And at what cost?

Having to bother other people and add to their problems and suffering, directly or indirectly...
Consuming resources that other people could have used instead... — OglopTo

Precisely. To live is to be "guilty." A world without exploitation is a world with defecation (an impossible dream, life being what it is.) And of course we prefer to keep scarce resources to ourselves, where I include our loved ones as part of these selves. I don't deny that the safe and well-fed person will probably feel generous toward strangers, but there's plenty of self-righteous, sentimental posing to be had on this issue, too.

As others have argued, the desire for perfect innocence is a desire for the grave. I wrestled with that desire intensely once and came out much freer and fiercer on the other side. Life is war. I prefer this war in its sublimated manifestations. I fight for a life of love, creativity, pleasure. This might require moments of hatred, destruction, and pain. Sometimes the ugly has to step in for a moment to maintain the usually beautiful.

With this: "We are taught to embrace and project universal systems (to understand religion as science and/or one-size-fits-all morality)," you don't mean that everyone is taught that, do you? I certainly wasn't taught that, for example. — Terrapin Station

I don't think we are taught this explicitly, but I do think we learn this by imitation. Science is explicitly objective and metaphysics and religion at least often project themselves as true-for-all and binding-for-all. Correct beliefs are correct independent of the believer. That's the usual idea. This is of course common sense itself in everyday life. But pretty soon ambiguous propositions about invisible deities like Jehova, Progress, Freedom make an appearance, so these kinds of propositions are often presented as valid for all.
Of course political discussions are almost universally about what "we" should do, as if all good people had the same interest. The "idiot" is the "irresponsible" "private person" who doesn't have sophisticated, solemn opinions about this We. That's one way I can make sense of "nihilist" or "relativist." If the nihilist shares that he's not interested in what "we" "should" think but only what he should think, then the non-nihilist is likely to translate this thoughtlessly into the assertion by the nihilist that nihilism ought to be embraced. This scarecrows the nihilist as an evangelist. The "universal" man doesn't have much use for merely first-person reports except as raw material to synthesize into objectivity, duty, and prohibition. (Maybe I'm exaggerating, but I'm trying to point at something that is easy to miss because it lurks in every background.)

It's not anything I'm consciously doing (and I don't at all buy the notion of unconscious/subconscious minds). — Terrapin Station

Where are your memories when you are not remembering them? To me it's pretty clear that we know far more than we can be conscious of at any particular moment.

I can't help but be a little skeptical about your disavowal of intellectual honest. I can relate to a certain irony about the virtue. It comes off a goofy if so-and-so praises himself in such terms. But would you really not be embarrassed to be accurately (in your own eyes) judged as a sloppy or dishonest thinker whose words do not deserve respect? I understand rejecting a externally imposed duty to be intellectually honest. But I view intellectual honest as another aspect of beauty and nobility, and I view beauty and nobility as what we just want to incarnate or be. I might speak of an internally imposed duty except that "internal" here stresses that I experience this urge as my true self so that "imposition" involve only what gets in the way of this incarnation project. For instance, a pious or sentimental proclamation of intellectual honesty seems (at least) emotionally dishonest in its sentimentality. Along the same lines a person might mock the authenticity project in order to authentically express his complexity/ambivalence.

We can reject every bearer of the "divine" or sacred predicates but perhaps not the allure of the predicates themselves. One form is rejected in the name of another.

I think it should be noted that "it's all just ripples in the nothingness, dude" was my voicing of a position that I was criticizing and not my own position. As I see it, life can be sufficiently fascinating on the local level so that "ultimate futility" can be abstractly true and yet not terribly relevant. We tend to get absorbed in our projects so that this futility is as "invisible" as our deaths, most of the time. Death is perhaps the real issue. To truly believe in one's death is almost to be forced to open the concept of the self outward toward the shared "divine predicates." Death threatens to interrupt all of our projects, including our project of accumulating or possessing knowledge and becoming or remaining a sage. But perhaps we comfort ourselves with the thought that knowledge and its attendant ecstasy is constantly being rekindled in new vessels even as its old vessels are constantly being ruined by time. The divine passes through us. This "divine" or these divine predicates might also be described as that which is highest in human experience, just as gods typically take the form of elevated and perfected humans. Perhaps I can tie all of this together by suggesting that the nihilist is wise at least in his tearing of the divine predicates away from any particular subject that stands at distance from him. The predicates thereby become intimate, accessible. "God" is "just" us at our best.

