Nihilism

What's so bad about it?

Other urls found in this thread:

philosophy.wisc.edu/hunt/ER&VIRT.htm)
amazon.com/Great-Chain-Being-Study-History/dp/0674361539/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485836274&sr=8-1&keywords=the great chain of being).
reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/reading
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

because what do you end up with upon pursuing nihilism?
nothing.
and do you want something?
most likely.
ergo, nihilism probably isnt for you.

it's a critique that writes itself.

Nothing because there is nothing

something can matter to you but still be essentially meaningless

that crosses the border between nihilism and existentialism

This is such a bullshit notion

its existential nihilism, which is still nihilism

how
anti-contrarian contrarianism is still contrarianism user

>something can matter to you but still be essentially meaningless

No, it can't. If it matters to you, it's not meaningless. That's literally a definition.

If that's a definition, it's a shit one. What basis is there to define somethings meaning based on its importance to you?

Humans value things. This is literally one of the definitions of being human.

If you don't value anything, what you're going to end up with his a whole lot of suffering with nothing to show for it.

You can value things, but the value you place on things is intrinsically meaningless. Finding out what to value using existential nihilism as a framework is the only way out of an existential crisis.

>>>>>>""""""pursuing"""""" nihilism

nigga what

If there is nothing how can you write "There is nothing".
Your sentence is illogical and self-defeating.

he can write there is nothing because that statement has no intrinsic worth or truth, its just something he believes

It appears to humans to be bad because there is such a thing as human nature, as I correctly asserted and defended in a previous thread on Veeky Forums, , where I had honestly expected at least the pretense of a rebuttal (or better, a schooled-yet-still-false argument), but none came.

Here is part of what I mean by invoking the phrase "human nature": the natural impulses of most human beings. The desire to eat, the instinct to survive, dumb-simple things like these. More complex patterns can be observed in social behavior: conniving, cooperating, competing, and at various times. These all may conceivably be attributed to my label of human nature.

Now, here is the other bit: science, and I'll even throw religion in to buttress this particular point by ways of thought. We are capable of abstract thought, and of considering possibly abstract, unpleasant ideas as being true. Thus, we can conceive of Hell, and we can conceive of global warming, and so on, as portending unpleasant fates. But, our nature (I return to this eminently useful and valid catch-all phrase) places our /desires and wishes/ in tension with our capacity for /knowledge of the unpleasant, which is undesirable to us/. There is a more elaborate psychological discussion to be had here, but I pass over it to arrive at my point:

In a very vague sense, here is my thesis: /People who are either smart enough right enough about how the world actually is, arrive at a nihilism./ The world, being what it is, militates toward the realization of this reality, in the face of the human insistence on personal storytelling and personal importance.

1/2

That is the reason why nihilism is "bad": it is anti-human because it correctly negates all human meaning and value. Yet, for a person who values truth above all other considerations, especially considerations of what is pleasant, social standing, etc, (which are naturally, again, dear to humans), that is instead to entertain what is unpleasant as being true, as nihilism is (or must provisionally be held as the best available model of truth, given our circumstances), then nihilism is a clear conclusion, once sufficient evidence is gathered, and provided that a person is born into such a station as to be able to compile this information, e.g. the modern west.

Local Human drives for storytelling and social behavior are absolutely and totally irreconcilable with the dumb blinking void that the world actually is.

Obviously there is one little hypocrisy above: the person who "values" truth is supposed to conclude, according to me, that nothing really matters, to use the teenage phrase. But the point is that the edgy teenager really was right all along, and once this is known, one has to throw away the ladder after having used it to descend to the depths, as it were.

For the rest, there is a simple pleasure in being right. This pleasure (not that it matters in the end) is most perfectly felt by taking a certain smug nihilism. Either kill yourself forthwith or while away the time as pleasantly as you can otherwise (the europe syndrome, the approach I provisionally recommend), either way it of course does not matter in the end.

And it's exactly this reality that humans naturally hate. Because human nature is a real local category, despite the global supremacy of, in the present case, nihilism.

This is a logical and performative contradiction m8. The things you value are by definition not meaningless.

On the contrary, I am not that guy, and you seem to me

A basic scheme of my philosophcal approach to the world is to first of all make basic edgy, godless, atheistic, nihilistic, and absolute, global observations: nothing really matters, it's all the same, and so on.

Yet, we are animals, trapped here, born into the world that we did not consent to participate in, and in which some of us ought to (conditionally!) while away the time as pleasantly as possible, especially in view of human nature.

Thus I conceive of a GENERAL nihilism, negation of meaning, and so on, while at the same time conceiving of a LOCAL hedonic imperative, which although of course it is readily negated by the above, yet we are bags of water and meat with nerves which are sometimes willing to cooperate with one another so as to minimize pain. I think that this distinction is roughly what the above user meant, and if so, then he is right that such a distinction is useful and valid, to local purposes...

although ultimately and finally meaningless. Consider especially that your last sentence is not necessarily true, as if axiomatically, as you would have liked.

Point is that you cannot escape the suffering of life, which is meaningful(suffering is painful, which is a form of meaning).

Which means that nihilists aren't actually nihilists at all, they are masochists, because they deny themselves all meaning except suffering.

Nothing.

i'm a university professor, and i can see why you were mocked--you're ideas are super incoherent and hardly hang together. your view of "human nature" is especially juvenile.

but i'll throw you a bone and save you some time, you weird autistic moron: you're ALMOST there, but others have done this, far better and far more poetically than you, e.g. nietzssche's conclusion, which is essentially that 1. life is meaningless; 2. man must therefore lie; insofar as man lies, there are two attitudes toward this: nihilism and the ubermensch. nihilism is the last man, the "they-self" that heidegger referred to: the mindless, souless automatons that sail through life on the tide of their age--nietzsche calls these the "last men," who stare into the void, and blink. conversely, however, there are those--the overmen--who see in the inherent void the opportunity for dance and joy, for storytelling and narrative-making, for lying--but in the most poetic, the most human, the most transcendental sense, the sort of lie that one builds for oneself and can live out fully and without reservation.

it's like, as yourcernir describes hadrian, you're almost someone smart--but i'm sorry to say there is nothing of much original import or value in your incredibly overflated and self-congratulatory musings. i would highly recommend you stop bothering professors who actually have shit to do and go about reading through the western cannon, as everything you wrote has been covered by people far smarter than you. it'll save you a lot of time, and a lot of loss of social capital.

>nothing matters
>so why bother fighting/standing up to the powerful and corrupt?

