“Nihilism is OK” is not OK
meaningness.com
meaningness.com
I grew up very religious and when I lost my faith in my 20s, I tried to replace it w/ absurdism and existentialism, but couldn't shake the notion that lives deep in me that ultimately, even if humanity spreads across the cosmos and we're able to find meaning in our own individual existences, the universe will inevitably suffer heat death, from which there is no eternalistic escape.
These days, my morality entirely stems from the reduction and prevention of suffering, which is ultimately the only moral currency we have.
This led me to veganism and anti-natalism, as the best way to prevent individual suffering is for the individual to never exist in the first place (see: David Benatar's Better Never to Have Been; or Ecclesiastes 4:2-3). Needless to say, these are wildly unpopular philosophies. In light of this, I began to come to the realization that we're all nihilists at our core. We embrace religion or other philosophies to ward it off, because it's a truly uncomfortable sate of mind, as the author notes in this post, and the only alternative is total misery until we die. And then, depending on your philosophy, perhaps a true eternal bliss awaits you in paradise! How convenient! The happy people among us are the best at this practice - lying to ourselves successfully about the true nature of reality. We don't care what gets us there, as long as we get there.
All this to say: I was much happier when I believed in God.
I think we can only ever really understand ourselves as humans in relation to other humans. Our individual ideas about who we are can only form in context of our ideas about who other people are and in relationship with them. This is an open system where meaning is an emergent property. Life create meaning, order and structure in the context of complex systems. This is a force as powerful and pervasive as entropy but much less understood.
Meaning exists outside of ourselves.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but attempting to create meaning strictly in relation to others is no panacea for existential dread and the fundamental nihilism of what I, and the OP, believe to be reality - that is, a strictly physicalist universe devoid of metaphysical or supernatural forces or beings.
And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain. And he said: Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy; And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields. And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief. Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility: For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen, And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.
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I've never been entirely clear on whether Sartre intended this or not, but it always seemed glaringly obvious to me that the problem in Huis Clos was not that they were trapped for eternity with other people: it was the specific other people they were trapped with. People who magnified all their own flaws and threw them back in their faces.
If, instead, you were bound for eternity to people with whom you shared mutual respect, understanding, and commitment to each other's happiness, that would be heaven.
It is not truly that "hell is other people", whatever Sartre might say. Isolation is the worst punishment we have in this lifetime. Being condemned to an eternity of isolation would truly be hell.
Even if you started out with people you couldn't stand, and spent aeons torturing each other, what's to say you couldn't then come to some form of co-commitment to happiness with them?
Heaven and hell are defined by how we interact with the people around us.
We _want_ to be able to say that suffering and pain imply meaningless, but I don't think that is consistent with a purely materialistic understanding of reality. It is what it is - that's all that can be said.
The materialistic view takes an epistemological stance that precluded the possibility of the metaphysical. That's not the same thing as the actual non-existence of the metaphysical. Fiat money, power and the nation state are all concepts that don't have material existence yet these are realities non-the less. The material world doesn't set the limits to reality, just the context.
Even if you see humans/society as just really complex versions of a cellular automata (or composed of nested automata) you can't deny that the emergent properties are more meaningful/significant than the material realities that compose them. The material world isn't a panacea of meaning either.
That's the most dumb thing I ever heard since the last conversation I had few days ago about asexuality. It's equivalent to the same argument I heard which was "people are asexuals because they don't have sex more often" or "you're straight because you didn't tried anything else besides that".
I don't know that there's a way to escape heat death either, but my answer to that is: So what? I don't see why that should make me a nihilist. Nor do I really see why deciding to try to prevent suffering through veganism should follow from any of the above.
Instead I'd rather continue to muddle along my path. Leveraging what ability I can to make enough money that I can do whatever it is I feel like doing and end up going to bed happy. And that involves eating delicious things and having good times with the ones I love and doing drugs and drinking and contributing to charity and whatever else.
