Nihilism

[Section 8]

Nihilism is very interesting. Not sure if I agree, but I'm deciding. I would like to here your opinion. Here are some links that provide a good factual base for debate.

http://www.counterorder.com/nihilism.html

http://www.counterorder.com/vision.html

http://www.counterorder.com/faq.html

http://www.counterorder.com/beyond.html

I know that there are alot of links, but you don't want to debate sounding like an ignorant jackass

Have Fun
Shalom

[shokka]

Wow, lots of reading, but let me get this strait from what I read of it

Nihilism, believes in nothing (no faith etc) and that the universe wasnt created upon random events? Its really hard to read it since its on a red background :/

[Section 8]

Here's yet another link from a different perspective. (Catholic Encyclopedia)

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11074a.htm

Here's an essay on Nihilism from The American Nihilism Association

You're Really Nothing at All



Nihilism is the characteristic value-disease of our times. The word comes from the Latin root for "nothing", with more ancient connexions with the word for "trifle". Nihilism is the general phenomenon of human values having no evocatory power, in that questions about meaning fail to yield answers that are trustworthy or in the truth, but rather a void of senseless silence. While episodes of nihilism could be identified throughout our species' cultural history, the label is usually applied to the crisis of valuation that now grips the planet's pre-eminent culture, the so-called 'Western' or Euro-American culture.

The concept of nihilism receives its most penetrating analysis in the work of the German genius Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), who called nihilism "that uncanniest of guests". Writing in the twilight of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche sketched an overall theory of value, in which the human animal invents value matrices with which to survive within, and perhaps to dominate, his physical and psychological environments. Nihilism is the result of a faulty value-system turning back on itself and its human creators, ultimately devaluing itself and causing the experience of nothingness on the many levels of human consciousness.

Specifically, Nietzsche accuses the platonic/christian schema of being inadequate to the needs of superior human beings, in that it promotes an anemic and unaesthetic worldview. This worldview is based on the illusion of another, more real world than the one we inhabit on earth, a supersensible world for which our actions here become merely derivative rituals. Plato's Ideas and the Christian God become the guarantors of all meaning for our lives. But Nietzsche maintained that this was a fiction that detoured us from being human, and that made men and women into slaves fettered to a herd mentality that strangled our profound creative urges.

Nietzsche saw this platonic/christian worldview coming apart at the seems in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The results, he said, would be an increasingly frantic search for new sources of meaning by the European mind, including cataclysmic wars and the pursuit of ever more powerful forms of intoxication. The history of our century, with its global conflicts and increasing chemical, sexual, and materialistic orgiastics are instructive in this regard.

For even if we indulge in ever more intense means to pleasure, behind it all still looms the life-shattering question: Why?, the question that in the presence of nihilism admits no answer. Why exist, why strive, why love and create? Why not untruth? Why not nothing rather than something, why not pain rather than pleasure? Nietzsche's formulation is that the nihilist is the person who judges the world as it is that it ought not to exist, and that in this light our lives are essentially in vain, sealed off from any "ought", from any meaning. In other words, our value-systems do not allow themselves to exercise power or attempt to seek and create happiness, but instead are mired in resentment and endless rationalization. We are machines that are constructed so as to inform ourselves that we have no purpose and no beauty.

Nietzsche saw nihilism as both the great curse and the great opportunity. Man, he said, might very well destroy himself because of nihilism, either through physical destruction or by turning to a nihilistic religion in which man would die spiritually. But he also hoped that perhaps a new race of philosophers would arise, who could both look into the sun of nihilism without blinking and who could legislate anew order of value, new "tablets", Nietzsche called them, for the strong creative minority to live by, values that would serve their creators rather than enslave and demean them. This effort Nietzsche called the revaluation of values, and he went mad in the effort to shape the course of this revaluing.

It remains for us to be honest and cheerful in the light of nihilism. We are all nihilists--those who deny it have not yet awakened to the necessary evolution of their own diseased value structures, or refuse to see out of cowardice. Those of us who look over the edge and peer into the void must call up new tablets of values out of ourselves. It cannot be done so long as we are human. For Nietzsche, at least, the answer lay in becoming more than human. He postulated the Ubermensch, the so called Superman, who could make meaning for himself, a creature as different from the human as we are from the ape.

Unless we become Supermen, we are really nothing at all, and are destined to remain so. As to how the Superman can be brought about, Nietzsche and his alterego Zarathustra give us hints, but nothing more. It is up to a new race of philosophers with hammers to teach themselves the Superman.

-Brandon Floyd

President Emeritus, ANA


Read the links though they are very infromative, and I'm pretty sure you guys know how to read.

Have Fun
Shalom

[RebelWithanAK]

We live to be contented, satisfied, and have occasional bouts of happiness. We have no divine right to anything, nor do we have a divine obligation to anything. Anybody who tells you different is trying to control you - which, of course, rather limits contentment, satisfaction and especially happiness. As such, how anybody can cling to petty vendettas for whatever reason is beyond me.

[Section 8]

Interesting, I'm starting to question my meaning as well. Recently I'm looking into Buddhism, I think you should give it a shot. Seems right on that material posessions are the root of suffering.

Have Fun
Shalom

[Geoff332]

Nihilism, believes in nothing (no faith etc) and that the universe wasnt created upon random events?

