Nice. Thanks for the clarifications.
My preference for vanilla shakes is not arbitrary, but neither is it systematic. It’s not a necessity, since sometimes I’ll have a berry shake. It’s not an observation, not an induction, not a falsifiable hypothesis. It’s what I do.
Nihilism isn’t necessarily a product of the dark side of life.
In India:
Ajita Kesakambali (a contemporary of the Buddha) taught that death was final, that the soul didn’t exist, that there’s no afterlife, and that hedonism was the best option.
Purana Kassapa, also around the same time, preached moral nihilism, that karma was not real, that there’s no reward for good acts and no punishment for bad acts, that the univerese was totally indifferent to morality, it didn’t care whether we’re good/bad.
There’s no reason to believe that India at that time was unstable and chaotic.
The “solution” to all these negative philosophies was Buddhism which rejected nihilism as described above, but it’s worth noting that a) the first of the 4 Noble Truths is dukkha satya (there’s suffering in life), but which must be read in the context of samudaya satya (our ability to end suffering) and marga satya (the means by which we can break the cycle of samsaric sorrow), and b) Buddhism also rejected the eternalism of Pakudah Kaccayana, that the soul is real and eternal. This sums up the Buddha’s madhyamarga (the middle way) between extremist views.
Some western philosophers have accused Buddhism of being disguised nihilism (re: anatman and Nagarjuna’s tetralemma) , which is at odds with what Buddhism declares itself to be. Maybe a Buddhist scholar can clear that up for us.
The more I think about it. The more I think of that statement as one “accusing” water of being wet.
I’m reminded of an earlier post on here somewhere. Something about thousands if not millions of actions contribute to something we consider “absolute”, in the context of human life that is short and fickle, and also binary, “alive or dead”, shall we say, a “win” or “loss.” A million things and persons could have contributed to an event or understanding of an event (or non-event) and we like to slap a label on things so our weak minds wander not. For context, the post I am referring to was (paraphrased) “when a war is won we declare a single person or entity as the winner despite their being numerous persons and factors responsible.”
Like most men, they will have access to what they were taught or otherwise led to believe, and nothing more. Just punch your question into AI at that point.
If a religion is not restrictive, the mind will define what is relevant, true, or pertinent, and what is not. Opinion is not a religion. Doctrine, while a system of beliefs that arose from opinions is not. You cannot have a consistent doctrine without an authoritarian (dictatorial) authority guarding it. It is truly not that hard a concept to grasp.
You have very many excellent replies already, but I’d like to add that I see this as a problem arising from deep cultural dynamics. Philosophers such as Nietszche and Heidegger foresaw the probability of nihilism as being the inevitable result of the collapse of faith in the animating principles that had previously informed Western culture (although it should be noted they didn’t analyse it the same way.)
I see the Western cultural malaise as a consequence of the persuasive power of scientific materialism. I’m not singling out any specific version of that, other than the general consensus of seeing life is the consequence of undirected material causation that underlies the process of evolution. This is not to take issue with the actual science but the way it has been interpreted in respect of the human condition. It means that we’re no longer part of a meaningful existential or cosmic narrative. I’m sure that this is a large part of the cultural dynamic of nihilism as it naturally entails a sense of the meaningless of the Universe.
But this is also the culmination of centuries of cultural development so it is not an easy problem to analyse and diagnose. My personal ‘quest’ so to speak has been via comparative religion, philosophy and Buddhist studies. I’m seeking a wide-ranging approach that can restore a sense of significance to life whilst being fully cognisant of scientific fact. To this end, I’ve drawn on a range of thinkers and perspectives from both Eastern and Western sources.
One resource that I’ve discovered is a long (50 hour!) lecture series by Canadian cognitive scientist John Vervaeke called ‘Awakening from the Meaning Crisis’ (YouTube Playlist). I’ve listened to probably 80% of it. It really helps articulate the cultural dynamics behind ‘the meaning crisis.’ I recommend a listen.