It doesn't, really, solve any of my problems. It doesn't, in and of itself, make me 'happy'. But I'm okay with it.
What makes me happy is the drugs.
On an unrelated note, is your grandfather a preacher or your grandson?
Seems that this view of human existence as something inherently temporary underpins a lot of nihilist thinking. However, there is a lot of scientific evidence in favor of eternalism (i.e. the philosophy of time, as opposed to presentism) if you only care to look.
For one, it seems to me you have to basically reject all of relativistic physics if you want to maintain a perspective on the universe where only the present moment exists. This is because the relativity of simultaneity tells us that there is no such thing as a universal present moment. How can only a single moment exist when there is no such thing as a single moment?
I think a lot of people who despair in nihilist thought would do a lot better if they simply updated their understanding of universe from being stuck in the 19th century.
Humans do extremely poorly in relativistic environments because we tend to become expanding clouds of atoms at the energies needed to make relativity relevant to every day experience.
At the energies we can survive at a universal time is an extremely good approximation to your daily experience.
Turned vegan too, but not for ethical reasons. Saw the movie Game Changers and immediately switched. I want to live a long healthy life.
I was was happy to discover that evolutionary biologists have similar ideas. I think of myself and other humans as naked apes with a mind which is on the one hand extremely weak (If the elephant wants someting else, the rider is powerless) but on the other hand able to believe in ideas which are detrimental to its' own health. I think the meaning of life is the same for humans, bacteria and all other living beings: survive and procreate, nothing more. For many minds this does not seem to be enough, for me it is.
Just to apply reductio ad absurdum to the anti-natalism argument: If there was a virus that would prevent all animals and humans on the planet from reproducing, leading to the quick extinction of all consciousness, would that be a moral good?
I'll also mention it's important not to confuse anti-natalism w/ pro-mortalism.
The better question is why aren't you having children as often as possible if you think life is worth while. On average any fertile couple can produce around 12 children, if you're not on track to have that number of children but think that life is so grand then why aren't you?
The difference between you and me is that you're ok with not creating 9 to 11 lives during your reproductive age, I'm ok with not creating 12.
I'll have enough children to sustain humanity and keep consciousness in the universe, having 2.1 children still means a potentially infinite line of descendants, so no reason to have 12. 12 would decrease the average well-being, while having none would decrease it as well.
Also, I would be interested what you think the crucial difference is between not continuing to live and not being born.
It is the difference between killing two children and deciding to not have 10 extra ones.
So I ask you again, would you prefer not to have been born? And if yes, what's your argument for continuing your own life?
People that exist have wants.
I exist, yet the dozen other children my parents could have had don't. You can ask them if they want to have been born, but they don't have an opinion on the matter.
Which part of that do you have trouble with?
That's a pretty weak "gotcha" as well.
The reason I have had 3 children instead of 12 is because it balances my interest and desire to be a parent with the work/cost of doing so.
I doubt anyone's decision to reproduce is centered around bestowing the maximal amount of meaning to the universe.
It might be a long shot, not maybe you can find some peace in it...
Update: ...and if stoicism isn't your thing, maybe epicurism is...
But there were a few absurd reductions in what you said, including the idea that the prevention of suffering is tenable yet somehow nihilistic.
Would it not be more sustainable to focus on spreading joy instead of preventing suffering? That way you won't drive yourself crazy focusing on the negative aspects of humanity.
In other words, religion is wonderful for those for whom it works; the same goes for existentialism (our meaning comes from within) or really literally anything else that gets you through the day.
Every morning we wake up and the vast majority of us decide to not jump off a tall building. Why?
They grow up having meaning of life, and all the rules to follow to get to the better place. You don't think you just follow.
When you break out of shackles of religion you are faced with reality, you are responsible for finding the meaning, you are responsible for creating rules for your life and to follow them.
