Have We Regressed into Nietzsche’s “Moral Nihilism”?
Steven Mintz, aka Ethics Sage
So, it never occurred to him that individuals come in all shapes and sizes morally? That historical and cultural and experiential factors don’t play critical roles when it comes down to how all of us are indoctrinated as children to view, among other things, everything under the sun? That the “search for meaning” is deeply embedded in the profoundly problematic confluence of social, political and economic variables that any particular one of us might be immersed in? Even an understanding of nihilism itself shifts over time as new factors come into play.
I can only try to imagine Nietzsche around today reacting to the manner in which I would deconstruct this sort of thinking. Gain an understanding of what particular conflicting good? And from what particular perspective – liberal, conservative? Though, yes, reflect on our experiences. But what about the experiences of those who live lives very, very different from ours? Which set of experiences [often beyond our full understanding or control] matter most? In a sense, Nietzsche’s frame of mind mirrors the attitude of those later existentialists who spoke of living “authentically”. And, sure, up in an intellectual clouds where the “serious philosophers” live in a “world of words”, an authentic life is always so much more readily encompassed…academically.
But what of the points I raise as a moral nihilist?
Perhaps someone here who is familiar with and a proponent of Nietzsche’s own moral nihilism would be willing to discuss that with me.
Have We Regressed into Nietzsche’s “Moral Nihilism”?
Steven Mintz, aka Ethics Sage
This is the part where things get tricky. The part where “might makes right” and “right makes might” are intertwined into a moral perspective that no one is is really certain about in regard to the part where “me, myself and I” end and everyone else begins.
Unless, as a serious philosopher who really does get Nietzsche, you invent your own intellectual contraption to rip them apart.
In other words, you take your own particular leap to Übermensch status. But this is predicated on “principle”. You rise above the herd but only because you deserve to and not just because you can.
Thus we have those like Satyr and what’s left of his clique/claque at Know Thyself [and his kowtowers here] basically insisting that Übermensch status revolves entirely around their own authoritarian assessment of race and nature, gender and nature, sexual orientation and nature.
And all else they insist that, genetically, truly rational and virtuous men and women are obligated to pursue. This set of behaviors and not that set. This they then insist revolves around being a “rugged individualist”. Ah, but one who is absolutely obligated to think exactly like they do about…everything.
The irony then being completely lost on them.
Whereas, from the perspective of nihilism as “I” understand it, Richard Rorty’s “ironism” is smack dab in the middle of my own value judgments:
I continue to follow Satyr’s posts on the nihilism thread over at KT.
As you’ll recall, I noted that I would only respond to a post of his that actually brings his “general description intellectual contraption” arguments about nihilism down to earth. In regard to gender roles and sexual orientation for example.
Nothing even remotely close so far.
In fact, here is his latest post:
So, if anyone here can reconfigure what you believe his point is here into an account of nihilism that is applicable to the life that you live and the behaviors that you choose giving a particular context please, by all means, do so.
Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality
James Tartaglia
Reviewed byGuy Bennett-Hunter, University of Edinburgh
From the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews webpage
This sort of argument seems to be on par with a discussion of whether this sort of argument is only as it ever could have been given a wholly determined universe. In other words, to finally pin down the definitive argument that establishes once and for all if life has a meaning, the meaning seems beyond our reach.
Whatever that means.
Right?
So, given human autonomy, meaning in what sense? We go about the reality of existing from day to day to day in which there are countless things, countless interactions, that we are able to establish as in fact true. We are able to completely agree about what this or that means. What it means to wake up in the morning, to eat breakfast, to go to work or school, to come home, to have dinner, to do any number of things that we all are able to communicate rationally about back and forth without the slightest contention.
Meaning that appears to be be objectively the same for all of us.
Where it all starts to break down however is when we agree about what we are doing but disagree about whether we ought to be doing one thing and not another. We all agree that John is eating bacon for breakfast. We don’t all agree that this is immoral because it is wrong for human beings to consume other animals.
We know what it means to have conflicts of this sort. But we don’t all agree on what it must mean to rationally resolve them.
If life and reality itself are essentially meaningless then how meaningful can it be to assert that “nihilism is just a fact”? Instead, as with me, it seems more reasonable to suggest that mere mortals, having no way of grasping whether life/reality has any necessary meaning/ontology or purpose/teleology going back to an explanation for existence itself, some think themselves into believing one thing, others another thing. With none able to actually demonstrate that either their assumptions or their conclusions are the whole truth.
Unless, of course, I am not thinking this through in the most rational manner.
Communication breakdowns don’t occur all the time between those who crave bacon and those who passionately embrace animal rights?
Maybe not around where you live?
What do you call that then?
How is the point I make above not reasonable? And how is the point you make above even relevant to the point that I make in regard to animal rights conflagrations that pop up on the news from time to time.
Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality
James Tartaglia
Reviewed byGuy Bennett-Hunter, University of Edinburgh
From the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews webpage
This is the point I often come back to…the point that many [the objectivists in particular] just seem to shrug off as of seeming little importance at all. When of course in grappling with anything in the vicinity of teleology, it is by far the most important consideration of all. Until someone has a grasp on why something rather than nothing exist, and why this something and not another something, it’s like them reading one verse from one chapter of the Bible and attempting explain the meaning and the purpose of Christianity.
Instead, at best, one can start with attempting to understand the meaning and the purpose of one’s own life. While, at the same time, noting that in some respects, it seems to overlap with the lives of others. Then sharing experiences with them…attempting to come up with those things that seem to be true for all people. In other words, an existential meaning and an existential purpose.
In other words, seeming to lack in any essential meaning and purpose such that when we compare and contrast the particular things that we think, feel, say and do, there does not appear to be a “transcending font” we can turn to in order to sort out differences and conflicts.
Still…
Here, however, I am quick to point out that evoking a “groundless” existence is just another manifestation of dasein. I have no way in which to demonstrate that there is neither a God nor a Humanist font from which to derive an essential meaning and purpose. And that, in fact, in the world as I know it, there are far, far, far more people able to think themselves into believing that there is one than there are folks like me who “here and now” cannot.
And that’s before we get to those who are able to just shrug all of that aside, and immerse themselves in any number of experiences/interactions that provide them with fulfilment and satisfaction. All of the meaning and purpose that they need as it were.
The difficulty here tends to revolve around the part when, in the pursuit of your own pleasures, it becomes an obstacle or an obstruction for those who wish to pursue things that precipitate conflicts. Or when these pursuits revolve around moral and political value judgments that come to clash.
Then this: which existential “meaning and purpose” will prevail?
Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality
James Tartaglia
Reviewed byGuy Bennett-Hunter, University of Edinburgh
From the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews webpage
Here’s the thing though…
If you treat your life itself as you do a game of chess, you merely have to think yourself into believing something about your life that is the equivalent of how you think about a checkmate in chess. Ontologically and teleologically the rules of chess and the aim in following them is to arrive at checkmate. So, if you believe that there does exist a God, the God or, instead, a No God Humanistic equivalent, then revolving your life around accomplishing that which you deem to be an obligation on your part in living your life becomes all that is really necessary.
That’s the beauty of things like this: the belief in and of itself is all that is necessary to make it true. You either do or you do not checkmate your opponent. You either do or do not live your life in sync with God or in sync with one or another political ideology or deontological/philosophical scaffolding.
Moves have meaning in chess only because they bring you closer to the ultimate meaning of the game. Same with the behaviors that you choose given what you have thought yourself into believing the meaning of life is.
Once you conclude however that there is no essential meaning you can wrap your own particular behaviors around, you are still faced with interacting with others in order to sustain access to the things that you need to subsist and the things that you want that will make your life more fulfilling.
That doesn’t change. This existential meaning doesn’t go away just because you are unable to link it to something that ties everything together.
Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality
James Tartaglia
Reviewed byGuy Bennett-Hunter, University of Edinburgh
From the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews webpage
Clearly, if an examination of nihilism focuses solely on the “role of philosophical questioning” then the answers themselves can be solely abstract. Paragraph after paragraph after paragraph in exchange after exchange after exchange can be devoted to examining the meaning of “transcendence” without once connecting the conclusions reached to the existential meaning that we grapple with in our day to day interactions. In particular, those that precipitate actual conflicting behaviors that precipitate actual consequences. My “thing” here.
How would the conclusion that “nihilism is compatible with the idea of transcendence” be relevant here?
Okay, what “on Earth” does that mean? Existentially, for example. Being conscious of what actual phenomenal interactions? Transcending objective thought in what sense substantively? In a physical universe that we have only just scarcely begun to understand.
Admittedly, I am never quite certain as to what on Earth – the planet I call home and interact with others on – this is actually supposed to mean. For all practical purposes, say. Again, it’s the sort of thing that “serious” philosophers ever seem intent on focusing in on first before they get to that part. If, of course, they ever do, right?
There are things that we can be conscious of that transcend other things. And there may or may not be any number of “things” up there or out there that transcend any particular things that mere mortals down here on planet Earth may think or feel or say or do. For example, given the lives that they actually live from day to day.
But: That is the part I wish to focus in on in regard to what I/“I” think nihilism means.
Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality
James Tartaglia
Reviewed byGuy Bennett-Hunter, University of Edinburgh
From the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews webpage
And what could this possibly be other than either God or mere mortals here on planet Earth – or intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe – in possession of free will and able to grapple with and grasp an understanding of existence itself?
Now, with God, it would seem likely that there is a teleological purpose “behind” existence. While for mere mortals in a No God universe, there may or there may not be.
Most tend to forget that part. Or they forget that in regard to the meaning we attach to human interactions we are most likely to pass judgment on, all that is necessary is to believe that your own meaning need be as far as it goes. Then, for those like me, the suggestion that even if you are willing to expose your own meaning to the criticisms of others, there does not appear to be a way in which to substantiate the most rational meaning.
