Realizing that eternalism and existentialism are wrong is the main reason people try to be nihilists, which makes it a more intelligent stance. This chapter explains why, with detailed analyses that are unlike those you have seen before. I hope to persuade you that you cannot actually be a nihilist , because you are too intelligent to fully convince yourself that nothing is meaningful. However, committing to nihilism, and attempting to live by it, may be causing you more trouble than you realize.
Fortunately, there is another possibility, not well-known, the complete stance. At first sight, Sartre's affirmation of our radical freedom for self-creation—our ability to transmute from Saul to Paul and back again—looks exhilarating, as indeed it was received in the aftermath of the Second World War.
Yet, carefully read, Sartre himself does not regard radical freedom as exhilarating at all. Far from being something we celebrate it p. Bad faith is attempted self-deception. In it, we seek to convince ourselves that we are part of the causal order in the same way that an ink bottle or a rock is. We attempt to deny our essence-free existence, to convince ourselves that our existence is our essence in just the way it is for a rock.
Sartre's famous example of this attempt to transform oneself into a thing is the Paris waiter BN, pp. But why should we do this? What is it about freedom that causes us anguish and so launches us into the ultimately futile attempt to deny it? As a being by whom values exist, I am unjustifiable.
Normally, says Sartre, my existence is one of engagement. I am fully and busily engaged in activities shaped by my fundamental project, the result of which is that my life is, or at any rate seems, meaningful. But sometimes engagement breaks down. Now I look at my fundamental project from without. And what I realize is that my free choice of that project is utterly without foundation. Suppose, for example, that I am fighting for the French communists against the Nazi occupiers, and that committing myself to communism and to opposing fascism is a life-defining, fundamental choice.
Suppose however that the fascist has made a similar act of fundamental choice. How can I show that my choice is the right one and not his? For Sartre, there is no way I can do this. When it comes down to fundamental choices there is no way of showing that one is any better than another, and so no way of showing that it matters which choice I make.
In other words it does not matter, any more than it matters whether I walk on the left or right of the pavement sidewalk or whether I drink Pepsi or Coke. We are clowns, our lives tragic comedies. Viewed with the insight of disengagement, we are people who devote absolute seriousness and concentration to, as it were, never walking on the cracks in the pavement.
It is the fact that once we have seen the absurdity of our fundamental projects we cannot, in our heart of hearts, take them seriously any more. We can no longer, that is, find ourselves genuinely committed to them. And if one is not committed to a goal then one does not really have that goal. Confrontations with the absurd, that is to say, plunge our lives into meaninglessness, frustrate our fundamental need for meaning.
The concrete form taken by this frustration is paralysis of action. Since action requires a purpose it follows that if our lives have no purpose we cannot act. Sartre explores this problem in the novels that make up the Paths of Liberty quartet written during the same period as Being and Nothingness.
The only way Sartre's characters can act—get married, join the communist party, die a soldier's heroic death, stab a knife into the back of one's hand—is via the act gratuit— the spur-of-the-moment action performed without reason since it is known that there are no reasons.
It yearns for a command from God in which to ground one's freedom. But where God should be there is only an absence. So Sartre's philosophy ends in nihilism, nihilism about life's meaning and so about its value. If God is dead then all things are permitted—and so worthless. Yet, as observed, Sartre's Existentialism is simply Nietzschean self-creation thought through to its ultimate conclusion. It is self-creationism shooting itself in the back.
What this shows is, not that the idea of our need for a life-defining project is defective, but rather that, as in the Christian era, meaning must be something we discover as part of our facticity and so do not have to choose. For Sartre is, it seems to me, right: if— if —our lives must be based on ungrounded choice then they are meaningless and so not worth living. This insight, I believe, plays a crucial role in the early 12 philosophy of Martin Heidegger.
Mostly, says Heidegger, our existence is in authentic. Why, Heidegger asks, to we do this? And without language there could be no thought. Conformity is a necessity of human existence. But conform ism is not. So why is it so difficult to become a non-conformist? Individuals die. But the One lives on. What Heidegger is suggesting, here, is that inauthentic life is a kind of strategy or device for evading the annihilating nothingness that is death.
Understanding that entry into death is something I do alone, I attain a vivid grasp of my own individuality. I understand that my choices even the choice to be a conformist, Sartre might interject have to be made by me myself.
I become in my own, rather than Heidegger's, language autonomous. But to do that, of course, I have to know what are those essentials. Authenticity is, then, autonomy plus focus. Better, it is focused autonomy. To live such a life is to live a life that is intense, passionate, urgent, and committed. It is to live a life, in other words, that is intensely meaningful. Authenticity is early Heidegger's account of what it is to live a meaningful life. Early Heidegger is, as he acknowledges BT , deeply indebted to Nietzsche.
But if this is so, must it not follow that Heidegger's account of the meaningful life is afflicted by exactly the same fatal flaw that is revealed in Nietzsche's account by Sartre's taking it to its logical, self-immolating, conclusion? In fact, however, this criticism of Being and Time could only be made by someone who had not read the work to its conclusion.
