What Nihilism Is Not
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
I think the author doesn't look at the drawbacks of nihilism completely -- nihilism is a blank canvas as opposed to something like paint-by-numbers. Ultimately the choice of nihilism is still personal. We are all given a blank canvas to start. What kind of painting do you want to hang up?
Nihilism is basically saying that no theory of aesthetics is better than any other. Is this really true? Would you paint random dots on the canvas? Surely circles are more meaningful than scribbles?
I did maybe a couple decades of applied nihilism, as presented by Landmark Education. It helped me a lot, given that I'm bipolar and prone to pessimism and depression.
So this makes sense to me:
> If, as I suggested earlier, nihilism and pessimism are opposites, then nihilism is actually much closer to optimism.
But not this:
> Such a lack of awareness is the point of nihilism, as nihilism is all about hiding from despair rather than dwelling on it.
As Landmark taught it, it's not so much hiding from despair as cultivating the awareness that despair is an illusion. That is, despair isn't about what happened. It's about our story about what happened. And our stories by default just reflect our programming.
This does, however, but it's too ambiguous:
> But the nihilist has feelings. It’s just that what the nihilist has feelings for is itself nothing.
It's not that it's "nothing", exactly. It's that it's indeterminate. By default, it's however we've been programmed. But it can be whatever we choose freely.
And yes, the Forum lasts three days. But there are many other courses. Most lasted just one weekend. Some were one weekend a month for maybe six months. One lasted almost a week (Six Day).
And for much of that time, I was taking seminars that met more or less weekly. Those are often focused on enrolling everyone you know in Landmark. But leaders have considerable discretion, and some of them focus far more on content.
The prices are all reasonable. The Wisdom Courses are considerably more expensive, but also more fun.[0]
0) https://www.landmarkworldwide.com/advanced-programs/wisdom-c...
If nothing has inherent meaning then you are the one who has power to give meaning to things. You can avoid giving meaning to mishaps, mistakes, past, nasty comments and anxiety while cherishing and making other things more meaningful (to yourself).
Nihilism opens door to countering positions such as above. By using it, one can either accept life without meaning and move on or they can counter it with different position that doesn't bind them from construction of their own structure.
off topic
> It helped me a lot, given that I'm bipolar
I am curious how do you trust yourself dealing with that. In a similar position, I find it a bit complicated to retain trust in myself (messy part is I have trauma related to trusting others as well). The feeling of being able to do anything devolving into sleeping like a rotten piece of meat within a few months. When I noticed the pattern, I had to stop thinking anything ambitious long term.
Currently, I have a few yes/no questions that highly depend on ny emotional and psychological state. I ask myself when I am unsure whether it's a good phase or bad phase. When am I myself? Is it when I can be high or low? Or somewhere between combining both.
Obviously, I can ignore the emotions and look at things objectively but then, I would start disagreeing with lot of people including doctors and become more 'robot' like. I start thinking about incentives, motive, biases, biological coding and what not to rationalize 'something' but that 'something' ultimately depends on my emotional underlying. The argument proposed are hard to deny unless someone has an irrational absolute stance originating from a position of faith or bias they are unaware of.(I am not saying things directly, I know)
Aa for drugs (they don't really work that much for me), do you not see yourself as intoxicated though? If someone was under the effect of alcohol, would you say that someone has control or actually thinking by their own? Comparing medical drugs to alcohol might be a bit stretched but some of what I took in the past was relatively similar in effects after a bit of research. What if you had to take drugs forever to retain that person? Who is judging what is ultimately good for you?
As I understand it, that is, in fact, existentialism, not nihilism.
Basically it's making up stuff to believe in, rather than believing in "nothingness" (which is not just "nothing").
As Landmark says, "We are meaning making machines." So it's very hard to stay centered on nothingness. And that's what TFA alludes:
> as nihilism is all about hiding from despair
So with existentialism, you're just manipulating yourself. But that's arguably better than being manipulated by others, your culture, authoritarian structures, and so on.
Another perspective is that it's all games. But that we're prone to forgetting that, and thinking that it means something else.
Yes, that's exactly it.
It's amazing how just noticing that I'm making myself miserable can bring a smile to my face. Or at least, a grin.
