nihilism

We’ll need a context of course.

If nothing else, in regard to this contest – “abortion, gun laws, the role of government, animal rights, conscription, gay weddings, vaccinations.” – you can argue as to what this truth “for all of us to see” actually is.

Right, tell that to the moral objectivists. Tell that to those who, through one or another God, or one or another political ideology, or one or another deontological assessment, or one or another take on nature, will use the tools of philosophy only insofar as they reinforce their own dogmatic font.

Use your arguments on them.

Instead, my argument is derived from the OPs that commence my signature threads here.

And you and others, given a particular situation that precipitates conflicting goods out in the real world, will either take the component of your own moral philosophy there or you won’t.

Again, take this to the abortion clinic and convince those on either side of the conflagration that the answers that they have arrived at – the unborn baby’s right to life, the woman’s right to choose – miss the whole point of philosophy. The act of endlessly thinking about it all as a moral question is what really counts. Whatever actual answer you come to is beside the point.

The irony here being that in my own way I am suggesting much the same thing. But more because the answer they come to is derived subjectively from their own unique experiences embedded in the particular lives they lived rather than from anything they might read by Plato or Aristotle or Descartes or Spinoza or Kant or Wittgenstein or Hegel or Nietzsche.

Again, given a particular context ripped from the headlines, whatever that means.

This is the part when it becomes apparent that this is not really a conversation.

Note to others:

I did it again!!

If you know what I mean. :wink:

Note to Faust:

See you down the road for the next “round”? :sunglasses:

Note to Faust:

A suggestion…

Come back to ILP as a moderator on the philosophy board and make one final attempt to steer the discussions in this forum more in the direction of what you construe such conversations ought to be.

I’ll jettison the polemics and take my chances with you.

Nihilism and Pop Culture
By David H. Goldbrenner
From the Harvard Crimson

Now, given the manner in which I construe the meaning of nihilism, I would suggest that this is just one more example of how any particular individual’s reaction to a film like Se7en comes back to the manner in which I root this in dasein. It’s not like there is actually one correct, most reasonable reaction that someone can have to it. Different people in being different in all of the many ways that we can be different in watching a movie like this, may or may not come to overlap or diverge with my reaction or your reaction.

What are we going to do then…argue over who comes closest to getting it right?

I beg to differ. At least I think I do. In other words, my own reaction to the character John Doe is no less rooted subjunctively in dasein.

What became crucial for me in regard to his behavior is his motivation. This part: youtu.be/gl0jKfzUan8

It’s not like he just picked people at random, tortured and killed them simply because he enjoyed it. The mindless sociopath, the thug who does things only because for whatever reason he wants to. Instead, his motivation comes closer to a religious conviction. His victims deserved to die because in his mind they committed the equivalent of sins. After all, do not his victims become victims precisely because they came to embody Christianity’s Seven Deadly Sins?

In fact what many people react to most viscerally are the means he chooses to commit the murders. The ghastly viciousness of his acts.

Spiritual darkness. Like the spiritual light that emanates from the more fanatic religious zealots down through the centuries makes for a world worth fighting for only if you are one of us. Whereas the nihilists that I am most in sync with would never speak of the world as either worth fight for not worth fighting for. It is an essentially meaningless and purposeless world in which each of us as individuals must struggle to sustain to the best of our ability any particular existential meaning we derive from dasein. And this struggle has always been embedded in all manner of conflicting goods.

Nihilism and Pop Culture
By David H. Goldbrenner
From the Harvard Crimson

Sure, for whatever personal reason rooted in the life that one lives, someone might feel compelled to lash out at a world that makes no sense to them. Or they may embody the sort of deep-seated cynicism that revolves by and large around accumulated personal experiences that predispose them in this direction. And, here, they may or may not be able to communicate it to someone who is, instead, smack dab in the middle of a much more constructive life…a life anchored in one or another objectivist font.

For me, however, nihilism is rooted considerably more within the parameters of a deep-seated philosophical examination of the “human condition”. At least given the assumption of free will.

I start with the assumption that whatever any particular individual’s “situation” in life might be – good, bad or ugly – it doesn’t change the arguments I make in my signature threads here. Thus to whatever extent you experience “misery” in the life you live, the part about “I” being fractured and fragmented given this frame of mind…

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

…doesn’t go away.

This “hole” that I have dug myself down into is, in my view, a philosophical argument so much more than a frame of mind revolving existentially around “sets of circumstances”.