So what makes these debates we have on forums of any value besides exposing our past experiences in indirect forms by talking about our opinions (or better said, preferences)? — oranssi

I like the graffiti metaphor. Sure, we might get lucky and have a rewarding interaction. But perhaps we mostly just want to scratch our version of events into the wall. I freely admit that I've been articulating the same basic ideas for years now here and there on the internets. Practice makes perfect. Sometimes I'm inspired by what I see as another's "error" (relative to my prejudices) and write when I otherwise might not. I've also "known" or believed for years now that there's a certain "aloneness" that "ought" to be embraced. Anyone (so runs my belief) with a sufficiently rich inner life is going to have incommunicable complexes of thoughts and feelings that no other human is likely to "get" in an absolutely satisfying way. Every once in a while, someone really shares an important "complex" with us, and that's a great intellectual joy. I'm presupposing that these "complexes" are big, beautiful thoughts or realizations. I don't bother to address the less than noble need to share "misery" complexes. I also write "complex" rather than thought because the feeling toward the thought is as important as the thought. Someone who blandly understands without passion doesn't really "get" it in a way that scratches the intense-for-some desire to share beautiful thoughts.

And this was my naive or falsely innocent hope for philosophy forums once. Yet I'm a killer of this dream like everyone else, stubbornly closing my heart to the jingles that others prefer and insisting on the superiority of my own. I now know that I want to snort and stomp my hooves in the dirt as much as I want to share beautiful thoughts. A certain kind of hatred and suspicion is natural. Maybe we beat it back in the pursuit of this or that goal, but I think we have a tendency to articulate our superiority. And my willingness to articulate this tendency is one more articulation of this kind. It's the result of asking questions about the kinds of questions we ask conspicuously. It's a shift of focus from topic of the conversation to the motives driving the conversation, etc. I don't pretend to exhaustively describe what goes on in debates, but only to point out what I'm surprised to find overlooked.

True. It's a hard trick to pull off. Usually the being-and-nothing talk translates into platitude or absurdity.

I'd love to believe that we are regularly visited by aliens, etc., I'd love to believe that magic, including black magic, etc. is real.--all sorts of things like that, as I love the fantasy of that stuff, and I love the idea of it being real to an extent where I read a lot of supposedly non-fiction about it, I regularly visit sites that are supposedly haunted, etc. (Of course, I regularly engage in fiction about it, too.) I want that stuff to be real. It seems to me that the world would be that much more fun if that stuff were real. But that doesn't enable belief. By disposition, I'm a very hardcore skeptic, to a point where I even believe that a lot of scientific ideas that are considered pretty mainstream are really fantastical nonsense that people believe (just like many believe in ghosts, etc.). So if it were emotionally guided, I'd believe a lot of stuff that I do not. But I simply can't "make myself" believe something just because I want to. — Terrapin Station

I suppose I'd ask why you couldn't make yourself believe. According to my prejudice or theory, this is just your attachment to intellectual honesty overpowering your desire to find the spooky stuff to be real. In short, I think in terms of collisions of forces. Consciousness is a vector sum. I also can't make myself believe stuff that I'd like to believe. I'm attached to an image of myself as nobody's fool, not even my own. That's a partial explanation.

To be sure, all kinds of irony and comedy become possible as demystifying theories turn on themselves. If we are all enacting hero myths (rationalizing pre-rational investments or poses), then what kind of hero or pose can bear the self-demystification in pointing this out? The theorist of endless role-play is himself a role conscious of himself as such. He knows that on some level he's just fucking around, a child at play with the serious, solemn grown-up words. It's hard to codify the "gingerbread man" and/or the "laughter of the gods," but I tend to look for (rarely finding) a gleam in the eye of the other that is not quite immersed or trapped in the pose or the game of the moment.