> The feeling of being able to do anything devolving into sleeping like a rotten piece of meat within a few months.
Yeah, been there.
> Obviously, I can ignore the emotions and look at things objectively but then, I would start disagreeing with lot of people including doctors and become more 'robot' like.
Some doctors are competent, and some just push whatever's trendy, or heavily detailed. Generally I recommend ignoring them all, except for some psychiatrists. Based on my experience, SSRIs are dangerous for people with bipolar disorder. They made me seriously hypomanic, but emotionally numb.
Also, I used to think that emotions determine how I think. But eventually I got that patterns of thinking determine what I feel.
It's just that stuff reminds us of a morass of similar past experiences. And there are associated feelings, which have been reinforced through repetition since we were very young.
The three canonical ones:
there's something wrong / I'm wrong (1-2 years)
I don't belong (early school years)
I'm on my own (teens)
The worst part about that is my avoidant behavior of self care in the pursuit of work that feels good. There are other issues that made it that way. It's akin to being addicted to hard drugs (not meant to be insensitive. Can't find any other analogy atm). Mind and body want different things while also being on their own in the reception/outcome. Priorities shuffle in a matter of minutes if you are not concentrating and controlling yourself. Having so much self control is exhausting when others don't have to do this and makes me wonder whether am I alive at all sometimes. Letting out anything becomes difficult and I really believe my future is gonna be full of substance abuse.
> It's just that stuff reminds us of a morass of similar past experiences. And there are associated feelings, which have been reinforced through repetition since we were very young.
I know but things went wrong my entire childhood and they still are. While I try to avoid things that reinforces negative emotions, some of them are just unavoidable. Eg - washroom...painful memories there.
I wish I had means to reward myself but I don't. Things that may have worked as a reward is an addictive dependency now and I truly don't care about most things including what I get to eat or whether even I get food at all.
That last part alone makes people doubt and fill in holes with their broken explanation which then I need to reassert how eating food in some situation is objectively better hence I do it but I wouldn't in lack of friction to avoid eating it therefore I don't desire the food for it's merit but external factors force me into it.
Do people enjoy things on their own merits or external factors coerces them to enjoy something?
I can't figure out the answer because I do most things for avoidance.
As long as you are taking good enough care of yourself to stay healthy, I don't think that it matters.
> Do people enjoy things on their own merits or external factors coerces them to enjoy something?
> I can't figure out the answer because I do most things for avoidance.
That's a hard question. Some of the things that I enjoy are bad for me. Such as ice cream. So I've learned to enjoy basically frozen fruit juices. And I don't have ice cream around. That's certainly avoidance.
I also make my own frozen food. Typically rice, beans, carrots, other vegetables, and some meat. So that's what's around to eat, and it doesn't take much work.
Otherwise I'd eat junk, and end up fat and unhappy.
Also, I don't recall anything explicit about Landmark and nihilism. It's just my opinion.
The group is a magnet for vulnerable people who respond to authoritarian style leadership and coercive psychological techniques including public shaming and gaslighting. They strongly discourage participants from taking notes. Anyone with a history of trauma, abuse or adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) should know that attending this kind of group can cause severe psychological harm.
There is a way to do deep personal transformation safely, but this group isn’t it.
0. https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Suppressed_French_documentary_on_...
There is a heavy emphasis on participants sharing experience with the group, and being coached to see their machinery. But it's a stretch to call that "public shaming and gaslighting".
However, people are sometimes very attached to their interpretations, and it can get very intense. But you can leave, at any time. And if you leave early enough, they'll refund your payment.
Edit: This is representative, based on my experience: https://praxis.fortelabs.co/a-skeptic-goes-to-the-landmark-f...
The authoritarianism increases as one moves up levels and more "secrets" are revealed. At the ground floor, it's welcoming and communal, but as you are further inculcated the number of "secrets" or "mysteries" revealed, the amount of potential personal exposure (read: blackmail and/or punishment for treachery) and the amount of authoritarianism rises steeply.
But not at all like what I experienced in Landmark. Seriously, there are no "secrets" or "mysteries". It's all basically laid out in the Forum. The rest is all practice.
