Is there any book that explores "There is no inherent meaning

>>8705882
"...Since playing life by the rules is logical", I forgot to add.

How I Learned to Stay Spooked and Die Mirin

>>8705886
I think you are half-memeing and half speaking the truth, so I won't dismiss your post but inquire into what is meant by "spooked" or "spook" since im new to reading and new to this board. What's the definition? Google doesn't answer me

>>8705887
Read Stirner's The Ego and Its Own, its a meme around here, but a fairly useful one that trumps all other memes due to its ability to brush off any argument based in any form of ethical belief.

>>8705892
So it's intellectual masturbation?

>>8705900
He advocated egoism and a form of amoralism, in which individuals would unite in 'unions of egoists' only when it was in their self-interest to do so. For him, property simply comes about through might: "Whoever knows how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property." And, "What I have in my power, that is my own. So long as I assert myself as holder, I am the proprietor of the thing." He says, "I do not step shyly back from your property, but look upon it always as my property, in which I respect nothing. Pray do the like with what you call my property!"[13] Stirner considers the world and everything in it, including other persons, available to one's taking or use without moral constraint[14] – that rights do not exist in regard to objects and people at all. He sees no rationality in taking the interests of others into account unless doing so furthers one's self-interest, which he believes is the only legitimate reason for acting. He denies society as being an actual entity, calling society a "spook" and that "the individuals are its reality"

but seriously maybe you should read the book

>>8705882
Any self-help book

You might like Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning a lot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27s_Search_for_Meaning

Maybe also discourse ethics, like Habermas and Apel

Maybe even Wittgenstein's "forms of life"

But the central problem of ethics is really the "why" and not the "how/what" of the question "what ought I to do?" If you take some given cultural order as axiomatic, it's easy to justify ethical statements within it, and then make plans about the most efficient ways to go about following those statements. The real question is why the hell you should pick that axiom over any other axiom:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

In your OP post, even "play by the rules" (again, maybe Wittgenstein on "rule-following") is itself a rule. You are setting down principles to decide behaviour. Why those principles?

This doesn't mean you have to agree or disagree, but it's something to think about.

>>8705929
Thanks for the suggestions, I've read man's search for meaning. You make some interesting points indeed. What if we take Logic as our core value/axiom, what would be the flaw in that?

>>8705932
That was the big project of the Anglosphere and a bit of Germany, for the better part of the 19th century. It didn't work for various epistemological reasons. Logical positivism is one of the notorious failures of philosophy.

If you mean "rational thinking" in general, and not just logic, the (sorta) consensus right now in the human sciences is that Western rationalism beginning with Descartes really fucked us up and tainted modernity, for similar reasons. There is a lot of talk for example about the Nazis being the natural outgrowth of runaway rationalism, of worldviews that try to reduce the entire world to matter that we manipulate and subdue, of trying to rationalize human communities and human life, etc.

Irrationalism is pretty big right now, since failures of scientific empiricism and logical positivism as worldviews, and the major self-critiquing that started going down in the West in the 60s. of There is a lot of doubt about science and rationality, and a sort of tacit assumption that scientism is our religion and will look silly in hindsight. It goes too far in a lot of places. Obviously rationality and science are cool things.

You might actually like Wittgenstein, especially recent work on him that is isn't part of the positivist/empiricist outlook. He rejects logicism and though he's been accused of relativism he is still a kind of practical rationalist who obviously still believes strongly in science and in logical thinking, especially the idea of clear thinking, clear communication and training ourselves to be rational. But he's really really hard to understand. Maybe check out Newton Garver's books on him if you're interested.

>>8705948
Sorry, for the better part of the 20th century*