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The uncanny absence of nihilism

142 points by feross 5y ago

smitty1e 5y ago
> And the nihilists they discuss are all fictional! They review novels that feature supposedly nihilistic characters. These are storytellers’ attempts to imagine what it would be like to accomplish nihilism. A realistic portrayal would be boring and depressing: catatonia. Maybe. If philosophy is noodling about the past, present and future, rejecting philosophy as a nihilist would be focusing on the present tense. That is, living like an animal. Which gets at the point that ours is a most nihilistic age. "Nihilism: you're soaking in it." => https://youtu.be/dzmTtusvjR4 https://youtu.be/dzmTtusvjR4
- deleted 5y ago
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- guerrilla 5y ago
  > That is, living like an animal. Not sure why you'd assume animals don't have memory and predictive ability.
  - xorfish 5y ago
    Humans live like animals. Homo Sapiens is part of the group animals.
  - smitty1e 5y ago
    There isn't much going on past the next winter, no?
- DangitBobby 5y ago
  Yes, it seems to me more like Nihilism would lead to Hedonism as much as catatonia.
farmerstan 5y ago
That must be exhausting.
- fzzzy 5y ago
  This is a big lebowski quote about nihilism. "Ulle doesn't care about anything, he's a nihilist." "Ooh, that must be exhausting." Definitely a good movie to watch if you are interested in nihilism. (Spoilers) Nothing matters in that movie.
  - krylon 5y ago
    The first time I watched the Big Lebowski, I hated it and found it really annoying, but I have re-watched it plenty of times by now, and it does get better every time. A Classic. EDIT: Also, thank you for pointing that out, I would not have caught that reference otherwise. I think it's a sign I need to re-watch The Big Lebowski again.
Borrible 5y ago
Isn't absence the default for nothingness?
guerrilla 5y ago
Ignorance isn't evidence of absence. Epistemic nihilists call themselves skeptics and there have been plenty throughout history, the earliest I know of being Pyrrho. Moral nihilists call themselves hedonists (or if you're being really strict, moral skeptics) and they are legion, many here in this very forum, plenty in the history of philosophy. There were a dozen or so Russian political nihilists for a while and you could probably argue that all anarchists are political nihilists in a sense (especially Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Max Stirner). Then there are many really niche ones like mereorological nihilists who, I'd argue, call themselves monists. Existential nihilists, who deny a meaning to life and/or value, call themselves existentialists and absurdists and reigned in continental philosophy for half a century (the blog is vague but seems to mainly be referring to these.) I'll give the author that I've never heard of a serious metaphysical nihilist. It's hard to deny that something does exist and that it does work in some way. There's another flaw in the analysis too: Why would people write about things they don't believe in and don't care about? Anti-theists do that, but what if they're the exception rather than the rule (because of a certain oppressive history in the area there.)
- enkid 5y ago
  I don't think it's appropriate to consider "Existentialists" or "Absurdists" like Sartre or Camus as nihilists. Rather, they developed techniques specifically to avoid nihilism even if life does not have a prescribed meaning by making your own.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    It depends on your definition. They certainly did not believe in any objective or universal values or meaning to life. Your criticism applies to most hedonists, moral relativists, etc. too.
    - enkid 5y ago
      I don't think the common understanding of either moral relativism or hedonism categorizes them as nihilism. For example, hedonism is just a specific form of consequentialism.
danschumann 5y ago
How could one come to the conclusion to be nihilistic? They would need to experience enough, and then say "the meaning of all the events of my life led to believe there is no meaning". So, to come to that conclusion is a paradox, because reaching that conclusion is done through assigning "no" meaning.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  You might get something out of this [1] article, especially it's section on nihilism but the preceding sections on requirements for their being meaning will probably be helpful to you. Who I really recommend is Camus and sartre who wrote quite a bit about it and how to live with it. 1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life-meaning/#Nihi https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life-meaning/#Nihi 2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/camus/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/camus/ 3. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/
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- causality0 5y ago
  That depends on how you define meaning and significance. A perfectly rational machine might decide that since the universe is going to run down and die a cold death regardless of anything the human race might do, everything is meaningless. Fortunately I'm not a perfectly rational being and I don't get a choice about whether temporary happiness and prosperity mean something.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    It's not necessary that something ending implies that it is meaningless. A piece of pie can taste good even if you're going to run out of it. I'm not saying there's a meaning to life, I'm just saying that's not a reason that there isn't.
- croes 5y ago
  Did you find any meaning in all of this. It's always the same circle of birth, reproduction, death until the end of mankind, nature, earth, sun, universe. Whatever comes first.
mmazing 5y ago
I mean, wouldn't a true nihilist simply not care to spread awareness of their position? Maybe there are plenty and they just don't give a shit.
- __s 5y ago
  Yep. Lots of philosophies which by their nature aren't successful on the basis of memetic evolution preferring ideas that encourage their hosts to propagate them more. Rather than being actively taught they're something which either have to be observed or deduced Like minimalism. Sure, there's the minimalism that's being sold, but that's some mutant strain made to be able to market The Index Card is a bit amusing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Index_Card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Index_Card where it's rooted on something free (the content of the index card), yet somehow they've tried to expand on it enough to be able to have something to sell I think this also shows up with corrupt people reaching places of power, where you can't blame them so much as the power structure selecting corrupt people for its own self propagation (the idea that "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It" can arise without the man being willfully ignorant when there was a selection process for someone capable of that ignorance)
