What happens after global warming inundates Florida? What’s left to cling to then?
floating floridians?
In answer to the question, “What is our purpose?” I will simply say that it is your choice. No one can tell you your purpose for living. This is an Objectivist attitude and if one doesn’t find purpose in their life then there exists none.
Nihilism is the ugly truth that no one wants to acknowledge. We all live our lives under the assumption that our values are permanent and immutable. We judge those around us and blame others for problems that we see in the world. Nihilism isn’t the problem, morality is.
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I can’t believe nobody’s gone with this so far
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Surprisingly, antifoundationalim can also be defined as nihilism
American antifoundationalist Richard Rorty makes a similar point: “Nothing grounds our practices, nothing legitimizes them, nothing shows them to be in touch with the way things are” (“From Logic to Language to Play,” 1986). This epistemological cul-de-sac, Rorty concludes, leads inevitably to nihilism. “Faced with the nonhuman, the nonlinguistic, we no longer have the ability to overcome contingency and pain by appropriation and transformation, but only the ability to recognize contingency and pain”
I can see it for people. Rorty would say that things like Human Nature, Natural Law, or the Rights of Man are all social constructs. He’d say that liberal democracy, the welfare state, moderate egalitarianism, and human rights ( somewhere somewhat to the left of, say, Denmark) are valuable because they have led to flourishing societies, not because they reflect underlying human nature.
What unleashes my underlying naive realist is when he applies this to the natural world. Suddenly coming across something in his writings along the lines of “we sent men to the Moon using Newton’s physics because they’re more useful than Aristotle’s” makes me want to scream out, “no, it’s really because they’re more True!- isn’t it?”
I think most scientists would say, yes, they are working with a model of the Universe, but what they are trying to do is build a model that is closer as a one-to-one correspondence with what is Actually Out There. Rorty would say you can’t get that, because it’s models all the way down.
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Good quotes. Thank you.
I’m not certain how one could “not believe in anything” though. Unless one is in a vegetative state his entire life, how could one not believe in anything? Or are you suggesting that Nihilism is an inner intellectual thing, completely disassociated from the natural world. You don’t believe in gravity? Natural Laws…that kind of stuff.
I was driving on the highway yesterday thinking about all this. As I drove under an overpass, I hoped that what I believed to be to true, that the overpass was forty feet above my car, was actually there and not three feet off the ground. Obviously it was. I am here.
This reminds me of the Question Everything bumper stickers I used to see for sale at Grateful Dead shows.
This reads like a IP thread or a high school class discussion on anything that relied on a personal opinion.
Thanks again QSS. Good stuff.
Not everyone though is even brought up with set of foundational values, family, religious or philosophical.
Why? Could you explain this further?
Morality, mainly in the west, is taught to children and later reinforced as a fact. The sheep that never question this can’t understand why free thinkers would ever doubt what they have been told.
I’m sure that saying morality is the problem precludes me from being a true nihilist. I consider myself a cynic or at least in a cynical time in my life. So much of what I have been told has been contradicted later in life so it does seem like nihilism is a rational attitude.
Of course, many attitudes make sense if we consider psychology. I would much rather investigate why people feel nihilistic rather than the truth of nihilistic philosophies.
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I agree. I know that now therapy is being watered down to hour long professional development calling on people to “Speak their own truth…be on your own path,” yet I find that without a paid professional observer, one falls into an echo chamber created by one’s peer group(s).
OK, and if we say that an objective 100% true TRUTH is out there AND attainable, then How has the knowledge of finding these contradictions adversely affected your life? Just bc Santa isn’t real doesn’t mean you kill ten people, ya?
I couldn’t kill someone. Even if I were to be guaranteed to get away with it. I’m not going to stand around and call someone a sinner because they did kill another person though.
I get your point though. If I don’t believe human life has value then I should act from those beliefs.
Well, I think my point was more along the lines of “Yeah, you learn some falsehoods have been presented as Truths, but so what? How much harm did it actually cause?”
That people are getting bent out of shape because “YOU CAN’T PHYSICALLY PULL YOURSELF UP BY YOUR OWN BOOTSTRAPS” and this was a real thing, said by a real American politician, as she tried to make her point understood seems to me to be somewhat foolish. “The sky’s not blue. It’s transparent…so let’s go burn down a school for teaching me this horseshit.” I just don’t think that most of the “lies” we were told are that big of a deal. 
I see your point but a nihilist would say that inculcating false beliefs would be as big a problem as any. What is the biggest problem for a nihilist?