For towards the end Heidegger—noting that, as explained prior to section 74, authenticity focused autonomy remains a purely formal concept—explicitly raises the question of content. Unlike, say, the U. Heidegger's, for present purposes, crucial thought is that heritage is not something we choose. Rather we are born into it. The values personified by our gods, Heidegger emphasizes, all belong to one's authentic self.
One is who one is, in large part, because one has grown to adulthood within a particular culture. The commitments of heritage, he holds, are one's own fundamental commitments. It follows that authenticity, and in particular autonomy, is acting out of the values of heritage. Being true to heritage is being true to one's own, deepest self. I find myself in a particular facticity. Since ideals are just that there will always be such a gap—of greater or lesser size. So let us suppose that I discover, say, a particular talent for writing and that what strikes me is the gap between fundamental Western values of equality and the currently disadvantaged situation of women.
My authentic life will then become that of a feminist journalist. The meaning of one's life appears not through self-creation but through receptivity. We should indeed, as Nietzsche suggests, live our lives with the economy and clarity of a well-constructed artwork.
But the fundamental goal around which that artwork is to be constructed is not to be created in an act of groundless, and so self-undermining choice, but is to be discovered, rather, in heritage. And yet doubts remain. Sartre observes, correctly, that Heidegger's notion of heritage is really a notion of place BN, pp. My heritage is the natural-cultural place within which, according to Heidegger, I become myself.
It follows that a way of putting Heidegger's view of the self is to say that, at the deepest level, I am my place. One line of attack might proceed along the following lines. Suppose, one might suggest, I go and live in Iran and come to believe in a hierarchical, sexually differentiated society. Suppose, that is, that, as a Western woman who has converted to Islam, I come to believe that Western notions of sexual equality are actually immoral.
Hence heritage is actually not inescapable in the way Heidegger suggests. Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated.
It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy. While few philosophers would claim to be nihilists, nihilism is most often associated with Friedrich Nietzsche who argued that its corrosive effects would eventually destroy all moral, religious, and metaphysical convictions and precipitate the greatest crisis in human history.
In the 20th century, nihilistic themes— epistemological failure, value destruction, and cosmic purposelessness—have preoccupied artists, social critics, and philosophers. Mid-century, for example, the existentialists helped popularize tenets of nihilism in their attempts to blunt its destructive potential.
By the end of the century, existential despair as a response to nihilism gave way to an attitude of indifference, often associated with antifoundationalism.
It has been over a century now since Nietzsche explored nihilism and its implications for civilization. Interestingly, Nietzsche himself, a radical skeptic preoccupied with language, knowledge, and truth, anticipated many of the themes of postmodernity. If we survived the process of destroying all interpretations of the world, we could then perhaps discover the correct course for humankind. Early in the nineteenth century, Friedrich Jacobi used the word to negatively characterize transcendental idealism.
In Russia, nihilism became identified with a loosely organized revolutionary movement C. The movement advocated a social arrangement based on rationalism and materialism as the sole source of knowledge and individual freedom as the highest goal. The movement eventually deteriorated into an ethos of subversion, destruction, and anarchy, and by the late s, a nihilist was anyone associated with clandestine political groups advocating terrorism and assassination.
The earliest philosophical positions associated with what could be characterized as a nihilistic outlook are those of the Skeptics. Because they denied the possibility of certainty, Skeptics could denounce traditional truths as unjustifiable opinions. When Demosthenes c. Extreme skepticism, then, is linked to epistemological nihilism which denies the possibility of knowledge and truth; this form of nihilism is currently identified with postmodern antifoundationalism.
Nihilism, in fact, can be understood in several different ways. I hope you don't really think that's a good argument EDIT: I'll probably be asked to elaborate, so before I go to bed I'll say this Nihilism is basically the idea that everything is essentially meaningless.
Any values or morals are just results of the collective opinions of humans, and don't really "exist". Outside of this planet, nothing we do really matters. This is just an explanation, not my actual beliefs. It is very close however, but I still don't necessarily consider myself a nihilist. Joined: Mar 11, Messages: 5, Likes Received: 6, Joined: Dec 24, Messages: Likes Received: I agree OP Nihilism is a social belief. Joined: Dec 31, Messages: Likes Received: Wheres the monayy Lebowski?
Joined: Aug 26, Messages: 8 Likes Received: Joined: Sep 6, Messages: 3, Likes Received: 3, Agree x 1. Joined: Aug 6, Messages: 3, Likes Received: 4, Joined: May 12, Messages: 9, Likes Received: 5, Joined: Feb 1, Messages: 1 Likes Received: 0. Joined: Aug 30, Messages: 1, Likes Received: The absolute truth can be that everything is meaningless entertainment with no value other than that which we place ourselves.
Nihilism is an incomplete thought, in my opinion. Our existence is on the cusp of "why" and "why not?
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