  - mmazing 5y ago
    I think another good example is psychopaths. There are plenty floating around, but it's sort of the prime feature of their behavior - they really only care about themselves. So, why would they write a book to give society a glimpse? Their motives simply don't align with that goal, because it's the literal definition of their behavior.
    - ip26 5y ago
      Hmm, but a narcissist would want everyone else to appreciate how great they are, and we know psychopathy and narcissism tend to go together…
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drops 5y ago
Did not read past the first bold paragraph. 'Nihilo' means "out of nothing, nothing is produced"; why does the author think that nihilism needs to have a famous proponent? A linguistic quibble far off the mark. UPD: I tried reading further, and it did not take long for the author to convince the readers that he is an idiot. Quote: "Committing to nihilism, deciding that you “are a nihilist,” is unusual, and typically a big deal." No, it's not. Most people in this world are in search of meaning: it is probably the most common source of suffering in the modern times - feeling lost, not having a purpose, etc. The fact that people don't brand themselves as nihilists doesn't mean that they aren't. Cue the downvotes from pseudo-intellectuals.
- Grimm1 5y ago
  Most people aren’t nihilists, in so much as the fact they’re searching for meaning by your own admission. If they were nihilists they wouldn’t be looking. Most people believe there is or should be inherent meaning in things. You’re getting downvotes because you yourself put out a surface level thought that is easily demonstrably wrong with half a second of thought and then insulted people, nothing to do with pseudo intellectualism.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  > The fact that people don't brand themselves as nihilists doesn't mean that they aren't. … Not a rebuttal to: > Committing to nihilism, deciding that you “are a nihilist,” is unusual, and typically a big deal. Do you see how these are different? You're talking past the author.
dvt 5y ago
> Nietzsche is easy and fun to read: straightforward, vivid, and outrageous. He was brilliant; the best philosopher of all time, in my opinion. I've read almost everything by him, and, cards on the table, I don't really like Nietzsche, but calling him the best philosopher of all time is a bit of a stretch. With that said, this idea that his philosophical writings are deeply nihilistic just needs to go away. His entire corpus basically deals with how to escape nihilism—how to find purpose in purposelessness. The will to power is not nihilistic at all. Sure, it's extremely amoral and probably wrong, but it's certainly not nihilistic. The eternal recurrence is brought up as a way to cope with meaninglessness and as a way to find purpose in ones life. Other ideas are purely rationalist, like the subject-predicate (non-)distinction (in his famous lightning flash example). Sure, Genealogy of Morals is probably all wrong, but its purpose is to re-intuit a moral system without socio-religious underpinnings. The idea behind nihilism is that it's valueless, whereas Nietzsche tries to find new values.
- fruffy 5y ago
  Are there any (continental) philosophers you would recommend over Nietzsche? I keep trying to move past him and Stirner, but have not managed so far.
  - andi999 5y ago
    If you like depressed mood then have a look at Schopenhauer?
  - krylon 5y ago
    Personally, I like Albert Camus very much. Like Nietzsche, he has a bad reputation for being moody and depressing, but the way I see it, he is really liberating and optimistic. A true humanist.
    - HKH2 5y ago
      Where does either of them have that reputation?
  - m_a_g 5y ago
thebooktocome 5y ago
Author props up a straw nihilism so restrictive such that, if one held it, one would never communicate that fact (or anything else) to anyone. Author is then surprised that it has no proponents among academics. The reference to uncanniness is also kind of strange. That has a pretty specific meaning in philosophy (starting with Freud) which doesn't seem to apply here. Oh, well. The rest of the book might be an interesting read.
- floe 5y ago
  I think the target audience is 'people who believe that they have to believe the strawman', if that makes sense. Pointing out that certain statements are self-defeating and (by definition) have no proponents can help someone escape a dangerous psychological process ('stance'). As a personal example, when I deconverted from evangelical Christianity, I was disturbed for a long time by the idea that I now had no reason to act morally. Even though that's obviously self-defeating (being disturbed was in itself a sign of morality), I didn't realize that for quite some time.
cryptica 5y ago
Nihilism can be a positive force in people's lives. Nihilism allows me to not take anything too seriously because I know that nothing is important and everything will end eventually. Surprisingly, it can also be a source of altruism. For example, I know that once I'm dead, I will be nothing. My consciousness will be destroyed permanently and all my achievements will cease to be my own since I will have no connection at all to the universe or my former identity. Any trace I leave behind in the universe might as well have been left behind my someone else who is not me. The fact that when we die, we all end up in exactly the same state of absolute nothingness gives me compassion towards fellow humans and other conscious creatures. We are all the same in the end; nothing. It also helps me to enjoy life more because from a nihilist perspective, every second of my life seems to defy the foundation of my belief system. Even though I know consciously that this sense of meaning is just an illusion in my primal brain.
- boogusbdg 5y ago
  Existence the way you put it, is quite beautiful like that, isn't it. The senselessness as a fundamental feature of cold and beautiful austerity.
- rufus_foreman 5y ago
  >> Any trace I leave behind in the universe might as well have been left behind my someone else who is not me You are making a value judgement there. Rookie mistake in this nihilism business.
  - georgewsinger 5y ago
    > Nihilism can be a positive force in people's lives. Also another value judgment. Two rookie mistakes. OP seems to be implicitly arguing that nihilism is morally justified (incoherent) because it can cause altruistic behavior (but who cares, if you're a nihilist?).