Nihilism is the tool of oppressors.

i'm a university professor, and i can see why you were mocked--your ideas are super incoherent and hardly hang together. your view of "human nature" is especially juvenile.

but i'll throw you a bone and save you some time, you weird autistic moron: you're ALMOST there, but others have done this, far better and far more poetically than you, e.g. nietzsche's conclusion, which is essentially that 1. life is meaningless; 2. man must therefore lie; 3. insofar as man lies, there are two attitudes toward this: nihilism and the ubermensch. nihilism is the last man, the "they-self" that heidegger referred to: the mindless, souless automatons that sail through life on the tide of their age, hardly thinking, only accepting, consuming "culture" that neither challenges nor helps grow--nietzsche calls these the "last men," who stare into the void, and blink. conversely, however, there are those--the overmen--who see in the inherent void the opportunity for dance and joy, for storytelling and narrative-making, for lying--but in the most poetic, the most human, the most transcendental sense, the sort of lie that one builds for oneself and can live out fully and without reservation. the last men--those that succumb to nihilism--are destined to ruled by the aristocracy of the ubermensch--those that overcome nihilism. see how much more sophisticated this philosophical-political project is than yours? see how much deeper?--and that is not to say a thing about nietzsche's ethics, his view of history, his idea of art, his critique of socrates, etc etc.

it's like, as yourcernir describes hadrian, you're almost someone smart--but i'm sorry to say there is nothing of much original import or value in your incredibly overflated and self-congratulatory musings. i would highly recommend you stop bothering professors who actually have shit to do and go about reading through the western cannon, as everything you wrote has been covered by people far smarter than you. it'll save you a lot of time, and a lot of loss of social capital.

stop just saying shit has meaning without saying why

Nihilism is good in that it points out how meaningless everything is.

However...that doesn't mean you shouldn't have meaning in your life. If you want something to have meaning, then boom, it magically does now.

You're saying the liers will rule the truthers? That doesn't seem to follow from just what you've said. All I get is that maybe the liers will have more fun (and that's nice).
How to tell if you've overcome nihilism or if you've just decided to ignore it? The void still rules reality (the truth), but can you lie strong enough?

Anyway, I'm not that guy, and I'm hoping you give me a better view of Nietzsche, but I'll look him up myself later.

First, a substantive clarification, followed by a humorous aside.

You have me confused with the OP of the previous thread that I had cited, which may explain some of your negativity - because the other guy actually is dumb. I am not the author of this OP: . I merely wrote the following four posts in that same thread, which were what I had referred to above in this thread. Notice that at the relevant post in this thread, I did not claim to be the OP of the thread that I'd linked.

That I claim to have written that professors receive unwanted e-mails from cranks on a daily basis ought to endear me to you just a bit, since I understand a little bit of your troubles. Now let me burn the bridge all the same. NOW, the humorous aside, which is a tangent of the main discussion.

Once I understood your confusion, I wanted to lead off in reply with that civil clarification, since you had an honest misunderstanding. My initial impulse was to first have a bit of fun and insult you for using a tripcode, which I'll still do, but I at least wanted to save it for second, because I do understand that you weren't totally addressing things that /I/ wrote.

I just went to a little trouble to indicate which posts I'd written. You could now reply very reasonably, "so if people want to have a conversation, why doesn't everyone use trips to save the hassle?" As you may or may not be aware, depending on your familiarity with Veeky Forums, tripcodes are culturally disliked in the platform, because they attach a self-importance of personal identity which is largely unwanted among the users, at least in this particular space. True, not using a trip leads exactly to the above confusions, but the trade-off is in some sense worth it. Once in a while, something substantive gets going somewhere, and only ideas and citations are discussed, without personal dickwaving involved. But now, since we're on Veeky Forums, a de rigeur piece of culture: Ph.D. or no, using a tripcode means that you are a faggot and that we can safely dismiss you. But some of your negativity was aimed at the other guy, so I'll just leave that caveat.

I get it, you're a professor, you're a busy guy who is just fucking around on the chinese cartoons website for private fun, and can't be fucked to read everyone's autism. But still, I find it funny that you can't quickly scan the, yes, thread of the conversation within a minute or two and discern who-is-who. You're supposed to be really, really good at /reading texts/.

not quite that the liers will rule the truthers. its rather there are those who recognize that all things are lies/self-stories we tell ourselves, either individually or collectively, and rather than receding from this lack of truth in fear or offloading the challenge of confronting it head-on unto some pre-given ideology (anything from christianity, capitalism, post-modernism, and utilitarianism onward), the "overmen" look into the abyss, laugh, and build their own lies. but instead of having the distance from that lie that one would have to, say, saying something like "i have a billion dollars), this type of lie is deeper: it is the capacity to live out your own, self-made illusion with PASSION and SINCERITY, such that you both see it as a product of your labor AND as something that is fully "true" in itself
there is essentially no category of "truther" for nietzsche--the "final men"--e.g. the "hollow men" --are the ones who basically live out their lives in unreflexive soma, consuming "easy" and "pop" culture at the expense of those true human challenges that nearly kill you, but sharpen you in the survival

so as far as if you can tell--you can. nietzsche has a powerful moment before his (in)famous and totally off-quoted and misunderstood "death of god" speech. the operative paragraph in "the gay science" is not paragraph 125, but 124, where nietzsche talks about how people will CLAIM that god has died in modernity (where we are now), but they are in fact to weak to live out the consequences--e.g. to take the place of god, to become gods in themselves through this world-building-lying-illusion-making that i mentioned above. so the majority of people--the so-called "herd," the "masses," etc.--are in fact born incompatible with the requirements of living out the life of an overman--e.g. most people are born to be ruled, with a minority (the overmen) destined to rule them. mind you, like hegel, nietzsche totally rejects the actual eradication of the enemy (see carl schmitt later on), and would radically reject hitler's "final solution" and would utterly bemoan the shoah.

does that begin to clarify? there are no "truthers" vs "liers"--all men lie, just some lies are better than others, e.g. they emanate from, and return to, the enlightened self

you are a joke. please, please stop.

but that isnt to say that one can't be a nietzschean capitalist, for instance, or even a nietschean liberal (though this is harder to achieve). one can accept and dawn these "lies" and still become an overman only insofar as one 1. recognize the ideology as a lie, among others; 2. weighs this lie through consideration and struggle with its implications; 3. commits to this lie fully and wholly, e.g. "passionately" and with "sincerity" that i mentioned above

lies are unavoidable and ubiqutuous. the way to see if you are "predestined" to be an overman (and here, i think nietzsche ironically toys with a broad implication of calivinism that the legaccy of the german reformation movement had to confront in the 19th century) is only if you are able to basically dominate the world effectively through your capacity to self-build or self-commit to an illusion, and then compete with the illusions of other overmen in all out battle (intellectual and even physical, but in the sense of greek gymnastics and wrestling) while they rule over a blind and ignorant and unthinking crowd/mass (the final men/hollow men)

