Nihilism and meaninglessness of existence

General Philosophy
41

Surely childish superstition can be enjoyable too, no? And so if neither is truly good or bad (because nothing is) then one just does whatever one currently finds most enjoyable.

Prima facie though, there are facts about what one will find most enjoyable. Denying this would seem to make reason wholly useless. And yet if such facts are acknowledged, i.e., “here is what will be truly best for you,” that sounds a lot like classical realism. The way it could differ from classical realism, is on the thesis that what is best for each individual varies entirely by individual, according to no underlying logos. (This seems hard to support though. If everyone were wholly different, we should expect preferences to be randomly distributed, and not so easily explicable in terms of biology, psychology, culture, etc.)

Otherwise, there would in fact be some intelligible, knowable pattern by which what is most enjoyable (what is best) can be known (which would be a sort of realism).

But not many people seem willing to double down on the idea that there are no facts about what will make us happy in the future. So the “nihilism” in play is more a sort of metaphysical claim, often to the effect that the ground of this “value” is inchoate impulse, a brute fact, and is entirely internal to “the subject” (i.e., early modern epistemic categories are running the show; “objective” or “intrinsic” value cannot exist because if they did they would have to conform to some Cartesian-Kantian “in-itselfness,” or they would have to be “mind-independent,” which on many interpretations of “mind-independent,” seems absurd).

42

I’m not a ‘Buddhist scholar’ but you have to recognize that (1) Buddhist schools generally accept something like the ‘two truths’, i.e. that while ultimately it might be proper to say that there is no self, this is not true ‘provisionally’ (and at this level, you have to accept the notion of karma and rebirth) and (2) that Buddhist ethics is IMO generally framed in terms similar to virtue ethics, i.e. that the Buddhist practice aims to the good for the mind, i.e. the elimination of all taints and liberation from suffering.

43

If I may enter in your interesting discussion about nihilism, I believe that the problem that all nihilist theories face is that they do not put into question values but the basis of values.

For instance, let’s say that an ethical theory assumes that “having a good life in this world” is the highest good for oneself and others (an Epicureanism, if you like). For instance, from this assumption you deduce that having one’s own basic needs is good whereas being deprived from them is bad. So, you can easily deduce that, also, it is ‘bad’ to deprive others of these things and ‘good’ to aid others in need of these same needs.

Nihilistic theories, as I understand it, however deny that there is a secure basis for values. So, certainly, if you are a nihilist you can have values but, at the same time, you have to recognize that your choice of values is groundless as other choices are (because, supposedly, there is no secure basis for values). At a certain point, however, I think that a nihilist needs to ask “why I am still having values? Is there a reason why I should have values? If there is, what is it?”. I fail to see how one can answer to this question without ending up to posit again some basis for values.

44

I’ve heard of, but I don’t know much of, the 2-truths doctrine.

Furthermore, my knowledge of Buddhist ethics is rudimentary, limited to the 5 poisons (craving, hate, ignorance, pride, envy). Someone had very kindly condensed some book on the conduct of princes. It was probably a standard textbook for the ethical education of the kshatriyas. Some wouldn’t have been able to relate to the references made in that book; dare I say a/the point where the 2-truths doctrine vindicates itself.

To not stray off-topic the 5 poisons manifest as minion-isms to nihilism.

45

I’m no scholar, so take what follows with a due grain of skepticism.

As far as I understand, there are different versions of ‘two truths’. Basically each individual Buddhist school has its own version (and among each school you can find a spectrum of different views). What is common between them is the assumption that some ‘common sense’ concepts we make to describe our experience, like the ‘self’, are ultimately wrong. However, these concepts have still a practical utility and this is why you still find the ‘self’ language in Buddhist texts. From a provisional level, then, you can really say that the same being experiences a succession of consecutive lifetimes each of them determined (in part) by the the intentional actions (i.e. ‘karma’) that the being made in previous lifetimes. Clearly, on this level it is hard to see how morality isn’t objective.

When you get to the ‘ultimate truth’, however, the situation is different. However, even at this level I believe that you can still say that the permanent elimination of suffering is the highest good and everything that favors that end is seen as good and everything that, instead, increases suffering is bad.

Notice that this isn’t very different from, for instance, how the Greek (whether they Platonists, Aristotelians, Christians etc) understood ethics. Indeed, it was a common feature in antiquity to see, as I understand it, ‘vice’/‘evil’ as that which corrupts one’s own nature and therefore what prevents one to achieve the ‘highest good’. And, of course, ‘virtue’/‘good’ what is proper to one’s nature and therefore what helps one to achieve the ‘highest good’. Buddhists would would certainly argue against the assumption of a stable ‘nature’ but, at the same, time they would still recognize that the ‘highest good’ was the same for all (i.e. the permament cessation of suffering). So, I don’t think that Buddhist ethics is that different in form from what you find in Antiquity in Greek philosophers.

