An organism rejects fluctuating ordered/chaotic energies to begin the process of self-organizing, we call life.
Skin/membrane, exoskeleton the flexible ‘boundary’ of its continuous repulsion of undesired other.
Self-consciousness emerges as a separation of ego - lucid self - from self - unconscious, automated processes. Detachment of mind, or part of mind, from body, which is the start of nihilism.
What is nihilism?
The defensive reaction to reality, projecting into it what it denies existence to, i.e., the absolute.
Self-consciousness is the trigger, exposing the organism to how it compares with other, producing insecurity and vulnerability.
It’s solution is to impose a cognitive barrier, using language, between itself and an indifferent threatening cosmos - otherness. Ideological alternate reality.
To such a mind a cosmos void of absolutes - i.e. one-god, universal morality, universal meaning, universal purpose - is a ‘negative’, implying its own desire to negate it using its own mental abstractions.
Nihilism implies an inversion. Noumena no longer adapt to phenomena - no longer represent them - but phenomena become noetic constructs that can be created mentally and projected into a world that lacks them.
The only way to accomplish this is through semiotics. Words/symbols, representing these absent absolutes, or these “missing” from reality concepts.
Essentially the mind ‘negates’ reality, by projecting into it what is lacking, and what it needs to cope with existence.
The experienced world is declared ‘illusory’ or ‘superficial’ implying a more real reality hidden in the beyond or the below - occult, accessible only to the select, initiated few. This is a reference to the organisms own psychology. This occult alternate reality only exists in the organism’s mind, and may be shared, if it is promoted, as a shared alternate reality - Abrahamic religions are born.
Spirituality of the nil.
A memetic alternative reality that usurps, in theory, the physical, experienced world.
Nihilism develops two distinct variants, corresponding to its binary paradigm.
It’s pure form, that simply negates all, without justifications or offering a alternative; its ‘positive’ form, which is self-contradicting, which offers its abstractions as alternate realities.
The former is more effective, the latter more seductive and so more popular.
Providing an alternate reality, entirely based on words/symbols, offers salvation from an indifferent threatening world, particularly to those born with inferior genetics.
A number increasing in human environments that have almost eliminated culling and have replaced natural selection with social selection.
All the positive nihilist must do is provide a relative self-consistent model with minimal connections to reality, to support its self-justifications; more importantly it must offer hope, in the form of power, freedom, sexual promise, hedonism, to those desperately seeking for such compensations.
Positive nihilism is at the root of current political ideology, marketing practices, psychotherapy, or anything that must manipulate and exploit weakness via the mind.
Nihilism is a political tool, and a marketing tool. It offers nullifications of reality the individual craves, ro it offers ‘corrections’ to reality, to what is missing ni th world, which individuals need to cope with their won existene.
if ‘nihilism’ were an objective phenomena and accessible to scientific inquiry, you’d be able to pin it down like you want and say something intelligible about it. but because it represents something only explicable through one philosophical narrative or another, what it ‘means’ can be any number of things.
all one can do is find the most common features of the available narratives and use those as a very limited, very generalized description. if you wanted only to do this, instead of constructing grand narratives about it (which for the above reasons is a waste of time), you’d simply describe a nihilist as someone who doesn’t believe that a vast majority of philosophical statements are true. moreover, that even considering those that are true, they still provide no definitive guidance for human action.
there are natural nihilists and then there are seasoned nihilists. the natural nihilists never had the capacity to recognize the confusion inherent to the philosophical language game and begins as a skeptic (without knowing how that skepticism is warranted). the seasoned nihilist has ‘been there and done that’, has intimate experience with the philosophical language game, and then finally steps back from it with a genuine understanding of why that is a reasonable thing to do.
but keep in mind that all this stuff is at the level of propositions - a nihilist is critical of the proposition to produce any certainty beyond the immediacy of experience, as well as the problem of the epiphenomenal nature of qualia (that they have no causal effect on actions) - and as such one doesn’t ‘act’ like a nihilist. meaning, you cannot spot a nihilist and say his apparant behavior is because he believes x. therefore, a nihilist is indistinguishable from anyone else. a nihilist certainly does ‘act as if there are values’ and ‘find things very much meaningful.’ only, he doesn’t bother himself with explaining of justifying any of this because to do so would involve the implication of the very thing he dismisses; the philosophical narrative.
don’t mean to shut this thread down before it even gets started, but there is nothing more to it than what i’ve explained.