Does getting caught up in a certain field last forever? Will this not too get bogged down in procedure? Perhaps we can all just be theoretical mathematicians/logicians/computer scientists/regular scientists and that will solve all our problems as we grapple with the esoteric nature of this or that logical statement or the next experiment? — schopenhauer1

Call me evil, but I just stopped bothering to pretend that I was looking for a solution for other people's problems. Maybe I'd feel guiltier (and maybe not) if I tend think these solvers of other people's problems weren't also working on their own. "Brother's keeper" is a purpose. We actually have a lot in common. I just think I've further "subjectivized" my reading of pessimism/nihilism. In my view this purifies and transforms it. To claim universal validity for this kind of "-ism" is still too "needy." It's not proud enough, this X-ism-as-universal-truth. It's still a salesman, an evangelist, however grim its message. We can drop the "scientific" pose and accept that we are voicing a fundamentally "irrational" position. To recognize a duty toward truth is already to "betray" "nihilism" and play at universal religion that won't confess itself as such. To me that's the truly interesting leap...the abandonment of the universal pretense. Not every human is my brother. Not every human is "worthy" or "capable," etc. I'd be silly to be expect my stronger thoughts to even register or make sense to those without a certain "irrational" sense of their own value and dignity. These are some things that aren't worth telling to those that have to be told in the first place. Instead we have one member of a type making the gut-level type-specific intuitions more and more explicit. We write for younger versions of ourselves, perhaps, since we can't travel back in time to apply the 20-20 hindsight in person, etc.

I can hear anecdotes all day about how someone had this great experience, but just like the evening news that provides a heart-warming last segment, it's only a segment, and the news has to make decisions on what to edit, what to present, how to construct the narrative a certain way. How am I to know people do not just do that on a philosophy forum? Anecdotes can be like these segments, edited to make a whole life seem a certain way. — schopenhauer1

Some people are strong and others weak. Some of the weak talk as if they are strong and some of the strong conceal their strength strategically among those who would resent it or be humiliated by it. As I see it, we tend to act purposefully. So I read even the rhetoric of purposelessness as the scratching of an itch, a variation of the usual heroic role-play. The pessimist faces the terrible truth. The non-pessimist is a coward and a sentimentalist. This is the basic structure of conspiracy theory. It's a product that tends to appeal to those who are already relatively passive in worldly terms (working a dead end job if they have a job at all) that justifies/encourages passivity. "Why bother, dude? It's all just ripples in the nothingness." I agree that it is in one particular sense just ripples in the nothingness. My real problem with the position is that it's just not impressive or challenging enough.

I don't think we are assigned a duty to realize ourselves (make something impressive of ourselves) but I do think we are born with an itch to do so. Maybe self-realization is just a fancy version of a horse scratching its ass on a tree. So what? But those fascinated by this game of self-creation (by a science or art or sport, etc.) are also fascinated by others equally passionate and at least on the way to being impressive. I don't feel the need to justify a preference for those are always working to improve themselves. It's a blind "stupid" impulse to be stronger, swifter, cleverer, more beautiful, etc. That's one of the things I like about Schopenhauer, his notion of the blindness of the life force. Nietzsche applied this idea to his critique of Socrates and the obsession with demanding and presenting rationalizations for what is largely instinctive. The "sickly" man whose instincts are out of harmony reaches for a fully explicit "system" and counts himself wiser than those who either never felt the need or (more likely) learn to transcend the need for full explicitness and "universal" reason-mongering.

Do these words really correspond to some kind of fixed metaphysical entities about which we can attain certain and/or useful knowledge? In my view, this kind of "word math" is a poor substitute for actual math. I do understand the esthetic appeal, however, of concepts like being and nothingness. I do think that some discussions involving "being" and "nothing" make for good "literature."

We are "condemned to be free" yet we inauthentically choose guidelines that help us with the procedural drudgery and mix it in with enough stimulation to get by. Does this lead to the conclusion that this general pattern of procedure and stimulation must be passed on and maintained? I am not sure. I do not see why this should be. What are we passing this on for? — schopenhauer1

I don't think it's a "we" issue at heart. Most of the time I am glad to have been born. My consciousness of my freedom and my value-for-myself emerged with difficultly from the usual confusion of childhood and young adulthood. It sucks that this consciousness is so fragile. Give me 1000 years down here. Give me 100,000 years down here. That's the attitude I have when I am fascinated. At the moment, theoretical computer science is blowing my mind. It's the coolest shit I've ever seen. I wish I had read some of these books as a teenager. But better late than never.

