Can "nihilists" stop conflating rejecting objective meaning with having no meaning (nihilism).
The word closest to rejecting objective meaning is just non-religious because objective meaning is mostly a religious phenomenon.
What matters is that the alternative is NOT just nihilism, but also existentialism.
Would you mind sketching out your take on it?
I think nihilism often goes beyond this though.
A Christian might respond with, "God tells me to live and spread the gospel, raise children, and feed the needy". A Christian will tell you that this is how you ought to think too because all truth comes from the bible, which is why I call it objective meaning. There is a single source of truth.
An atheist might say, "I find meaning through living life, understanding the world, human connection, etc". This person will usually readily admit that what makes them happy might not make you happy. Hence, subjective meaning.
A real nihilist in my opinion would probably kill themself because there is not purpose in life. A fake nihilist will say, "I can make sense of my suffering" which makes them not a nihilist because they found meaning.
Now I'm wondering what definition of "meaning" people are using for this issue.
I wonder if the fuzziness of the term leads to people unwittingly talking past each other.
It turns out that believing in meaning isn't always necessary.
[1] A friend mine put this very well once. We were talking about Meno, and Socrates' refusal to flee Athens, dying instead on the principle he'd entered into a sort of social contract (please excuse the ahistorical terminology) with Athens.
"I've never heard Socrates talk about the social contract before," my friend said.
"I refuse to die over a minor fucking principle."
Dying for a thought experiment isn't romantic. Being rational in all things is actually undesirable, because not everything functions under rational principles (or we wouldn't need the concept in the first place, it would just be the air we breathe).
In the same way that everyone can make a cryptosystem they themselves can't break, everyone can create a logical knot that they can't untie. It's a parlor trick, and not a reason to die.
Let's suppose for a moment you're mistaken. How would you recognize evidence to the contrary, were you to receive it? If you met a nihilist, you'd dismiss them, right? It's an approximately unfalsifiable construction.
> Also, I don't think believing in meaning has anything to do with nihilism.
It seems like you call it "purpose" and I called it "meaning?" I'm a bit confused on that point. Am I misusing terminology?
> In fact, the sentence kind of implies you are speaking of objective meaning which is what grinds my gears.
I meant meaning writ large, subjective or objective. If there's a different phrasing that wouldn't have contained this unintended implication I'm open to suggestions.
An example of a line of thinking you might accept; a nihilist could decide go on living, just because they feel like it. It's entirely rational (and let me be clear, you don't need to avoid suicide on rational grounds anyway, it's entirely acceptable not to kill yourself for arational reasons) to decide you don't want to die because you're curious about what will happen if you don't, or because you think it would be an unpleasant endeavor, or because you've just adopted it as an axiom that you should go on living without any justification. There is no contradiction there.
Really, presupposing that a life of suffering should be ended is asserting the existence of a meaning to life, just a negative one instead of a positive one.
I think it's almost tautological. But most people are on a spectrum, there are extremely nihilistic people who still care about their mothers for example. But yea, I think that the spectrum of nihilism is just the inverse of the spectrum of willingness to live.
> presupposing that a life of suffering should be ended
I'm not prescribing action, I just think it usually ends up this way.
> An example of a line of thinking you might accept; a nihilist could decide go on living, just because they feel like it.
I believe many people live like this, but not because they are a nihilist, but because they don't do introspection and/or take meaningful things in life for granted, because just a tiny bit of introspection would reveal that there are many many things you find meaningful in life, even if its something basic like, security, health, or peace. If you take these things away from a person, they will probably contemplate their existence and try to figure out why they should go on with life.
You're saying very insensitive things about real people and a very touchy subject, and you've had multiple people explain to you at length what it is you've misunderstood about nihilism. I think you should take a step back and take another look at that, I'm not sure you've accurately estimated the weight of your words or the sturdiness of your foundation.
This is as one human being to another, if I think I recognize a certain pattern of thinking and am asking you to reevaluate it, it's only because I've had that pattern of thinking in my own mind and someone else has drawn my attention to it in the past.
Pessimists, broadly, are closer to a real definable "school" to which one might credibly assign hypocrisy at failing to follow through and off oneself (though there are various valid reasons that may still not really be fair). A famous example of this kind of philosophy in pop culture is Rusty in True Detective, who explicitly labels himself a pessimist, and who carries on not because he believes there's a reason to that he could defend philosophically, but because he "lacks the constitution for suicide", as he puts it himself. Though, again, even the pessimist school comes up with justifications for going on living (they just tend to lean more romantic, than couched in reason).
