.
In the end, we determine context, context deremines genetic superiority alongside pretty much everything else.
What? That makes so sense whatsoever. In what way is nihilism the foreseer of humanity’s objective current status and future statuses?
Nihilism proclaims no objective understanding, as soon as it does, it self-refutes, thus infinite regress. I’ve said this over and over again. Lucidity is simply the state of not committing to one objective framework, i.e. just floating in temporary subjectivity.
For whose benefit?
Such a statement is nullified when one realizes that attitude is the output that is dependent on the input. Having a new ‘outlook’ on the world is simply paradigm shifting; opting for one value-system over another.
Your promulgation of attitude sounds extremely religious, if not theistic existential. It resorts to a psychological system that you either believe (religious) or deem to be (existential) objective.
Besides, who exactly determines what the ‘right attitude’ is?
Glad you like to use the word ‘nonsensical’.
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Yes, I think it is a very accurate term to apply to convoluted double-talk.
History as ebbing rivers and streams?? You can’t be serious. While I admit historical documents can be obscured by varying perspectives, this is not to say that there is no objective truth to history.
The Constitution was signed in the year 1776. This is true whether I am a Christian, a Darwinist, or Scientologist. If I deny this based on some postmodern gibberish, I am simply turning away from reality.
How many postmodernists does it take to change a lightbulb?
Two: One to ponder the subtextualities of change regarding the cultural hegemony of the electrical/manual pseudoduality and the other to call a janitor.
I think nihilism is freedom. They’re ultimately the same thing. We’re only as un-free as we are un-able to be nihilistic. Values unto themselves are diversions, are they not, from nihilism. Values are precisely what keep you put. You must value something very close to you, else you’d leave. Hell, chances are, you value a shitload of things, so finely intertwined with your sense of self that to break from any of them would mean “chaos” for your fragile existence. Ultimately, we’re terrified of freedom - for it is nihilism. It means that there is no “value” there, it is empty. By filling it we create the value ourselves, the ultimate expression of freedom.
A nihilist, though, would simply state that all affirmations of value or philosophy are convoluted double-talk; nihilism being the only one to self-admittedly say it.
There are five stages of grief and nihilism is the only ‘world philosophy’ to have reached acceptance.
No, it’s just to say that there is no homogenic objective truth that is evenly dispersed across this ‘line of history’. Sure, blatant and outright historical events are hard to subjectify (admittedly) but there are, in my opinion, equally as many instances where there are multiple perspectives and interpretations.
Truth is determined by consensus. It isn’t very inaccurate to say that every mentally capable person on Earth consensually agrees that the Sun will rise tomorrow (something I hope you and I can at least agree on), thus it is true that it will. Where human beings begin to disagree is the point at which objective truth becomes subjective opinion.
In psychology, a human being duplicates the objective world with a subjective template, clumping together qualia into concepts, memories, and feelings. Now, I’m certainly not the first to say that this subjective framework cannot be 100% trusted–Hell, any garden-variety existential author will tell you such things. So to completely exclude history from subjectivity, especially for what seems to be for the sake of underlying motives, is somewhat stubborn. We duplicate so-called historical events into our own mental depictions of them; such metnal depictions can deviate from their originals.
Postmodernism does not say that history, as it is taught in high school social studies today, is false. It whole-heartedly agrees that with rigorous scientific uncovering, objective truth, in its historical context, can be known (remember, objective truth is something we all agree upon; the more that scientific evidence supports a particular hypothesis, the more reinforced our agreeance of it is). All it says is that history’s objective truth can only be known insofar as it has one.
Postmodernists believe that our post-twentieth century society has shedded itself of a commonly agreed upon objective truth.
Postmodernism marks the end of history in that it says that we are currently entering an epoch so mucked by subjectivity that the underlying objective truth that once permeated society hundreds of years ago is now nonexistent. Because we live in a secular, politically correct, all-encompassing, non-descriminating society, opinions are true, not as so long as the overwhelming majority agree with it, but as so long as SOMEBODY agrees with it.
I agree up to one point: the ultimate expression of freedom is not the creation of values, but the destruction of them.
It’s like this: if pain lets you know you’re alive and pleasure lets you forget, then values are like Xanax and horse traqnuilizers while their destruction, that is nihilism, is like castration. Everyone is addicted values, as if they were drugs; nihilists are the only ones to admit that they have a problem.
Where people have misconceptions about nihilism is that they assume that nihilism considers itself sober. Nihilists shoot up the same enibreating values everyone else does, but they aren’t in denial of it.
and this is point I’ve tried to point out and when said " if we have the right attitude " for the bottom line through any Human centered philosophy is just this , will this or that philosophy promote our survival in the end ? does a nihilist do this ? not that I can see so far
the " right attitude " is just that , in regards to our own Human survival . that is the bottom-line , period ( and by the way Provalone I banned all religions out-right )
Don’t you see!?!?!? A nihilist’s philosophy & existence is built on the question of survival!!! How can a person/anybody desire to live when there is an absolute negation of meaning and value in human existence???