I might also add that pessimism/nihilism also opens up (the possibility of) a radical sense of self-possession. "Ultimate futility" (our certain eventual erasure) urges us toward authenticity. Who wants to waste the entire "ride" faking it? As for procedural drudgery, that's not a given. It's possible (as I know from experience) to work at a passion until (at least maybe) someone will pay you for it. Some work really is creative. Of course lots of us are going to be stuck with drudgery, and maybe (I'll entertain the possibility) only the luckier among us will be able to "self-realize" sufficiently to be able to sincerely affirm life (to really be glad more often than not that they were born). And maybe it's part of being lucky that one doesn't get entangled in a sickly pity that can't be happy because not everyone else knows how to be happy. I see crazies and losers all the time on my commute to work. If I could fix them without sacrificing myself, I would. Why not? But most broken people seem to me to be unfixable. They identify with their disease. They are victim-heroes or hero-victims. Their affliction is simultaneously their inflexible point of honor. You can't fix them without snuffing out what they experience as their divine spark. So they aren't even broken in an absolute way, but only relative to my distaste for evasions of freedom and responsibility --and socioeconomically, but that's relative too.

I don't have kids, but that's largely because I've missed the window. If I had established myself economically earlier, I would have. If I somehow come into enough money sooner rather than later, I might do so even now. It's a question of $ for me. My "nihilism" doesn't dissuade me. Only my readiness to protect and nurture potential children in this strange society is the issue. I think others have kids (if they make the conscious more or less informed decision and don't just find themselves knocked up) because (1) they find life worth living and (2) they expect to be able to guide the development of their children so that these children will also find life worth living (to be a net good.)

The reasonable relativist is conscious that basic pre-rational investments close or open the possibility of various intellectual/moral positions. — visit0r

I've read that sentence at least six or seven times now, but I can't any sort of grasp on what the heck it might be saying, exactly. — Terrapin Station

A simple example is that some people just will believe in God and others just will not. Occasionally we do shift our views suddenly, but as a general rule the dialectical clash of a theist and and atheist is not going to change the basic position of either. They are emotionally ("pre-rationally" or "irrationally" invested in being whatever they currently are. The theist has an orderly universe that makes sense and a foundation for his or her moral preferences. The atheist has either the radical freedom that comes with the death of god or the beauty/nobility of living without a "crutch."

I think this "cynical" view of mind stands out (a little at least) on a philosophy forum because those who bother to argue either position with strangers are likely all invested (no matter their differences) in the notion of a single or universal truth which can and ought to be possessed. As rule, philosophers model themselves after scientists rather than novelists. They (often implicitly) make a claim on a shared "logical space." Their truth is not only theirs. I don't claim to completely escape this structure myself. But this is where I drag in Nietzsche's idea of "rank" and modify it a little bit, so that it's a little less hierarchical and more pluralistic. I think we can "let go" of the goal of inscribing the One Truth For All by living with the reduced goal of inscribing the "truth" of our own type. So the universal philosopher thinks of himself as a scientist, a universal metaphysician and the local philosopher develops "software" for others who happen to run a particular operating system --which is to say a community defined in terms of a set of "pre-rational investments." In practice (in my view) the healthy ego tends to feel that such pre-rational investments and their consequences are those of the "highest" type. But my reasonable relativist is well aware that just about everyone counts himself among the chosen or superior.

Finally, a conversation within such a community is "rational" or reasonable in terms of shared "normalizing" axioms or investments. An intellectual community might be defined in terms of an implicit and perhaps un-formalizable set of criteria for valid or warranted assertions. The criteria in this set are not "rational" in that they cannot be justified within the system of rational assertion that they make possible in the first place. Popper's notion of falsifiability, for instance, is a suggested criterion that cannot justify itself, which is not to say that it's not worth adopting as a demarcation of science from non-science. We might think of the realm of "rhetoric" or "abnormal discourse" as the sort of conversation that installs or edits these criteria. Rhetoric persuades us to adopt this or that notion of the trans-rhetorical (true philosophy as opposed to sophistry). For me that's philosophy at its most radical and exciting. I get my itch for normalized discourse scratched by my day job (which involves an almost ideally "normalized" discourse.)