I often insist that “we’ll need a context, of course”. But from my current fractured and fragmented understanding of “I” at the existential juncture of identity, value judgments and political economy, all contexts are basically interchangeable in a No God/No Goddess world.

Art. Society. Culture. The Public.

Put them all together and what comes out? Is it something you approve of, disapprove of, are indifferent about? Should we bring together those who call themselves nihilists and those who call themselves other things in order pin down the optimal reaction in regard to each piece of music, painting, film, television program, performance?

No to cynicism?

You tell me.

Nihilism and Pop Culture
By David H. Goldbrenner
From the Harvard Crimson

On the one hand, how is your own reaction to this not going to be a manifestation of the manner in which I construe nihilism in regard to moral, political, spiritual, social, psychological etc., values? On the other hand, yeah, it’s a point of view that has merit. At least to the extent we move further and further away from the conviction that we can find some middle ground between the repressive 1950s and the dystopian world portrayed in Se7en.

Still, let me remind you that…

How is his motivation in the film all that different from the motivation of the Taliban in Afghanistan today? Don’t they too divide up the world between those who commit the deadly sins and those who do not?

My problem of course is that, in being fractured and fragmented here, I have no easy answers. In fact, I have no answers at all that I am able to yank up out of this:

“I” can only cling to my own moral and political prejudices rooted in moderation, negotiation and compromise as the best of all possible worlds. And hope that I can bump into someone able to yank me up out of the hole I have [philosophically or otherwise] thought myself down into. Or convince others to come down into it with me. To have empathy at least.

So, no censorship. But that doesn’t stop the author from setting himself up as an arbiter – the arbiter? – for differentiating morally commendable from morally bankrupt “products”.

And what if the “product” revolves instead around any number of moral and political conflagrations that sustain the media headlines day in and day out. What here is morally commendable rather than morally bankrupt?

Again, the religious, theocratic juggernaut that is about to descend on the citizens of Afghanistan: nytimes.com/2021/08/15/opin … e=Homepage

Is that closer to moral objectivism or moral nihilism?

Nietzsche’s Analysis of Nihilism
by Vered Arnon
At the The World Is On Fire website

I agree. But my reasons are derived only from my own subjective assumptions about it.

And, in my view, the first assumption is that nihilism — moral nihilism in particular – is a perfectly reasonable philosophical assessment of the human condition in a No God universe. In other words, the pessimism doesn’t flow from a subjunctive – emotional, psychological – reaction to the world around us but from thinking through human interactions in a world where there does not appear to be a font enabling us to establish what some call a deontological framework. A set of behaviors linked to what is described as the moral obligation of all rational men, women and children.

If that doesn’t exist then why one secular rendition of it rather than another?

Weariness? Well, maybe for him, but from what frame of mind does this weariness settle in? Again, for me, it is derived from the attempt to establish something in the way of an essential meaning and purpose in our lives and concluding that sans God there isn’t one. And that, more to the point, when mere mortals come to conclude that their own subjective prejudices are in fact the foundation for objective morality it almost never takes long before they bump into others who agree that objective morality is within reach…but it’s theirs and not yours.

Then what in a No God universe?

Well, let the objectivists here tell you.

There are so many differing shades of meaning of nihilism, what it says and means, how it is to be interpreted and applied, and so on, that I do not think that there can be one covering definition. Note that Nietzsche found Christianity nihilistic because it denied authentic meaning to this life and fobbed it off to the (non-existent) next one. At the same time, his famous God is Dead monologue seemed to dictate a new form of nihilism.

For me, if moral nihilism is meant to mean that there is no objective morality, I’m fine with that, because there isn’t. If, otoh, it is meant to mean that there can be no morality at all, or that all moral valuations are meaningless, I don’t agree.

I think morals are an invention of social species, not limited to humans, that arises from a combination of nature and nurture. I don’t think that morals are objectively true but I also don’t think they are merely subjectively true. I regard this as a false dichotomy.

There is a third way, intersubjectivity. Morals can be intersubjectively agreed upon, by implicit or explicit consensus, and this arises from a combination of nature (our evolved characteristics as social beings) and nurture (our cultural, ethnic, linguistic, historical and contextual backgrounds, which obviously differ from nation to nation and tribe to tribe).

Nature to iambiguous:

Not to worry. It’s okay to respond to pood on this thread.

Click.

Yes, but then I ask myself, “where do those shades come from if not from the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein in my signature threads here?” There are historical, cultural, and experiential assessments rooted in the actual experiences we have as individuals.