Another little known fact: Landmark was based on the IP from Werner Erhard’s Est seminars in the 70s, which in turn incorporated specific techniques from Scientology [1]. Some of these fun Scientology influences still exist in today’s forum trainings.
And yes, Werner did take some stuff from Scientology. But not the bits about ghosts of aliens nuked on Earth, millions of years ago ;)
Scientology is still probably behind many attacks on Landmark. And I wouldn't be surprised if they were part of the mess in France.
Pessimist: the payoff matrix is negative
Cynic: players refuse to cooperate, so we're stuck playing with a net negative result
Apathetic: this game is boring
Pessimist: the expected value less than or equal to 0. It's a meaningless game of chance, and it doesn't matter what you do.
Existentialist: the expected value is 0, but if you score 10 points, we'll call it a win.
Cynic: you think that the expected value is positive. You idiots only act like you're not playing to win.
Nihilism is simply the rejection of inherent value or purpose to the universe or anything in it. It means the only values or purposes in the universe are non-inherent and they are things we made up. It doesn't discourage you from making up values, it just discourages you from claiming they are inherently right for some reason.
For a nihilist, hearing somebody ask how things are "good" or "bad" in a nihilist viewpoint is like an atheist being asked why they act morally without a god to act as judge. It is mildly horrifying to see somebody else unable to behave reasonably without made-up guidance.
Not behaving according to your made-up reasonableness?
If there is no absolute line, then the only thing that matters is being the current top-dog
When illustrating an idea, It might be sensible to use relatable examples that make the concept easier to grasp. I don’t see that an attempt to prove a point or persuade in and of itself.
I do however believe that if you disagree with the greater piece, it could be easy to pick on this kind of example to create the appearance of childishness / lack of seriousness. An easy win but not necessarily with merit.
There is a thin line where justice crosses over into complacency, maintaining order or just being a hollow PR slogan that instead of rallying people actually pacifies them.
I think the author is right that there is something liberating about pessimism and cynicism because they refuse to play, actually challening and mocking whoever claims to know what is just or correct.
> Thrasymachus’s cynicism is so compelling that Socrates spends the rest of the “Republic” trying to prove that justice is better than injustice by trying to refute the apparent success of unjust people by making metaphysical claims about the effects of injustice on the soul. Socrates is thus only able to counter cynicism in the visible world through faith in the existence of an invisible world, an invisible world that he argues is more real than the visible world. In other words, it is Thrasymachus’s cynicism that forces Socrates to reveal his nihilism.
The logic seems to be that such an invisible world is obviously false - so obviously false that not even Socrates himself could believe it. But the absurdity of calling Socrates a nihilist is easy to see as soon as you give that invisible world a little credibility, even if only to say that Socrates could have found the idea plausible.
Imagine your friend asks you to count the windows on a building, so you count the rows and columns and multiply them. When he asks you how you did it so fast, you tell him, and he responds with something like: "Oh, I didn't realize you were a Nihilist." He then explains that mathematics is immaterial, and therefore non-existent. You believing in such a thing apparently makes YOU the Nihilist?
No. Nihilism is not about holding supposedly "empty" beliefs. If anything, it's the opposite; Nihilism would hold that these beliefs in the immaterial are themselves empty. Your friend might be a Nihilist, but you certainly aren't.
First, I think we've all most commonly seen the "colloquial" form of Nihilism, which is a sort of despair over a lack of meaning in life. I'm pretty sure most people are aware that this is oversimplified, but it is partially grounded in actual Nihilism. The emphasis is put on despair, but the despair isn't the philosophy, just a product of it.
To sum up Nihilism in a sentence: reality lacks inherent meaning, and any meaning we attempt to fulfill is ultimately chosen, not given to us. Importantly, most of the sense of purpose we see as being "real" comes from our desire to continue existing, (hence Existentialism.) But, existence is a choice. You simply choose to continue to exist, or you don't. (In which case you die.) This is the main insight which makes Nihilism disturbing. Philosophically, if our existence has no purpose, then it seems that everything else we believe and value is built on a foundation of sand.
I think you're basically right about what nihilism is, but I don't find the main insight to be disturbing at all. I never truly felt free, liberated, until I had that insight.