Taken all together, I find in it a clear trend of progress, even if that progress is not smooth or consistent. — tim wood

I agree. Of course I'm a big fan of Hegel, and I think he's roughly right. Of course technology now makes it possible for humanity to cut short its own development. I try to affirm that possibility, which is to say live happily without repressing my consciousness of that possibility. I suppose I see what I'd call higher states of consciousness as fragile blossoms that emerge from the soil of suffering and confusion. No soul, no blossom. No nightmarish past, no blessed "awakening" or transcendence. The confusion is that which is transcended. As Sartre wrote, we are our past in the mode of no longer being it, and we are our future in the mode of not (yet) being able to be it. History is the nightmare from which we strive to awaken, occasionally succeeding. For me this "awakening" has always been a process of dis-identification and/or demystification. For instance, most of us transcend our parents. We learn to see them as imperfect humans whose approval is not spiritually authoritative. Dad is demystified. The actual father is separated in our mind from the father archetype from which he derived his power over us. In the realm of love, similarly, we learn to separate the actual woman from the "anima" image that makes her so seductive. Oxytocin steps in so that (to some degree) a sexual friendship replaces the almost insane or manic first phase of "falling in love." In short, we "distill" the predicates. Plato and Blake come to mind. We don't escape or transcend the energy of the predicates, but we are liberated to some degree by "introjection" or projection in reverse.

Amen, and yet alas! It's a long road, and for many - maybe most - not a good trip. — tim wood

Ah, yes. I feel like one of the lucky ones. I suppose most of us have our comforts, but I hate the idea of being robbed of the knowledge of my own freedom. And yet the beautiful drama of God waking up from the nightmare of not being God can only repeat if all souls are marched through Lethe every so often and installed in new bodies. For me this is metaphorical, but metaphorical is good enough.

And it's just here organized religion deserves credit, that is, the concept of god many of us find untenable. At its best it preserves/instructs in, hope and wisdom. — tim wood

I agree that organized religion has its value. I might describe my own journey (which I understand to be a progress) in terms of a series of better interpretations of Christian ideas presented to me as a child. The texts and rituals are raw material. My irreligiousness is just another kind of religiousness. Of course Jesus himself was a religious rebel.

What is a "pre-rational investment" first off? — Terrapin Station

By 'investment' I'm trying to stress that we don't enter a discussion without prejudices. These prejudices might even be said to constitute our intellectual personalities. For instance, I'm an atheist. I don't think I'm an atheist for purely "logical" reasons. (Indeed I think the notion of a cold "pure" reason is itself a God surrogate.) Roughly speaking, I think we all have images of the virtuous person that are as unique as our fingerprints, though of course roughly similar so that friendly communication is possible. I stress the word image to suggest the non-rational component. For instance, I have an irreligious/impious inclination that precedes the arguments I might make to defend this position or to justify my refusal to bother defending this position. You might say that I have an image of the radically free spirit that (in retrospect) I have been dialectically clarifying for myself since I was a teenager. We are taught to embrace and project universal systems (to understand religion as science and/or one-size-fits-all morality), so that the leap directly to the realization of freedom is just too terrifying. So instead we (or rather those I'm imaging as my general type) go through a sequence of wider and freer systems (bigger cages) until the negation of the cage as such becomes thinkable (emotionally bearable). For me "spiritual" growth is as much an affair of training and developing the heart and guts (arguably the body too) as it is of merely finding and believing the correct propositions.

This continues the thought of the above post but replies to no one in particular. The reasonable relativist is conscious that basic pre-rational investments close or open the possibility of various intellectual/moral positions. The reasonable relativist has been around long enough to recognize the futility of trying to reprogram those who are in error relative to his own vision. The reasonable relativist is not making some metaphysical point. He's just wisely acknowledging that in fact we have to deal with those we consider "irrational." And we most effectively do so (if persuasion is preferred to force) in terms of how those to be managed are motivated and understand the world. This is something like an extra-metaphysical perspective that metaphysics tends to misunderstand. It's a gesture that points at the futility of a certain game that can only register within the game (for those who live in the game) as another move in the game. It's more or less the same with the "reasonable" nihilist. The reasonable nihilist/relativist doesn't forget that he's a self-asserting personality among self-asserting personalities. He doesn't forget that sentences are tools in the hand (or rather mouth) of a person who likely enough is practicing seduction and/or intimidation. I try to convert you to my household god (I get to be high priest), and you do the same with me. This is "ugly" subtext, not the entire text. I suggest that this is the lower (that never vanishes) on which the higher blossoms. A "good" person is (in my view) more aware than most of that which is "evil" in them. If this view is ugly or cynical to some readers, then I myself tend to find opposite views unrealistic or sentimental.

