Just Live
drb.ie
drb.ie
Having no answer is not negative. You deem it negative because you have decided it should have a meaning.
People think nihilism and absurdism to be very pessimistic philosophies, for the sole reason that they do not want to accept that life has no absolute meaning. Even the idea of leaving your mark to the world is short-sighted selfcentredness, because in a long enough timescale people will even forget about Einstein.
No, what is pessimistic and aberrant is this very human notion that life must have meaning. Just embrace the reality of it. There is none. No one really cares or judge you at the end. It is such a happy and freeing platform to build your life around, rather than going through life silently cursing a God that by not existing, forgot to give you meaning.
Go through your own spiritual ego death. Then go do whatever you feel like doing, free from any shackles.
I'll freely admit that I didn't read to the _end_ of the article - but I got about halfway through, and I didn't detect any sense of disappointment from the author regarding their "negative" answer (nor, conversely, a yearning for a "positive" answer).
Well they are, and embracing them rather than entertaining them is probably a good way to get the soul-sickness.
What you're describing sounds closer to Existentialism. It gets put into this group sometimes too, but I don't think that's correct. My interpretation is that it's a more optimistic alternative where meaning exists, but it is fundamentally subjective & completely personal.
Embracing existentialism may feel like a heavy burden for some, but others will find it liberating since the emphasis is on personal responsibility. Like nihilism and absurdism, it requires no special faith in external things. But like Stoic or Zen traditions, it's actually pretty empowering. Responsibility for your life and its philosophy is a gift and a curse though, because there's so much work to do and that can feel overwhelming.
No one is coming for us, we have to save ourselves.
When I was a theist I would sometimes lay awake at night wondering if maybe I was wrong and everything was meaningless!
Once I was NOT a theist I would sometimes lay awake at night wondering if maybe I was wrong and everything has meaning!
Believe that everything is meaningless, truly believe it and you realize how little is known. Oh, sure I still believe everything is absurd... but late at night... what if everything is full of meaning? My knowledge is unfortunately not exhaustive.
I think no matter how deeply you investigate reality, and how many hypothesis and traditions self select out as untenable or plain false, intellectual humility is the real basis for happiness.
I also now suppose that increasing knowledge and "unknown reduction" is basically the foundational basis for morality as a species as well.
And I think this may actually be a decent and grounded basis for moral reasoning and moral realism.
I don't know a single religion that actually says we should pursue real ignorance, that uplifts ignorance as a state to pursue and increase. Unlearning "false" knowledge, sure, unlearning "habits", sure, but stupidity and ignorance, Pignorance if you will, are never viewed as the state we should pursue.
So I think the basis of morality and moral reasoning is a system that maximizes the number of avenues of pursuing knowledge. The greater the number of free (not in the deterministic/freewill sense) moral agents we can have running in our universe over time the more likely we are to find something if it is out there (over time.), and if not? Well, that's for a future generation to worry about if they ever manage to square the circle.
The closest thing to this is Taoism, and it's the least religious of religion. It's the most encompassing of philosophies. There is the Tao. It's everywhere and in everything. You won't ever be able to understand, define, touch, taste it, but you and everything else is part of it. Now go do whatever.
As Alan Watts said, Taoism is the purest of religions, all other religions are for people that don't get it so need to be taught verbosely and in details what is fundamentally unexplainable.
I'm a bonafide atheist, and I believe the Tao Te Ching to be one of the greatest cultural works every created.
My working definition of nihilism is not "life without meaning". Rather, it is "life without values." Values, here, means personal values. That which we seek to acquire and keep.
While some may have their own definitions that are at odds with mine, my view of nihilism is that it is a philosophy of self-sacrifice, because a nihilist (at least a logically consistent nihilist) does not value life, let alone anything else.
We have many examples of nihilist philosophies that are prevalent today. To give one: a particular variant of "envrionmentalism." Don't get me wrong, not all variants are nihilistic. But there is a specific variant that views humans as inherently destructive and at odds with "nature", and genuinely believes that humans ought to go extinct for the sake "nature", which is everything non-human. This is nihilistic because human life is what makes value possible in the first place, therefore without life you can't value anything, let alone "the planet."
> Then go do whatever you feel like doing, free from any shackles.
This is not nihilism, it is hedonism. There is a value there, albeit irrational ones (what if I feel like robbing a bank, or doing heroin? How will that work out for me?) But it is not without values, it values whims and pleasure without context.