I’m not even in a position to answer that. Yet if we go with, iirc, @MikeN1’s post about Rorty who suggested that “it’s models all the way down” then aren’t ALL beliefs proven false sooner or later or much much later? I honestly don’t know. This is a fact finding mission for me. I am open to consider other POVs.
Sure, people can riot because they feel like rioting – something along the lines of life is kinda pointless but cheap thrills are fun so hey why not? – rather than because they actually want to protest something. Like when you’re walking down the street (not during a riot) and some complete stranger + nasty drunk fatally bonks you on the head and the next day can’t think of why he did it. It happens, sometimes.
The stuff you’re seeing in your country now is more about people wanting change. The fact that riotous behavior is easier in a crowd that’s already assembled means people who want to do it anyway suddenly have the opportunity when crowds happen to exist. Yet the protests that create those crowds are (basically) for the purpose of promoting certain beliefs against certain others.
Of course, people can organize protests in the hope that they will lead to riots, but that’s not nihilism either – it’s the belief in your own ability to use the beliefs of others for your benefit (as I’ve tried to explain before).
If there are more riots than usual in a given period, that probably means there are more emotionally charged protests than usual. And there have been emotionally charged protests, and riots too, for pretty much as long as humans have been capable of forming crowds (i.e. since long before Nietzsche and all that).
The way your thinking comes across to me reminds of that old cliche: son does something parents don’t like it, parents get pissed off, parents declare I have no son –
– or I have no daughter as it goes from time to time.
It seems like if you were there, you would ask the son (or daughter), why don’t you believe in family values?
(You could instead – or also – ask the same question of the parents, but that would be very un-Confucian. 
)
I would say that question misses the point. In the vast majority of cases of family conflict, it’s not yes family values vs. no family values but rather FV version A vs. FV version B. In those two literary examples I gave, Juliet justifies her disloyalty to her father by pointing out that she’s being loyal to her husband (who is also her family), and Cordelia is the only one of the three daughters whose family values have any substance – the other two put on a good show but really only care about themselves.
Actually, that last example is very resonant here, as the loyal daughter’s values are mistaken for, literally, nothing.
There’s also the occasional I have no brother/sister, like in a certain episode of Game of Thrones. And (spoiler alert) in that case, nihilism almost works as an explanation, because who wouldn’t be a nihilist after going through Ramsay Bolton’s “enhanced interrogation” / ego annihilation program? But in the end, it turns out deep down the brother never really lost his values (he was just afraid), and the sister never really stopped caring about him (she was just pissed off and/or being pragmatic). 
Um, possibly the part where you said
When people start BEHAVING as though life and existence is pointless, and not simply thinking and moaning about it…
Storming a legislature because you’re an anarchist and want to burn it down and not let it or any similar structure ever be rebuilt is one thing. Storming it to correct a perceived injustice is something else. Those people were wrong (very wrong), but there was a perfectly non-nihilistic reason for what they did.
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What reason would anyone have to say that, other than hubris?
Even we beings who are advanced enough to overcome the so-called “laws” of space-time know that the universe is bigger and more complex than our brains can comprehend.
Sooner or later, concepts like proof and false become subjective. 
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Right. I think an anti-foundationalist like Rorty would say that it’s not that all beliefs are proven false; it’s that beliefs can’t be true or false, just more or less useful- which brings up the question “useful for what?”
Think about it. If YOU are of the belief that nothing matters, why wouldn’t you want to shut down others’? Fucking happens here on this site all the time. Is it hubris or simply douchbaggery?
People hold unquestioned beliefs all the time. And people like me (a teacher) teach values that simply make their lives easier. Certainly in there are a few genuine nuggets of truth but, generally, I’m just looking at learning outcomes and my own sanity
This holding up of the slave morality is what neitzche talked about and I am very much in agreement. All of the talk about family values was very interesting to me because I never really considered morality on the micro level.
It’s not that they can’t be true or false but that humans are not in a position to know, ergo what people think of as true or false corresponds more reliably to useful or not-so-useful than to genuinely true or genuinely false (though maybe Rorty would say it the way you said it.)
How do you get from absolute truth (as opposed to relative truth) is beyond comprehension to nothing matters?
More importantly, how do you get to absolute truth is within comprehension?
Think about it: the universe is big. The human mind is complex, but it’s not complex on a scale even remotely like that of the universe’s bigness.
I haven’t been paying attention. Did you guys go over truth tables yet?