BUT, and again this is key, it is vital to note that the overmen, when battling it out among themselves do not just kill their inferiors (the final men), but rather take something of a paternalism toward them--you would be totally destroying the nietschean creed to "love thy enemy" (a direct and ironic appraisal of the christian ethos), rather than "eradicate thy enemy"

without the dynamic hold that the overman has to other overmen and the presence of the final/hollow men, the overman is nothing. to this end, your enemies define you more accurately than your friends, and it is important that, in trying to defeat and dominate your enemy, you do so with gallantry, respect, reverence--even a kind of protectiveness, such that the battle might always be revisited in the future, when your enemy may come back to your doorstep, stronger and more cunning and therefore providing you--thank the lord!--with an even greater challenge.

the perfect nietzschean image is the single man standing against an entire army with a flaming sword in hand and a grin on his face

finally, i would also note the role of LOVE in nietzsche's discourse. the core of his personal ethics viz. the overman--his only prescriptive moment--might be summed up in his idea "amor fati," or "love of fate." this is where one can look back upon all of one's past experience--all the pain, all the joy, all the success and failure and odi et amo alike--and one accepts it all. think of freud's repression in reverse: strength, for nietzschean, is the totally unrepressed psyche, one that has swallowed everything thrown at it whole, who LOVES themselves and their own history, and by extension LOVES the enemy insofar as the true enemy is also an opportunity for self-perfection; one LOVES all of reality, one LOVES challenge, etc. etc.

hence the laughter, the grin, etc. that usually accompanies the nietzschean figure--it's a type of crazed openness to experience as such, a type of infinite love in-itself--perverse, perhaps, both something to reckon with nonetheless

You're both embarrassing to read.

Since none of this matters in the long view, I see no reason not to. I'm just amusing myself, and you're continuing to dignify me with responses.

The point of the above is that you should at least divorce me from the user that you had confused me with. Not that it matters. And this exactly because it goes to your core competency /of reading and interpreting texts/. How can I take you seriously as a purported master reader and interpreter of texts if you can't tell who is supposed to be who, by context, given a little challenge on the point?

C'mon, get mad! Destroy me! Walk the whole thing back up the chain, it should take you about ten minutes to properly contextualize, pick out the bits that you need, and then /really/ lay me out.

This fucker is poking at you, so destroy him with your superior education!

It's inauthentic philosophizing.

Except rapture's posts are entirely spot-on. He understands N. is a 'hierarchical fictionalist,' and not an emotivist for humanity as whole. MacIntyre had it wrong, it's not 'Nietzsche or Aristotle,' it's both! Only the teleological basis for ethics isn't actually real, but made-up by the Great Men/overmen.

Nothing, the only reason people don't like it is because they fear it.

It's false because Christianity is true. Most nihilist want nihilism to be true. I.e. edgelords.

wow, thanks, man. easily the nicest post anyone has ever responded with.

have you read arthur lovejoy's "the great chain of being"? i think that nietzsche is sorta the apotheosis of the "principle of plentitude" that is drawn from plato and is perfected in aristotle--to this end, i agree entirely in the characterization of nietzsche as a "hierarchical fictionalist"; and i also agree that the telos is one of the myths par excellence as part of this or that will-to-knowledge/ploy-to-power of the overman; but i also think that there is an irony to nietzsche's appropriation of aristotelian structure--e.g. the principle of plentitude, that all things have their place, and diversity improves the overall quality (hence john winthrop, edmund burke, and the whole conservative discourse up through today's trumpites and alt-right--see corey robin's "reactionary mind" for a pretty good analysis here)--that goes unnoticed by nietzsche himself.

where did you read/encounter nietzsche? are you a "nietzschean" by temperament?

ima respond one last time, just to correct your absurdity for my own musing: you seem to think that one should take the same careful dedication to reading your posts/figuring out who you are in an anonymous context that one takes to reading nietzsche. this is a silly assumption, and i assure you my time has been better spent "interpreting" that "text" than it has been/will be engaging anything you have written/will write. i'm pretty sure we're done here, as you have yet to say anything substantive in rebuttal--and i imagine you never will, as you are incapable of doing so meaningfully, originally, or with even an ounce of academic rigor.

or, to put it another way, i think the principle of teleology intrudes upon nietzsche's conception of the overman in two ways: 1. in the type of predestination that seems indicative of one's identity as an overman or not--are you born this way? can a final man ever become an overman? i am admittedly out on these questions/do not know enough about nizetsche's minutiae. and 2. in the type of necessary binary--between overmen and final men--that emerges along the axis of this pre-selection.
so it sorta seems that teleology as a political instrument may be just one more discourse the overman fashions--but it also seems that there are deep teleological veins to nietzsche's discourse that go unacknowledged, and push him toward a type of prescriptivism his own relativism is constantly want to avoid

That is a silly question.

Couldn't resist when I saw someone properly understand and explicate N. on here!

>but i also think that there is an irony to nietzsche's appropriation of aristotelian structure--e.g. the principle of plentitude, that all things have their place, and diversity improves the overall quality (hence john winthrop, edmund burke, and the whole conservative discourse up through today's trumpites and alt-right--see corey robin's "reactionary mind" for a pretty good analysis here)--that goes unnoticed by nietzsche himself.

Would you mind expanding upon this idea here? Might be the brain fog brought on by the opioids, but I'm not sure I quite understand what you mean---although it certainly seems interesting.

>where did you read/encounter nietzsche?

Oh, same place where anyone does in the internet age: researching existentialism as a preteen. Otherwise just personal study from then on, refining my understand through debate and explication on here for the past few years. Yourself?

>are you a "nietzschean" by temperament?

Undoubtedly. His genius stuns me everyday, and I find little to disagree with. They say Carnap would quote Nietzsche every 20 minutes! Similar case here.

>-are you born this way? can a final man ever become an overman?

Back when I was first beginning to seriously study Nietzsche, I read this paper (philosophy.wisc.edu/hunt/ER&VIRT.htm) that I think gives a pretty good description of the ethical and metaphysical implications of the concept of eternal recurrence. In short, while reality is 'flux' and man is always becoming, he is only ever becoming what he already is/has been.

>-but it also seems that there are deep teleological veins to nietzsche's discourse that go unacknowledged, and push him toward a type of prescriptivism his own relativism is constantly want to avoid

Indeed, his criteria for 'Great Men' certainly seems rigid and fixed, that while beauty and myths are determined differently by various creators (i.e. "philosophers of the future"), there's an inevitable and untractable commonality between all of them (i.e. Beethoven is always going to be a Great Man even if our conception of music changes entirely).

nihilism is essentially sophistry. Assigning objects and concepts no meaning could not be done except through word play.

