no i’m with you one hundred percent. spend enough time doing philosophy… and doing it right… and you end up at the logical conclusion of nihilism. but this nihilism isn’t rooted in some existential dread or anxiety from the knowledge of meaningless. things are quite meaningful, in fact. rather philosophical nihilism, for me, is a kind of post-wittgensteinian conclusion to the ineffability of sense in the philosophical language game. for years i was part of it, then i got out of it, and from that vantage point i was able to see how it worked more clearly than ever. i see it all the time now; i read a text and immediately recognize how many different ways and to what ends it can be interpreted by other writers/readers who have in mind something entirely different when using such concepts and ideas. the apparent ‘fusion’ of agreement that you see when posters correspond is a state that’s reached not necessarily because what is being said is sensible, but because there is nothing against which its sense and reference can be tested so to be shown to be wrong. it is this frictionless atmosphere that philosophy exists in which allows it such passage, and the scrutiny of the natural sciences can’t touch it (unfortunately). so long as you realize that philosophy is nothing more than play, you’d not invest too much seriousness in it to be disappointed when you discovered you’ve been misunderstood.
the important things in life are handled by the sciences… and if you’ll notice, the ethical problems tend to work themselves out naturally and without much guidance from philosophy. think of it as a natural ‘correcting’ mechanism that works very slowly and over vast periods of time. you’ll note also how both those in power as well as those without are by and large philosophically illiterate. what then is running the show? what then is guiding that great hegelian dialectic of the real being/becomming rational, whatever whatever? it certainly isn’t attributed to philosophy. what it is is what marx had made a point of explaining in so many ways; that the material relations of a society have absolute influence on the engendered ideas that rule an epoche… that ideology does not organize society and its material relations, but vice-versa. that philosophers need only realize that their language is a distorted language of the actual world. so on and so forth.
that being said, the engine that moves progress will always tend toward the greater distribution of a hedonic calculus that works out naturally… kinda like a set of governing rules that oversees society’s development which philosophers can’t quite get at completely, though their business is always to try and describe/explain it. but as said above, these theories always come ‘after the fact’, out of the exiting material relations, and therefore reflect the ambitions and orientations of the theorists themselves who are embedded very certainly in some circumstances that either benefit them or not. as it stands, there are more people than not who are not benefiting from the present circumstances… hence, the forwarding of that correcting mechanism that works above and beyond any philosophical attempt to grasp its nature. marx was spot on when he removed this dialectic from the hegelian metaphysics and put it back into the concrete, social sphere as an expression of real progress… how societies evolve.
so don’t think of marx and engels in terms of ‘philosophical objectivists’ who are trying to persuade philosophers to ‘join them’. that’s for ideologues, not marx and co. if these two did anything, it was to show how despite the ways in which we interpret the world philosophically, history follows a very rational course always trending toward increasing the hedonic margins for the population of the planet. in other words, greater reward for physical labor. i know, its an embarrassingly simple formula and philosophers hate that it’s so easy. they’d prefer to complicate the matter… especially those who profit from the present system.
so forget about what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. the continuum isn’t moving toward righter or wronger, but what is more efficient, cost effective, less wasteful, more distributed, etc. this shit works automatically, bro. you could make philosophy disappear and it would still happen. philosophy is not the source of it, nor can it stop it. there simply cannot be a philosophical narrative that could convince people they shouldn’t want to better their lives… and since the vast majority are struggling at the advantage of a much smaller minority, that mechanism works to resolve the conflict. its like a collective sixth sense, so to speak. these people don’t know the first thing about ‘philosophy’. perhaps because ‘philosophy does not real work (W)’?
yeah so no, my nihilism is not at all what the existential theater has portrayed it to be. it’s no passive resignation to fate or any bullshit like that. rather it’s an active nihilism that invites radical, experimental change if even it puts the world in danger. i have a profound faith in man as a creature that is notorious for figuring out how to make shit work. my nihilism is not a loss of faith in man, but a high spirited casual withdrawal from philosophical floundering. i’m not interested anymore in asking stupid metaphysical questions. been there done that. i mean sure, i too have esoteric thoughts and weird ideas, but i realize that they cannot be talked about clearly… so with them i pass by in silence.
simplify dude. right shoe goes on the right foot, left shoe on the left foot. who was the eastern zen master who said that? i forget.