nihilism

[Karpel Tunnel]

For two points, name a single problem that philosophers have solved in 2,400 years. Or even better...name a single problem they aren't still arguing about.

Philosophy has helped solve all sorts of problems. That's right help solve, since it is a set of tools to create ideas much more than to, by iteself resolve issues. Darwin was strongly influenced by the philosophical discussions of his time. Empiricism obviously influenced the solving of an unbelievable number of problems once applied. Newton was strong influenced by a couple of philosophers. It's a bit like saying what problems did mathematics solve. Well, apart from mathematical proofs, not only applied math has solved all sorts of problems (applied by physicists say) but even pure math has turned out to end up helping explain all sorts of phenomena. In itself they don't really resolve very much. Just like hammers don't. But tools couples with other knowledge or in the case of a hammer with knowledge and a body can solve problems. Philosophy has been presenting people with new ideas and way sof thinking and ways to eliminate falsehoods, how to notice assumptions, how to notice belief systems and paradigm and models, how language can lead us astray and epistemological options and much much more. It's a category error to bring up things like free will vs determinism and the like and say, oh, well it hasn't solved anything

[iambiguous]

Some of my best fiends are nihilists.

Again, that I reduce you down to "quips" like this speaks volumes regarding what I can only imagine as the trepidation you feel that one day I may well succeed in pulling your own comforting and consoling rug out from under you.

And then you too will be on the road to a "fractured and fragmented" personality.

On the other hand, at least you won't still be a Stooge.

Psychobabble.

Good catch. You know, for a run-of-the-mill pragmatist.

Unless, of course, that's a category error.

[Ecmandu]

Iambiguous,

Come to the abyss with me. Oh that’s right, you’re such a pussy that you put me on ignore.

Nihilism is not the abyss. Nihilism is a reaction (mirroring) of this cruel world as a defense mechanism. Who’s the scared one here, you or me?

You’re just an adolescent posturing here iambiguous!

Not an adult. You are the kid you accuse everyone else of being.

[promethean75]

Bro I think you got it backwards. Why would one endorse nihilism as a 'defense' mechanism?

Subconscious mind: 'Gosh you know, I think believing that I'm mortal, that the universe is meaningless and that nothing matters, might make me feel better. I think I'd like to be a nihilist because that'll help me ignore my real problems.

Buddy. Those ARE the real problems. We are not escaping here. We are not telling ourselves comfortable lies.

christ that wuz dumb. Why would somebody believe THE WORST CASE SENARIO to make themselves feel BETTER?

[iambiguous]

Woody Allen, Nihilist
By Matthew Boudway at Commonweal website

In a recent column titled "Ideas from a Manger," Ross Douthat of the New York Times pursued a similar line of argument.

The secular picture...seems to have the rigor of the scientific method behind it. But it actually suffers from a deeper intellectual incoherence than...its rivals, because its cosmology does not harmonize at all with its moral picture.

In essence, it proposes a purely physical and purposeless universe, inhabited by evolutionary accidents whose sense of self is probably illusory. And yet it then continues to insist on moral and political absolutes with all the vigor of a 17th-century New England preacher. And the rope bridges flung across this chasm — the scientific-sounding logic of utilitarianism, the Darwinian justifications for altruism—tend to waft, gently, into a logical abyss.

Bingo!

Well, one of them.

This encompasses my reaction to the Humanists among us. Of which I was once one myself. They reject the existence of an omniscient and omnipotent God as 1] a font assuring a definitive differentiation between moral from immoral behavior, as 2] an omnipresent point of view assuring us that no one can ever get away with immoral behavior and as 3] an all powerful Being assuring us that the immoral behavior will be punished.

Yet, while accepting the actual existential reality of 2 and 3 in a No God world, they still insist their own philosophical or political or [for some] scientific assessments can at least determine which behaviors are in fact moral and which are not.

And, okay, I ask them to bring their own assumptions here out into the world and demonstrate to us why, in a world bursting with conflicting goods about practically everything, their own moral narrative and political agenda encompasses either the optimal perspective from which to concoct "rules of behavior" or is, in fact, the only rational perspective. Given that, down through the ages, there have been hundreds of them for us to choose from.

And, given the argument of the nihilists and the sociopaths that, in the absence of God, all things are permitted. How philosophically, politically or scientifically is that necessarily wrong?

