Why is nihilism almost always used as a pejorative? If you're a theist, I can understand. But to nonreligious posters...

>The only logical conclusion of it is to kill yourself.
No, because that would have no value either. No reason to live, no reason to die

>It is not a constructive way to approach the world.
Yes, it won't get you far in a society, probably.
>Inherently negative outlook on life is also a sign of mental illness.
wut

Well first of all OP, it's not possible to be a nihilist. There are many things that have meaning in life, whether you like it or not, such as pain and suffering.

The reason it is a pejorative is because so-called nihilists are either extremely depressed teenage edgelords(who literally can't see that they are mentally ill), or actual sadists who want the world to burn.

People like you suffer from too little exposure to cultures outside those of the West.

How is this in any way related to what I said?

>There are many things that have meaning in life, whether you like it or not, such as pain and suffering.
How does these things offer meaning beyond telling you it hurts? That's not meaning. I could inject a batch of heroin, receiving pleasure, but that wouldn't give any meaning. That would just be me, washed in pleasure for a time - just as with pain

I am depressed but it's divorced from my 'nihilism'. I was depressed when I was religious, too. I just wanna live according to as accurate a picture of reality as possible.

Because there are other types of pain that physical.

If you are happily married for 5 years, and you come home from work and a note lies on the coffee table saying your wife is leaving you for her lover of 5 years, something changes. You wouldn't be the same person as when before you walked in the door and read the note.

This is literally pure meaning in the form of lived experience or being. Just because you can be glib and say "Hurr durr it doesn't matter because in 100000 years you'll be dead anyway", doesn't change the fact that our whole lives are oriented around the meaning of our lived experience.

Does that really have anything to do with 'meaning', though?

If you'd had a little more exposure to cultures outside those of the West, you'd know.

Sure it does, why would your wife being unfaithful, and leaving you, matter at all, if the nihilist thesis that life is meaningless is true?

It's because the nihilist thesis isn't true, and can't be true, because whether you like it or not, the universe is literally made of meaning.

I find most nihilism stupid because they reject "values" believing them to be false while glorifying truth.

If you're a nihilist just for the hedonism tho then no problem.

Just because something isn't imbued with objective meaning doesn't mean we can't personally hold things as 'valuable'. I like my partner and like my relationship with them, and are personally committed to helping it thrive.

Truth brings me pleasure, my property

>Just because something isn't imbued with objective meaning doesn't mean we can't personally hold things as 'valuable'.

But that's the point you moron. The objective meaning *is* the fact that you value your partner, your relationship, and are personally committed to them.

What you're essentially saying is that because I cannot access "subjective experience" of the value you hold for your partner and relationships, this means it doesn't exist.

>Why is nihilism almost always used as a pejorative?
Because it was BTFO almost 200 years ago by Dosto and Nietzsche

Nietzsche was a positive nihilist

The experience of value is not the same as value itself. If all value is subjective then it can fuck right off. I'm not trying to demean personal value, I'm just opposed to the elevation of personal value to the universal.

I guess the problem here is that nihilism means a million fucing shit.

>The experience of value is not the same as value itself.

Yes it is, because values are actions in the world, and to experience something you must do it.

alright listen here you little faggots.

world is deterministic. Every action is pre determined and only a higher entity above this universe can see the action reaction chain of everything. its a book and time is the reader. is there a meaning to that ? probably not. it just is. As long as we dont ask the creator/s if there are any but then we would have to ask the creator of the creator and we are stuck in infinitive loop.

Cognitive dissonance

I thought nihilism was about things not having inherent meaning? I don't see why someone couldn't adhere to that belief and also believe that certain morals are worth having despite being socially constructed.

The existence of the creator is irrelevant if it does not intervene and initial systems are deterministic. Emergent complexity.

And how are they worth having in the philosophical framework of nihilism?

Stop posting.

Personal value judgments. Applied value instead of inherent. Maybe you see some moral belief like "do not murder" as evolutionarily beneficial and you place personal importance on the continuation of humanity.

No.

I don't see how this is different from absurdism or existentialism.

So what do we think is the bigger subhuman meme..