I have some experience with the topic, having done an MA in Buddhist Studies (UniSyd). Nāgārjuna, and indeed the Buddha, was often accused of nihilism by his Brahman opponents, on the basis that they reject the authority of the Vedas and the Indian caste system. It’s also a common misconception that the ‘emptiness’ of Buddhism (śūnyatā) is a ‘void’ or ‘nothing’, but explaining why it is not, is quite difficult in a short space. Volumes have been written on it. Perhaps I could refer to an essay of mine which addresses some aspects of the topic, Phenomenology Meets Buddhism. It’s also touched on in a thread in Philosophy of Religion section, Questions the Buddha Didn’t Answer.The first refers to an insightful essay by a Buddhist scholar, Thanissaro Bhikkhu, called What is Emptiness?
“Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to, and takes nothing away from, the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there’s anything lying behind them. This mode is called emptiness because it is empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience to make sense of it: the stories and world-views we fashion to explain who we are and to define the world we live in.” Thanissaro Bhikkhu “What is Emptiness?”
For those familiar with phenomenology, the resonances ought to be clear enough.
1 Like
Thanks for listening.
@Jackal 
Indeed, it’s quite a simple matter, but we’re creatures of habit. Some are reluctant to challenge tradition.
@Wayfarer Buddhism’s sunyata (misunderstood?) can/is easily conflated with nihilism’s nothing. I don’t know how Buddhists wiggle out of that trap? Their primary logical tool is negation. I haven’t studied Buddhist logico-epistemological structure to the depth required to see how all the pieces of this jigsaw fit together to produce the right view of the world.
That is an important question for philosophy. It is true that in some ways the discovery of evolution by natural selection displaced the religious narrative of the purpose of life. As I said in an earlier post, this did result in the sense that human life is a kind of accident of nature or a freak event. But your insight that the universe has in some sense become conscious through us, actually has a pedigree. Julian Huxley said in his book Religion without Revelation:
Man is that part of reality in which and through which the cosmic process has become conscious and has begun to comprehend itself. His supreme task is to increase that conscious comprehension and to apply it as fully as possible to guide the course of events. In other words, his role is to discover his destiny as an agent of the evolutionary process, in order to fulfill it more adequately.
He saw the main means of achieving that as via scientific knowledge, as a kind of a stewardship - which is an estimable aim in my opinion. His brother Alduous had a much more spiritual view of life. Among his many books was The Perennial Philosophy, 1945, which argued there was a primordial spirituality of which the world’s major religions were offshoots. (Must have made for some interesting dinner-table conversations.)
Śūnyatā means that phenomena (dharmas) are empty of intrinsic or independent existence (svabhāva). Meaning, they are not self-originated or possessing of their own cause. This doesn’t mean that nothing exists - particular things and beings exist, but their existence is dependent on causes and conditions.
The elaboration of the ‘chain of dependent origination’ is very lengthy and too difficult to summarise in a forum posting.
So:
-
A tree exists because of soil, water, sunlight, time, and countless other conditions.
-
A human being exists because of biological processes, social relations, language, culture, and history.
-
Concepts are defined with respect to networks of meaning and interpretation.
No phenomenon possesses a fixed, self-subsisting essence. However, this doesn’t mean that nothing exists or is real, nor that nothing is meaningful, which are typically associated with nihilism (ref).
There’s a book called The Cult of Nothingness (Roger Pol-Droit) which shows how the equation of śūnyatā with ‘nothingness’ or the ‘monstrous void’ grew out of early nineteenth century European encounters with Buddhism. He said that early Western interpreters—including Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche—saw Buddhism not as a religion of compassion but as a “negation of the world” that called for the destruction of the self. He argues that these philosophers were not accurately describing Buddhism; instead, they were projecting their own fears regarding the collapse of traditional values, the rise of atheism, and the “specter of nihilism” shaking European culture at the time.
But the depiction of Buddhism as nihilist is still a persistent trope. The late John Paul II caused an uproar, or at least a flap, when he published an encyclical which criticized those religions which advocated ‘a form of salvation consisting in liberation from the world understood as radically negative.’