Again, it isn't that those who believe in "a purely physical and purposeless universe" are all nihilists. Most of them aren't. It's just that their fundamental view of reality leaves them without a good way to get past nihilism; their "rope bridges" are too short. Hard materialism may turn out to imply nihilism in just the same way that nihilism implies amoralism.

Unless, of course, given a No God world, there is in fact an argument from the Humanists that transcends the arguments from the sociopaths and the nihilists. My own participation on this thread reflects the ambivalence that consumes me in confronting this. On the one hand, I would like to believe that my own frame of mind here is a reasonable point of view. That I am capable of being rational here. On the other hand, I would like to come across an argument that refutes it. Why? Because in believing it I remain "fractured and fragmented" here and now, preparing to topple over in the abyss that is oblivion there and then.

The irony being that if determinism gets "hard" enough, I am left believing that I am left believing only that which I was ever able to believe in a world where human volition is just a psychological illusion.

And yet I recognize that my own intelligence is hardly the most supple one around. Even here. So there is always the possibility that someone can come up with an argument that hopefully crumples mine to dust.

[iambiguous]

Nihilism & Philosophy by Gideon Barker
Roger Caldwell scrutinises philosophical revolutions.
Book Review

The philosopher as nihilist is a destroyer of worlds, a revolutionary who comes to make us see with new eyes and radically change how we live. The nihilist philosopher uses words, not bombs; but not simply to offer us new doctrines or facts.

Yes, that is clearly one way in which to spin it. On the other hand, a moral nihilist, in rejecting both religious and secular fonts as the basis for an objective morality and/or a doctrinaire political agenda, can instead advocate more for moderation, negotiation and compromise -- democracy and the rule of law as the "best of all possible worlds" relating to social, political and economic interactions.

Given of course the historical parameters of political economy. And given the extent to which any particular "I" here might topple over into the "fractured and fragmented" hole that "I" am in.

This is philosophy not as a matter for contemplation, but as something to be lived – and if we are to live in a new order, the old one must first be dismantled or destroyed. The question is, once the cobwebs and lies are swept away, what are we left with? Once all our old values and ways of life are gone, do we still have a world at all, and not chaos?

Come on, any philosophy can only be grappled with in terms of how one connects the dots existentially between theory and practice. Indeed, name a single school of philosophy that does not make claims up in the clouds that, upon coming down to earth and becoming intertwined in human interactions, finds the going considerably more problematic.

Start with the assumptions made by any of the Great Philosophers and defend them in a particular context in which the components of my own moral philosophy come into play.

Go ahead, pick one and see what unfolds.

[Meno_]

But as soon as man became conscious of his existential predicament , he tried to fix it, and pass any solutions down to his progeny.

That set of passed down attempts codified and was then revised by later thinkers

So philosophy becalmed a languages in it's self , for it's self.

It becalms strung between universals and the individual ontological Das Sein.


There is no way to dispense e with the underlying conditions of it's genesis or it's veiled prospective object(ivity)


Iambiguous,

I do feel we may have a conversation here, and referring to a
possible connection of nihilism and Buddhism

It really is no fault of any one of us that we have realized the unrealized -nihilism, and in one sense, it is the angst of the sign of modern civilization.

We alienate generally, in this horrible time of plague, and perhaps it befits Susan Sontag's concern with it as rising, or lowering to the level of metaphor.

In any case I am looking forward to communicating with You further, as things evolve.

[iambiguous]

Nihilism & Philosophy by Gideon Barker
Roger Caldwell scrutinises philosophical revolutions.
Book Review

Typically...this going forward into a new world also involves a sort of going back. Gideon Barker’s book Nihilism and Philosophy deals with four such instances. In ancient Greece, the Cynics rejected what they saw as the artificial world of the city-state in the interest of a return to nature.

As though in choosing either option the realities embedded in my own account of nihilism go away. The only factor that seems relevant to me in regard to any path that one chooses as a mere mortal is the existence of God. No God and meaning comes to revolve around that which can demonstrated to exist for all rational men and women. A God/the God and there is a transcending font able to judge the meaning that mere mortals ascribe to...anything.

Thus...

Then, with the rise of Christianity, the hierarchical order of the Roman Empire was rejected in favour of a world in which, in St Paul’s words, there would be “neither Greek nor Jew, slave or free, male or female” but all standing equal before God.