>would you mind expanding upon this idea here?

yeah sorry, i was unclear on that point. so, basically i am interested in this idea of the "principle of plenitude" (see arthur lovejoy: amazon.com/Great-Chain-Being-Study-History/dp/0674361539/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485836274&sr=8-1&keywords=the great chain of being). the idea is basically that the diversity of entities in the world is 1. a necessary condition, and 2. insofar as it is a necessary condition, it is also the best possible condition. so diversity is first appreciated on a horizontal basis: think the animism of the jesuits, e.g. "god in all things." but then add to this the will-to-power: while the diversity of all things is still good, things are no longer considered equal. now you have the naturalization of hierarchy: that i dominate you is sanctioned by the entire worldview, which means that the people at the top take care of the people at the bottom, who sustain the people at the top: the hierarchy perpetuates itself through time as part of the "great chain of being." i will simply quote lovejoy on this point:

he describes a "conception of the plan and structire of the world which, through the Middle Ages and down to the late eighteenth century, many philosophers,most men of science,and, indeed,most educated men,were to accept without question--the conception of the universe as a 'great chain of being,' composed of an immense, or--by the struct by seldom rigorously applied logic of the principle of continuity--of an infinite number of links ranging in hierarchichical order from the meagerest kind of existents, which barely escape non-existence, through 'every possible' grade up to the ens perfectissimum--or, in a somewhat more orthodox version, to the highest possible kind of creature, between which and the Absolute Being the disparity was assumed to be infinite--every one of them differing from that immediate above and that immediately below it by the 'least possible' degree of difference" (lovejoy, p. 59)

you can see how this worldview, which is essentially the neo-platonism of the medeival era (augustine primarily, but also some aquinas and the "moral economy," and by extension aristotle), laid the groundwork for justifying slavery, feudalism, even the domination of the bourgeoise--not to mention, and to the point, nietzsche's split between the overman and final men.

so, in cursory form, this idea is the following:

for plato: the golden philosopher, who is set to dominate the silver and bronze classes, also needs those classes, and hence cannot eradicate them (engage via noble lie)
for augustine: the christian, who is set to dominate the heathen, also needs those heathens to exist, and hence cannot eradicate them (engage via conversion (discipline, law and "education") and, as nuclear option, jus belli)
for the meideval christians/early americans, especially john winthrop: again the christian, and what would become the white landed/propertied christian male, is set to dominate everyone else (especially slaves/the colored races), also needs everyone else to exist, and hence cannot eradicate them (engage via discursive forms of domination: religion, economics, law)
for burke: the ruling aristocracy, with its traditions and manners and religion, is set to dominate the lower social orders, and needs the lower social class to exist, and hence cannot eradicate them (engage via aesthetics)
for nietzsche: the overman is set to dominate the final man, who he needs to exist, and hence cannot eradicate (engage via--returning to plato--the "noble lie," here individualized and turned into the perversion of hegel's "weltgeist")

so i think one thread to draw between these authors--and this is really and admittedly to discount their grand complexities and focus only on a single connecting, self-selected thread--is exactly the capacity to build theories around this idea of the principle of plentitude and the great chain of being i mentioned here: .
so while i think you are right to point how "telos" operates, in nietzsche's critique, as just one more discourse of power, i think there is ample evidence to show how telos-as-a-conceptual-structure haunts a lot of western thought, and is used upon which to hinge a lot of hierarchical justifications

does that make a little more sense? and i am curious: you are not a professor or phd? what other subjects interest you--and why nietzsche specifically?

a side note: it might also be pointed out that the authors i just listed all were trying to carve out room for a minority political position in a world hostile to it. so:

for plato: how to claim power for the philosopher, who is beseiged by the sophist/democrat--the latter would overcome the former
for augustine: how to claim power for the christian, who is besieged by the heathen/pagan--the latter would overcome the former
for medieval christians: how to keep power for the feudal/ecclesiastical authorities, who are besieged by a burgeoning individualism and novel popular criticism--the latter would overcome the former
for john winthrop: how to keep power in the hands of a white propertied male class, who was beseiged by a hostile new ideology of equality--the latter would/is overcoming the former
for burke: how to keep power in the hands of the aristocracy, who is beseiged by the abstract liberalism of the jacobins--the latter would overcome the former
for nietzsche: how to keep power in the hands of the few overman, who are beseiged by the hollow ressentiment of the final men--the latter overcome/is overcoming the former

all these authors seem to try and engage this minority status, and all i think ultimately fail--but their engagement discloses a type of fear that i think is actually closer to hobbes, e.g. there is this fear that what one is--a philosopher, a christian, a fuedal lord, a landed male, an aristocrat, an overman--is in danger of being snuffed from the earth, and each, in their unique wills-to-power, are all attempting to erect forms fo sovereignty most amenable to their personal character types. to this end, nietzsche might be might in a very meta-sense, and he ultimately succumbs to the very ideology he set forth--the more you reject him, the more you seem to fulfill him.

i think their failures also sum up a lot of western philosophy: what you witness at any given time are men trying, often desperately, simply to matter in a world that does not understand them, does not care for them, or is set, at the most extreme, to end them.

I really appreciate the exposition, the idea is incredibly interesting and I understand what you're getting at now. I just picked up the book from gen.lib and will be reading over the next couple of days, thank you.

What do you mean, however, that Nietzsche is returning to Plato's "noble lie?" My view has always been Nietzsche is almost doing the reverse---instead of hiding an elitist, esoteric message ala Straussian theory, he's laying bare what the elites have known all along in grounding all philosophy in the material world.

I definitely get at what you were referring to in regards to 'conservative thought' in relation this idea---the reverse or opposition of the Hegelian/Marx view of history as the evolution toward the Absolute/the oppressed overcoming the oppressors.

>each, in their unique wills-to-power, are all attempting to erect forms fo sovereignty most amenable to their personal character types.

That's precisely the Nietzschean view I take of it as well, and why I see N. as much as the first psychologist as Heidegger does as the last metaphysician. And speaking of Heidegger, applied to your lens is the parochial, poetic world trying to hold off the cosmopolitan, technological mode of being.

> you are not a professor or phd? what other subjects interest you--and why nietzsche specifically?

Nope, dropped out freshman here due to opiate addiction. I still wish to contribute to literature and academic philosophy though, only from outside the system (I'm just mimicking Nietzsche at this point). And I love the entire history of philosophy, with focus on continental thought, and fiction/poetry. I focus on Nietzsche because I've never felt such a deep connection to another writer, the way N. would talk about Napoleon and their connection (even going as far as to claim he was Napoleon reincarnated) I feel about Nietzsche, as silly and juvenile that must sound. But aside from that, I believe he's the most important philosopher since at least Kant, and maybe even Aristotle. Everyone who has come after can be found in him (Freud, Foucault, Ortega, et al., but you already knew this). And lastly, I also believe modern academic philosophy has grossly misinterpreted N., but I suspect you also already know this as well.

>opiate addiction

i've been there, too. never going back to the desert. i don't have to say it, but: you are loved, user.

you strike me as genuinely educated--i hope to talk more tomorrow.

>i've been there, too. never going back to the desert. i don't have to say it, but: you are loved, user.

Thank you.

>you strike me as genuinely educated--i hope to talk more tomorrow.