Universality (also sometimes misnamed objectivity)
or
Equality.

Cast your votes.

It's not, but aren't those nihilistic philosophies?

there's nothing wrong with subscribing to the belief that life is without meaning, purpose, or value

there is a lot wrong with letting those principles govern your relationship with other people and society which is what people who read the wikipedia entry for nihilism and then use it as an excuse to act D A M A G E D do

Existentialismis the belief that through a combination of awareness, free will, and personal responsibility, one can construct their own meaning within a world that intrinsically has none of its own.
Nihilismis the belief that not only is there no intrinsic meaning in the universe, but that it’s pointless to try to construct our own as a substitute.
Absurdismis the belief that a search for meaning is inherently in conflict with the actual lack of meaning, but that one should both accept this and simultaneously rebel against it by embracing what life has to offer.

Interesting, thanks for the run down. What are nihilist arguments for the pointlessness of finding not inherent bases of meaning?

>the meaning you make for yourself is meaningless
Thats fucking dumb, and why no one takes nihilists seriously.

>there's nothing wrong with subscribing to the belief that life is without meaning, purpose, or value
There is because those would be either misnomers or contradictio in adjecto.

aside from accusations of adolescence, edginess, etc., it's used as a pejorative because it's so far from being a philosophically serious position it's almost funny
it's like identifying as someone who misses the point

>the will to power
>nihilism
Pick one.

>free will
>intrinsic meaning
>inherently
Nihilism, existentialism, absurdism, whatever. These discussions all seem to have such an extreme misuse of language going on. How could a will be "free" if we define the term explicitly as how an is agent both being-acted-upon but also acting-upon-on others. Free will would seem to imply only the latter occurs, a bizarre view of reality.

Similarly, if the world was "intrinsically/inherently/objectively" anything it would already be like that and not need to be investigated in such a way, *reality can only be as it is*.

Why.

>if the world was "intrinsically/inherently/objectively" anything it would already be like that and not need to be investigated in such a way, *reality can only be as it is*.

The word of God doesn't warrant investigation?

>nihilism
>creating purpose and value
PICK ONE AND ONE ONLY YOU PSEUD

>nihilism is "the belief that life has no intrinsic meaning or value and that humanity is insignificant"
Where does it say that we can't create our own?

I am not the one you replied to.
I don't know much about Nietzsche.
I don't know much about anything, in fact.
I just don't see any contradiction.

I see nihilism as destroying the idea of universal moral and inherent value. It's a first step.

Then, you can build your own subjective moral system. You can choose to value anything in any way you want.
You just have to acknowledge the fact that the choice you made do not bear any absolute within themselves.

Under that light, what is wrong with nihilism?

The years-old tradition on Veeky Forums of specifically (and with negative intent) referring to contrarian types of all stripes as "edgy", "fedoras" etc (don't pretend that atheism and nihilism aren't very closely related in the contemporary western mind) puts the lie to this claim of yours.

Not that any of this matters.

The simple fact is that despite being "more right" ways of viewing the world in accordance with available information, categories like nihilism, atheism and so on remain deeply repugnant to humans, since they are both in their ways anti-human. That doesn't make the content of what they're about untrue however, as various intelligent people have observed and as the OP has eloquently phrased the tacit defense in the form of a prompt.

Not that any of this matters.

Add to this something that Veeky Forums understands very well about itself: above being of a particular political bent, Veeky Forums is above all /contrarian/, always looking to get the rise out of people, to try the other view. That is exactly why /pol/ is lately inhabited by genuinely rightist/religious people, because these acts are perceived by maybe-former-teenage-atheists, back when /that/ was contrarian, as ways of pushing back against the current culture. The point being that this insistence on contradiction explains Veeky Forums to a very large degree.

Not that any of this matters in the long view, of course.

For the record, I am past thirty and in the past few years, I would describe myself as having genuinely settled down into a nihilism. As you might imagine, this has deleterious effects on me personally, but there you have it. I think the thing that keeps me going is that I do not have a naturally depressive personality/brain chemistry, I can derive enjoyment from certain things, I can laugh and so on, but I don't see myself coming out of this.

