Nihilism

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>>9038081

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

>>9038177
something can matter to you but still be essentially meaningless

>>9038262
that crosses the border between nihilism and existentialism

>>9038262
This is such a bullshit notion

>>9038269
its existential nihilism, which is still nihilism

>>9038274
how
anti-contrarian contrarianism is still contrarianism anon

>>9038262
>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.

>>9038291
If that's a definition, it's a shit one. What basis is there to define somethings meaning based on its importance to you?

>>9038308
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.

>>9038318
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.

>>9038177

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

nigga what

>>9038260
If there is nothing how can you write "There is nothing".
Your sentence is illogical and self-defeating.

>>9038351
he can write there is nothing because that statement has no intrinsic worth or truth, its just something he believes

>>9038081

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 /lit/, >>9033034 , 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.

>>9038322
This is a logical and performative contradiction m8. The things you value are by definition not meaningless.

>>9038418

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 anon 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.

>>9038440
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.

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>>9038081

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

Nihilism is the tool of oppressors.

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>>9038411
>>9038416

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.

>>9038464
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.

>>9039989
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.

>>9039989

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: >>9033034 . 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.

>>9033417
>>9033454
>>9033516
>>9033559

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 4chan, 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 4chan, 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/.

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>>9041114

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

>>9041200

you are a joke. please, please stop.

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>>9041114
>>9041833

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)

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>>9041114
>>9041833
>>9041856

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

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>>9041114
>>9041833
>>9041856
>>9041874

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

>>9041833
You're both embarrassing to read.

>>9041833

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 anon 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!

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It's inauthentic philosophizing.

>>9041908
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.

>>9038081
It's false because Christianity is true. Most nihilist want nihilism to be true. I.e. edgelords.

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>>9041939
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?

>>9041910
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.

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>>9042045
>>9041939

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.

>>9042045
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.

>>9042061
>-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 (http://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.

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>>9042212

>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: https://www.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.

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>>9042212
>>9042435

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: >>9042435.
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?

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>>9042212
>>9042435
>>9042456

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.

>>9042435
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.

>>9042483
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.

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>>9042564
>opiate addiction

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

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

>>9042583
>i've been there, too. never going back to the desert. i don't have to say it, but: you are loved, anon.

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

>>9038081
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.

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>>9042564

>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?

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>>9044078
>>9042564

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 4chan 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

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>>9042564
>>9044078
>>9044111

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.

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>>9042564
>>9044078
>>9044111
>>9044153

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.

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>>9044182
>>9044153
>>9044111
>>9044078
>>9042564


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.

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tfw too intellegent for nihilism

>>9044205
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.

>>9044111
>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.

>>9044153
>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...).

>>9044078
>>9044078
>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?

>>9038177
This is the face of anti-nihilism.

>>9044078
>(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.

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>>9044470
>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

>>9044505
>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?

>>9044470
>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?

>>9044656

New anon 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?

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>>9044836

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:
>>9044505
>>9044470
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?

>>9038177
>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?

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>>9044215
Gonna have to ask how your colon smells, because you're pretty far up it with your r/iamverysmart attitude.

>>9044656
>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.

>>9041917
how will bukowski ever recover?

>>9044656
>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.

>>9044950
>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.

>>9038081
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.

>>9044656
>>9045047
>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.

>>9044836
>>9044950

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.

>>9045218
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.

>>9045228

Got any tips on acedemic forums/websites?

>>9045245
reddit is actually a good resources if you browse the right subreddits (e.g. /r/askphilosophy). Check this out, for another example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/reading

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

>>9045281

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

>>9045334
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.

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>>9045218

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.

>>9045047
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?

>>9046360

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?

>>9046360
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.

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>>9046626

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 (>>9045047
>>9045106)?
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?

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>>9046603

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.

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>>9038081
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

>>9038081
Try being a nihilist in today's society. It's like being torn in two.

>>9038291
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.

>>9048401
What? The overwhelming majority of people are nihilists now.

>>9048443
Hedonists*

>>9038081
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

>>9038081
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?'?

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>>9048755

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

>>9048802
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'

>>9048443
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.

>>9038081
edgy teens taking it out of context to justify their yolo life style

>>9048022
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?

>>9048911
>>9048802
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?

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>>9038081
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?

>>9049428
>>9049381

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

>>9049572
>isnt nihilism just the stance that 'nothing out side of the mind 'means anything''
(in and of itself, the mind is the dictator of all value and meaning)

>>9042045
I too agree that you are spot on. Thank you so much for your contribution, I really needed you there hahahaha

Why does it matter that nothing has meaning?

>>9038411
>science
>true
wrong

The only true nihilist are those who kill themselves.
All values are built upon experiencing existence, and disregarding this fact makes all nihilist hypocrites. There is no 'nothing', there is your consciousness while you're still alive, and that is valuable.
The problem with nihilist is that if you do not value anything, not even your own life, then it becomes justification to end my life, and that is not something worth arguing.

>>9046360
>authoritative sources
i wish redditors would stop claiming to be 'professors'

this is one of the most informative and civilized discussions I have ever come across on my 8 years surfing this site...