TL;DR I think you're wrestling a ghost with this true- or not-true nihilist deal. I think the colloquial use of the term admits cases and views less-strict or precise/complete than you're insisting on, usually being a shorthand for some limited and specific case of nihilism (e.g. existential nihilist) that doesn't necessarily mean what you're expecting nihilism to mean, while some more-formal-and-strict version that exists as an all-encompassing School of Nihilism isn't really a thing to begin with.
Nihilism in truth has no prescriptive value judgment on one's choice to keep living.
Nihilism as a philosophy puts forth the notion that there is no inherent meaning to life; full stop.
What you derive after this is your prerogative.
Under this framework, living one's life to their fullest is equally as valid as killing oneself; there is no preference for one or the other, and there is no difference, as it doesn't matter.
The inclination to associate nihilism to destructive tendencies is overblown by popsci and is valid only to the extent it is easy to argue nihilism allows for it, but it neglects to mention nihilism is completely compatible with other/optimistic ideals as well... as it doesn't matter.
A lot of built-in taboos (e.g. against bodily damage) make living a "default" human choice, and unless you're also burying the assumption that without meaning one should actively seek death as soon as possible(?), it seems like nihilists could keep riding the default until they got sufficiently bored of it.
There are a decent number of people who are nihilists without meeting your assumptions above (though they're probably less salient, as if someone seems functional & not-miserable, people don't usually bother to ask whether they're a nihilist).
Nietzche defines nihilism (partially) as those who oppose the affirmation of life which is kind of related to what you say here... except the affirmation of life requires a "yes" to life such that "all of eternity [is] embraced, redeemed, justified and affirmed,"[0] which I think plenty of (functional, happy-ish) people do not experience.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzschean_affirmation
[Footnote: Nietzsche is writing against the nihilism he saw in his own time, not in favor.]
What I hate is when people describe nihilism as "Well, I don't believe there is meaning but also I find satisfaction in the small things in life" or "There's no point in life, the point of life is to live". It's always the same pattern of rejecting objective meaning and thinking that's the same as having no meaning.
Fwiw, I'm in favor of Nietzsche's definition too, but I don't want to introduce a whole host of loaded words to an already confusing topic
(I don't understand the second quote so can't comment on it.)
One of my favorite poems is Be Drunk[0]. Would you take someone agreeing with the "thesis" of Be Drunk (thinking it's necessary to numb yourself against meaninglessness through diversions like alcohol or poetry) as unable to be a nihilist, because they are capable of distracting themselves from meaninglessness?
[0] https://poets.org/poem/be-drunk
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ETA: I don't think "is there anything meaningful in your life" uses the word "meaning" in the same was as the question "does life have meaning." Maybe the below commentor was totally correct about us all talking past each other, because the first question seems to ask "does anything reliably bring you joy" while the second asks "is there a purpose to existence." Someone could have things that matter to them while still thinking existence is purposeless.
Nihlism is acknowledging that many if not all aspects that result in "life" are pointless. I fail to understand how that equates to no will to live life. There is only irrationality to living while acknowledging the pointlessness of it. According to the nihilist, every other justification is flimsy at best, so justifying the pointless is equally irrational to them.
Regardless, I think there are a lot of misjudgments about such philosophy, particularly with associating with some destructive impulse or depression etc.
At the same time a person gets miserable going against the grain of society and thus you learn how to be content and how to keep your emotions in check. I do not see any conflict in these two things. I see it as the survival skills of a nihilist.
Your natural instinct will be to prosper in this life, it doesn't mean there is a bigger meaning than farting and dying.
This is a grossly uninformed misrepresentation. Some Protestants do espouse the idea of sola scriptura, however these groups are largely the minority of Christians. The Catholic Church, Orthodox Churches, and Anglicans/Episcopalians vastly outnumber the Lutherans, Pentecostals, Calvinists, and Baptists.
Catholic philosophy (Catholicism being the largest Christian group and approximately as large as all the other groups combined[0]) holds that faith and reason are the two pillars by which we can come to know truth. By faith is meant in general the knowledge received through revelation (e.g. the Bible). By reason is meant the workings of the intellectual processes, empirical evidence, and scientific knowledge.
Through the working together of faith and reason, we can come to know the fullness of the truth. The Bible is not the sole source of truth to Catholics. See also Fides et ratio by Pope St. John Paul II.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denomination... (data as of 2011)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life-meaning/#Nihi
https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/nihilism/v-1
Stanford's is probably the best-regarded of the bunch—you'll struggle to find a better brief introduction to most topics, than it provides, especially for $0. Skipping e.g. Wikipedia and going straight to the SEP, for philosophical topics, is usually a good call.