    - rufus_foreman 5y ago
      Good catch.
jayd16 5y ago
I consider myself a nihilist in that I take a side eye whenever anything is described as "truly" something. I find it much easier to see the world with no universal meaning and instead its something we each find personal meaning in. Most (if not all) things are just concepts. No tables exist, there's just a lot of matter arranged in a way that fits my concept of a table and I have breakfast on that. People often find the term nihilist detestable though. It seems like most people get frustrated or anxious thinking this way. That said it is mildly frustrating to talk about. The arguments on both sides are very unconvincing to the other.
gremloni 5y ago
I mean it’s true that nothing really matters unless you assign an arbitrary baseline that you as an individual are trying to optimize for. What’s there to write about. It’s categorically true.
acituan 5y ago
I wish author got out of their self-referentiality a bit before going deep with their presuppositions into a book. > “Nihilizing” is a thing we all do at times: refusing to recognize meanings that are right in front of us. If there is a refusal of recognition, it implies a pre-processing stage of estimating a lack of payoff for the cognitive work in that area, which itself is requires a meaning system we made that evaluation from! This is not nihilizing, it is merely not committing cognitive suicide by trying to make sense of everything indiscriminately with a limited information processing capacity. By their definition, only a "god" would not be nihilizing. > Committing to nihilism, deciding that you “are a nihilist,” is unusual, and typically a big deal. It’s a conversion experience, and the adopted identity may persist for years. It’s uncanny that you can go that long without noticing that there isn’t an –ism. That’s a feature of the peculiar cognitive distortions nihilism produces as a stance. Author asserts "true nihilism" is merely an existential state, and not a system. True nihilism is not a useful category though; dead matter would be the most "true nihilists" while a breathing human would always have a pre-supposition of meaning as they continued to breathe, since they are meaning making agents strongly embedded to their bodies and within their environment. This is not a very useful way of diving things up. The pragmatic existence of nihilism is not a pure empty state; it is not even throwing noise to our meaning making machines, it is throwing "anti-meaning" patterns that take the deconstructing and dismantling to an extreme without any goal to put things back better. Certain post-modern thought can both perform and propagate nihilism in this way pretty well; an assertion of non-existence of any meta-narrative that joins all narratives while scrambling all the puzzle pieces you've tried to piece together and then throwing them into an acid vat as a proof is an -ism. Peculiarly, author is also a nihilist in the -ism sense; in addition to this article, their "No cosmic plan" article is subtitled "Great confusions about meaningness stem from the mistaken assumption that there must be some sort of eternal ordering principle.", or "Nihilism: denying meaning" with "Nihilism is the wrong idea that nothing is meaningful, based on the accurate realization that there is no external, eternal source of meaning." Those are serious (and in my opinion misleadingly incomplete) assumptions on first principles that also happens to be the WIP chapters of their book.
nathias 5y ago
as a philosopher I find this blog offensive
- aeorgnoieang 5y ago
  I found your comment amusing!
VoodooJuJu 5y ago
Had Nietzsche existed today, he'd just be written off as some edgy 4chan troll. I'm glad he was able to get his ideas on paper in the time period that he did.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  That's an interesting way of putting it; yes, I agree that Nietsche was a bit of a troll. He said stuff to wind people up.
jonplackett 5y ago
Nihilism is probably not a very helpful evolutionary strategy for an individual or group so no surprises there isn’t much of it around. Better to believe in anything however pointless and get doing something productive.
- im3w1l 5y ago
  I love how this basically turns the paperclip optimizer on its head. Traditionally "optimizing paperclips" is seen as a metaphor for some useful industrial process and taking over the universe is seen as a catastrophe. But your argument is basically that humans are in the same situation except for us the paperclips are pointless and their only purpose is to motivate us to take over the universe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence
  - acituan 5y ago
    The difference is paperclip optimizer's existence does not depend on the paperclips. For any organism, being able to correctly read their subset of "reality" is the only thing that increases their chance of survival - and over time their genes. It is a genetic algorithm deeply tested against reality; there is no skirting around it. Human consciousness is able extend projections into the future or to other humans and thus have a greater capacity for conformance to reality. It has horrible failure modes and room for self deception - nihilism being one - but even though this proliferation looks like the paper clip maximizer that was never the goal but the side effect. Now that we're tasting the unadaptive consequences of over-proliferation we will see how well our reality conforming machinery can overcome our collective self-deception modes.
- weatherlight 5y ago
  Our consciousness is the "parent of all horrors, an evolutionary defect that has doomed us to a futile search for meaning while our survival hinges on the response to pain, the fear of death, and the instinct to procreate. Awareness of this absurdity pushes us to shut it out, trapping us on a proverbial hamster wheel where we busy ourselves with whatever will keep those thoughts away—religion, hedonism, even the distractions of art and music.
georgewsinger 5y ago
Here's a simple proof that moral nihilism is false. 1. Suppose moral nihilism is true. 2. Then it would be incorrect to think that boiling a human child alive for pleasure is morally wrong. 3. But clearly (2) is false. 4. Therefore (1) is false. You might wonder how we can know (3). The answer is that (3) appears to us to be true, and we have no good reason to think it is not true. This has been called the "Principle of Phenomenal Conservatism" in philosophy books, and it's the same principle that justifies our belief in physical/scientific facts (e.g., that tables exist, or that evolution is true). But it also implies that moral facts exist as well! Of course, sometimes things appear to us to be true, but we eventually discover reasons strong enough override those appearances. For example, if you stick a pencil in a cup of water, it appears to us that the pencil is broken in half. But through scientific rigor, we have learned that this appearance is just an illusion. But this is not the case with (3). It both appears us that it is wrong to cause needless harm to children for fun, and any reason we might consider to doubt this fails to be strong enough to persuade us otherwise.