This comes very close to my personal theology. That "god" refers to, can only refer to, human possibility, broadly considered — tim wood

Right. For me there can be no god that isn't anthropomorphic. If there was such a god, we couldn't make sense of it. We'd have no motive to worship or incarnate such a god. But there are divine "predicates" like love, wisdom, power, beauty that we always already revere. So a certain conception of nihilism is impossible, excepting perhaps rare moods of intense demotivation. Another conception of nihilism is that of the man awake to his "divinity." He has completed the iconoclastic journey through a sequence of projections that he once mistook for an alienated or distant version of the divine. Like anyone he still reveres the predicates, but these predicates recognized as such are therefore as ideas possessed already by the mind that might otherwise covet them.

I'm trying to paint a picture of "incarnate freedom" becoming conscious of itself as such by means of a dialectical process. We might call it "The Birth of Spirit from Agency," where agency is the general structure of the alienated state. The agent serves a distant or external divinity that is not simply his own ideal possibility. Then "Spirit" is incarnate freedom conscious of itself as such. It understands itself to have created itself dialectically (in an long, painful debate with itself and others about who it ought to be). But in my view this essentially terminal state is no substitute for the living of life, nor does "Spirit" stop learning and sculpting itself. It just continues its self-sculpting self-consciously, having accomplished what is likely its greatest triumph in the spiritual/intellectual realm, the winning of its theoretical if not practical freedom. The increase of practical freedom involves that "living of life" that is only illuminated but not performed by theory. We might say that we are only just fully born as we become conscious of ourselves as "incarnate freedom."

On the other hand, I'm well aware that this vision doesn't (as a rule) appeal to others. As I experience it, I'm a cheerleader for "spirit" who is always verbally grinding against cheerleaders for this or that agency. I wouldn't be very free if I needed agreement. But I have found variants of these ideas in some of the more famous philosophers, so I know my "brothers" in "spirit" (fellow devil-worshippers) are out there. And I paint my positronic graffiti on the wall like a muted post horn. I'd be delighted if you could relate to even 80% of this little sketch. By all means, point out what I left out or didn't account for or even the 20% that you can't relate to (an optimistic estimate on my part.)

In the sense you've written, how is our experience of god any different from any other experience? Just change "god" to "blue" or "pizza." Are you saying it is impossible for one person to understand another's experience of the world? — T Clark

But "blue" and "pizza" won't work as substitutes. First we think we do understand the joy of pizza more or less like everyone else. It's not controversial. God, however, is used as a justification for killing human beings, obstructing free inquiry, etc. To have a relationship with the supreme being is to make a status claim.

My point is that maybe there all kinds of peak experiences. I've had my share. They felt universal. But I'm rarely satisfied that others know what I'm talking about if I try to describe them. Yet they've had their own experiences that I can't quite feel my way into. I think there's a common but not universal assumption that there is one essential genuinely spiritual experience. There is one kind of "enlightenment," for instance. But I see no reason to assume that. I understand the appeal of the One True Thing, but that appeal is (at least among other things) nakedly narcissistic and status-driven. "Glamor is the happiness of being envied." It's another fetishized commodity, perhaps the ultimate commodity. That's hardly exhaustive. But it's the grime that tends to stick to claims of subjective treasure.

If there's difference in our views in these posts, it appear to me that you're fixed in in the practical and the transient, a tumbleweeds sort of a value system, which understands itself as being no value system at all, but an illusion of one. — tim wood

I would describe a process of "mind" becoming conscious of its own creation of its apparent masters. In earlier stages of this process, mind experiences principles as fixed, external objects. They are decrees of gods or sacred ancestors, for instance. Mind has not made its creative power explicit to itself. It lacks self-knowledge. But it comes to see the sacred objects outside it as its own projections. Finally it becomes conscious of this process itself. It becomes conscious of itself as process. In terms of what you wrote, we end up with a value system that is consciously in flux. It's not an illusion. It's a version that expects to be update, that even posits its own partial destruction as a value to the degree that this partial destruction allows for overall progress. What does seem to remain fixed is the idea of ascent or progress. But this is the bare skeleton or archetype. Our notion of the ideal and therefore of ascent is even self-editing. To posit truth as an absolute value might motivate us to question the sincerity or possibility of such a positing. Maybe "truth" is the mask of the will-to-status, for instance, etc.