On the other hand…
…this frame of mind evades my own argument about the nature of objective facts able to be accumulated in regard to interactions in the either/or world. There is no way that a community could function coherently if there was not objective meaning able to be assigned to all of the interactions necessary to subsist…to sustain a community from day to day. It’s just that, as distinct from a community of ants, meaning for our species becomes entangled in a vast assortment of “memes” as well.
For example, for some, meaning abounds in their reaction to such things as “March Madness” here in America. While for others it is utterly meaningless.
Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality
James Tartaglia
Reviewed byGuy Bennett-Hunter, University of Edinburgh
From the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews webpage
Here, again, I make the distinction “for all practical purposes” between seeming essential meaning able to be successfully communicated regarding things and interactions in the either/or world, and seeming existential meaning only able to be more or less successfully communicated given the arguments I make in my signature threads here. In regard to moral and political value judgments in the is/ought world.
On the other hand, in regard to those things that need to be accomplished – by individuals, by society – in order to merely subsist, does it really matter if something in the way of an essential meaning is found. Providing food, water, clothing, shelter, defense and an environment able to sustain the reproduction of any particular community is simply a given. And in these interactions there are any number of contexts in which we find pleasures and fulfillments and satisfactions. This in and of itself is meaningful enough.
Or “intellectually”:
Point taken?
And then “for all practical purposes”:
But then for the objectivists here, that just won’t do. They insist that, on the contrary, if you think about human interactions in exactly the same way that they do, you have no recourse but to grasp that, in fact, there is an essential, overarching meaning that fully explains, incredible as it might seem, everything.
On the other hand, reconfiguring nihilism into Nihilism seems to suggest that if you think about it long enough you can capture the very essence of it’s meaning. The Nihilism. The Nihilism intertwined in Being itself.
Like, for example, was once done with Dasein.
Admittedly, the author here does note this:
"Disclaimer: My writings state my opinion. Feel free to disagree.
But, from my frame of mind, he/she is not off to a good start.
Of course my own nihilism starts with the assumption that 1] the human species embodies free will and 2] that the human condition is embedded in the gap between what any particular one of us have come to believe about it and all that can be/must be known about it going all the way back to an understanding of existence itself.
This and the assumption that the “free man” or the “free woman” is largely an existential contraption rooted inter-subjectively in dasein.
Okay, you see through “society” and you set out to live more “authentically”. As a Nihilist. But then you bump into other Nihilists hell bent on doing the same. Only their own moral and political value judgments come into conflict with yours. So, how do all of these true Nihilists resolve those conflicts?
Or does this true Nihilist insist that in order to be free authentically all of the other Nihilists must think and behave as he or she does?
Ironically enough, that is one way to go about it. You set out as a philosopher to find meaning in life and, eventually, in reading all of the other philosophers attempts to do so, you conclude that ultimately, essentially, ontologically, teleologically, etc., there just isn’t any. Or not the meaning of life. That was basically my own path. Meaning embodied in both the God and the No God world collapsing under the weight of actual existential reality. If only in the is/ought world that encompasses moral and political value judgments.
Reason? Nope.
But then faith?
Yep for some, nope for others.
Yes, that works for me as well. In particular in regard to those who insist that they are the authority on which particular behaviors allow you to become “one of us” and not “one of them”.
They are still everywhere here. Though, given my own contributions over the years, not nearly as many as there used to be. At least not the ones I respected as philosophers. Now they are mostly Kids and the fulminating fanatic rot. Minds that, in my view, only a fool would respect.
There is destruction of meaning.
Then there is neutrality towards meaning.
Neutrality is different than anti.
I think a good nihilist will be as neutral as possible about everything.
Doing this will conserve so much mental energy that it will
change the character of the nothingist, on nearly every level.
It would be an experiment to apply nothingness to ourselves and all our mandatory meanings.
We would still eat, drink and go poo, but neutrality leads to idleness.
Idleness leads to refocus of the energy and self.
It centers a person and balances their energy.
Every once in a while the word nihilism will make an appearence in the news media.
Here’s one I just came across at the New York Times:
“I can tell a story in which the Trumpians self-marginalize or exhaust themselves. Permanent catastrophism is hard. But apocalyptic pessimism has a tendency to deteriorate into nihilism, and people eventually turn to the strong man to salve the darkness and chaos inside themselves.” David Brooks
An assessment of those right wing extremists “out there” basically intent on making Donald Trump America’s first Führer.
But, again, I suspect that his use of the word revolves more around means than ends. The end, in other words, justifying any and all means.
On the other hand, there are those who don’t make this distinction. Nazis and Communists and Anarchists – all extremists – are construed to be nihilists.
Just the opposite of my own subjective assessment. For moral and political nihilists of my ilk, all ends are interchangeable given the “psychology of objectivism” here: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 5&t=185296
Here’s the latest intellectual contraption from Satyr:
Again, all I can do is to challenge him – or those who subscribe to whatever they think he means here – to come to an agreement on a particular reality [set of circumstances] in which we can explore nihilism given the components of our own philosophies.
In particular as it relates to moral and political value judgments that come into conflict out in the real world.