1 Like
Or people pleasing, or norm pleasing, etc. So, wouldn’t Ted Bundy be closer to the ideal here? At the very least, serial killers and genocidal tyrants cannot be the least bit worse, since there is “no correct way to live.”
But a world of nothing but liberated Ted Bundys—that does seem like the “end of civilization.” Nihilists are just incapable of living with the courage of their convictions; even Bundy acted like some things were more choice-worthy than others.
Anyhow, prima facie, if nothing is good or bad, killing yourself over religious angst or even having religious angst cannot itself be bad. You’re invoking a standard of value here. The standard seems to be something like “the pleasure or positive sentiment of the self?” But people kill themselves, rape, murder, steal, according to the drive towards the pleasing themselves all the time,so I’d say this is a dubious standard. Or if not, I don’t know why religious angst is considered bad here? Indeed, how could dogmatism be bad or freedom good either?
And since freedom is itself already declared to be the freedom to choose between equally meaningless and pointless options, all of which are equally correct, I’m not sure why it would be valuable, except as a received dogma.
As to skepticism, epistemic nihilism is the position that knowledge is impossible, so there is a close overlap.
@Wayfarer I don’t know how you would respond to a paraphrasing of a paraphrasing of a Nobel laureate physicist, “it is a sad poet who must fall silent when he learns that the sun is giant ball of Hydrogen fusing into Helium”
Sunyata seems to be a peak in Indian semi-religious philosophical thought. Indian philosophers (Buddha et al) seem to have boldly attempted to grapple with the 0 of nihilism, to make something out of nothing, while the rest of the world seems to have retreated to the dubious sanctuary of, inter alia, Christianity’s eternalism. The honeymoon with eternalism ended in the chaotic upheavals of 19th/20th centuries. Suggestive books like God is dead seem to have hit the right notes.
Not to say Christianity’s a bad religion, but from a Buddhist lens it’s a jump, from the frying pan into the fire.
Auto-definitions (finding one’s own meaning) is, as some seem to have figured out, unsatisfactory. If that weren’t the case nihilism would never have seen the light of day.
Some who do so do so from a place of negativity or myopic gain. And so, many find what they seek. Until they realize they actually did not. Those fortunate who do not end up living a life consumed by a constant internal battle of self-imposed falsehoods and justifications that in the end are only supported by degradation of human society and one another, most especially those who made better decisions in life or who otherwise, whether real or imagined, live better lives, that is.
The child challenges the spoon that provides him the food and resulting nourishment that without he or she would perish in agony. Casual shoutout to @Evald for the reference, by the way. That guy is out of control with the wisdom. It’s almost not fair to the rest of us, to be quite honest.
@Jackal that may be, but the call seems to be one of the given options. Perhaps we can make that decision instead of “queuing up in orderly fashion outside the booth” eager to take a shot at the ducks on the conveyor belt, no?
Goodness… not sure why you’d pull out a corny line like this, it seems like the kind of line a Christian apologist of the most rudimentary kind might use. So a lack of belief in intrinsic meaning leads to the murder of coeds? But wait… of course it doesn’t, because deep down we intuit transcendent meaning… more on that question later.
I believe you are sincere.
Nicely put, but I think this fails to match my position. Saying there is no inherent meaning is not the same as saying there are no values. It simply means that meaning and value arise contingently, from human practices, preferences, and shared norms. Jumping from “no intrinsic meaning” to rape, violence, and social collapse is a non sequitur. People live together in communities and form intersubjective agreements about values, which is where most of our moral life actually comes from.
For me the idea of no inherent meaning is that the world itself does not come with built-in purpose or value; meaning arises from human practices, preferences, and the shared understandings we develop within our communities. Which of course some dangerous people subvert: the jails I have visited are also full of theists.
Which means that:
I’m more of an existential nihilist.
But we’ve been here before and I suspect it may not be worth continuing.
But I will ask a question if I may? What for you is the foundation of intrinsic meaning and how do you know it is true?
I was just thinking about this. Your preference is an explanation for your behavior. We say you drank the shake because you prefer vanilla.