- Retric 5y ago
  Your argument boils down to saying I believe something therefore I am correct. Which isn’t an argument as someone else saying they have a different belief provides exactly as much evidence. In other words the mere existence of nihilism inherently disproves your argument. Also, that’s really not why scientific facts are considered true. Science is based on positive evidence as in a prediction is made and it turns out the prediction was accurate. Simply presupposing something is true isn’t considered evidence that it is true.
  - georgewsinger 5y ago
    > Your argument boils down to saying I believe something therefore I am correct. No it doesn't. It boils down to something appearing to be true to me (or "us") and there being actually no good reasons to think that it is not true. > Also, that’s really not why scientific facts are considered true. Science is based on positive evidence as in a prediction is made and it turns out the prediction was accurate. You're wrong, and here is why: first I would ask you what counts as positive evidence that a prediction made was verified. You would give me some theoretical explanation (depending upon the context), and then I would keep asking you more detailed questions about your explanation. Eventually I would ask a question that you wouldn't really be able to answer, other than "look, it just appears to me that such-and-such counts as predictive evidence!" (or something like that). So for example if we had a scientific theory that all red cars cannot exceed 100mph, and you said "that's not true, for look at my red car going 105mph!", I could ask you "well, yeah, your speedometer reads 105mph, but how do you know you're actually going faster than 100mph?" You would give me an explanation about how speedometers work, and I would say "well yeah, but how do you know that theory can be generalized to this particular case <blah blah blah>". Eventually after this chain of questioning you would be left relying on some sort of mere appearance being true. And of course that is rational. The problem is that this chain of reasoning can also be applied to moral theories as well. > Simply presupposing something is true isn’t considered evidence that it is true. I'm not merely presupposing something is true. I'm observing that something first appears to be true, asserting there are no good reasons to think it is not true, and then supposing it is true. Contrast these two cases: 1. It appears to me that 2+2 = 4, and I can think of no good reasons at this moment to doubt otherwise. I guess, therefore, that 2+2 really is 4. 2. I shall pressuppose that 2+2=5! You're acting as if I'm taking the strategy of (2), but I am actually taking the strategy of (1). And in fact you are as well. Here's a really simple way to see why. Suppose you thought of some argument that showed that the Principle of Phenomenal Conservativism was false. But why should you, after pondering that argument, believe that argument? Because it appears to you to be true, and you can give no plausible retort for why it's false. Thus in "refuting" the Principle of Phenomenal Conservatism, you must use it! This shows that it is self-defeating to argue against the Principle. The Principle of Phenomenal Conservatism has to be true for other reasons as well. For example, the following are all statements that I'm sure you agree are true: 1. 1 = 1. 2. The law of non-contradiction is true. 3. Empirical theories which make testable predictions are more likely to be true than empirical theories which can't. 4. The keyboard in front of you actually exists. But why do you believe these statements? You won't be able to insert some other empirical theory to justify them. They are instead just sort of raw appearances that we suppose are true (because we can't think of any good reasons to doubt them). We make use of our sensory instruments to do this (e.g, our eyes, our non-moral intuitions, etc). But this is exactly like me asserting that "it's wrong to torture children for fun", which relies on a moral intuition that it is wrong (plus the fact that we can't think of any good reason to think otherwise). All of this is to say: you can't be a scientific realist without also being a moral realist at the same time, or at least if you can, it's because of some argument I haven't yet considered :]
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HKH2 5y ago
As far as I see, Nietzsche was about embodying meaning - doing! Which is why he was an existentialist. I think people are far more likely to declare themselves as depressed or even antinatalist than nihilist.
weatherlight 5y ago
there's different types of nihilism, Epistemological Nihilism, Moral Nihilism, Political Nihilism, Existential Nihilism, etc. It's the latter that the author seems to be engrossed in. I'll leave you with a quote. “This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really “out there” cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live? Without the ever-clanking machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill. There would be nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. The alternatives are clear: to live falsely as pawns of affect, or to live factually as depressives, or as individuals who know what is known to the depressive. How advantageous that we are not coerced into choosing one or the other, neither choice being excellent. One look at human existence is proof enough that our species will not be released from the stranglehold of emotionalism that anchors it to hallucinations. That may be no way to live, but to opt for depression would be to opt out of existence as we consciously know it.” ― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
itsdsmurrell 5y ago
Is there a point to this article?
- aeorgnoieang 5y ago
  Many!
sophrocyne 5y ago
For anyone deeply interested in philosophy, the evolution of religion from a cognitive science perspective, or escaping a nihilistic perspective, this series has it all. I can’t recommend it enough. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=54l8_ewcOlY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=54l8_ewcOlY
a0-prw 5y ago
I refer you to The Big Lebowski ;)