My point is that while some (many) things are grounded via reference to something else, some standard, other things are grounded in reference to themselves. Perhaps I should say may be so grounded, but what I mean is when you get down to the bedrock of the matter, everything is so grounded. — tim wood

I think we actually agree more than disagree. Non-silly nihilism is made possible by (almost) "everything being so grounded." I like "all is vanity." I find a wisdom in it. It is of course easy to interpret the phrase in a cheap way (silly nihilism), but I guess that's the cost of pithiness.

The nihilist says nothing matters, while it seems to me that only in traversing nihilism is real value found. — tim wood

I can't make sense of this kind of nihilism. So for me it's a bit of scarecrow. I'd say that nothing matters in the long-enough-run but immediately stress that human concern fades out as it ventures further from the present. So Mr. Nothing Matters is 95% passionately invested in the same kinds of things as Mr. Something Matters Absolutely.

Nor is there any narcissism,which, to reclaim some precision, is just a personality disorder. — tim wood

I realize that narcissism is usually only pointed out in terms of an accusation (as a vice), but I have in mind the sane and healthy driving force that encourages us to finish med school for instance, because we want to be a "winner." What is the force that gets us out of bed after 3 hours of sleep in order to shape ourselves into our ideal self? What is the force that carves and edits this very ideal? We might call it ambition, too. Lots of words come to mind. Anyway, I suggest that nihilism is embraced to some degree as a realization of freedom. His ego ideal is pure (theoretical) freedom, perhaps. The reasonable nihilist enjoys a sense of himself as bound by no artificial principle. He stands without the usual crutches. Of course this notion of himself can be attacked, but such attacks are usually going to rely on some absolute that the nihilist doesn't recognize as authoritative. He doesn't offer much of a target. So nihilism also looks like a late participant in the rhetorical-moral arms race.

That is, calls into awareness a reality so vast that to mature thinking - and feeling - fear itself must dissolve in its presence. — tim wood

That's a beautiful line. I think I know what you mean, and I agree.

The truths become myths as their truth is denied. "These stories of sinful, ridiculous gods are lies! The truth is that gods are morally perfect. "

God is an experience that you need to have to understand what it is. One thing it's not is that it's not a being that you can communicate with or pray to, like the Christian concept of a God, but it's a collective sentience that brings everything together. — stonedthoughtsofnature

Hi. I believe that you've experienced something, but why assume that this experience is universally accessible and also that others' experiences labelled 'God' are the same one you had? Why not a unique experience or set of experiences for every person? I have 2 suggest answers. First, certain peak experiences feel universal. Second, we want to make a claim on the universal. "I've experienced God" is like "I've read War and Peace" and "I've been to New York." It's more grandiose, perhaps, but it's same kind of bragging. It might take the form of spreading the good news ("I just want to share this joy.") but it's also a presentation of the virtue of the presenter.

But I'll agree with you in an important sense. There's a limit to the power of mere words. You can't pack the experience into a sentence and shove that sentence into an ear and expect the heart connected to that ear to light up with the same experience. Instead two humans share more or less the same peak experience or slow-burning realization and they determine this sameness by exchanging sentences. We learnt to trust that a new friend or lover really gets it or really had that "divine" experience.

I agree that the word is often abused, but is it possible that you are tilting against windmills? This is maybe just my bad habit, but I tend to check whether 'oughts' are connected to realistic opportunities for change. Is it likely that a preference like yours will put a dent in the general (relative) stupidity? I stress that stupidity is relative. If we enjoy feeling smart (and we do), then we need the stupid(er) as our foils. And is 'science' really so useless a word? Or is it just used stupidly by those who use most abstract words stupidly, since they are not yet (and maybe not to be) invested in a notion of intellectual virtuousness? Maybe I'm playing the game right now, but I suspect that "oughts" tend to signal virtue or taste rather than represent the desire for change. Or I suspect that our presentation of the ought tends to be impure. Part of us needs the violation of the ought, so that our speech act can "jut out" heroically/conspicuously. We largely exist as the willful negation what is. Fix one thing and we'll find or become the negation around another disclosed-as-broken thing.