Likewise. I've followed your posts for a long time now, so it's really nice to have finally engaged in a discussion with you.

Blessed thread

It's an elaborate validation of existential defeatism and seeks to accepts it. It may be reasonable in its reasoning but never the less it isn't constructive, it leads to a trap where you can relativise everything into insignificance which kills all dilemma but also every possible solution.

if you want to get nihilism, imagine the smartest man to be a nihilist.

>what do you mean...that nietzsche is returning to plato's 'noble lie'?

again, sorry, this was a matter of lack of specificity on my part: i meant "returning to plato" as a type of appropriation, not necessarily a fulfillment. what i hope the previous posts i made might illustrate are some of the relations between plato and nietzsche: i see nietzsche as picking up the project of socrates (ironically, given his idea of socrates as "the first jew" and his critique of socrates as creating a supra-natural world--"ethics"--by which to judge this one, as THE maneuver of power that ended the early reign of the brutish but adept "proto-overmen" and the first time man became "deep") in such a way that he is the first philosopher after plato to seriously consider what it means to carve out a place for oneself as a philosopher in a world of sophists and democrats. that both fall on the "lie" (have you read martin jay's "the virtues of mendacity"?--i think this is a really interesting overview of the role of the lie/lying in western political theory) i think is an interesting and vital moment in this history of thought; although they do so from different angles, the treatment of the lie is so central to the operation of the political sphere that it opens up spaces that will be filled by machiavelli, arendt, etc. with their own prescriptive uses of the lie, more or less as derivative versions of either the platonic or nietzschean versions.

in short, i think you are absolutely right--i see nietzsche's relation to plato as christ's relation to the jewish law: his was both the acceptance of a lineage and the refoundation of that lineage in a different soil


what, if you don't mind me asking, do you do as a profession? are you a younger man? i imagine that you are like some of the deeper thinkers i've met, and therefore have a series of problems that you return to or that define your focus at any given time--what ideas most interest you/are you pursuing most passionately now?

i think, further, that the lie for both plato and nietzsche operates in a specific way, both in terms of the individual psyche and in terms of the way that psyche interacts with the external world. i would argue that plato's conception of the ethical self is one--and this is certainly to simplify, as most of the conversation on Veeky Forums unfortunately has to be--that tries to avoid what he calls "the civil war of the self"--a cohesive, well-ordered self (the philosopher), when given power, leads to a cohesive, well-ordered political/social/economic world (the hierarchical gold/silver/bronze caste system, mortared by the noble lie). i think the same is true, fundamentally, of nietzsche--both in terms of the self-purging aspect that tries to avoid internal "civil war" (see amor fati, and the corresponding energies of the eternal return) and, further, the addition of power to this self-purged "overman" that will lead to the balanced, self-orbiting system of overman and final men he envisions.
both the platonic philosopher and the nietzschean overman are aware of thelie they tell; but this awareness, unlike other forms of bad faith, does not lead to self-fracture, but cohesion and coherence, both of the individual and greater social collective.
so, while i think they arrive at the lie from different angles, and certainly set of systems where its deployment and use is substantially different, i believe that the architectonics of their treatment viz. the "lie" seem similar enough to warrant some consideration

finally, and this is a personal reading, i think the most important line in the platonic ouvre in terms of politcal theory (not ethics or metaphysics, certainly) comes actually fairly early on in the republic, where plato stages the major thematic of the work as a subtle performative between socrates and the slave-owning son of celaphon, polemarchus. socrates is still at the piraeus, and polemarchus sends his slave to tug at socrates' sleave and have him wait. polemarchus approaches socrates--i will quote in full:

Pol.: 'It looks as if you;re all on your way back to the city, Socrates. You're not stating, then?'
Soc.: 'That's a pretty good guess,' I replied.
Pol.: 'Do you see how many of us there are?' he asked. [(note the allusion to democratic numbers!)]
Soc.: 'Yes.'
Pol.: 'Well, then,' he said, 'you must either get the better of all these people or else stay here.' [(note the allusion to the choice between democratic coercion--"get the better" of the masses--or submission to that coercion, thus foregrounding the problems of democratic tyranny that would define rousseau's "forced to be free" doctrine, and isaiah berlin/jacob talmon's critique of that doctrine)]
Soc. 'There is another possibility,' I said. 'We might persuade you that you would let us go.' [(note the allusion to convincing-via-rational-argument, the whole project of locke, and rawls/habermas' appropriations of kant)]
Pol. 'And do you really think you could persuade us, he said, 'if we refused to listen?'
(Plato, Rep. 327c)

those who "refuse to listen"--this, to me, is the central project of platonic political philosophy, to which the noble lie becomes the crucial answer. on a personal note, this is also what defines almost all of my own intellectual work: i grew up in a house with a fundamentalist christian/alt-righter, and the intransigence of this human agency has both fascinated me and determined much of how i see the world. the only thing i care about, whether it be religion, secular, in terms of business advertising, in terms of historical epochs, etc--is conversion, what it means to convert another, under what conditions that conversion is made effective/"just", etc. so to that end i think the lie, drawn from plato and nietzsche, stands as one of the most interesting contributions to this problem to date.

it seems to me that the platonic philosopher does not lie to the other philosophers--that they in the gold caste are somehow all "in" on the secret, that the audience of the lie are the bronze and silver. but do you think the same is true of the nietzschean overmen? is it fair to say that the ubermenschen lie to one another--or does their recognition of mutual myth-making somehow discount this, and mean that they lie--individually? collectively?--only to the final men? i am out on this point and would be eager to hear your opinion.

in sum, i would say: plato and nietzsche deploy the lie in response to the perennial problem of how to persuade those who refuse to listen. their answer, ironically, is that you can't--at least not directly, not by operating on the same faculties of rationality and reason that you would the philosopher already concerned with such matters. you can drag them out of the cave (coercion-- the discipline of augustine's platonism, and the reason why the philosopher stakes his very life returning to the democratic abyss in plato himself); or you can remake the entire political world around them, rob them of power, and then console and assuage them through lies--either the realization of the platonic republic or the realization of the nietzschean aristocracy of ubermenschen. this is what i meant when i said the lie "mortared" both.

this is, btw, to draw out only one aspect of nietzsche's political implications viz. the lie--i see how it operates in a far more substantial manner viz. the myth, especially considering that plato sees the lie being deployed against the existence of an understood theoretical Truth, the eidos, etc.; while nietzsche obviously has been torn free of that assumption, and the lie hangs more as the truth itself, rather than against the backcloth of something more stable, if also only reserved for the happy, enlightened few.

tfw too intellegent for nihilism

Wow, thank you for this. It comes across as a very Straussian interpretation, one that I also agree with---the idea of lies as consolidating power among the elites and enlightened few, of Nietzsche returning to Socrates (Strauss says N. "lead[s] to the point at which Socrates begins" and rediscovers "the problem of Socrates"), etc.