The distinction I then make are between those who recognize the subjective/subjunctive elements involved here and those who insist that, no, only their own understanding of nihilism actually does pin it down…philosophically?

Then the part where I insist that we’ll need an actual context.

As for Christianity, it is precisely because any number of Christians insist that only their own denomination reflects the one authentic meaning of God that they become exactly the opposite of nihilists to me. Then there’s Nietzsche’s will to power and the ubermensch. How is belief in them not analogous to a religion to some here?

Well, regarding the first part, I don’t agree. Or, rather, I don’t see how any of us as “mere mortals”, infinitesimally tiny specks of existence in the staggering vastness of all there is, can possibly demonstrate that in fact, there is no objective morality period.

Instead, my approach here is this: So, you do believe that there is an objective morality? Okay state your argument. Then note the manner in which you would go about demonstrating how, regarding this argument, all rational and virtuous human beings are obligated to think as you do. Especially how you go about demonstrating it to yourself.

Of course the scary thing here is that for those objectivists who do gain access to actual power in any particular community, they don’t have to demonstrate anything at all. They need only to believe it themselves and then go about the task ridding the community of those who refuse to toe the line.

The surreal example in Afghanistan right now. The objectivist Taliban are being challenged by the even more objectivist ISIS-K fanatics!

On the other hand, I never fail to point out that it’s the “show me the money” moral nihilists who own and operate the global economy that probably bring about the most human pain and suffering around the globe.

Though I certainly agree with you that there is no getting around the existence of meaningful morality per se in a world where human wants and needs ever come into conflict; making one or another set of “rules of behavior” all but mandatory. Then it just comes down to which particular combination of might makes right, right makes might and/or democracy and the rule of law prevails in any specific community.

Again, though, we need the discussion to shift to an actual set of circumstances in which “conflicting goods” give rise to conflicting behaviors give rise to actual consequences in human interactions.

Here my own existential self rooted in dasein is “fractured and fragmented” given the manner in which “I” have thought myself into thinking this:

Nihilism is purity.
Belief is the death of reason:
"Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

Reject belief in all things and embrace knowledge.

When I say that there is no objective morality, I am using a kind of shorthand. I don’t insist that there is no objective morality, or that there cannot be any. I just lack a belief in any kind of objective, mind-independent morality. If there is such a thing, I would need to see evidence of it. I can’t even imagine what such evidence would look like. In a matter like this, I think the burden of proof lies not on the moral nihilist — the person who disbelieves that there is an objective, mind-independent morality — but on the person who believes that there IS such a thing. It’s exactly the same with atheism. The atheist has no burden of proof to demonstrate that there is no God. Rather, the burden of proof lies with the theist who claims that there is a God.

Morality and God are tied together because generally objective morality is entwined with God belief. God is supposed to provide the objective ground of morality. Yet way back in ancient Greece the Euthyphro dilemma showed how problematic this is.

Many species apart from humans display what we would call moral behavior, including reciprocal altruism, which even distant human relatives like bats exhibit. However, I would say that humans invented morality as a concept — and then identify traits that we call moral among ourselves, and in other animals. Animals may exhibit moral behavior but it is doubtful they have a concept of morality, though I’m not too sure this is so for animals like chimps, elephants and cetaceans. I think it is possible that they and perhaps others do have such a concept.

But the behaviors, and the concept, and the descriptions of moral behavior, are limited to sentient creatures. We can imagine, without contradiction, a universe devoid of sentience. Where, in such a case, is morality located? Is Saturn moral? Is quantum mechanics? Is the Milky Way galaxy, or any galaxy, moral? The idea seems absurd. To argue that objective morality exists outside of minds would be to claim the stance of a moral Platonist. I see no reason to accept Platonism in any form, and certainly not in matters of morality.

More later.

BTW, you don’t need nature’s permission to respond to me. It’s as silly as asking God’s permission. God doesn’t exist and there is no reason to think that nature or its so-called laws have any control over you whatsoever. I am glad to see you are reading and working through the paper on regularity theory that I linked.

Well, we are certainly on the same page here. This is pretty much my own thinking on the matter. Only here “I” put more emphasis on the manner in which any particular individual will draw their own conclusions about morality from the assumptions I make in my signature threads.