And, in regard, to human interactions in the is/ought world, what prominent philosophers have not introduced one or another rendition of God as of fundamental importance in defining and defending the most righteous "hierarchical order"?

In modern times, after the ‘death of God’, Nietzsche declared the end of what he calls Christian ‘slave-morality’, trusting to the Übermensch or ‘Over-Man’ to bring back an heroic age that valued courage and caste.

What can Nietzsche possibly have known about nihilism if he didn't include the Übermensch as well? The irony being that the Ubermensch themselves become slaves to their own moral and political agenda. They end up kowtowing to people like Ayn Rand and Satyr.

Then Heidegger, seeing the present technocratic age as a result of more than two thousand years of forgetfulness of Being, tried to return us to a long-forgotten way of understanding and living in the world, to recover a more ‘primordial’ thinking.

If only up in the clouds of intellectual contraptions where, among other things, being and time get to mean whatever he said they did. Oh, and Dasein too.

[iambiguous]

Nihilism & Philosophy by Gideon Barker
Roger Caldwell scrutinises philosophical revolutions.
Book Review

Baker’s account of the Cynics is heavily indebted to Michel Foucault, whose lectures on the subject...were the last he was to deliver before his death in 1984. The Cynics had not previously been accorded much space in the history of philosophy: their doctrines were sparse, their writings have not survived, and what we know of them comes down often in jokes and anecdotes. They were shocking to the society of their day, in that their way of life involved a rejection of all conventional values. They would do in public what most people thought it proper to do only in private; they acknowledged no family, home, or state, but willingly embraced a life of begging and destitution. If this was a sort of asceticism, it was a cheerful one: the Cynics showed that you could be happy without material possessions, and that care of the body is less important than care of the soul. There is nothing ‘other-worldly’ in this.

From wiki:

Cynicism...is a school of thought of ancient Greek philosophy as practiced by the Cynics. For the Cynics, the purpose of life is to live in virtue, in agreement with nature. As reasoning creatures, people can gain happiness by rigorous training and by living in a way which is natural for themselves, rejecting all conventional desires for wealth, power, and fame. Instead, they were to lead a simple life free from all possessions.

Then there's my own tendency towards a cynical philosophical perspective. It has little or nothing to do with souls or living virtuously or being in agreement with nature or shocking anyone...let alone "embrac[ing] a life of begging and destitution."

Instead, my own reasons revolve around a philosophical assumption: that all of the paths chosen by all of us in regard to souls and virtues and nature and conventions is rooted largely in dasein. Thus while some may call themselves cynics there does not appear to be an argument they can make that would obligate others to choose it as the most reasonable manner in which to think about human interactions in the world around us. It's just one of many frames of mind that can seem reasonable to some based on the manner in which they conflate their own personal experiences and their attempts through the study of philosophy to "think through" to a rational understanding of the most meaningful and moral life.

In Plato’s dialogue The Sophist, Socrates says the real philosopher is one who ‘lives the philosophical life in truth’. For Baker, Cynicism is the first philosophy to have actively tried to put this vision into action.

As though in taking this "vision" down out of the clouds the sheer complexity of human interactions in the modern/postmodern world won't rip it to shreds. In fact, the only antidote that seems to remain is objectivism. In other words, the vision is sustained largely "in your head". Then others around you may or may not be hammered into it. Or, if the "vision" revolves around ideologies like fascism or Gods that sanction going after the infidels...?

In other words, historically, Cynics weren't the only ones to have a "vision".

Thus to what extent could this frame of mind...

The Cynics radicalized the Socratic simplicity of life. After all, Socrates went home each night to bed; the Cynics by contrast often didn’t have homes. Socrates didn’t take part in politics: the Cynics didn’t even acknowledge the city-state (polis) to begin with. It was necessary for them to keep a distance from the exercise of political power if they were to say what they thought needed saying. They aimed to speak truth fearlessly whether to fellow citizens or to a mighty tyrant, to expose lies or wrongdoing. Most Greek philosophy was for an elite, but Cynic philosophy was available to all.

...become just another rendition of objectivism?

To speak their truth fearlessly. To expose that which they construed to be lies. All embedded in their own particular world in their own particular historical and cultural context.