Its my pet peeve when I hear 'atheists are just lazy and left the religion because its easier'. When its the opposite. A godless person that understands that concept of god (more precisely any god that people claim exists and talked to them via various means) doesn't make sense, is burdened with all complexity of life without mental shortcuts religion provides.
All that said, de-converting into atheistism doesn't automatically translate into lifelong misery.
This purely instrumental stance of viewing the world is basically just cope. A more mature and real approach is what you could call having an honest stance towards the world. If you come to the conclusion that nihilism, of whatever form, is what describes the world best, is the correct stance to take, and so on, you ought to do it. Not because it's 'good' or 'bad', but because it's intellectually and personally honest.
In the Will to Power one of the first things Nietzsche says is that we'll have to pay for 2000 years of Christianity. That is to say, the loss of absolute values and meaning is painful. Nonetheless it is necessary, because it has the benefit of being true. The widespread nihilism that the author thinks is a form of malaise is just a disorientation, having shed old values after recognizing that they're not fundamentally real.
I don't think Nietzsche was ever really able to come up with a great alternative to religion, and he certainly didn't seem happy about its end.
> God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
Living on a lie that you know to solely exist for comfort is not the same as genuine belief, and it is fundamentally broke. If you just run back into the matrix and pretend it's real because it's pleasant, in a sense you've managed to be more nihilistic than the nihilist and in a way schizophrenic because you have to live something you actually know not to be authentic.
There is a lot of figures in our culture today who basically advocate this. People who declare themselves to be atheists but tell disoriented youth to just 'pretend to believe'. And it really has the quality of LARPing. It will not move anyone forward philosophically.
I think you can come up with your own (stretched) interpretation of Christianity that doesn't require belief in the divine, and I think that approach, taking an existing societal value system that works pretty well, makes a lot more sense than trying to build a new one from scratch and getting everyone to buy into it.
Personally speaking, I used to be somewhat of a militant atheist. I was really engaged with the whole new athiest movement of 00's.
But I've distanced myself from that, I certainly don't try anymore to persuade people away from their belief. I don't describe myself as a Christian, although I do think that western society is built upon it's values.
Maybe that's LARPing, inauthentic, not philosophically rigorous, but it's good enough for me.
[Wolf Larsen] “Do you know, I sometimes catch myself wishing that I, too, were blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies and illusions. They’re wrong, all wrong, of course, and contrary to reason; but in the face of them my reason tells me, wrong and most wrong, that to dream and live illusions gives greater delight. And after all, delight is the wage for living. Without delight, living is a worthless act. To labour at living and be unpaid is worse than to be dead. He who delights the most lives the most, and your dreams and unrealities are less disturbing to you and more gratifying than are my facts to me.”
He shook his head slowly, pondering.
“I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason. Dreams must be more substantial and satisfying. Emotional delight is more filling and lasting than intellectual delight; and, besides, you pay for your moments of intellectual delight by having the blues. Emotional delight is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate. I envy you, I envy you.”
He stopped abruptly, and then on his lips formed one of his strange quizzical smiles, as he added:
“It’s from my brain I envy you, take notice, and not from my heart. My reason dictates it. The envy is an intellectual product. I am like a sober man looking upon drunken men, and, greatly weary, wishing he, too, were drunk.”
“Or like a wise man looking upon fools and wishing he, too, were a fool,” I laughed.
“Quite so,” he said. “You are a blessed, bankrupt pair of fools. You have no facts in your pocketbook.”
“Yet we spend as freely as you,” was Maud Brewster’s contribution.
“More freely, because it costs you nothing.”
“And because we draw upon eternity,” she retorted.
“Whether you do or think you do, it’s the same thing. You spend what you haven’t got, and in return you get greater value from spending what you haven’t got than I get from spending what I have got, and what I have sweated to get.”
Who cares about truth?
Ultimately, if you don't have absolute values handed down to you by magic, every other alternative we can construct are ultimately based on nothing more than natural preferences.
Yet, given that, what options do you really have if any? Why do we wake up in the morning and do something instead of doing nothing?