Anyway I'm sure this is going to open up a big can of worms in the form of replies. I look forward to reading some of them but will probably opt to just do this single "drive by" comment since philosophical discussions are almost necessarily verbose and time consuming.
I'm going to answer your question and, in doing so, answer another comment that argued with me about the definition of nihilism.
The short answer to your question is "no."
According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism):
> Nihilism is a family of views within philosophy that rejects generally accepted or fundamental aspects of human existence, such as knowledge, morality, or meaning.
> There have been different nihilist positions, including that human values are baseless, that life is meaningless, that knowledge is impossible, or that some set of entities does not exist or is meaningless or pointless.
If existence doesn't exist, then there no values because nothing exists. If morality does not exist (or is baseless), this is a rejection of values since morality is a code of values. If knowledge doesn't exist or is impossible, this is a rejection of values since values are that which we seek to acquire and keep, and so if you can't know anything then values become meaningless because you don't know what you value or what you ought to value. If nihilism is a rejection of meaning qua meaning, then you are rejecting values since nothing can mean anything, and therefore values have no bearing on your life or existence since life and existence itself is meaningless (no matter how you define "meaning").
Therefore, nihilism is the rejection of ALL values regardless of whether they are personally chosen values or "imposed" values.
There may be degrees of nihilism. Some nihilists may reject certain values while choosing to retain others. But no matter how you slice it, nihilism is a declaration of war on values themselves.
Now, slight digression: my personal opinion is that on a fundamental level, all values must be chosen by the individual since only individuals are capable of forming value judgements. Groups can agree upon values, or say "if you want to belong to this group then you must accept certain values ('our' values)", but at the end of the day the individual must ultimately decide what values to adopt.
Hedonism broadly refers to a philosophy of "whim worship" or "pleasure seeking." It values pleasure for pleasure's sake and considers anything that brings pleasure to be "good" and anything that does not to be either "bad" or "neutral."
While hedonism may very well assert the "right" to "arbitrary pleasure", I disagree that that is its defining characteristic, since you can assert that right while also acknowledging that pleasure seeking for pleasure sake can be self-destructive and therefore morally wrong (ex: bank robbing and heroin abuse).
[Edit: upon re-reading the above paragraph, I think a better example here is to focus on drug abuse. I personally think that you have a "right" to put whatever you want into your body. And abusing hard drugs might feel good and bring you lots of immediate pleasure. That doesn't mean that it is "good for you" and therefore, under my code of ethics, self-destruction via drug abuse or other is immoral. But I'm also trying to steer clear of discussing the definition of morality, and why human beings need morality, because that would quickly get off topic].
I would say that pleasure is a positive value (vs the negation of values), whether you are a hedonist or not, and therefore hedonism and nihilism are mutually exclusive by definition. Though I would also argue that both are destructive since one dispenses with values all together while the other uses pleasure as a SOLE determiner of what to value and therefore values that which can be destructive.
No and no. I've replied to you elsewhere, but you seem to confuse "having no meaning" with "war against meaning". It's a common, and tiring, fallacy.
The former is neutral, the latter is negative. The point of nihilism is that there is NO meaning, so the subtext is "make your own", not the ignorant cliche of "nothing matters, we might just off ourselves."
I mean you can happily define any term however you want.
It will cause certain kinds of issues though... but just because the community organized documentation of our massively open source project called philosophy says (very roughly):
let Nihilism: &str = "Life is without an (intrinsic|external), fixed basis for meaning."
you can absolutely redefine it in your personal REPO to mean.
let Nihilism: &str = "Life is without a personal basis for value."
But... I mean, your definition is very strange and is not aligned with the community docs, in many ways it is quite antithetical and will cause any dependent arguments or clauses to have runtime errors.
But I mean, if you want to pick a nihilism variant/alt (My favorite nihilism is Mereological Nihilism) and elevate it to be your primary definition of Nihilism that's ok!
> This is not nihilism, it is hedonism.
Only if you are driven by selfish desires, but that’s not the only way of operating even when there’s no external/“absolute” definition of meaning. See “selfless action”, “karma yoga” and “dharma” on page 45 of the spiritual life manual.
No, hedonism is seeking pleasure. That is not what I said.
What you feel like doing is the stuff that makes you tick. The stuff that makes you get out of bed in the morning. For some, it's pleasure, for others, it's work, painting, surfing, seal-clubbing, whatever.
> what if I feel like robbing a bank, or doing heroin?
