Nihilists annul everything and as such they will annul themselves at the end
Nihilists annul everything and as such they will annul themselves at the end
“Those who seek to satisfy the mind of man by hampering it with ceremonies and music and affecting charity and devotion have lost their original nature””
“If water derives lucidity from stillness, how much more the faculties of the mind! The mind of the sage, being in repose, becomes the mirror of the universe, the speculum of all creation.
I have a philopohy myself, a sort of mixture between nihilism and existentialism. it goes as follows: There is no point in life. So have as much fun doing what you can while you are alive. Religion aside, we have no idea what will occure when we die, so have as much fun as you can while your still 'live and kickin'.
Dada was a very nihilistic movement and yet I think it only benifitted the world. It challenged many social and cultural assumptions, it upset the ruling class' taste, it liberated art and literature from rigidity, it terrorised the world with bad taste, absurdist humor and frivolity. And today we're better for it. I couldn't imagine myself living in the world before Dada.
Even so, I think nihilism is only useful in small doses. I think at the end of the end, humans need stability, culture, family, friends, and some guiding rules to achieve full happiness.
nihilism is all about having short bangs and wearing blue spectacles.
nihilists everywhere!
" ah. must be exhausting.."
To above: thank you. I clicked this thread hoping to find a Lebowski reference, and you saved me some time by being the first thing I saw.
Metawordz.com
INEVITABLE.
Nihilist: We believe in nothing, Lebowski. Nothing. And tomorrow we come back and we cut off your chonson.
The Dude: Excuse me?
*mission accomplished*
whats life if there is nothing to believe in ?
Whats life is there is faith?
The only thing that keeps us moving on is our belief... our believe that that something good is going to happen.. Our belive in Love, death , God , truth.... etc..
I don't think that nihilism is a way of living .. nor something to follow.. nor something that has any meaning !!!
"He is asleep. Though his mettle was sorely tried,
He lived, and when he lost his angel, died.
It happened calmly, on its own,
The way the night comes when day is done."
caveat lector: i'm not doing these ideas justice here...
There is a modern nihilism much different than what this thread seems to be about which was influenced by Heidegger and was based on the 'ex nihilo' theory of existence and has received a great interpretation by Jean Luc Nancy in the fantastic albeit short book 'Creation of the world'. it is more to the point that as there is no Kantian foundation to existence, neither in nor prior, and that all perspectives are relatively valorized that nihilism in this sense is merely a relativist anthropological perspective, which is to say rather skeptical- in the philosophical, epoche/aporia sense of the word in which any view is as justified in its basis as any other. it also allows it to be a very creative principle as everything comes 'from nothing/ex nihilo'.
yeah maybe, but as i recall, the heidegger approach, at the end, dangles between an under-the-covers mysticism specially in later texts like " the end of phylosophy" and actually nihilism, which in his definition would actually be something of the sort "everything is nothing. and nothing is everything. all that is real is the void."
and stuff.
anyways, as usual, i killed a thread. so BUMP.
http://www.ctheory.net/will/index.html
http://www.rhizome.org/
http://www.lifeinthewires.net/
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=201
http://web.uvic.ca/~akroker/
its more than just girls with short hair and blue spectacles for ya.
I'm an immanentist thank you very much. :P
I had to study the nihilist perspective on the meaning of life once, if I remember correctly the premise goes as such:
Premise 1: In order to have meaning in life, there must be a transcendent meaning to life. (I reject this)
Premise 2: There is no transcendent meaning to life. (I accept this)
Conclusion: There is no meaning in life. (I reject this)
I remember I had to read through bits of Schopenhauer, Camus and Nagel's pieces on the meaning of life. Bits were somewhat depressing, not that there works weren't brilliant, especially Camus approach with the "Myth of Sisyphus" or Nagel's view that one should carry life with a grain of absurdity.
Though I'm not exactly sure if Camus or Nagel are nihilist but there piece's do reflect a feeling of meaningless in life.
I'm not a philosophy major and this is way beyond my element, so here's hoping I don't sound too ignorant trying to convey my feelings on nihilism.
Last edited by Derwind; 01-11-2011 at 11:09 PM.
I think that the existence of a nihilist website, and (especially) nihilist texts that took a lot of work and thought testify to what is in reality a more existentialist-type outlook, since the website and the texts are themselves projects of the sort that existentialists advocate for the sake of deriving a person meaning in life..
"Nihilists annul everything and as such they will annul themselves at the end"Originally Posted by weltanschauung
A mercy killing though.
Last edited by prendrelemick; 01-12-2011 at 03:55 AM.
"death to ideology" is an uneducated thing to say
ideology exists in existence itself.
I don't know if this has been mentioned before, and I apologize if it has been, but I don't have the time peruse everything that has been written before me. I have seen it mentioned, however, that nihilism is a negating philosophy; that the nihilist must inevitably kill himself in his process of destruction. This is an excellent example of the non sequitur fallacy. A moral nihilist (the kind many here are discussing), above all else, denies the validity and the existence of universal ethical claims. These are all, to the nihilist, subjective, meaningless propositions. Thus, the universe is inherently valueless. From this, it does not follow in anyway that one should kill one's self; in fact, to do so would catapult the nihilist away from his philosophy, in that a moral judgment must be made predicated on the perceived value of death. Simply put, it is just as senseless to a nihilist that he remains alive then that he dies. No choice is better or worse than the other. Therefore, to claim that a nihilist is hypocritical if he refuses suicide is to impose upon him a type of value system which he denies. To him, naturally, all human beings are nihilistic, whether they realize it or not -- even if one adheres to a meaning-based ethical system, these systems are still necessarily false. Similarly, many nihilists are also scientific determinists, and they derive their nihilism from the idea that we are nothing but the composition of particles in time and space. In this sense, we do not have free will, we do not have a Self, we do not have a soul, etc. Everything is a grand process, a constant system of actions/reactions. Thus, proposing that the nihilist must commit suicide is essentially meaningless, as no action can truly be freely "committed," and no "self" can be killed. We simply exist, all things occur passively. The idea that a nihilist is necessarily predisposed to violent actions based on his philosophy is historically accurate, of course, but philosophically invalid.
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