142 points by feross 5y ago

> And the nihilists they discuss are all fictional! They review novels that feature supposedly nihilistic characters. These are storytellers’ attempts to imagine what it would be like to accomplish nihilism. A realistic portrayal would be boring and depressing: catatonia. Maybe. If philosophy is noodling about the past, present and future, rejecting philosophy as a nihilist would be focusing on the present tense. That is, living like an animal. Which gets at the point that ours is a most nihilistic age. "Nihilism: you're soaking in it." => https://youtu.be/dzmTtusvjR4 https://youtu.be/dzmTtusvjR4

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guerrilla 5y ago
> That is, living like an animal. Not sure why you'd assume animals don't have memory and predictive ability.
- xorfish 5y ago
  Humans live like animals. Homo Sapiens is part of the group animals.
- smitty1e 5y ago
  There isn't much going on past the next winter, no?
DangitBobby 5y ago
Yes, it seems to me more like Nihilism would lead to Hedonism as much as catatonia.

farmerstan 5y ago

That must be exhausting.

fzzzy 5y ago
This is a big lebowski quote about nihilism. "Ulle doesn't care about anything, he's a nihilist." "Ooh, that must be exhausting." Definitely a good movie to watch if you are interested in nihilism. (Spoilers) Nothing matters in that movie.
- krylon 5y ago
  The first time I watched the Big Lebowski, I hated it and found it really annoying, but I have re-watched it plenty of times by now, and it does get better every time. A Classic. EDIT: Also, thank you for pointing that out, I would not have caught that reference otherwise. I think it's a sign I need to re-watch The Big Lebowski again.

Borrible 5y ago

Isn't absence the default for nothingness?

guerrilla 5y ago

Ignorance isn't evidence of absence. Epistemic nihilists call themselves skeptics and there have been plenty throughout history, the earliest I know of being Pyrrho. Moral nihilists call themselves hedonists (or if you're being really strict, moral skeptics) and they are legion, many here in this very forum, plenty in the history of philosophy. There were a dozen or so Russian political nihilists for a while and you could probably argue that all anarchists are political nihilists in a sense (especially Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Max Stirner). Then there are many really niche ones like mereorological nihilists who, I'd argue, call themselves monists. Existential nihilists, who deny a meaning to life and/or value, call themselves existentialists and absurdists and reigned in continental philosophy for half a century (the blog is vague but seems to mainly be referring to these.) I'll give the author that I've never heard of a serious metaphysical nihilist. It's hard to deny that something does exist and that it does work in some way. There's another flaw in the analysis too: Why would people write about things they don't believe in and don't care about? Anti-theists do that, but what if they're the exception rather than the rule (because of a certain oppressive history in the area there.)

enkid 5y ago
I don't think it's appropriate to consider "Existentialists" or "Absurdists" like Sartre or Camus as nihilists. Rather, they developed techniques specifically to avoid nihilism even if life does not have a prescribed meaning by making your own.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  It depends on your definition. They certainly did not believe in any objective or universal values or meaning to life. Your criticism applies to most hedonists, moral relativists, etc. too.
  - enkid 5y ago
    I don't think the common understanding of either moral relativism or hedonism categorizes them as nihilism. For example, hedonism is just a specific form of consequentialism.

danschumann 5y ago

How could one come to the conclusion to be nihilistic? They would need to experience enough, and then say "the meaning of all the events of my life led to believe there is no meaning". So, to come to that conclusion is a paradox, because reaching that conclusion is done through assigning "no" meaning.

guerrilla 5y ago
You might get something out of this [1] article, especially it's section on nihilism but the preceding sections on requirements for their being meaning will probably be helpful to you. Who I really recommend is Camus and sartre who wrote quite a bit about it and how to live with it. 1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life-meaning/#Nihi https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life-meaning/#Nihi 2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/camus/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/camus/ 3. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/
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causality0 5y ago
That depends on how you define meaning and significance. A perfectly rational machine might decide that since the universe is going to run down and die a cold death regardless of anything the human race might do, everything is meaningless. Fortunately I'm not a perfectly rational being and I don't get a choice about whether temporary happiness and prosperity mean something.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  It's not necessary that something ending implies that it is meaningless. A piece of pie can taste good even if you're going to run out of it. I'm not saying there's a meaning to life, I'm just saying that's not a reason that there isn't.
croes 5y ago
Did you find any meaning in all of this. It's always the same circle of birth, reproduction, death until the end of mankind, nature, earth, sun, universe. Whatever comes first.

mmazing 5y ago

I mean, wouldn't a true nihilist simply not care to spread awareness of their position? Maybe there are plenty and they just don't give a shit.