I do appreciate that anons in the thread seem to be actually hashing out the value question, but it seems to me that the "pro-life" anti-nihilist user(s) are badly misreading things.

>Not that any of this matters in the long view, of course.
Spooked.

good post

Tldr

whats it called when you uhhh
acknowledge that theres absolutely NO objective or intrinsic value in anything BUT you continue to live because

a) you dont care
b) you dont care
c) youre only concerned with things that have value to you and thats it
d) you dont care

i call it nihilism because im being cheeky but im seeing a lot of revised definitions and questionable arguments itt

This is cheeky but it goes to a simple idea I've had that has probably been articulated elsewhere.

Basically, I start here. I reject religion for the conventional fedora reasons (preference for science, no personal experience of anything genuinely outside of the convential western scientific worldview, "faith" in science, and so on). And since (for me, consequently) we really are at bottom just globs of purposeless meat floating through space, and buttressed slightly by my personal view that the depictions of god have him as an asshole according to my contemporary sensibilities, I begin by rejecting god, and move toward what Charles Murray calls the Europe Syndrome, which is what I've sketched above. Naturally all of this materialism (as another user ITT has intimated), taken to its logical conclusion, leads (correctly in my view) to a nihilism.

My basic view at the time is that of course daily lived human life will always have some sort of local meaning/conditional value, but that these shouldn't be confused for the so-called non-existent intrinsic value of nihilism, which does require a god or some other means of getting-outside-of-the-world, which I reject for the above starting reasons.

For me, the will-to-life is a specific animal delusion which extends even to individual human intelligences. This delusion will rationalize itself to no end, of course, as it is programmed to do. The intelligence of this particular animal however proves to have diminishing returns, as in the case of (for our illustration) the quasi-voluntary celibacy of Japanese men, the suicide of a Weinenger, etc. Genuinely smart people get rid of themselves. Why?

The specific, local value is whatever concerns one here, and so it is the concern of most living humans. But the absense of the larger value, meaning, purpose etc scuttles our little scurryings. This is what existentialists work-around somewhat validly, but at hte same time the real experience is you, being a hard-coded animal, lying to itself, lying that its continued existence is important.

The average normie doesn't even bother about these gymnastics, but being a thinking and feeling animal, /knows/ that things /feel/ important, and so is usually content with a lesser analysis: "yeah it might not really matter in the end but it still matters to me for now so fuck it." I gather that this is part the existential impulse, and this type of thought process is nowadays accepted uncritically.

Basically I allow that there are "local meanings/purposes" of daily life, but I reject a deeper meaning or purpose, and not that it matters but I would like to convince other of this view.

Persons treat 'nihilism' as if everyone has the same clear, definite idea of what element of experience they refer to with 'value' or 'meaning'.
But they don't. Unless you adopt some kind of quasi-solipsism, everyone is experiencing essentially the same thing. It's a merely a difference in what is being refered to by the word- non-nihilists think they're refering to a certain element of their experience, but nihilists think they're refering to something that isn't part of their experience. If you define 'values' the way the former implicitly do, they exist, if the way the latter do, they don't. It's just arbitrary naming.
This is the pattern for all or almost all philosophy- with 'truth', 'knowledge', 'existence' and so on, which why it's worthless.
It's tantamount to a difference in general language. No one screams about how the 'sun' exists but the 'soliel' doesn't, or any such thing. But with these 'philosophical' concepts, since they've come to carry political weight, monolinguals will rant and rave and roar about them.
But none of it matters. The world you experience is as you experience it, and there's no 'deeper knowledge' or magical invisible intangible floating 'values' or 'possibilites' that you can ever access.