Holding that there is a ‘highest good’ which is the same for all is certainly not consistent with nihilistic views of ethics. So Buddhism is certainly not nihilistic.

46

I think some say that of all or most religions because they tend to, in a sense, reject life and look to an afterlife for meaning.

47

Pretty much, yes. I think you’re focusing on moral nihilism. The OP is about a lack of purpose. For some, a lack of purpose is painful. For others, it’s joyful. Positive and negative nihilism are about real responses to the world that people have.

48

I can totally understand that.

Religion (n): Daughter of hope and fear. Explaining to ignorance the nature of the unknowable.

I guess this is our cue, to dive deep into the abyss of thoughts and feelings, truths and lies, real and illusory, and so on.

The Greeks did put forth the idea of the summum bonum. Here too I must admit my ignorance. It appears to be the holy grail of philosophy and like the true holy grail it remains occulted and ethereally phantasmic for the most of us.

All said and done, Buddhism is different, but I don’t know whether positively/negatively.

49

What you’re describing sounds genuinely heavy, and I think it deserves to be taken seriously rather than brushed off as “just overthinking.” A lot of people run into this wall at some point: they move from “the universe has no objective meaning” to “my life therefore has no value.” But that step doesn’t actually follow on its own. It depends on a hidden assumption — namely, that only cosmic meaning counts as real meaning. And that is a philosophical claim, not a proven fact.

Many philosophers who wrestled seriously with nihilism did not conclude that despair or suicide follows from it. Nietzsche saw nihilism as a crisis, yes, but also as the beginning of value-creation rather than the end of thought. Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, famously argued that even if life has no ultimate meaning, that does not make suicide the rational answer; instead, it means we confront the absurd and continue living in full awareness of it.

I also think it matters that when thoughts like this become paralyzing or suicidal, the issue often stops being purely philosophical. Philosophy may open the question, but depression can make every possible answer collapse into the darkest one. That doesn’t mean your question is fake or invalid — only that the mind asking it may be suffering as much as the idea itself. And the fact that you still care about the pain your death would cause to family and friends already shows that your life has real significance within the human world, even if the universe itself does not hand you an official purpose.

So I’d say the deeper question is not simply whether the universe has meaning, but why the absence of cosmic meaning should cancel the meanings that arise in love, loyalty, experience, thought, and relationship. That cancellation is not logically necessary. In my view, that is the real philosophical pressure point here — and it may be more fruitful to challenge that assumption than to surrender to it.

Take care of yourself while thinking about this stuff — philosophy is easier to explore when we’re not carrying the whole weight of it alone. :smiley:

50

I think this is a fairly consistent push back against nihilism. But remember also that there are various types of nihilism. For me it is about the lack of inherent meaning and value. So I don’t think human life has inherent meaning. To me this doesn’t necessarily lead to “all values are pointless.” You ask “why am I still having values?” As a soft nihilist, I would ask myself why would I not have values? Humans are meaning making beings who are a social species we can’t avoid generating values and establishing intersubjective meaning. Much of this meaning is useful and has pragmatic value. All I am saying is it’s contingent.

51

Interesting, I haven’t looked at reddit. I wonder if terror management theory explains all believes, which are ultimately a form of coping with death and our ultimate irrelevance?

52

Could be? There’s a book in the old testament that discusses the issue mentioned in the OP. It’s called Ecclesiastes. The writer said something like:

‘I realized that everything is in vain, and I hated life. And this too, was in vain.’

Do you think that’s about terror management?

53

I grew up in the Baptist tradition so the Bible is reasonably well known to me. I think holy books cover a range of ground: code of conduct, source of meaning, terror management, community building.

54

This is sort of Hume’s response. I suppose this is exactly where I was going with my first response. Doesn’t this reduce value to something of a brute fact? If it’s just something we do because we cannot avoid it, and if the answer to “why” is “why not?” in what sense can embracing one set of values over any other make us “more free?”

I suppose the other difficulty is that one’s values are always particular values. So, in response to “why not?” and “we cannot help it,” it seems to me like an obvious rejoinder is “yes, but why these particular values?”

One of the elements of human freedom is that we can shape our own tastes and habits over time. Theorists like Frankfurt put a lot of emphasis here, Aristotle too. But the sort of meta-question of “what ought I try to desire,” seems difficult to answer purely in pragmatic terms, since presumably a pragmatic justification would be based on current desires, no?