By the time you grow to be able to comprehend the incomprehensible, the absurdity and meaninglessness of human conscious existence and subjective experience, then it is too late, you are already tangled in a web of relations and responsibilities, surely you are paying some bills to enable you to read this, or you believed in some simplistic story about life and death, or you have narrowed your scope of thinking, or busy yourself with the hedonistic pursue of pleasure.
And if you conclude against living and your brain is still functioning, you'll sense hanger, fear, anxiety, etc, your hardwired survival instincts will kick-in and override your thinking, it would push you out of bed. In other words, if you are not severely depressed, you won't have enough pain threshold to commit suicide. Thus, you don't really have a choice but to wake up and do something until you fail to do so or it gets too painful to continue. You can tell yourself a nice story to make sense of it all, or you can just accept the absurdity and lack of control and leave hacker news to enjoy the outdoors and hangout with someone, and try to do some good (minimize suffering) while you can.
> Nihilism makes you miserable and ineffective.
Why?
> That is not OK.
Why?
> It also erodes our cultures’ and societies’ ability to improve lives and tackle urgent problems.
Why?
> That is also not OK.
Why?
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None of this is answered in the rest of the blog post.
If you accept that a true nihilist has to be depressed, I would agree that the third point follows. Acknowledging a depressed individual's viewpoint that it is okay to feel everything is meaningless - that this viewpoint is not indicative of a mental health issue that should be addressed - would probably erode societies ability to improve the lives of depressed individuals (assuming improvement means they suffer less).
As to whether other people's suffering matters to you or not, I suppose that depends on the individual. The author seems to think it is not ok for people to suffer, but obviously not everyone would agree with them here.
I wrestled with this in my undergrad, which plunged me into a depression that I had never known before. This was doubly troublesome for me because I had previously believed that God existed and had a plan for my life– some kind of universal determinism, destiny, or fate. Going from that mental model of the universe, to one in which the universe is random, cold, uncaring, and devoid of meaning is quite a shock to the mental health.
My happiness came back significantly once I discovered Existentialism, which the author seems to dislike. Existentialism is the belief that while there is no objective meaning to the universe, there is a subjective meaning. I can love my wife, enjoy my job, and enjoy a few brews with my buddies. All of those matter to me, and they don't have to have universal significance. They don't have to have objective meaning. Hell, people might not even be truly conscious or free anyway. It's not going to stop me from having a good time and loving life.
The author makes broad assertions with very little explanation and few references to back them up. I'm still not convinced nihilism makes you miserable and ineffective. I'm still not convinced that that wouldn't be ok from an objective standpoint (although I'd have a problem with it, subjectively). I'm not convinced that it erodes our culture's ability to tackle problems or change people for the better (in fact, maybe it's the first step). And even if it did, who is to say that isn't okay? Obviously those who lose out will not like it (subjective meaning). But there is no objective meaning to any of this. It's random, inconsequential, cause-and-effect bullshit from top to bottom. Who says it means anything at all?
But if it means something to you, then that's great.
From Google, nihilism is:
> the rejection of all religious and moral principles
I wonder if the author is religious and if nihilism is so contrary to the author’s core beliefs that it doesn’t even occur to them that these statements need further explanation and justification in order to be complete as a rational argument.
"Unfortunately, existentialism is difficult to maintain, because mostly we can’t choose meanings. Some meanings are nearly impossible to either alter or overlook, and so are some meaninglessnesses."
WUT
So the whole post argues against something that most probably isn't even meant.
So, why not try to do your best anyways?
I am not sure why if someone simply believes that they cannot prove, with the fundamental aspects of reality, that there is provable "meaning", that this automatically means that such a person will slide into some sort of existential "Catatonia".
Whats wrong with just accepting that we could have unprovable axioms, that we simply take for granted?
For example, I think that killing is wrong. But that is an unjustified axiom. If someone comes up to me and says "Well, technically, you don't believe that you can prove that killing is wrong", my response is simply "I don't care".