(Count this post as probably less perfect than the one above)
>'truth', 'knowledge', 'existence'
Add 'free will' and 'God' to that list also- these are the examples I've done the most thinking about. Though the latter is complicated by involving... for lack of better words I'll say """empirical""" claims as well as """rational""" ones.
Namely, the 'God' of Christendom is at the same time supposed to be the First Cause as well as a traditional polytheistic entity. I'd say primâ facie that this First-Cause-god is no more absurd an idea than the Sun-god or War-god, which aren't ridiculous ideas at all. But the trouble is that, as the First Cause or Necessary Being is by definition the determinant of all, the narrative of will, of rage or desire or love, that flourishes with a less-than-absolute power is impossible here. Rather, reason demands that the First-Cause-god be completely satisfied with every other element of existence, to which He is the like the soul to a body- though more perfectly. For if there were anything at all unsatisfactory to Him he would have fixed it from before the beginning, since he is the determinant of all things. Moreover His will is of course absolute.
The Scholastics- at least it seems to me- play a word game with the word 'nothing', making it into another deity more powerful and ancient than what the feign to consider the Highest. Abzu by another name. Nothing is greater than God, after all, so it makes sense that it'd be able to overpower His perfection and defile His creation.
And of course they whine and call you an atheist or pantheist when you take the existence of what they occasionally claim to be their God seriously.

This.
I have talked with one guy who is a materialist and thinks objective morality and free will exists, among a few other things. How he can deduct that from his materialism is absurd. It's actually pretty funny how such a contradicting person can exist.

I haven't cringed this hard for at least a year. You are not only a stupid and ignorant person, but also extremely obnoxious.

Because then it's not nihilism.

I also watch Jordan Peterson.

That was extremely mean and contributed nothing to the discussion. Fuck off.

Denying the idea of inherent values does not forbid you from assessing your own subjective values.

This is still nihilism. If you don't agree, at least explain why.

>Go to watch a panel discuss Macbeth
>this one pseud memes all this crap about women and how half of all men will not reproduce
>other panelists actually interesting but get dominated by dipshits ramblings
>fast forward 6 moths
>pseud has memed himself into fame

#triggered

care to explain why?

If there is a sect of nihilists that claim nihilism rejects subjective meaning as well, they're in the minority (and likely don't have a firm grasp of the nature of subjectivity).

It's the philosophical equivalent to a child throwing a tantrum, you could imagine the other schools of thought as the annoyed parents trying to get the damn kid to walk.
Same as other 'absolute' blanket-philosophies, but not quite as bad as the "dude, everything is subjective" kids.
It's just intellectually lazy.

Every school of thought addresses their worldview, the thing about nihilism is they go no further than that. Even the accessible continental philosophies like Existentialism and Absurdism are more developed and comprehensive in their approach to existence. They are constantly pulling at the arm of Nihilism because it's underdeveloped, half-baked, and answers zero questions, but instead waves them away with a "nothing matters".
Nihilism ignores the fact that you are human and you must live. You can only be a nihilist so long as you are comfortable, otherwise you slip across the borders into Utilitarianism, Hedonism, and Absurdism, depending on your current wants and needs, all the while refuting their worldviews.
Nihilism is for babies.

That's absurdism

I used to be a pretty staunch nihilist until I started researching the background to H.P. Lovecraft's work and his concept of "cosmicism". I think their may be meaning, but as a human I'm ill equipped to discern it in any meaningful way.

I think the reason people condemn it so hard is fear and denial. Think of the matrix scene where neo exits the matrix. He's traumatized. It's initially a horrifying idea that your whole value system is just in your head (but unbeknownst to them, is subsequently freeing and comforting).

Particularly on Veeky Forums though, anons fear the feeling of nihilism, which is a feeling of emptiness and alienating sadness. People who are intelligent and isolated naturally come into this feeling, and anons do everything they can to deny its emotional presence, mainly by stigmatizing its intellectualized translation.

Although, it's also a fact that immature edgy teens use nihilism to be a dick, which adds a shitty odor to the idea.

Jesus Christ, did someone post another chart on Reddit or something? It's like someone left the door open and a bunch of redditors wandered into this thread

Absurdism really doesn't even say there is no meaning, it just says that people are inherently misguided in their search.

Explain how it isn't?
Nietzsche may have understood nihilism as an approach to life, but do most people? Most people cannot even mentally grasp at his works. How is some dilettante going to make nihilism the foundation of his conduct like a real adherent to the philosophy? How would they even know how to recreate themselves as a free agent in a godless void, where only Will itself, and the end of exerting that Will is God itself?