>i think the same is true, fundamentally, of nietzsche--both in terms of the self-purging aspect that tries to avoid internal "civil war" (see amor fati, and the corresponding energies of the eternal return)

Absolutely. This goes back to what I meant when I said I see N. as the first psychologist, for his thought is prescient in seeing the human psyche as not an organized Self but warring drives, the Will-to-Power via our conflicting desires and masks. With what you said, what really differentiates N. here (being first and foremost a student of Heraclitus and the world-as-flux) is he isn't solely being descriptive here, but, bringing it back to your ideas of "principle of plenitude," applying such a metaphysical and teleological idea of hierarchy and increasing diversity to the overman himself (“The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions, who has, as it were, antennae for all types of men---as well as his great moments of grand harmony---a rare accident even in us! A sort of planetary motion---”). Very early hints of Deleuze's schizoanalysis and rhizomatic model of influence and power, and in a way I even see Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God and the need for creative philosophers of the future as a kind of recognition of this model, and an attempt to restore it to one of 'simpler' hierarchy else the masses'll misbehave and devalue life---a return to a 'principle of plentitude' perspective, even.

>i am out on this point and would be eager to hear your opinion.

I see Plato in the exact same way, and that's always been my conception of the "Mysteries" elite cult that we have scattered whiffs of---a private club of privileged initiates sharing secrets of mass psychology, propaganda, and noble lies. But that's another topic... For your question, if anything I'd characterize it a just the opposite: they are brutally honest with each other. "This is my Will-to-Power manifested expressions for the world, based solely on my own creativity and blood, let's go to war over it." But yes, it is in the interests of the elites to collectively delude the masses (sometimes I think most professional philosophers who espouse a type of moral realism are really just fictionalists...).

>do you do as a profession? are you a younger man?

I do odd restaurant and general contracting jobs while I refine my writing skills and get a novel/short story/poem published. And yeah, I'm 22.

>what ideas most interest you/are you pursuing most passionately now?

Well, I'm still at the point where I'm working on just a general self-education in place of going to college, but otherwise refining my idiosyncratic conception of Nietzsche and resulting political solutions (reading MacIntyre as planted the seed of resorting to a closed-off provincialism in order to recapture a Heideggerian poetic, authentic mode-of-being and N. influenced structure [ “‘Mankind must work continually at the production of individual great men -- that and nothing else is its task.’ ... how can your life, the individual life, receive the highest value, the deepest significance? ... only by your living for the good of the rarest and most valuable exemplars”(U III: 6).] and devouring as much fiction and poetry as I can while I write. What about yourself?

This is the face of anti-nihilism.

>(have you read martin jay's "the virtues of mendacity"?--i think this is a really interesting overview of the role of the lie/lying in western political theory)

Yet another book I must add to my reading list, thank you! Ever since I first read Leo Strauss I've always been highly interested in the concept of lying as a means of political stability and disseminating ideas, so I suppose my discovering this book was an inevitability.

>The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions

this is off topic a bit, but i am curious to start a number of conversations going with you: have you read much of the american transcendentalists, especially emerson and whitman? i would be very curious your take on the "genteel tradition" and how nietzsche hangs in the background of american antinomean philosophy; i think, too, that postmodernism is less a product of nietzschean philosophy and more an extension of american culture viz. transcendentalism and genteelism. of course, postmoderns would never admit this and see themselves as a herd of nietzscheans, but whatever, i don't think they tend to understand irony as much as they would portend

>Mankind must work continually at the production of individual great men -- that and nothing else is its task

you seem to have read aristotle--are you familiar with the idea of the moral economy? and have you covered much hegel? i have a couple questions on this point if so.

also, who ranks among your favorite poets/authors? are you american?

>they are brutally honest with each other

fascinating interpretation. two things: first, do you think nietzsche would condone more "traditional" lying among the ubermensch as one more tool of manipulation/power, one that they may use strategically in an effort to duke it out? can the ubermensch strategically lie to the ubermensch in the same way he lies to the final man--or is this a perversion of the relationship?
secondly, on a personal level: do you believe there is such thing as "truth"--or are you neitzschean through and through? what truth have you thus fashioned/are laboring to fashion for yourself now?

New user here, you seem like you know stuff and I was wondering if you could share some tips on how to get read up. What subjects to study and if you should read some subjects/authors in unison with others? Maybe tips on what traps not to fall into and/or avoid?

Also any tips on keeping a reading journal?

thanks, man--that's kind, though i read a lot of my material in more structured academic environments where instruction was prevalent; for better advice for/from an autodidact, you should ask this guy:
he's very smart and seems self-educated, so he would probably be better from the angle you're coming at.

i keep a journal, but its not associated with reading, just for general analytic/critical thoughts/musings. for non-fiction works, i write a lot in the texts themselves, taking notes and so forth--and then i usually go back and build an outline after i am done with the work, since if it is good enough then i will most likely try to teach it eventually. i cannot tell you how much i recommend 1. keeping a notebook of your thoughts (wittgenstein said most of one's philosophy is just a compilation of previous notes; and 2. writing in/outlining your non-fiction works. it will save you an enormous amount of time later on.

what topics interest you inherently the most?

>pursuing nihilism
???

"Nihilism is false because some nihilists wish things had inherent value."

Do you even philosophy?

That's like saying "cosmology is false because some cosmologists wish modern cosmology's discoveries weren't true."

If a philosophy is just personal preference, the fuck are you arguing superiority for?

Gonna have to ask how your colon smells, because you're pretty far up it with your r/iamverysmart attitude.

>especially emerson and whitman?

I know my Whitman much better than my Emerson, but with regards to American tradition and a Nietzschean lens, I see them as the progenitors and voice for a new kind of American Will:

>Alas, there are so many things between heaven and earth of which only the poets have dreamed.
And especially above the heavens; for all gods are poet’s parables, poet’s prevarications. Verily, it always lifts us higher — specifically, to the realm of the clouds; upon these we place our motley bastards and call them gods and overmen. For they are light enough for these chairs — all these gods and overmen. Ah, how weary I am of all these imperfections which at all costs become event! Ah, how weary I am of poets.

Basically, with regards to the faltering genteel tradition and new free-spirited, active, and individualistic American thought (correct me if this isn't what you meant by 'american antinomian philosophy"), I see those two thinkers as the birth of a Dionysian spirit in the New World---I've always seen N.'s conception of the Great Men to be a triumvirate consisting of Artist/Philosopher/Warrior (Statesman), and here Whitman and Emerson would fit into the molds of the first two, obviously. Anyway, what I'm getting at is the parallels behind this movement and the kind of thought N. admires/promotes. After all, is antinomianism not the "Death of God" taken to its very final limits before breaking free with new traditions and philosophies? To be honest, I've always seen this America as the pan-European culture N. promotes for a new greatness (compare to his turning his back on Wagner, who I see as the reverse parallel to the genteel tradition---maybe not in the 'promoting slave morality sense,' but the clinging to old, lifeless binds of traditional thinking). Have I gone completely off the rocker here or is this what you had in mind? As for the postmoderns, I'm not to the point where I can do a proper genealogical analysis of their works, so I can't speak to any American influence on them (outside the cultural critiques, of course), but which parts do you see them appropriating in their own writings?