Then do that. People that feel like robbing banks, already are doing it, so what is the problem? Reminds me of the misconception from religious people that atheism means having no morals whatsoever, that it means murdering babies all day long. It won't be "philosophy" nor "religion" that stops you from doing harm, if that's what drives you.
I much prefer to believe that the vast majority of people have good intentions, and have loftier goals for themselves than pursuing hedonism.
It does not mean anything about the nature of the answer itself.
I used to consider myself an "optimistic nihilist". But now, I understand the meaning of my life (by way of my biological programming) is producing offspring and ensuring they get to the point where they can produce offspring. They bring me great joy (AKA the right combination of bio-chemicals + electrical signals, ego death be damned).
So now, my meaning of life is my children. Any other "meaning" is something I make up and pretend (Eg. do a startup). And I'm at complete peace with all of that. And I'm still a very optimistic person.
Actually, I think this because a suspicious number of people who ID as open nihilists/absurdists when the Discord turns philosophical feel the need to say things like "but it's not like I'm depressed because life has no absolute meaning".
Maybe, but they often do turn out to be depressed. And claiming the arrow of causality does not exist actually isn't a proof that it doesn't exist. Plenty of obese people claim their daily caloric surplus has no relationship to their health problems, and they are just incorrect.
On the other hand, when I consider the moral realists I know, most of them seem to be quite happy people. I almost never hear someone say "But I'm not depressed because good is objective". Sometimes they might get sad or frustrated because they feel they suck at chasing it, but that's a level up.
In the most interesting case, I know of someone who started as a depressed non realist, read a bunch of middlebrow philosophy books, realized the moral realists actually had much stronger arguments than r/nihilism led them to believe, became a moral realist, and actually stopped being depressed. That would be me, myself. So that suggests a pretty strong arrow of causality to me.
That's not what people do you know.
> Go through your own spiritual ego death. Then go do whatever you feel like doing, free from any shackles.
Free from any shackles, even those of our innate empathy? No thanks. And please don't either.
…is unanswerable not because life has no meaning, but because the answer is personal.
Part of growing up is to answer the question for yourself.
For me, part of the meaning of life is to walk in the woods and see as much as I can. Part of the meaning of life is to understand the trauma of my family of origin and take steps forward with my daughter. Part of the meaning of life is to be ambitious and creative and build something lasting and useful, but to not do so in isolation, to be integrated in culture and people I respect.
Exactly zero of those may apply to you or anyone else. I’ve been here for 42 years and those are things that seem steady to me.
But another person could find radically different meaning.
That’s what I think these attempts to define life’s meaning in an essay are doomed to fail. The meaning of life is not a thing in the world. It’s a process we each can embark on, if we so choose.
What is the "meaning" of a mountain? What a silly question. The only reason the "meaning of life" seems coherent is because we wrap our very sense of existence in words.
Let go of words and definitions and just be. At rest in all that is.
It’s hard to let go of language
But it’s an amazing experience when we can stop it from mediating or even interrupting, our perception of the present moment
Just being, just here, just now
Thank you for the reminder
Be of one mind with the tool. Use it to complete your purpose. Then, the work complete, put the tool down and walk away. The only path to serenity.
An observation, not a criticism! The author is a professor of philosophy, it is in fact his professional duty to engage with and teach the Great Sophomoric Questions.
And nearly all of us were sophomores, once or twice. Some of us, presumably, are sophomores right this instant.
Fortunately for all of us, after millennia of searching enquiry, this question, finally, has a definitive answer: the Meaning of Life is a 1983 musical sketch comedy, by the inimitable British troupe of Oxbridge philosophers, Monty Python.
While better known for their invention of the most popular programming language in data science, we owe the Pythons a great debt for at last settling this question, once and for all.
I guess I'll never be one of the cool kids who can honestly answer this question with a deafening silence. Oh, well. I'd rather be happy doing right by my fellow man because that's the point of it all than sitting in a corner ruminating on whether my intuition is misguided.
I'm a moral realist. Everyone seems to advocate that some things are properly basic, I think morality is one of those things.
In fact, all of our senses work like that. So it would be surprising if this other felt sense isn't also usually, approximately, but correctly, homing in on objective good.
Are there times when what we perceive to be true really is rarely the actual truth? Absolutely -- in deeply abstracted thinking, and over highly complex domains. That seems to me to be more of an argument against trusting the complicated chains of logic that lead one to deny the evidence of their moral senses, though. I've made enough "trivial" mistakes in math class that led to a totally wrong conclusion to be skeptical, and that was back when I could check the right answer with Wolfram|Alpha.