The issue was never about the validity of the approach to life, but what kind of people are drawn to it. We know from history time and time again that immature minds will only so readily adopt the that which genius revealed to the world without even understanding it.

you probably should have googled that before posting it duder.

I know it better than you, you've just been memed by popular absurdisms.

lol ok guy.

Repressing something user? Cuz you sound a little defensive

Agreed.

Absurdism includes nihilism at its core. As I said, you can build from nihilism in many ways.

1st rule of nihilism: don't talk about nihilism

Because they're scared and try to bullshit their way out of the holes they dig.

To be quite honest, I don't see why nihilism has to be inherently depressed and "edgy." Can't one be a nihilist and still see inherent beauty in the natural world? Many works of art and music are grounded in nihilism but are still achingly beautiful.

the only interesting perspective I've seen on nihilism was that of ray brassier, for whom it is the attempt to think thought after the extinction of thinking—that is, what would philosophy be like after the extinction of the human race? nihilism effectively becomes license for the "last" thought experiment of philosophy, namely, the speculative one. but unfortunately all this does is provide epistemological grounds for object-oriented ontology, which is total dreck that rightly shouldn't have left the english department; even graham harman has come around to the position that, focusing on the "inner life of objects" leads to "aesthetics becom[ing] first philosophy," which in other words means ontology gets reduced to criticism. ontology is interesting and important, but only, i think, if it is politicized, which speculative realism makes every last effort to avoid.

so i think that nihilism is cool to think about, but utterly pointless.

yeah but materialism does not necessarily have to be positivistic. dialectical materialism is fucking amazing for this exact reason—and I'm not even necessarily talking about it in an exclusively marxist sense.

>the belief that life is without meaning

this is exactly the problem with nihilism as it is usually constructed by dweebs like the antinatalists—nihilism can only function precisely if it is not a belief, but knowledge—it is not enough for nihilism to construct itself as an opinion, it must be fact, it must really be "out there" in the world—but by then you've already affirmed limits to knowledge, and within those limits the meaning-making functions of things like structuralism tend to encroach pretty quickly once you start to consider what actually exists.

I see it as follows: either there is something absolute or there is not.

On one hand, if there is such a thing as an absolute, it is not accessible to us as we are not omniscient and never will be.
So, it might as well not be there, for all practical purposes. Nihilism is thus a valid worldview.

On the other hand, if there is no such thing as an absolute, nihilism is obviously a valid worldview.

Either way, nihilism is a valid worldview.

As another user said, nihilism only sucks when it is used as an excuse to act damaged.
You can build on nihilism by embracing your own subjectivity, that is by establishing your own meanings, values and purposes.

If you think that nihilism is necessarily or "usefully" supposed to be in some sense exposited by/as an interesting, elaborate point of view, then you've missed the point. Of course it /can/ be, and one might derive a certain pleasure from reading about nihilism according to X than according to Y, but it need not be explained well, let alone at all. The rejection of nihilism as being pointless, anti-human and so on, as you've just done (and which is admittedly a natural conclusion for a human to come to), makes basically the same mistake.

The OP has made an extremely "valuable" (pardon the hypocrisy/pun) point about nihilism in the last sentence of his OP. He basically and correctly senses something. What is it that he is sensing, supposing, rhetorically suggesting in his correct skepticism of the rejection of nihilism, and especially in the repetitive, predictable banality of these rejections (just make your own life's meaning, maaan, just come to Jesus, maaan, just have a kid, maaan, it feels good, maaann...)

These excuses make me retch. Not that that matters, of course.

I would hazard to attribute what is normally thought of as a positive, virtuous quality, but which can more properly for our purposes also be seen as a /neutral/, purported quality of nihilism, to it. If nihilism does not (and in some sense shouldn't) concern itself about being interesting, relevant, pro-human, or other generally /good/ qualities, then why does any one speak of it at all? Why does anyone consider the ideas at all (or absence and void of ideas as the case may be), if the thing, the way of thinking about the world, is so useless and contemptible? Because nihilism corresponds very closely, as best as I am presently able to tell, to a feature of the world, and a central concern of philosophy in general, which commonly trumps almost all other considerations:

Nihilism is /true/.