>you seem to have read aristotle--are you familiar with the idea of the moral economy? and have you covered much hegel? i have a couple questions on this point if so.

Yeah, and not so much. I know the thinkers he's influenced far better than I do him directly, as silly as that is.

how will bukowski ever recover?

>also, who ranks among your favorite poets/authors? are you american?

Hart Crane, Yeats, Shakespeare, Henry Miller, Nabokov, Whitman, Blake... a pretty standard list. Yourself? And yeah.

>two things

Lying as spectacle, absolutely, but that's really just deceiving the masses. But aside from that? Look at the way N. views Socrates, as an ugly specimen who stripped the noble character of Greek life by resorting to dialectics and reason. So the opportunity for lying directly to one another doesn't even come up, if that's clear at all. Or, to use an example,of two overmen, Christ and Napoleon, in a future where the ubermensch are aware morality and interpretations are merely 'useful fictions' where vitality, power, and aestheticism wins, it doesn't make sense for a future Christlike figure to lie to a future Napoleon figure, because it's all make believe anyway.

I'm a Nietzschean through and through. Well, for example, I support a Aristotelian virtue ethics and religious society, even though I don't believe there are any mind-independently existing virtues or telos for provide a realist backing or that any such God exists, but I think they are very useful fictions.

>he's very smart and seems self-educated, so he would probably be better from the angle you're coming at.

Thank you, it does mean a lot. Everyday I wonder who much further I'd be in my intellectual pursuits if I had gone through with university. I've seen some of your posts in the past and it seems you've done very well in that area, if I'm not mistaken.

There is nothing bad about nihilism.

It's pre-eminently sensible, if not practical for enslaving idiots - which is the real purpose of all schemas of thought.

>Lying as spectacle, absolutely, but that's really just deceiving the masses. But aside from that? Look at the way N. views Socrates, as an ugly specimen who stripped the noble character of Greek life by resorting to dialectics and reason. So the opportunity for lying directly to one another doesn't even come up, if that's clear at all. Or, to use an example,of two overmen, Christ and Napoleon, in a future where the ubermensch are aware morality and interpretations are merely 'useful fictions' where vitality, power, and aestheticism wins, it doesn't make sense for a future Christlike figure to lie to a future Napoleon figure, because it's all make believe anyway.

Actually, to use a better example, suppose you have two future overmen, one (A) whose WtP manifests in a society with human rights, and the other one (B) without any such concept. The latter kidnaps a citizen of society A, and executes him without any sort of due process. At this point, aristocratic-leader A probably says to leader of B something like, "I'm declaring war on your for violating my citizen's inalienable rights." Inalienable? Rights? Nonsense, leader-B thinks of the whole matter. But he doesn't see leader-A as lying because when he hears that declaration, it automatically translates into, "I'm declaring war on you because your WtP expression has come into conflict with mine." It's all rhetoric. Is that clearer? 'Lying' as a concept wouldn't even really exist between the two.

It's similar to emotivism, where moral statements aren't actually truth-apt but merely expressions of personal preferences. "Murder is wrong" = "Boo, murder!" Nietzschean philosophy is just emotivism for the aristocrats, so something like "my citizen's inalienable rights" isn't even really truth-apt.

I feel asleep. What interest me the most is probably how the human mind works and I have no idea about how to read up on it. How do you sort through all the information to find what actually seems like good theories?

What are you supposed to read? Philosophy, psychology, sociology, history, neuroscience, politics, anthropology, biographies, and/or propaganda, etc?

Where is a good start if and what to read in unison with others to get a relatively good order and thinking as you go along?

Can note that I'm relatively good at sticking with something as long as there is some sort of plan instead of aimless wandering.

The best advice I can give is browse academic forums/websites for filtering out poor texts/information. In addition to that, a great place to begin is to do a search for the class syllabus of whatever subject you're interested in at some prestigious university. The open.yale site has a lot of good stuff, for example.

Got any tips on acedemic forums/websites?

reddit is actually a good resources if you browse the right subreddits (e.g. /r/askphilosophy). Check this out, for another example:

reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/reading

And these subreddits will also have links to other good website/blog resources.

Now this is useful information. Never realised reddit was actually that useful. Thank you kind user, this will help immensely.

No problem! There has never been a better time in history to go the autodidact route. The only difficulty is paywall sites for academic research and papers.

it depends on what you're interested in, man. there is no "set course," unless you want to do specific trajectories--e.g. greek philosophy, western cannon, etc--and there are plenty of lists online for those purposes. what more specific subjects crop up in your own curiosity/life in this world? i can recommend some pretty deep syllabi--sanctioned by authoritative sources--in a number of categories, it just depends on where you personally and uniquely want to begin.

i have much to say, but it has been a long day and i'm rather tired; for now, i would only ask: what is your opinion of the phenomenon of "fake news" today?

I don't know, what interests me is thinking in and of itself; I enjoy the act of thinking. For example I would like to be able to think my views on how an Utopia would be, but I lack experience in how people work, what motivates us, problems that crop up etc.

The problem comes in because that I align more with the Eastern way of thinking that everything is connected/tie in to each other which causes me to feel like if I study one subject I won't see the forest for the trees.

Do you think philosophy would be the best starting point as it helps cultivating critical thought or do you feel philosophy contain enough information in and of itself if I want both the theory and the theoretical application?

No worries, I'll have the thread open for as long as you want to continue our discussion!

>Fake News

A new method of psychological warfare made possible by the high-speed internet news cycle, loss of faith in traditional institutions and truth-referents, and a deep conspirational confirmation bias aka mythmaking in the postmodernist age (a core theme of Pynchon, IMO).

What's actually interesting though, and I don't know if you were hoping I'd link it back to Nietzsche but, at risk of sounding like a broken record, but I think what truly makes it a new and unique phenomenon compared to traditional examples of misinformation or slander is, as with everything else, its "democratization" or grassroots nature of the whole process made possible via the internet. Popular information warfare theory requires a top-down, meticulously managed system of deception (in a state's own people, which sells the story to the opposing state), aka managed by the elites/gatekeepers/intelligence agencies. And now in this current climate all I have to do is write a blogpost about how 3 million votes by illegals were cast in the Presidential Election and bam, done, I've convinced a substantial part of the electorate, and influenced the perceptions and emotions of even more. In short, the whole power to influence in the hands of the "superior ones" brought down to the masses, what Plato and Nietzsche saw as the danger of the masses getting too empowered and far more influence than they ought to have.