I don't hate this formulation, but I think it's a bit cute. It avoids the main issue with verbal sleight of hand. The scope of nihilism, as normally discussed, doesn't deal with things happening billions of years from now. It deals with human lives now and especially human values and institutions. — T Clark

I think I can guess what you mean, but consider the OP: "Nihilism (I define here): the belief and attitude that ultimately nothing matters, nothing has any ultimate or absolute value or significance."

There's this from a dictionary: the rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless.

But what sense can we make of "meaningless" if we're not talking about ultimate "meaninglessness"? We all have preferences and fears and therefore constraints on our behavior. If I'm hungry, the sandwich is meaningful. If I burn my lips on hot coffee, that's meaningful. I care. As I see it, most humans are dominated by spatio-temporallylocal hopes and fears most of the time. But the metaphysical urge is to articulate the imperishable (to do math in a wider, wilder set of concepts). We might also think of God as the image of the invulnerable perfected human. Man qua man is the desire to be God, one might say. Since doing this is impossible, we settle for surrogates. We participate in godlike collective enterprises like science, social justice, a church that embraces the notion of itself as the "body of Christ." The saved person is a member of Christ, a finger or a toe. This is the general structure. We have to share the absolute, because we can't pull off the thing by ourselves unless we do it in the bubble of madness.

But maybe this is too grandiose. Maybe we are just afraid to age and die. Aging dims our glory and dying dumps out of all intellectual treasures and memories at once. The newborn in the same hospital is not us. We construct ourselves over the decades. If we do a good job and attain self-love, we don't want such a unique fusion to be erased. So we either deny that we will be or we accept surrogate crystallizations of this unique self that will survive the death of the body. The nihilist sees that even this plan B is flawed and has to adapt to the metaphysically absurd situation.

I invite you to consider the absolute of the present moment (that is, the moments of your life). These moments are temporary with respect to passing time, but the moments themselves are permanent. If a thing is well done, or done as well the moment allows, and you know it, that's really all the epitaph that matters, Comparisons are conjectural, memory unreliable, only the moment is real; self reflecting on itself is the ultimate beauty and monument. — tim wood

I have no objection to the edifying intention of this passage, but the moments are by definition not permanent. We are also anticipating and remembering creatures, so present moments are often anything but present in another sense.


Still, I can relate to the notion/experience of the self-justifying moment. I can relate with making peace with impermanence. Indeed, I think there is a "feel good" aspect to nihilism as I described it. It articulates and strives to accept the futility of the all-too-human desire to escape time and chance. So my version of the nihilist (unless he is still green and angsty) would have to agree with the spirit of your post already in some way to endure his metaphysical vision of ultimate but not general or practical futility. A person can be an overachiever and a nihilist at the same time. Doing a job well for the beauty of it, for the self-consciously temporary narcissistic pleasure perhaps, is quite conceivable. But nihilism only really makes sense in terms of a metaphysical rejection of (metaphysical) absolutes. We are all practically dominated by (our actions manifest) various values and moral principles. But some of us might decide that various candidates for absolutes are grounded finally by the hope and fear of pleasure and pain, both of which are at best or worst temporary.

Nihilism (I define here): the belief and attitude that ultimately nothing matters, nothing has any ultimate or absolute value or significance. — tim wood

Hi. I would stress ultimate here. A nihilist perhaps reasons (1) that he will die and (2) the human species will become extinct. My personal death argues that all value is temporary. I act now in terms of a finite future, which is to say in terms of hopes and fears that do not extend indefinitely into the future. I may fantasize that I can contribute to science, art, or philosophy for instance in a way that gives me a sort of immortality. I can "crystallize" my personality in some work that will survive me. I "upload" my best self or spiritual fingerprint by adding this work (which hopefully is truly great and maintained in the minds of those who survive me), and I can enjoy this notion while still alive. I can comfort myself that death will not be as absolute as it might otherwise be. But (2) or the eventual extinction the species threatens even this comfort. It seems that even Newton, Shakespeare, and Plato will be erased --will become as if they had never been. From this perspective everything is radically temporary. Nothing is ultimately meaningful. Everything is finally empty or rather emptied or erased. To me this is both terrible and beautiful. This realization (or rather belief/myth) creates a "space" outside of everything finite. Life becomes a vivid dream. The only absolute is the impossibility of any other absolute.