Prior to that insight, in young adulthood, I explored Hedonism and Existentialism, but it turned out that the secret is to just stop caring about it all so much and just live/die/whatever. Let it be.
It brings me joy to not care if I live or die, though my instincts will tend towards keeping me alive. It brings me joy to not care if I succeed or fail, although it's fun to Try sometimes. I enjoy trying to do right by others, raise good kids, but I don't worry about it when I fail.
It's just a ride; people get on, people get off.
Only if you assume that only "inherent" or externally supplied meaning or purpose is valid.
Why make that assumption, though?
I'm not a Nihilist but if I were I wouldn't be too happy about it.
I discovered nihilism before I even understood that it was a thing. I came to a realization that, until I had some clear evidence to the contrary(even then I'm not sure I could let go of my skepticism), there is effectively an exception to every rule that we conceive of and that our view of existence is almost completely tainted by the way in which we perceive it. Thus, I have to accept that people in my reality are also perceiving reality in an entirely unique way, in which case I can't truly begrudge them when they act out. Essentially, I became a moral nihilist because there's no way I can reconcile my view of the world with idea that morals are objective and not contingent on circumstance. (which isn't to say that I'm a moral relativist)
I doubt that most people who call themselves nihilists are truly nihilists or even have the kinds of views on nihilism that I do. It's an identity that most people arrive at not through their own inward exploration but as a response to the world acting upon them. I would argue that's true of most belief systems, though it's probably more transparent with nihilism since it's the rejection of something, so it's not as if there's a coherent doctrine that so-called nihilists can use to bullshit others.
Maybe there are some very 'core' morals that might be consistent, but pragmatically, they won't resemble at all.
The 'morals' of Athenian life in antiquity were such that every able-bodied male had to have his own war fighting gear, and be called to fight in the defence of the city if need be. This would be an existential duty towards the community, without which, they could not exist. But Athens today? Not necessary.
One problem that I think has long been overlooked is the foundation of human rights. Only in the past roughly five years has there been much scholarly contribution on the matter.
What could possibly ground human rights? And if they have no ground, then aren't they simply the same as the preference for, say, peeing standing up vs peeing sitting down?
Edit: Or to put it another way, ideas about legal systems can evolve over time, by analogy to how biological systems can evolve. Ideally, we'd be looking at what works and what doesn't and adopting best practices.
Someone can tell you your life has a lot of meaning... but what does that mean to you. It's vacuous if you don't think that yourself.
I won't say meaning is something emergent. It's something about point of view.
Or perhaps even stronger. If you don't find meaning in your life, there's none.
In regards to emergence, the dominant view of consciousness in physics and philosophy and neuroscience alike is that the first person "subjective" perspective of reality is the inherent intrinsic perspective of physical matter and not an emergent phenomenon (unlike say self-awareness or intelligence)- ie. panpsychism.
Anyway, under this paradigm meaning is nothing more or less than a kind of experience and as such is necessarily subjective. More specifically "meaning" is an account of the type of experiences which are most significant from a subjective perspective.
If receiving meaning by fiat or dictum as if it were objective is something you subjectively find meaningful then that is your perspective and it says nothing of objective reality as such, other than that such subjective experiences are possible.
If you reduce "meaning" to anything that somebody thinks is worth doing (instead of just lying in bed until they die of dehydration), then it's not really possible to be a nihilist, except for those few days before you die of dehydration, unless somebody is keeping you alive (you wouldn't care, naturally).
I found the irony here rather amusing.
That's not to say that meaning is relative or that it isn't real.
This may be difficult to grasp at first. But consider this analogy which grasps the objective nature of a more concrete subjective experience: When you gaze up at the sky and see two birds it is objectively true that you are having a subjective experience of two birds in the sky above you (whether you're hallucinating or not) and not one bird or two elephants. There's nothing relative about it and it's very much a real experience. Cogito ergo sum, after all.
Likewise, under nihilism meaning itself is a subjective experience with quantifiable objective properties. Specifically, meaning is a quantitative (something objective) measure of experiences which are the most highly connected (ie. significant) to other experiences from a subjective perspective.