Everything.

i've been trying to work this--fake news--out not only in terms of american democracy (which i think it is fairly and categorically destructive), but in terms of weber's idea of disenchantment of hegel-nietzsche's notions of mythology. for instance, it seems to me that you are absolutely right and offer a powerful insight viz. the shift from top-down propaganda to ground-up or more horizontally democratic forms of myth-making. but is this not the swan song of a certain battle between secularism and theology? is this not a crack--finally--in the black sepulchre of god?
i mean: does not the production of fake news 1. disclose the local death of our democracy, but 2. disclose the universal awakening of the spirit to itself? the capacity to lie is no longer to business of the happy, chosen few, who prelate within their sanctum sanctori--but isn't mythmaking a matter of the common man, the mass, the single person who sees, at the new dawn of a human epoch, an invitation to master and labor upon the world as never before? a perversion of hegel and nietzsche--or is it the fulfillment of their dialectics once realized in our actual human conditions?
how does the status of this type of lying relate to the status of lying, say, among the ubermensch you so wonderfully addressed here ()?
i'm certainly not saying those asshole macedonian fake newsers are tiny ubermenschen leading us to a brave utopia--but perhaps they are a bridge, a stepping stone, a precursor to something truly great? what existential space have they carved out--and who, i wonder, will feign capacity to fill it?

i very much respect your tone and desire to read more. i'll try to help as much as i can--i'm sorry if my questions seem repetitive or nit-picky, just trying to get at who you are. SO:

are you interested in utopian literature, then?
or in epistemology (philosophy of knowledge)?
or in more applied scientific/cognitive studies?

i also think all things are connected--i was raised in a western catholic--specifically, jesuit--tradition that took "god in all things"--and the associated interconnectivity--as it's starting point, so i feel you there, if only from a different angle.

i think philosophy is a wonderful thing to study, but you need to ask yourself two things first: 1. what end does you study hope to meet? what objective do you want to accomplish? that is, building a reading list around understanding how science works is a lot different than reading list in applied ethics, or a reading list on 20th century analytic philosophy, etc.
even more generally, though, this first question is a matter of what kind of instruction you want: do you want knowledge about how to practically act in the world, e.g. to cover a certain problem or achieve a specific end--or are you looking for self-improvement of a less-practical, more "life of the mind" manner? or: do want to study philosophy as a means to an end, or an end in itself? this is a matter of who you are and who you want to be.

It's a phase people go through as teenagers and it's better not continue with it afterwards. Endlessly whining about life being meaningless and things being inherently without value will only turn you to an anti-human sociopath or a depressed person who wastes his life fearing he will no longer be alive to fear he will no longer be alive.

>inb4 nothing matters anyway XD

Try being a nihilist in today's society. It's like being torn in two.

mean·ing
ˈmēniNG/Submit
noun
1.
what is meant by a word, text, concept, or action.
"the meaning of the word “supermarket”"
synonyms: definition, sense, explanation, denotation, connotation, interpretation, nuance
"the word has several different meanings"
adjective
1.
intended to communicate something that is not directly expressed.
"she gave Gabriel a meaning look"

If you can't understand what I'm saying here, it's that meaning is outside of you. Much like the glyphs, alphabet, and phonetics which gives 'meaning' it's very meaning. It's shared belief, not esoteric.

What? The overwhelming majority of people are nihilists now.

Hedonists*

Because EVERY SINGLE pasty white teenager on earth that think's he's edgy and intellectual tries to show off nhilism and neechee in every single way possible. how can it be worthwhile if the entire following is 15 year old tumblr fags all alike to one another

Whats wrong with nihilism?
a lot (largest understatement, difficult to overstate) of "strong" "care" has gone into the erection of systems and powers and stabilities and civilizations, that the position of 'nihilism' which is in effect viewing all of such stuff, that others or majorities or minorities may say "this is history, this is arguments, declarations, agreements of physical, monetary value structures", and so in such a society, of 'necessary and widespread meanings, grand sophistication and complexity, contingency and stringency', if a citizen, and the further the range of potential damage, of towards 'wielder of great power', operates their mental computation system with a background processing, valuing, algorithm, of 'type A Nihilism', this may threaten, non trivial details about the qualities of the fabric, and its patterned designs, of society

In short, technically, and maybe absolutely only, if your 'nihilism' equals 'freely pursuing and expressing my life while living in my nation and obeying its laws', then yeah I dont know how one would approach that with qualm/s, as what more is, can, or should be asked of one?

Is this the territory of 'unwritten cultural laws/faux pas/whats that other word for this?'?

i dunno what the fuck you just wrote but you are confusing nihilism with anarchism
maybe there are some similar implications viz. the status quo power relations, but that's a broad relation, and anything that remotely challenges power can pretty much be grouped therein
i don't see what you are getting at whatsoever

I have observed people refer/relate 'nihilism' to being 'bad/wrong/incorrect/false/dangerous':

What ever equals 'bad/wrong' besides 'that which is against a nations laws'? If a 'nihilist' exists, and is not breaking the law, 'what contention could one have for denying the '(reason of) existence of nihilism'

No, they aren't. I can tell you as someone who isn't a nihilist out want but as a result of contemplation. It's like everything glows with leftover embers accentuating their outline.

it's a poorly disguised solipsism.

edgy teens taking it out of context to justify their yolo life style

No problem if you keep questioning if you think its necessary.

I think studying philosophy as an end in itself resonates with me, with a hint of sociology and history on the sides is probably me. (I have no problem spending years on something that is engaging the mind.)

Then as a side project I would probably be interested subjects regarding 'artificial Intelligence' as I'm studying computer science. So maybe epistemology and/or applied scientific/cognitive would help with the basic reasoning of automation and learning?

what does the anti nihilist think the nihilist is missing out on, and would this be the same as how the baseball or shrimp enthusiast believes those who are not interested in such are missing out?

Is active nihilism not just saying "fuck it, I'll be an empty tool to whatever ideology is forced on me most vividly?" Does the recognition that one is never truly free of ideology mean the death of nihilism?

I'm sure this has only become more prevalent in recent times but even before the age of information there must have been some underlying socio-political ideology to the most radical backwater of human existences. Even if you have to go as deep as the Kantian categories wouldn't nihilism eventually give way to conceptual thinking as simple as binary thinking, whole/partitive differentiation, cause and effect etc? From there it seems like child's play to subtly condition an ideological background with which to play with.

As an example I'll use the archetypal nihilist. Bazarov from Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons" may espouse nihilism but in his every action there is some measure of either the Russian merchant class (his socio-economic situation) or of Orthodox Christian morality (the ideology of his mother and his household). This is definitely a loaded example but it gets the point across.

How does one attempt a life of nothing from a starting point of something? Am I just reading too much into the etymology and trying to find a mysticism of the zero in an ideology that is essentially just Epicureanism?

isnt nihilism just the stance that 'nothing out side of the mind 'means anything''