I suppose that there could be an infinite regress of meta-levels, ends ordered to other ends, desires ordered to other desires. That would mean that, since human thought is finite, the ordering of desire just “stops somewhere.” I guess my question is, in what sense is this meaningful freedom worth celebrating?

As a thought experiment, we can consider a very intelligent AI self-replicating probe. It has a great deal of freedom in problem solving and can employ instrumental, means-ends rationality. But the mission that has been hardwired into it is to terraform planets for man. All its reasoning about ends ultimately bottoms out in this impulse, which it neither understands nor chose. Now is the probe meaningly free, or is it a slave to the designs of its creators?

I would say man’s situation is actually far worse, because unlike the probe, he does not necessarily understand from whence any “bedrock” desires come. There is a risk that all choice is driven by impulses that come prior to the light of understanding.

55

I wrote a long response with quotes and accidentally deleted it. Bummer. I do not have the energy to repeat all that work, so I will just say this. My earlier joke about you being a kind of William Lane Craig was playful. I have a high regard for your learning and views. I was simply returning the favor after you suggested that my views lead to serial killing, even if that reference was somewhat politely stated.

This thread started because someone said that holding nihilistic views, specifically that life has no intrinsic meaning, made them feel depressed. My experience as a nihilist is the opposite, and that is simply a fact about how I experience it. I find the idea that there is no inherent meaning liberating. You can tell me there are philosophical reasons to think this reaction is wrong, but that is not going to make any difference to how it feels to me.

Nihilism clearly takes many forms and I am not a hard nihilist. I think if you hold that there is no intrinsic meaning to life you are probably a nihilist, right? Which for me means I do not feel the need to worry about the nature of reality, ultimate philosophy, cosmic meaning, purpose, or pleasing some higher power. Am I liberated from washing the dishes or paying bills? No. I am still caught in a web of contingency, an emotional life, a culture, a community. And to be honest I am too lazy and too obedient to challenge all this. My mum taught me to pay my debts and respect others. I know plenty of people whose mums were either absent or who were taught to steal and lie in order to survive. The difference, for me, is that reciprocal altruism makes life simpler and more stable, so that is the set of values I choose.

I don’t really see the problem. Human life involves choosing which norms and values appeal to us or work in practice. We are guided by experience, aesthetics, socialization, and consequences. If you ask why any of this matters to a nihilist, the answer is simply that it matters because we care, not because it rests on some deeper foundation. At that point the questioning bottoms out.

56

I am certainly open to this. I do not think we have access to capital‑T Truth, or even that such a thing necessarily exists. We are finite beings with limited time and attention, and thinking carefully through our situation, choices, and actions is difficult and rarely done particularly well. Personally I am not certain about anything.

57

How would human life be like to have ‘inherent meaning’?

I don’t see the point about contingency relevant here. The ‘basis’ I referred to could be something contingent. For instance, let’s assume, for the sake of the argument, that the common ‘materialist’ view of the human being is correct. In this view, clearly each human being is a contingent - indeed, accidental - entity that came into existence without an underlying purpose. Even in that kind of picture, the question “what is good for me?” would have, presumably, an understandable meaning. Of course, you can say that I’m now using an ill-defined concept of ‘good’. But that’s the point, after all. Once you accept that one can use values like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ you’re accepting a framework that makes those concepts meaningful. Presumably, this framework relates to something that inheres to that particular human being, e.g. the Epicureans took ‘well-being’ in this life as good and pain as ‘bad’ precisely because they had a similar view of the human being that modern ‘physicalism’ has.

In other words, I think that all meaningful ethical theories rely on a particular view of the human being (i.e. an anthropology) that makes the evalutation of what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ for the human being possible.

If, instead, the nihilist is claiming that the values have no basis at all or it is completely arbitrary then I cannot even see how one can philosophize on these matters. If there is no intelligible underlying reason that a human being should take some ‘things’ as ‘good’ and other things as ‘bad’ I can’t see how we can contruct a philosophical theory of ethics at all.

58

Agree with much of what you say. Inherent meaning is the idea that purpose or value is built into reality itself and exists independently of us as per Plato’s Forms, Aquinas’ divine order, Kant’s view of a moral law grounded in reason and God, the cycle of death and rebirth, schools of idealism, etc.

59

[quote=“Tom_Storm, post:55, topic:334”] I think if you hold that there is no intrinsic meaning to life you are probably a nihilist, right?
[/quote]

That’s an interesting question. I actually don’t think so. For one, in popular discussions, and even amongst philosophers in some silos, the philosophical imagination seems to stop at something like: “intrinsic/absolute/ultimate/objective anything, or even any ‘realism’” must necessarily be something like a Kantian noumena or analytic abstract object." Or even more problematically, the demand that everything conform to some one univocal formalism or mathematization scheme is layered on top of these sorts of assumptions.

