sarty pants wrote:I believe nihilism is a mental defensiveness to emerging self-consciousness, exposing the individual to himself, as it compares to other. The awareness of natural election, the world's indifference to the plight of the individual
as my students have seen, i've created a remarkable reversal of this general formula to identify that those who's indicative philosophical mood while declaring values - permitting them to
forget that there is no teleology in nature, no objective right or wrong, and no intentional purpose for the existence of the universe - forces them into an incoherent position, formally, insofar as they declare their values in the same way one might assert an argument. by this i mean that the nihilism does not yet exist in just stating 'i wish this and that to be so', but rather in the mood and practice of trying to produce lines of reasoning that defend those values. so for example, take a collection of some of sarty's pants arguments that he uses to, say, critique democracy, multiculturalism, religion, etc. each of these critiques can stand to support his
personal convictions and values for aristocracy, uniculturalism, atheism (or paganism, whatever). he need not defend himself so far because one is perfectly within the bounds of moral judgement here. but when he tries to argue that his preferences
reflect some natural order, or some 'more right' thesis about the 'proper' direction of economics, politics, society, etc., he inadvertently becomes a nihilist - i call this essentially
denying the truth. he forgets that these are simply his preferences and becomes philosophical to rationalize their supremacy when no such supremacy exists.
but in order to understand this logic here you have to first realize that nihilism is actually impossible, because it is impossible to not have values. rather the battle against nihilism takes place between 'objectivists' of one variety or another who, in forgetting the contingent nature of their values, assert them in the wrong, indicative mood as formal philosophy. that is, they present them as if they are the result of having come to recognize facts about nature that simply don't exist. so being the case that nihilists don't exist in the traditional sense they are thought of being, the
real nihilists are those who... how shall i put this... devalue the value of the knowledge that there are no values in nature beyond those created by thinking beings (who must have memory, anticipate and act intentionally). ergo, sarty pants is a nihilist.
how you like me know, biggs? watch me work son.
I believe nihilism is a mental defensiveness to emerging self-consciousness, exposing the individual to himself, as it compares to other.
okay it couldn't happen here because merely being self-conscious is not yet enough to develop the intellectual underpinnings of the emotional discord felt after accumulating various conclusions of a skeptical nature. an example would be very primitive man. certainly self-conscious, but nihilists? they all truly believed in some form of life after death and were very superstitious. how then could one have the same kind of existential crisis a camus might have in a modern world that has accumulated a great deal of skepticism as the result of the scientific revolution? see? we cannot yet
be skeptical about life after death until we have accumulated knowledge that persuades us to dismiss theories of life after death. in short, such primitive men
were too dumb to be nihilists.
and what is this 'defensiveness', anyway? can one
be in denial of their skeptical nature if they don't yet
have a skeptical nature?
and since being 'defensive' already requires a great deal of sophisticated intellectual and emotional capacity, one cannot be defensive against an 'emerging self-consciousness' unless they are already self-conscious... because that's what it takes to be defensive in the first place.
(this is why i don't do philosophy anymore. if i want to play language games i watch wheel of fortune)
i dunno, maybe it would take years of showing this kind of stuff in philosophy for that lightbulb to appear above your head. it's inherent to language
in this setting to produce all kinds of ambiguities, and while you all believe you're moving forward in a discussion, you're actually moving perpetually backwards in the same way derrida described the production of the philosophical text. for instance, when sarty pants sees this post, he'll produce another one in which he'll say 'no, this is what i meant.' that post itself will involve its own ambiguities, which he will then work out in yet another post. the very process of substantiating philosophical statements that involve more than tautologies, analytical truths or inductive statements of the natural sciences, will always be subject to this endless deconstructive problem. but cha'll niggas go'head and do whatchu do. i'm fixin to ride one of my motorsickles. imma flip a coin. heads the cbr, tails the sv.