In other words, how, in regard to my own value judgments, “I” am considerably more “fractured and fragmented” than most who, like me, do not believe “here and now” in an objective/universal morality. Thus the most intriguing exchanges I have had here at ILP are with those like moreno/karpel tunnel. Those who are pragmatists by necessity in rejecting objective morality, but who still seemed to believe [in a way I never really understood] that their own moral and political prejudices were, what, still superior to those on the “other side”?

And, just as crucially, with God [most of them] there is Judgment Day. Not only [on this side of the grave] is objective morality Scripted for you in one or another Good Book, but, if you stay on the righteous path, you gain access to both immortality and salvation [on the other side] as well. And, who knows, perhaps when you do get to Heaven, God’s “mysterious ways” will be explained as well.

Perhaps. But they don’t congregate and exchange philosophies. Their behaviors would seem to be far more rooted in biological imperatives, instincts, drives. Thus little in the way of a “concept of morality”. But that’s when you bump into those like Satyr at KT who insist that “natural behaviors” – biological imperatives – are applicable in regard to, well, everything under the sun.

This is where things can get downright…spooky? Suppose human beings are the only sentient creatures in the universe. Suppose next week, month, year, decade, century the really, really, really Big One comes hurling down out of the sky, smashes into the planet and all of human existence is obliterated.

What then of morality? What then of anything at all if, in a No God universe, there are no minds around?

How do we with minds here and now wrap those minds around this?

Nietzsche’s Analysis of Nihilism
by Vered Arnon
At the The World Is On Fire website

Again, philosophically? To the extent that you don’t just act out a set of values, but stop and think about why you are acting out one set and not another? And how values themselves become a necessary part of human interactions?

Yes, this is as good a description of nihilism as any. But alienation becomes rooted in having thought through values in a No God world. It’s reasonable to feel this alienation because Humanism in all its many moral and political manifestations over the centuries is never able to establish that one “ism” is necessarily more rational than any other. Then those like me who think up arguments to encompass nihilism as they have come to understand it.

But there are still any number of things “out there” in the world that you can pursue such that this alienation doesn’t really bother you much at all. Sports, the arts, food, hobbies, music, sex, politics, friendships, love, lifestyle distractions. Anything you are able to imagine doing that can bring you fulfillment and satisfaction.

Until of course in interacting with others, your own particular existential values rooted in dasein make contact with the subjective or objective value judgments of others and a conflict ensues.

That’s the dilemma of being fractured and fragmented morally “out in the world with others”. You are unable to believe in right and wrong, or good and bad as the objectivists do, but if you choose to interact in society the moral and political prejudices that you have taken an existential leap to, can still come into conflict with those of the objectivists [and the Maias] of the world. They have a font but you don’t.

Again, this would seem to exclude the either/or world which is no less real to the moral nihilists as to the moral objectivists.

Nietzsche’s Analysis of Nihilism
by Vered Arnon
At the The World Is On Fire website

Well, from my frame of mind [and you know what’s coming], that depends entirely on how “fractured and fragmented” you become. And that is predicated largely on the extent to which you come to view your own moral values as the embodiment of this:

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

In other words, you may come to distance yourself from the ideals of the past but you have no new ideals to put in their place. Other than one or another rendition of the Uberman: that your value judgments however fractured and fragmented – nihilistic – they might be must prevail over the scriptures embraced by the bleating sheep.

Then this distinction again…

Of course there are those who argue that the Nazis used their own “transitional stage” to mount, among other things, the “final solution”. National socialism as the “active” nihilism. So, as nihilism goes, which is the least dangerous kind…passive or active?

In any event, this part where “all is meaningless” pertains only to the assumption that, in a No God world, there does not appear to be a “transcending font” for any essential – ontological, teleological – meaning.

And even here any particular nihilist is no more able to demonstrate that than those claiming that their own font establishes that their own essentially meaningful take on human existence is the One True Path.

Their very own Coalition Of Truth.

Nietzsche’s Analysis of Nihilism
by Vered Arnon
At the The World Is On Fire website

Here, however, we are always confronted with the [at times] complex interaction between someone’s “philosophy of life” and the set of circumstances they find themselves embedded in. That and having actual viable options in which to change those circumstances. After all, it’s easy enough to convince yourself it’s your “passive nihilism” that is impaling you when in fact it’s really more that your life is in the toilet and all you seem motivated to do is to flush it all away.

Everyone’s situation is unique in this regard. The “spirit” able to attach itself to any number of fulfilling distractions in life can send that passive nihilist philosophy packing to the back burner. Here one’s “existential meaning” from day to day makes all the difference in the world. Just as someone with an upbeat philosophy can tumble into a shitstorm of setbacks and be unable to fall back on that optimistic philosophy to pull them through. Here it’s often dasein down to the bone.