People can simply be OK with having values that they care about, and accept that they will never be able to fully "prove" them in the way that hardcore philosophers might want them to be provable.
Societies with a moral against killing thrive and spread compared to those without.
I didn't mean "Advanced" in any sort of value judgement way, but just in terms of complexity. "Never kill people" is a much simpler axiom than "never kill people, except for in these specific circumstances where it's good to kill people instead."
Eg: Thou shalt not Kill vs. Thou shalt have only one wife.
They are two very different things. I am talking about the latter which is context-specific and malleable. The former i don't consider as a "Moral" but as a direct corollary of the instinct for self-preservation.
"Thou shalt not Kill" provides for stability that enables for long-term societies to develop.
"Thou shalt have only one wife" just sounds like a rule made up by someone who wouldn't have a wife if Jerry next door was allowed to have two.
I think this is true, morally good or bad has been a moving target for some time, they are not concrete. Rather they are derived from inner definitions, and outside definitions at a point in time, and even then questionable.
While my knowledge of Nihilism is very small, but I would gather that Moral Nihilist are not rampaging through the street killing people, as while there is no concrete version of morals, there is no need to act in a manner which harms people, after all why would it matter.
And now I am going back to my solipsism.
"Nihilism"(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism) is the one backdrop "True Reality" against which we paint our chosen "Schools of Philosophy". This is quite independent of the problems of "Consciousness" and "Free Will".
And I'm quite happy to have a sense in life.
> Unfortunately, existentialism is difficult to maintain, because mostly we can’t choose meanings. Some meanings are nearly impossible to either alter or overlook, and so are some meaninglessnesses.
Then there was this passage which further put the nail in the coffin:
> Where existentialism said meaning must be an arbitrary individual choice, pomo makes it an arbitrary social choice. When social groups make different choices, there is no basis for negotiation, because both are equally arbitrary. Then all conflicts reduce to raw power struggles.
> This “banal nihilism” is the ideological basis for much current populist authoritarianism.3 These movements are simultaneously dogmatically eternalistic and chaotically nihilistic. The tribal ”values” are absolute, and must not be questioned or disrespected; but truth, morality, and justice have no meaning beyond what we want this week.
These interpretations of Existentialism and Postmodernism are so catastrophically wrong that they invalidate the entire article. A cursory reading of Existentialist discussion of "bad faith" should cover the first. For Postmodernism - first off, Postmodernism is such a loose coalition of thinkers that any totalizing statement about them, is likely, wrong (at least in part). Secondly, Postmodernism generally encourages a skepticism about all hierarchies of knowledge, including what the author describes as 'tribal "values"'. Under Postmodernism, these values are questioned and, for example, "deconstructed".
My suggestion is that the author ought to stop thoughtlessly regurgitating what Mr. Jordan Peterson has to say about Existentialism and Postmodernism and expand his reading to cover the texts themselves.
I don’t even know why people need a “meaning” or purpose to life. Just waking up and existing is incredibly fun.
The reason why religiosty is so common among poor countries is because, without religion, the logical conclusion would be to stop existing...
Which is exactly the position the West was in pre-renaissance. Without religion society would never have succeeded through ages of negative utility.
It feels to reductionistic, humans are complex system and often none rational.
Certainly religions provide utility to the followers, but I wouldn't equate wealth of a country as direct correlation to religiosity.
There are wealthy countries (US, gulf counties) that are largely religious, and smaller poorer (czech rep) countries predominately atheistic.
I think religion is more of an entertainment then meaning of life. in poorer counties there is less things to be occupied with. Thats where you have the festivals and celebrations. Contrast catholics in EU vs South America.
Also religion can be seen as a stop gap solution to education. It provides answers to questions - knowledge (though of varying quality). The higher education the lower interest in religion, for one the science + critical thinking exposes errors and fallacies in religious texts. So religion as a source of knowledge looses appeal in educated populations.