__s 5y ago
Yep. Lots of philosophies which by their nature aren't successful on the basis of memetic evolution preferring ideas that encourage their hosts to propagate them more. Rather than being actively taught they're something which either have to be observed or deduced Like minimalism. Sure, there's the minimalism that's being sold, but that's some mutant strain made to be able to market The Index Card is a bit amusing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Index_Card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Index_Card where it's rooted on something free (the content of the index card), yet somehow they've tried to expand on it enough to be able to have something to sell I think this also shows up with corrupt people reaching places of power, where you can't blame them so much as the power structure selecting corrupt people for its own self propagation (the idea that "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It" can arise without the man being willfully ignorant when there was a selection process for someone capable of that ignorance)
- mmazing 5y ago
  I think another good example is psychopaths. There are plenty floating around, but it's sort of the prime feature of their behavior - they really only care about themselves. So, why would they write a book to give society a glimpse? Their motives simply don't align with that goal, because it's the literal definition of their behavior.
  - ip26 5y ago
    Hmm, but a narcissist would want everyone else to appreciate how great they are, and we know psychopathy and narcissism tend to go together…
deleted 5y ago
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drops 5y ago

Did not read past the first bold paragraph. 'Nihilo' means "out of nothing, nothing is produced"; why does the author think that nihilism needs to have a famous proponent? A linguistic quibble far off the mark. UPD: I tried reading further, and it did not take long for the author to convince the readers that he is an idiot. Quote: "Committing to nihilism, deciding that you “are a nihilist,” is unusual, and typically a big deal." No, it's not. Most people in this world are in search of meaning: it is probably the most common source of suffering in the modern times - feeling lost, not having a purpose, etc. The fact that people don't brand themselves as nihilists doesn't mean that they aren't. Cue the downvotes from pseudo-intellectuals.

Grimm1 5y ago
Most people aren’t nihilists, in so much as the fact they’re searching for meaning by your own admission. If they were nihilists they wouldn’t be looking. Most people believe there is or should be inherent meaning in things. You’re getting downvotes because you yourself put out a surface level thought that is easily demonstrably wrong with half a second of thought and then insulted people, nothing to do with pseudo intellectualism.
wizzwizz4 5y ago
> The fact that people don't brand themselves as nihilists doesn't mean that they aren't. … Not a rebuttal to: > Committing to nihilism, deciding that you “are a nihilist,” is unusual, and typically a big deal. Do you see how these are different? You're talking past the author.

dvt 5y ago

> Nietzsche is easy and fun to read: straightforward, vivid, and outrageous. He was brilliant; the best philosopher of all time, in my opinion. I've read almost everything by him, and, cards on the table, I don't really like Nietzsche, but calling him the best philosopher of all time is a bit of a stretch. With that said, this idea that his philosophical writings are deeply nihilistic just needs to go away. His entire corpus basically deals with how to escape nihilism—how to find purpose in purposelessness. The will to power is not nihilistic at all. Sure, it's extremely amoral and probably wrong, but it's certainly not nihilistic. The eternal recurrence is brought up as a way to cope with meaninglessness and as a way to find purpose in ones life. Other ideas are purely rationalist, like the subject-predicate (non-)distinction (in his famous lightning flash example). Sure, Genealogy of Morals is probably all wrong, but its purpose is to re-intuit a moral system without socio-religious underpinnings. The idea behind nihilism is that it's valueless, whereas Nietzsche tries to find new values.

fruffy 5y ago
Are there any (continental) philosophers you would recommend over Nietzsche? I keep trying to move past him and Stirner, but have not managed so far.
- andi999 5y ago
  If you like depressed mood then have a look at Schopenhauer?
- krylon 5y ago
  Personally, I like Albert Camus very much. Like Nietzsche, he has a bad reputation for being moody and depressing, but the way I see it, he is really liberating and optimistic. A true humanist.
  - HKH2 5y ago
    Where does either of them have that reputation?
- m_a_g 5y ago

thebooktocome 5y ago

Author props up a straw nihilism so restrictive such that, if one held it, one would never communicate that fact (or anything else) to anyone. Author is then surprised that it has no proponents among academics. The reference to uncanniness is also kind of strange. That has a pretty specific meaning in philosophy (starting with Freud) which doesn't seem to apply here. Oh, well. The rest of the book might be an interesting read.

floe 5y ago
I think the target audience is 'people who believe that they have to believe the strawman', if that makes sense. Pointing out that certain statements are self-defeating and (by definition) have no proponents can help someone escape a dangerous psychological process ('stance'). As a personal example, when I deconverted from evangelical Christianity, I was disturbed for a long time by the idea that I now had no reason to act morally. Even though that's obviously self-defeating (being disturbed was in itself a sign of morality), I didn't realize that for quite some time.

cryptica 5y ago

Nihilism can be a positive force in people's lives. Nihilism allows me to not take anything too seriously because I know that nothing is important and everything will end eventually. Surprisingly, it can also be a source of altruism. For example, I know that once I'm dead, I will be nothing. My consciousness will be destroyed permanently and all my achievements will cease to be my own since I will have no connection at all to the universe or my former identity. Any trace I leave behind in the universe might as well have been left behind my someone else who is not me. The fact that when we die, we all end up in exactly the same state of absolute nothingness gives me compassion towards fellow humans and other conscious creatures. We are all the same in the end; nothing. It also helps me to enjoy life more because from a nihilist perspective, every second of my life seems to defy the foundation of my belief system. Even though I know consciously that this sense of meaning is just an illusion in my primal brain.

boogusbdg 5y ago
Existence the way you put it, is quite beautiful like that, isn't it. The senselessness as a fundamental feature of cold and beautiful austerity.
rufus_foreman 5y ago
>> Any trace I leave behind in the universe might as well have been left behind my someone else who is not me You are making a value judgement there. Rookie mistake in this nihilism business.
- georgewsinger 5y ago
  > Nihilism can be a positive force in people's lives. Also another value judgment. Two rookie mistakes. OP seems to be implicitly arguing that nihilism is morally justified (incoherent) because it can cause altruistic behavior (but who cares, if you're a nihilist?).
  - rufus_foreman 5y ago
    Good catch.