That and the distinction one makes between essential meaning and purpose in their life and existential meaning and purpose. These can become two very, very different things.

Or you can try something like this:

Hollow of course being in the mind of the beholder. And escapes that work and can be sustained are better than the alternative. Again, the emptiness might revolve only around the extent to which you allow yourself to dwell on the lack of essential meaning and purpose in your life. And, besides, to the extent you abandon the One True Path you are providing yourself with many more options in which to find existential meaning and purpose. And this doesn’t necessarily entail “resignation, generalizations, petty things, debauchery and fanaticism”.

Instead, this is often only how the objectivists construe passive nihilism. How bleak it must seem to them because they put all of their eggs – comfort and consolation – in the One True Path basket.

Also, in “revaluating values” you can dupe yourself into falling for all the Übermensch bullshit that some Nietzscheans use to divide up the world between the Masters and the Slaves. The Satyr Syndrome.

Nietzsche’s Analysis of Nihilism
by Vered Arnon
At the The World Is On Fire website

The spirit. The will. Employed to bring about and then to sustain, among other things historically, the “final solution”. Action is spades as it were.

In other words, “active nihilism” is no less in search of a context in order to be assessed and then judged. And those who call themselves active nihilists are no less entangled in a set of value judgments derived subjectively from dasein.

It’s not like we can plot the lives of those who call themselves active nihilists and then pin down those who actually come closest to being what a true active nihilist really is.

In other words, there is no objective moral system around that is not essentially empty and meaningless but any and all human communities need behavioral prescriptions or proscriptions in order to yank itself up out of a world that is ruled basically by the “law of the jungle”. A dog eat dog survival of the fittest moral wasteland. If morality is to be entirely existential at least let it revolve around democracy and the rule of law.

Then back up into the clouds where the assessment of Nietzsche and nihilism becomes entangled in a world of words.

Yes, simplification and lies. But simple from what frame of reference and whose lies? Empty in what sense given particular sets of circumstances? As for what the nihilist embraces, same thing: what on earth does embracing “irrationality and freedom from logic” mean to this active nihilist here and to that active nihilist there?

In fact, if you embrace Nietzsche’s general philosophy, I assign you the task of noting where Nietzsche himself applied all of this “philosophical stuff” to a particular context such that we can explore what he described to be “both destructive and ironic”. Actual examples of how the active nihilists seizes the “opportunity to assert [their] strength and power to deny all authority and deny goals and faith––to deny the constraints of existence.”

Iambigious says:

"In fact, if you embrace Nietzsche’s general philosophy, I assign you the task of noting where Nietzsche himself applied all of this “philosophical stuff” to a particular context such that we can explore what he described to be “both destructive and ironic”. Actual examples of how the active nihilists seizes the “opportunity to assert [their] strength and power to deny all authority and deny goals and faith––to deny the constraints of existence.”

Guidence please, the literature is so vast, and to find specifics among general contexts would entail some labor.

His vocabulary not exactly specifying directions going upward, but usually pointing toward lesser ‘slaves’ to look for signs that could show the way.

I am trying to insert the least amount of facetiousness here, incidentally , where has our expert Nietzchien gone , hasn’t posted for a very long time.

Nietzsche & Values
Nietzsche rejected all conventional morality but he wasn’t a nihilist – he called for a “re-evaluation of all values”. Alexander V. Razin describes the gulf separating him from that other great moralist, Immanuel Kant.

This supposedly is why in the intro above we are to accept that Nietzsche, while rejecting conventional morality [derived as often as not from one or another God or No God religion/deontology/political ideology] was not a nihilist. The Ubermensch are able to transcend, among other things, a fractured and fragmented “I” in interacting with others in regard to moral and political values.

On the other hand, I can’t help be wonder how Nietzsche might have reacted to my own arguments here. Instead, all I can do is to go in search of those who do subscribe to his master class embodying the “will to power” and given their own “reevaluation of values” how they manage to elude this predicament:

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

As, for example, others do:

Ultimately indeed.

For the life of me I can’t imagine how someone with a mind like his could ever have managed to think himself into accepting all of those highly improbable assumptions.

And then I remember that I once did myself.

And, as well, there are in turn some really sophisticated minds here able to trick themselves into believing in a path to immortality and salvation.

If it is a trick.