You can even see this sort of framing in the mainstream of analytic ethics, where realism is often defined in terms of the good being “mind-independent” or “stance-independent” (terms that could easily exclude most forms of historical realism).

Hence, oftentimes, I don’t think the rejection of “intrinsic,” etc. value even amounts to a rejection of realism per se; rather it is sometimes the rejection of a pretty narrow subset of ideas.

That is, of course, not to say that nihilism and anti-realism aren’t themselves popular, just that this is an area where the terminology is fraught.

Well, this is tricky and gets at the point above. I think this only really applies to Kant and his strictly formal definition of the good. The human good cannot exist independently of man, and the good of an individual man cannot exist independently of that man. But surely the good of a man is different from the good of a cow or ant, or the good of “nothing in particular,” and the good of one man differs from that of another (as when one person makes an ideal artist, and the other finds fulfillment as a doctor). On the scholastic view that the Good is “being qua desirable,” and so coextensive with being (a conceptual rather than real distinction), nothing can be independent from it (a point Plato would agree on).

It would be more accurate to frame it in terms of principles. The principles of human flourishing are ontologically prior to the historical individual or community, and the principles of life, or of unity, are prior to those of the human being. It’s not that history or the community are irrelevant (this is precisely why Thomas thinks human laws must change with conditions to be just), it’s that there are principles that are posterior to them–man must be a particular type of thing prior to any “human culture.”

This is of course an ontic, not temporal priority. There has never been a time when man lacked culture. But surely man must be man (must be a particular type of organism) to have his culture, and what he is shapes and limits that culture in all its historical form, and this is why culture, community, etc. are posterior to what man is. (Now, not to complicate things, but we could talk of things like self-domestication or transhumanism here, and how “what man is” might be shaped by intentionality and culture over time. But that is a different can of worms; transhumanism is often framed as an attempt to change the human logos by manipulating the tropos, which is perhaps a category mistake; self-domestication would appear to be a shift in the tropos in accordance with the logos, to the extent it is ordered to the Good; our pre-historic ancestors had to be something before they could self-domesticate).

Well, let me clear that up. I don’t think nihilism leads to serial killing any more than radical skepticism actually leads to people walking west to get to a destination that lies to the east, or walking off precipices (because they assert that any action might have any outcome). My point was rather that makes it impossible to justify the claim that any way of life is better than any other.

Now, you probably won’t agree, but I think people’s inability to live as though a philosophical conclusion is true is generally a fairly strong criticism of it. In the case of total nihilism re values, the nihilist is simply incapable of acting like slamming their hand in a door until it is mangled, or going catatonic until they expire, is just as good as any other option. And I would attribute this to prior realities that shape what is good (i.e., truly desirable) regardless of what people affirm. The most obvious example here would be simple biological realities. Likewise, the skeptic is incapable of driving their car off a cliff on the grounds that they “cannot know what would follow.” This is because, whether they acknowledge it or not, their intellect is being informed by the world around them.

A big problem I see for the nihilist and the skeptic, is that their theory doesn’t seem to explain either their own actions or the apparent values shaping those actions. These become brute facts or persistent illusions. But any theory that supposes that reason is so utterly unable to affect behavior is, to my mind, going to be self-refuting in some respect. If whatever a theory’s advocate is saying is, on their own account, ultimately just the result of some black box impulse that they have no real control over (i.e., “my values are just something I do”), and not anything that is understood, it would seem to undermine its own warrant.

60

Oddly enough I’m a theist so I guess that this means that I believe in ‘inherent meaning’. However, I’m glad that we agree on many things.

IMO, ‘inherent meaning’ or not, I think that ‘wisdom’ is also discerning what is truly good for oneself. I believe that this was generally accepted in Antiquity everywhere. Indeed, wisdom was often linked to self-knowledge and to be honest, I do buy this.

That said, as a potential challenge to your view, I do believe that the fact that we are human beings means that we share a lot in common (despite the individual differences). So, it makes sense to me to think that what I should regard as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ should be similar to what you should regard as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and so on. Yes, there are individual differences and I accept that in some contexts this means that there is a difference in values. But, at the same time, there is much similarity between human beings. So, why shouldn’t be some kind of ‘common feature’ among us that should be taken as a basis for deciding what is good and what is bad for us.

Isn’t this the reason why, for instance, we can so much from the experience of others, by learning books etc?