jayd16 5y ago

I consider myself a nihilist in that I take a side eye whenever anything is described as "truly" something. I find it much easier to see the world with no universal meaning and instead its something we each find personal meaning in. Most (if not all) things are just concepts. No tables exist, there's just a lot of matter arranged in a way that fits my concept of a table and I have breakfast on that. People often find the term nihilist detestable though. It seems like most people get frustrated or anxious thinking this way. That said it is mildly frustrating to talk about. The arguments on both sides are very unconvincing to the other.

gremloni 5y ago

I mean it’s true that nothing really matters unless you assign an arbitrary baseline that you as an individual are trying to optimize for. What’s there to write about. It’s categorically true.

acituan 5y ago

I wish author got out of their self-referentiality a bit before going deep with their presuppositions into a book. > “Nihilizing” is a thing we all do at times: refusing to recognize meanings that are right in front of us. If there is a refusal of recognition, it implies a pre-processing stage of estimating a lack of payoff for the cognitive work in that area, which itself is requires a meaning system we made that evaluation from! This is not nihilizing, it is merely not committing cognitive suicide by trying to make sense of everything indiscriminately with a limited information processing capacity. By their definition, only a "god" would not be nihilizing. > Committing to nihilism, deciding that you “are a nihilist,” is unusual, and typically a big deal. It’s a conversion experience, and the adopted identity may persist for years. It’s uncanny that you can go that long without noticing that there isn’t an –ism. That’s a feature of the peculiar cognitive distortions nihilism produces as a stance. Author asserts "true nihilism" is merely an existential state, and not a system. True nihilism is not a useful category though; dead matter would be the most "true nihilists" while a breathing human would always have a pre-supposition of meaning as they continued to breathe, since they are meaning making agents strongly embedded to their bodies and within their environment. This is not a very useful way of diving things up. The pragmatic existence of nihilism is not a pure empty state; it is not even throwing noise to our meaning making machines, it is throwing "anti-meaning" patterns that take the deconstructing and dismantling to an extreme without any goal to put things back better. Certain post-modern thought can both perform and propagate nihilism in this way pretty well; an assertion of non-existence of any meta-narrative that joins all narratives while scrambling all the puzzle pieces you've tried to piece together and then throwing them into an acid vat as a proof is an -ism. Peculiarly, author is also a nihilist in the -ism sense; in addition to this article, their "No cosmic plan" article is subtitled "Great confusions about meaningness stem from the mistaken assumption that there must be some sort of eternal ordering principle.", or "Nihilism: denying meaning" with "Nihilism is the wrong idea that nothing is meaningful, based on the accurate realization that there is no external, eternal source of meaning." Those are serious (and in my opinion misleadingly incomplete) assumptions on first principles that also happens to be the WIP chapters of their book.

nathias 5y ago

as a philosopher I find this blog offensive

aeorgnoieang 5y ago
I found your comment amusing!

VoodooJuJu 5y ago

Had Nietzsche existed today, he'd just be written off as some edgy 4chan troll. I'm glad he was able to get his ideas on paper in the time period that he did.

denton-scratch 5y ago
That's an interesting way of putting it; yes, I agree that Nietsche was a bit of a troll. He said stuff to wind people up.

jonplackett 5y ago

Nihilism is probably not a very helpful evolutionary strategy for an individual or group so no surprises there isn’t much of it around. Better to believe in anything however pointless and get doing something productive.

im3w1l 5y ago
I love how this basically turns the paperclip optimizer on its head. Traditionally "optimizing paperclips" is seen as a metaphor for some useful industrial process and taking over the universe is seen as a catastrophe. But your argument is basically that humans are in the same situation except for us the paperclips are pointless and their only purpose is to motivate us to take over the universe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence
- acituan 5y ago
  The difference is paperclip optimizer's existence does not depend on the paperclips. For any organism, being able to correctly read their subset of "reality" is the only thing that increases their chance of survival - and over time their genes. It is a genetic algorithm deeply tested against reality; there is no skirting around it. Human consciousness is able extend projections into the future or to other humans and thus have a greater capacity for conformance to reality. It has horrible failure modes and room for self deception - nihilism being one - but even though this proliferation looks like the paper clip maximizer that was never the goal but the side effect. Now that we're tasting the unadaptive consequences of over-proliferation we will see how well our reality conforming machinery can overcome our collective self-deception modes.
weatherlight 5y ago
Our consciousness is the "parent of all horrors, an evolutionary defect that has doomed us to a futile search for meaning while our survival hinges on the response to pain, the fear of death, and the instinct to procreate. Awareness of this absurdity pushes us to shut it out, trapping us on a proverbial hamster wheel where we busy ourselves with whatever will keep those thoughts away—religion, hedonism, even the distractions of art and music.

georgewsinger 5y ago

Here's a simple proof that moral nihilism is false. 1. Suppose moral nihilism is true. 2. Then it would be incorrect to think that boiling a human child alive for pleasure is morally wrong. 3. But clearly (2) is false. 4. Therefore (1) is false. You might wonder how we can know (3). The answer is that (3) appears to us to be true, and we have no good reason to think it is not true. This has been called the "Principle of Phenomenal Conservatism" in philosophy books, and it's the same principle that justifies our belief in physical/scientific facts (e.g., that tables exist, or that evolution is true). But it also implies that moral facts exist as well! Of course, sometimes things appear to us to be true, but we eventually discover reasons strong enough override those appearances. For example, if you stick a pencil in a cup of water, it appears to us that the pencil is broken in half. But through scientific rigor, we have learned that this appearance is just an illusion. But this is not the case with (3). It both appears us that it is wrong to cause needless harm to children for fun, and any reason we might consider to doubt this fails to be strong enough to persuade us otherwise.