(My own deeply abstracted thinking suggests that your moral intuition homes in on objective good similarly to how the processes of markets home in on Pareto efficiency. See how silly that sounds? And yet I can't shake it. It's like making up a conspiracy theory to explain why water is wet!)
What does this mean for mystics, who claim that the most important points in life are beyond narration? How about psychedelic experiences, which in a similar way escape from the constraints of storytelling?
In a society where the absolute majority of storytelling happens in advertising, doesn't it carry risks to hinge your personality and belief on this practice?
Edit: Ah.
"Galen John Strawson (born 1952) is a British analytic philosopher".
It means nothing to them. I think they don't care about such trivialities as a meaning of life, they just live it and are happy splashing in a puddle of water (I still remember how happy I was in one pretty big puddle, there was a lot of splashing!).
> What does this mean for mystics, who claim that the most important points in life are beyond narration? How about psychedelic experiences, which in a similar way escape from the constraints of storytelling?
That's about searching of other narratives when your chosen one isn't working for you.
> In a society where the absolute majority of storytelling happens in advertising, doesn't it carry risks to hinge your personality and belief on this practice?
Yeah. When you chose a specific meaning of life, you risk it being not aligned with your inner expectations, even worse when you chose a meaning pushed down from people who don't care for your wellbeing. Like with any metaphor of life (life is a game | life is a series of transactions | life is a story | life is life [nah nah, nah, nah nah] ).
From article:
> More bluntly: it’s certainly not true that all of us are naturally Narrative; not as I understand the notion. Some people are naturally non-Narrative. Some, like myself, are profoundly anti-Narrative. We conform to the eight platitudes, but we don’t in any way conceive of our lives as having the form of a story.
What do you mean, "working for you"? Do you consider a meaningful life instrumental in relation to something else, which we have to conclude is meaningless or it would be the meaning of that life?
I get the impression that you manifest the risk I was alluding to in my initial comment. There's a huge distance between the person Augustine described in his confessions, notably book 2, about the pear tree, and the kind of 'choosy' personality you describe here. Are you really, really sure about which kind is preferable to you?
I mean "are you happy with how your life is unfolding". Some people need meaning, some don't. It's up to them. I don't care if other people don't have the same needs as me. I only care that they reflect upon what they need in life and try to either fulfill that needs or try to abandon them if they can't. Having unrealized needs is making us humans unhappy. We can either realize them or try to remove them from our "I need this" list.
> There's a huge distance between the person Augustine described in his confessions, notably book 2, about the pear tree, and the kind of 'choosy' personality you describe here. Are you really, really sure about which kind is preferable to you?
Sorry, didn't read Augustine, Marcus Aurelius Meditations was my book of choice (when I finally read it, most of what he wrote was pretty evident for me, so I describe myself as self-inflicted stoic, but not a TRUE stoic).
Because one of the main themes in Meditations is that it's fine to be unhappy as long as you are a good person, living a virtous life.
Augustine is kind of _the_ critic of stoicism within virtue ethics in european antiquity. Maybe you're missing out. Have you at least engaged with Aristotle?
This is a helpful reminder that I get most satisfaction from those things - cooking, gardening, physical activity, socialising with and helping/nurturing others, etc.
In the modern world, most of us 'make a living' by doing quite abstract tasks and fall into the trap of using that income to replace what we think of as mundane tasks with more convenient alternatives (fast food, movies instead of conversation, etc). In a sense, we alienate ourselves from what our lives actually are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F
Amusingly, he prefers the equation ATMAN = BRAHMAN
(See wikipedia article)
The meaning of life is what life is and does. Life experiences reality and message-passes thee grokked data to the future.
Not really an answer though to "What is the meaning of life?"
At some point I questioned the word "mind" here as the ultimate scope of the question.
Whatever meaning one will find could prove (babble follows) "orthogonal to the existential plane".
The mind is great as far as it goes.
It has countless possible meanings - whatever we make of it; because meanings are made in the mind.
Saying it has no meaning is as silly and non-helpful as saying it has one particular meaning.
The meaning of life is very much whatever we make of it.
I don't see the point of answering the question this way.
That's not surprising because it's downstream from religion, where we don't get to decide what's meaningful: we are told.
It's neither here nor there because what it's really about is a feeling, not a rationalization.
No. Inherent. Meaning.