We can’t say the cause and effect are one thing unless we want to be mystical. Otherwise, it’s just nonsense. So outside mystical domains, the behavior stands in a relation to the explanation. They aren’t the same thing.
I just did a search on another site for the posts from far too many years ago when someone first exposed me to this idea. The poster did not mention Huxley, or anyone else, as having been his exposure to it. I wonder.
I wonder if their parents loved this and joined them, or if they looked at each other and rolled their eyes thinking, “Here we go again.”
I agree it’s an estimable aim. I don’t have much faith in humanity, though. If protection is among the highest responsibilities of a steward, and living things are that which need protecting, I think our record speaks for itself. Perhaps the universe already has stewards who will protect it from us. Maybe they can teach us to be less brutal and uncaring, if we don’t manage to teach ourselves those things before we meet them.
How is this anything more than a rhetorical insult? Oh no, “you’re a corny Christian.” At any rate, I think the problem is that you’re reading the implication wrong.
Look, if there is no correct or incorrect way to live, it simply follows that there is no incorrect way to live, and that applies across the board, for rapists as much a saints. You said there is “no correct way to live,” why doesn’t this follow?
You’d have to explain the modifiers you are using, e.g., “intrinsic,” etc. I was responding to the claim about nihilism, which does not generally mean “this specific, caveated type of x does not exist,” but rather “x does not exist tout court.” For instance, epistemic nihilism is not the position that some theories or types of knowledge are impossible, but rather that any knowledge is impossible.
And I think you’re missing the conclusion here. It isn’t:
“Nothing is good or bad, therefore people will murder coeds,”
But rather,
“Nothing is good or bad, therefore murdering coeds is neither good nor bad,” which is a simple, “no x is y” implies that z, if it is x, cannot be y.
Likewise, if being free from norms and history is good, then it simply follows that someone like Bundy has accomplished something choice-worthy in virtue of the fact that he seemed exceptionally free from social norms and historical pressures. However, there is an interesting tension here. You are now trying to appeal to intersubjective agreement and constructed norms as the ground of value, right? That’s you’re answer to the values question. Yet earlier you seemed to be advocating for this same philosophy in virtue of the fact that it erodes the hold of norms and history on one, no? Why is this not self-defeating? If nihilism is good because it erodes social norms, and social norms secure value, then nihilism erodes its own value in a manner than is self-refuting.
To be more specific, how can it be “good” to be freed from norms if norms are the only thing that secure value in the first place? Or is it only good to be freed from some norms and not others? If so, in virtue of what is one set of norms judged better than any other, given that contingent norms are themselves the only ground of value? And why is someone who simply rejects their community’s norms (like Bundy, or Martin Luther King or Saint Anthony for that matter) wrong? Or if they aren’t wrong, how are communities securing anything worthy of the name “value” in the first place?
As to the rest, I guess my confusion is that I don’t think this would normally be defined as nihilism. Constructivists don’t generally accept the label for instance. Actually, a big part of those sorts of projects is avoiding the charge of nihilism, or a “collapse into nihilism.”
Now, whether such attempts are successful depends by system. I think a great many collapse into rather obvious performative contradiction if you pull on their threads a bit, because they will want to say all value is mutable, and mutable according to no particular prior pattern, which then makes it very difficult to justify the values that must be imported through the back door if any philosophy isn’t going to collapse into misology. That’s a different issue though.
1 Like
Yes. There’s continuous competition on reddit between negative and positive nihilists, the OP being typical of the former. The people on the positive side are focusing on the way nihilism brings the focus back to this world, here and now, as opposed to dreading hell, or waiting to be happy in heaven.
A debate as to whether or not it is good or bad that nothing is good or bad…
Meaning of existence is 50% psychological and 50% logical. Non mental existence never asks about the meaning of its own existence. They just exist.
Other animals apart from humans never ask about the meaning of their own existence. They just happen to exist.
Only the humans with self reflection ask about the meaning of their existence. At this point I ask you, if I may, what is the nature of the meaning of existence?
The nihilist is free of childish superstition. That freedom is enjoyable. It makes a person look with pity toward those still sunk up to their ears in it.