Retric 5y ago
Your argument boils down to saying I believe something therefore I am correct. Which isn’t an argument as someone else saying they have a different belief provides exactly as much evidence. In other words the mere existence of nihilism inherently disproves your argument. Also, that’s really not why scientific facts are considered true. Science is based on positive evidence as in a prediction is made and it turns out the prediction was accurate. Simply presupposing something is true isn’t considered evidence that it is true.
- georgewsinger 5y ago
  > Your argument boils down to saying I believe something therefore I am correct. No it doesn't. It boils down to something appearing to be true to me (or "us") and there being actually no good reasons to think that it is not true. > Also, that’s really not why scientific facts are considered true. Science is based on positive evidence as in a prediction is made and it turns out the prediction was accurate. You're wrong, and here is why: first I would ask you what counts as positive evidence that a prediction made was verified. You would give me some theoretical explanation (depending upon the context), and then I would keep asking you more detailed questions about your explanation. Eventually I would ask a question that you wouldn't really be able to answer, other than "look, it just appears to me that such-and-such counts as predictive evidence!" (or something like that). So for example if we had a scientific theory that all red cars cannot exceed 100mph, and you said "that's not true, for look at my red car going 105mph!", I could ask you "well, yeah, your speedometer reads 105mph, but how do you know you're actually going faster than 100mph?" You would give me an explanation about how speedometers work, and I would say "well yeah, but how do you know that theory can be generalized to this particular case <blah blah blah>". Eventually after this chain of questioning you would be left relying on some sort of mere appearance being true. And of course that is rational. The problem is that this chain of reasoning can also be applied to moral theories as well. > Simply presupposing something is true isn’t considered evidence that it is true. I'm not merely presupposing something is true. I'm observing that something first appears to be true, asserting there are no good reasons to think it is not true, and then supposing it is true. Contrast these two cases: 1. It appears to me that 2+2 = 4, and I can think of no good reasons at this moment to doubt otherwise. I guess, therefore, that 2+2 really is 4. 2. I shall pressuppose that 2+2=5! You're acting as if I'm taking the strategy of (2), but I am actually taking the strategy of (1). And in fact you are as well. Here's a really simple way to see why. Suppose you thought of some argument that showed that the Principle of Phenomenal Conservativism was false. But why should you, after pondering that argument, believe that argument? Because it appears to you to be true, and you can give no plausible retort for why it's false. Thus in "refuting" the Principle of Phenomenal Conservatism, you must use it! This shows that it is self-defeating to argue against the Principle. The Principle of Phenomenal Conservatism has to be true for other reasons as well. For example, the following are all statements that I'm sure you agree are true: 1. 1 = 1. 2. The law of non-contradiction is true. 3. Empirical theories which make testable predictions are more likely to be true than empirical theories which can't. 4. The keyboard in front of you actually exists. But why do you believe these statements? You won't be able to insert some other empirical theory to justify them. They are instead just sort of raw appearances that we suppose are true (because we can't think of any good reasons to doubt them). We make use of our sensory instruments to do this (e.g, our eyes, our non-moral intuitions, etc). But this is exactly like me asserting that "it's wrong to torture children for fun", which relies on a moral intuition that it is wrong (plus the fact that we can't think of any good reason to think otherwise). All of this is to say: you can't be a scientific realist without also being a moral realist at the same time, or at least if you can, it's because of some argument I haven't yet considered :]

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HKH2 5y ago

As far as I see, Nietzsche was about embodying meaning - doing! Which is why he was an existentialist. I think people are far more likely to declare themselves as depressed or even antinatalist than nihilist.

weatherlight 5y ago

there's different types of nihilism, Epistemological Nihilism, Moral Nihilism, Political Nihilism, Existential Nihilism, etc. It's the latter that the author seems to be engrossed in. I'll leave you with a quote. “This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really “out there” cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live? Without the ever-clanking machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill. There would be nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. The alternatives are clear: to live falsely as pawns of affect, or to live factually as depressives, or as individuals who know what is known to the depressive. How advantageous that we are not coerced into choosing one or the other, neither choice being excellent. One look at human existence is proof enough that our species will not be released from the stranglehold of emotionalism that anchors it to hallucinations. That may be no way to live, but to opt for depression would be to opt out of existence as we consciously know it.” ― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

itsdsmurrell 5y ago

Is there a point to this article?

aeorgnoieang 5y ago
Many!

sophrocyne 5y ago

For anyone deeply interested in philosophy, the evolution of religion from a cognitive science perspective, or escaping a nihilistic perspective, this series has it all. I can’t recommend it enough. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=54l8_ewcOlY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=54l8_ewcOlY

a0-prw 5y ago

I refer you to The Big Lebowski ;)