And how can that possibly be? How can I make such a bold claim? Why does everyone revulse at such a simple thing, honestly stated? Why are most anons now reading this getting a strong urge to reply *tips*, as a means of non-argumentative dismissal? This goes directly to the heart of the OP's question.

The latter part can be readily explained by the anti-humanity of the conclusion. But there is a certain value-trace that is left in nihilism, when all other values are necessarily sucked out of it. And that is its truth-value.

In brief, it seems to me that our actual objective importance in the world, based upon our understanding of it (that is, precisely nothing), is totally and irredeemably irreconcilable with our subjective animal impulse to attribute positive feelings, stories, a.k.a. "value and meaning" to ourselves and to the world around us, in order to survive, reproduce, avoid pain, etc. My prefrontal cortex therefore rejects my reptilian brain, intellectually rejects human instincts and cultural lifeways about humanity itself, and concludes at a nihilism.

Because nihilism is viciously strawmanned. It's the new atheism.

Nihilism merely holds that all values are subjective. Any sensible person that understands what objective and subjective mean would readily agree with that fact.

In order to hold that there are objective values you have to be a theist, a kantian, or believe in magic. That's it.

Fuck off, Camus' dumbtarded "philosophy" isn't worth mentioning

>In brief, it seems to me that our actual objective importance in the world, based upon our understanding of it (that is, precisely nothing), is totally and irredeemably irreconcilable with our subjective animal impulse to attribute positive feelings, stories, a.k.a. "value and meaning" to ourselves and to the world around us, in order to survive, reproduce, avoid pain, etc. My prefrontal cortex therefore rejects my reptilian brain, intellectually rejects human instincts and cultural lifeways about humanity itself, and concludes at a nihilism

^this. Imagine you create a machine, and you want this machine to replicate ad infinitum. You decide a good way would be to program it so that it assigns positive value to those actions & co. which increase it's chances of replicating, and a negative value to those actions & co. which decrease it's chances of replication. So you compose its circuits to run this value system, and it works, your machine successfully replicates by it's own actions just as you hoped.

But then it gains consciousness and dismissively condescends "my value system has nothing to do with how my circuits are composed, and everything to do with how the world is composed". At first you're bemused, then amused, then you think to yourself "I'm one helluva programmer".

nihilism is symptomatic of the times my dude. a sign of cultural weakness. it is not an absolute. it's historically determined like all other thought.

I was agreeing with what you were saying until you mistakenly delineated the human inclination to seek/find value and meaning as a subjective animal impulse. It isn't. The urge to procreate, to defecate, to slip into mob mentality, to steal another man's wife, to pillage another man's property, tribalism, xenophobia... etc. These are animal impulses.

Greed, lust, wrath, hate, short-sightedness etc. is the subjective experience that permeates such impulses.

An animal has no values, ideals or meaning for or beyond such things. Only a human being can even deign to ascribe meaning (however petty of may be) to these things.

Really what you are asserting is that nihilism is objectively true, and therefore to reject it would be the result of a regressive hind-brain bias.

>I thought nihilism was about things not having inherent meaning?

Yeah, and that's obviously false. Everything has an inherent meaning, even a fucking banana.

Because very few people like to have their dogma questioned, and very few are actually able to defend them again rational criticism. It doesn't matter if they are left/right or theist/atheist.

>I should clarify that I'm only really a nihilist when it comes to morality and the probability of attaining divine, perfect knowledge in this life or the next

Then you're not actually nihilist, though.

>Everything has an inherent meaning, even a fucking banana.

Please come again when you're out of preschool.

Butthurt depressed teenager detected.

>muh urges

Darwinist EvoPsych is literally on par with the theory of the four humors lol.

>have not problem with inherent not value in life
>have problem with not value in life

you are liying to yourself. this is what you want to say:
i can understand the idea that nothing have inherent value. but life have value because we are living. or something so shitty like that,