Easterners already knew that nothingness does not mean nothing.
The key word there is 'thing", as in some-thing, and no-thing, implying no thingness.
what is this 'thing"?
It is how a subjective consciousness experiences - interprets - order, by simplifying/generalizing a pattern into a abstraction - a thing.
So, no-thingness mans no patterns, no order.
This corresponds to the ancient Greek conception of chaos - ΧΑΟΣ - expanse.
If we use Heidegger’s language, space impossibility and matter/energy, order, is probability.
The no-thingness is an absence of order - patterns that can be experienced as appearance.
Nothingness is not void of energy, of existence.
Existence cannot come from non-existence. But order, can emerge within chaos.
What is void is existence of order.
Nothingness implies a state of random energies - an expanse of possibilities with no probabilities, from which the probable emerges as a 'beginning" of some-thingness.
Nihilism is a psychological reaction to reality.
there is no ‘one’ and no ‘nil’ in existence. Both are mental abstractions - ideas/ideals. Their meaning is based on the individual’s relationship with existence.
I already explained all that…but you do not bother to read. Because you are a cynic using the nil to dismiss anything and everything too troubling or requiring more than a bit of effort.
Skepticism is warranted in everything, because there is no absolute and so no possibility of omniscience.
But skepticism can also be sued as a psychological tool, like selectively demanding absolute evidence when this is impossible, in one context, and then showing remarkable leniency in others…like how you swallowed Will to Power, with no second thought.
You have no power to shut anything down. you are merely a gadfly - Will to Powerlessness.
You’ve already made it clear that Will to Power does not apply to you, but to your god, the universe, who has the will and the power, and you are but a reflection - power through association.
Herd psychology.
Everything is a proposition.
One has to evaluate what is more and what is less probable.
Nihilism, as I said a dozen times before, is a attitude, projecting abstractions as a defence against a cosmos that does not provide to it what it expects and demands.
Your idol Nietzsche, only spoke of psychology. His only insights were psychological, nihilism is psychological, eternal return is psychological.
He had nothing new to say outside human psychology.
Without the nil, there is no one.
This agrees with the cosmological model of the ancients that believed in chaos preceding existence. The age of the Titans, preceding the age o the Olympians.
A metaphorical way of saying that chaos precedes order, and order is where thingness is probable - from no-thingness, to some-thingness.
Nothingness is not …nothing.
Nothingness is the absence of probability or order that can be interpreted as thingness - abstraction.
Without nil there is no life. Life being the negation of what is other than itself.
Absolute power of the nil.
If the absolute one is non-existent, then the absolute nil must be worshiped in its place.
A slight flaw only proves the absolute power of the nil.
If absolute evidence of the singularity is offered, then we must admit that the absolute nil is the fabric of reality.
example
If absolute gnosis cannot be proven - omniscience - then we are all equally ignorant.
If absolute power is not evident - omnipotence - then we are all equally powerless.
Gotta check in on your various ‘its’ in the sentence. The nihilist projects into reality the absolute that his own philosophy denies the possibility of?
IOW ‘it’ nr. 1 refers ‘reality’, ‘it’ nr. 2 refers to nihilism?
The power of nil is founded on the absence of absolutes:
absolute gnosis; absolute power, absolute oneness (singularity).
The positive psychosis takes advantage of this absence to declare its own abstractions the hidden absolute, using language to substitute for actions; using noumena in the absence of phenomenal (empirical) evidence.
The pure nihilist psychosis takes advantage of this absence to selectively deny and dismiss what si threatening to tis well-being, on the ground that it lacks absolute evidence, and to remain true to his preferred ideology, on the grounds that is is as plausible as any other, given that there is no omniscience.
To put it another way…in th absence of a one-god (anthropomorphic absolute) - omniscient omnipotent, omnipresent - the desperate mind declares himself a god, ro declares all men equally powerless and ignorant.
If not absolute one, then absolute nil.
The concept of absolute can be renamed ‘universe’ or ‘one’ (singularity), ridding itself of the infantile anthropomorphosis but retaining all other traits and implications, such as the absence of free-will to maintain “innocence” as a substitute for salvation.