For example, if you experience prayer as meaningful to you, whether you're delusional or not about it's meaningfulness to you or in general, then it is objectively true that you are having said real non-relative experience of meaning.
For more insight, see A Nihilists Guide to Meaning: https://meltingasphalt.com/a-nihilists-guide-to-meaning/
Concise and seems pretty clear to me. While the article is well written, it doesn't really adds much IMO.
This is actually objectively true, our life are not different to the laws of physics then a rock on the surface of Mars.
Our life is meaningful to ourselves, however.
Definitely not 'objectively true'.
It's only 'objectively true' from a narrow materialist perspective, and there are other ways to look at it.
"our life are not different to the laws of physics then a rock on the surface of Mars.
Our life is meaningful to ourselves, however."
This is really quite some contradiction.
First - the materialist assumption (which I would say is a fallacy, or rather it's only partly true) which postulates that the universe is merely energy/matter bouncing around according to laws ...
... and second - then the acceptance that 'it's meaningful to ourselves'.
Consider what 'ourselves' (i.e. life, consciousness) are - something that's by definition not possible to describe with 'physics' because we've ruled it out (energy and matter acting according to rules cannot be 'aware' or 'conscious').
Contemplate for half a second that the expression of life is the meaningful, real thing, and that materiality is just the measure of the matter it's expressed in, and that science is just a tool for that. Or at least that's another, pretty reasonable way to consider it. And there are definitely other ways.
Even though I agree with the nihilistic view, you're right. Too often people declare certain positions are 'objectively true' ("objective" in this way is usually a euphimism for "common sense" or "obvious") without actually looking at the arguments on the other side.
I don't know why people think this is more acceptable when talking about philosophical topics rather than physics or sociology.
I’m not sure I follow.
>One is obliged to admit that perception and what depends upon it is inexplicable on mechanical principles, that is, by figures and motions. In imagining that there is a machine whose construction would enable it to think, to sense, and to have perception, one could conceive it enlarged while retaining the same proportions, so that one could enter into it, just like into a windmill. Supposing this, one should, when visiting within it, find only parts pushing one another, and never anything by which to explain a perception. Thus it is in the simple substance, and not in the composite or in the machine, that one must look for perception.
As far as I know, there's no proper definition of consciousness, and any time we have narrowed what consciousness may be (over the past few centuries) we have redefined consciousness so that it remains indefinable.
It seems strange to me to divide the universe into "meat inside bags of skin" and "things outside bags of skin" and presume one side of that split somehow possesses unique properties not subject to physical laws of matter and energy.
The dominant theory of consciousness in physics, neuroscience, neuro-physics (no surprise) and philosophy today is that conscious experience is the real intrinsic perspective of matter.
As such consciousness and all its contents are necessarily subjective, qualitative, and not reducible to purely quantitative physicalism.
Materialism then accounts for both consciousness and meaning (as measure of the significance of experiences relative to other experiences) in a way which physicalism cannot.
The very assumption that the universe must be made up of 'laws that act on matter/energy' literally rules out our own existence as sentient beings, because it implies we are just randomness.
It's a paradox because most people who use materialism as their default perspective (most of us do, daily), also believe in their own life, will, consciousness.
The OP did exactly this: he's describing the objective universe has 'having no meaning' because it's just a bag of noise, but then implying that it does have value 'to us'. Well, 'us' the 'observer' is obviously not accounted for in the materialist, reductionist view, and yet it's there and we all know it.
I believe that scientific materialism for this reason, represents a nihilist philosophy, or at least they are closely related.
All of those are ways we have developed to explain the sensations we have experienced according to those rules.
We act as though we have free will and consciousness because they are the terms we have developed to describe how we think we act. They can not be described by physics because they were theories developed with very poor data available, not truths that need to be described.
>Well, 'us' the 'observer' is obviously not accounted for in the materialist, reductionist view, and yet it's there and we all know it.
"Us" is not an independent observer, we are a part of the universe. The universe can give itself as much meaning as it wants, that doesn't create an external meaning to the universe.
One person can use it as an excuse to turn to woe, another person can use it as an excuse to treat the world as their oyster.
Nihilism on its own is merely the recognition of the random and arbitrary nature of reality.