Nihilism (usually most strongly associated with Nietzsche, but can be traced back to the skeptics, such as Demosthenes. It appeared in a bunch of anarchist writings, but really received its best voice in Neitzsche's works.

The basic notion of nihilism is that there is no objective order or structure to the universe. Any order or structure we see has originated from us, rather than from the universe itself. All values and meanings are false. Nietzsche argues that "the highest values devalue themselves" (I think that's in Will to Power). Nihilism is the belief in nothingingness, implying that the world is inherently meaningless. Moreover, in Nietzche's view, nihilism is not just the passive belief in the lack of meaning, but the active destruction of imposed values and meanings.

It got picked up by the germans (Heideger's Being and Time is essentially nihilistic) and the French Existentialists (Sartre and Camus most notably). It has fed comtemporary post-modern and post-structural theories (people like Leyotard and Foucault).

I'm curiously ambivalent on nihilism. I agree that most of our values and meanings are imposed, rather than derived from the external world. I'm in favour of challenging them -- albeit not as absolutely as Niezsche suggested. I'm not convinced that behind these meanings is absolutely nothing. Nor am I convinced that we can ever truely destroy our own systems of meaning (we use them as reference points for our own thinking; without them, we are rendered unable to think). We can, however, challenge and revise our own thinking and this is the heart of intellectual progress.

[Anarchist Patriot]

Nihilists were the original anarchists. They were also athiests. This is actually part of a wider philosophical movement called positivism which based itself on the belief that only scientific rationalism was valid thought. This was used by such thinkers as Karl Marx, and his revolutionary followers, Auguste Comte, who espoused captialist rationalism. It was later the basis of four seperate braches of social-political thought, Anarchism, Scientific Socialism (Communism), Corporate Socialism (Fascism) and National Socialism (nasism). In Democratic societies this was the basis of lasse-faire capitalism, which was dominate during the "guilded age". The reason for the popularity of these systems of thought may have been the triumph of industrial society over agrarian society, the victory of the urban bourgois over the landed aristocracy (which actually was a trend which began during the renasaince and continued through the age of enlightenment) and the realized futality of romanticism and nationalism of the early 19th century. There were odd variations of positivism. German national socialism blended two seemingly contradictory beliefs, Romanic nationalism and scientific reason. It practiced a very practical form of scientific reasonism in its exercise of selective eugenics. The USSR under Stalin ultimately rejected scientific rationalism in favor of the creation of a religion based on Stalin's "Cult of Personality".

Pure Nihilism, which is the basis of Anarchism rejected any form of state tyrany and thus became the anthisis of economic tyrany (Capitalism), Rule by meritocracy (Soviet Communism), Corporate socials (fascism) or National Socialism of Hitler.

[GreatWyrm of Babylon]

Nihilism is baicly low road philoshophy. You can basicly use it to justify any action you wish to take by simply claiming that it does not matter what you do anyway. It is contrary to technological advancement, or any other kind of advancement for that matter. To truely accept this philosophy you basiclly must accept everything as it is and not bother to try and improve anything. Leading to a society where everyone seeks self pleasure only, since if all actions are equally futile, you might as well seek pleasure. Long term we would all be living in caves again...

[RebelWithanAK]

Nihilism isn't the "low road" approach - quite the opposite, it's the most 'realist' and existentialist policy one can think of. "Nothing is sacred," and truth be told, nothing is. Why go for technology for technology's sake unless you have a set goal in mind? All that really matters is to be contented, so if we devolve into a decadent society we know why... =P

[GreatWyrm of Babylon]

If contentment is all that matters, let us perfect the system of wiring the pleasure centers of our minds to run off of house current. Or I suppose, hand generators so we can still experience nirvania when the power plants stop working...

[Section 8]

I personnally believe that material possessions are the rooot of all evil. But I take a more Buddhist approach to that philosophy, as opposed to the nihilistic approach.

[Fallen Angel]

I can't see anything wrong with having possessions, as long as you are not buying them simply for the sake of buying something.
If I really want or need anything I get it, but not on impulse.

[G. Adams]

It is not the possessions themselves that are the problem, from a Buddhist perspective, rather the attatchment to them.

[Fallen Angel]

Originally posted by G. Adams@10-03-2003 06:57 AM It is not the possessions themselves that are the problem, from a Buddhist perspective, rather the attatchment to them.

Theres nothing wrong with that I think, I treasure my shoulder pads and footy boots, because of all the pain I went through in wearing them.
I treasure my pick up guitar and music books because of the hours of pleasure they gave me and others, posessions that gave me pleasure and pain, haha.

[Section 8]

Material possessions are the route of all evil. Think of all the killing over them.

[RebelWithanAK]

...said the guy typing on a computer.

[Section 8]

I know, I can't go without material possessions right now, considering that I would like to finish all my schooling.

[GreatWyrm of Babylon]

If you eliminate material possessions 90% of the worlds population will starve...an argricultural economy will not feed the current population.

[Fallen Angel]

Originally posted by Section 8@10-03-2003 10:46 AM Material possessions are the route of all evil. Think of all the killing over them.

Mans envy is the problem Section 8, not the possessions.

[RebelWithanAK]

hahaha, "an agricultural economy will not feed the people." Why? It always has before...