Nihilism
Nolen Gertz at the Aeon online site
Again and again and again: here, in my view, we can only go back to what must surely be an enormous gap between what each of us as individuals think we know [about anything] and all that there is to be known given the perspective of some entity [which most call God] privy to comprehending everything there is to know about existence itself.
For some, like me, this encompasses a particularly grim sense of futility; one that is considerably more demoralizing than in how others seem to react. Some in fact just shrug it all off and seem more than content with embracing what they consider to be all that they need to know in order to propose all manner of completely “thought up” narratives about the “human condition”. There are any number of ILP members who have themselves offered us their own elaborate set of assumptions about the way things are and why and how they got that way. Some through God and some through sheer “philosophical” deduction. No need to mention names but you know the ones.
Of course from my frame of mind there tends to be two things they all share in common:
1] they almost never bring these “worlds of words” down out of their own theoretical clouds bursting at the seams with all manner of “thought up” assumptions
2] none [to my knowledge[ have ever succeeded in demonstrating why all rational [and in some cases virtuous] men and women are obligated to think the same…through a philosophical equivalent of the “scientific method”.
Instead, I construe their efforts as more a psychological contraption aimed at providing them with an intellectual foundation they can attach “I” too in order to attain and then sustain a measure of solace in a world that can often be brutally painful. Like ours todays.
I am not able to go this far myself. There are simply too many things that we can know [and share with others] in regard to the either/or world to make this frame of mind plausible. Do not mathematics, the laws of nature, the empirical world, the rules of language provide us “for all practical purposes” from day to day to day, with all of the standards, foundations and grounds needed such that “knowledge claims” exist that we are readily able to demonstrate as in fact true objectively for all of us?
This begins to crumble for me only in acknowledging at least the possibility of Sim worlds, dream worlds, computer generated realties, or the stuff explored in sci-fi accounts.
Or the possibility of solipsism or determinism.
Why? Because, again, the gap between “I” and a definitive understanding of “all there is” is still very much the reality we all interact in.
But it’s not for nothing that the overwhelming preponderance of us go about the business of living our lives day in and day not at all paralyzed by the thought our interactions cannot “philosophically” be made to correspond with “reality itself”.