...then again most of it consisted of shitposting on /b/, but yeah kudos to u guys

>>9041200
This is for sure written by a college sophomore pretending to be a pseud. It just has to be.

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>>9045037

so what would you say to the proposition that postmodern continental philosophy--and its popularity among self-titled american "deconstructionists"--is not a product of nietzsche's hammer, heidegger's existentialism or adorno/the frankfurt school's appropriation of marxism into the critical method--but it is rather the lingering symptom of a uniquely american phenomenon. this phenomenon arose in the 19th century when the elitism and intellectualism of early puritan ideology gave to the antinomean religious revivalisms of the early- and mid-century; what was preserved was the crushing moral certainty of puritanism--the desire to see the world as right and wrong, as fundamentally a battle ground between good and evil--without its educational hierarchy. i would argue that it is in this antinomean tradition--where anne hutchinson might be the first and most famous examplar--that whitman and emerson first grew (this is santayana's argument in his "genteel tradition" essay). insofar as whitman and emerson's philosophy's sought to look ever-inward, rather than outward, as the authoriative source of their inspiration, they deified the self and relegated the role of traditional external authority to a quasi-demeaned status--it became all about judgments which emanated not from some sovereign, collective authority, but from individual opinions.
so whitman and emerson picked up the moral certainty of puritanism and combined it with the relativism viz. authority that came with the various 19th century backwater religious revivals. so, while they certainly departed from populism and came to define high american letters, i think they actually formalized and institutionalized a popular antinomeanism that we see existing today on both the american leftist intelligentsia as well as the alt-right neo-populists (this is partly richard hofstadter's argument in his seminal "anti-intellectualism in american culture"--an absolute must read, one of my top 3 on american history). the popularity of german idealism--see especially hegel and william james, for instance, or nietzsche's influence on turn of the century american thought--met the watershed post-war immigration of european intellectuals (see: adorno, marcuse, etc.) who would lay the groundwork for postmodernism precisely because they found soil amenable to its cause in american culture.
so my argument is--and i would love to hear your thoughts--that postmodernism is really an extension of this paradoxical american tradition, which combines puritanism with revivalism, adding crushing moral certainty (which it would never admit) to a type of hollowed-out relativism that is the ultimate endgame of antinomean politics.
so, i would say: the genteel tradition (whitman, emerson + trascendentalism, william + henry james et al) is really the source of postmodernism, not the continental philosophy that the french post 68-ers feign to have preserved through the war and dredged up themselves.

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>>9045047
>I support a Aristotelian virtue ethics and religious society

very interesting; how come? how did you land on this?

and wtf are some of your relevant life circumstances that might explain your learnedness? where you from? it's rare to find an ex-opiate dropout with such a broad but deep knowledge...not flattery just honest curiosity at this point
autodidacts of your level are a weird myth in american culture, romanticized and popularized around the mid-20th century as the shift occurred in mass high school enrollment--but fuck, it was usually just a myth. i'm a little interested not only in your ideas, but what the fuck has produced them...insights?

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>>9041939
>N. is a 'hierarchical fictionalist,' and not an emotivist for humanity as whole

you wrote this a bit back, and i am curious: does mcintyre argue this? what is the basis for reading nietzsche as an emotivist?--in your opinion, is there any stock in it?

at first glance, the emotivist argument almost strikes me as a work of historical revisionism. and this reminds me, tangentially: are you familiar with the revisionist attempts at turning figures like plato (see jill king at cornell) and machiavelli (see mary dietz at northwestern) into democrats? if so, do you have an opinion on the matter?

>>9050118
>ex-opiate

Heh. The reason I didn't respond to your first post earlier was because I've been spending all day trying to hustle up today's 'fix.' I'll come back with a complete (and worthy!) reply in like two hours.

>>9041200
mass fedora levels in this thread

>>9050130
Hey Rapture, gotta say your analysis is great. I read the entire convo last night and have to thank you guys for this; I've never felt so inadequate, and now so hungry.

Few questions about the Ubermensch/last man dichotomy. First, Nietzsche talks of the ubermensch almost as a meta human, yet you use the term as a man who manifests his vision of reality out of sheer force of will. Do you think Nietzsche meant anything literal when he says an ape is to man what man is to the ubermensch- or was that just metaphor for an ubermensch's greatness relative to his contemporaries?

Second: The Noble lie is an obsession of mine as well. I do differ with you in that I don't think all Ubermensch/great men know that they are manifesting a fiction- I think many truly believe in the 'lies' they tell, and that this belief is a potent source of willpower. Many more might not, your Caesars and Napoleons who just seem to be grabbing power for the fuck of it, but an ascetic, spiritual Ubermensch like Buddha or Jesus, I would assume, believes his interpretation.

Random Question: What are your thoughts on God and the origin of consciousness? I was a total fedora-lord atheist growing up, but now I'm convinced that there is a source of consciousness that we all draw from and express through our 'physical' being. I'm still just starting out, would love to hear your thoughts on the Ultimate source of existence.

Also: How do you classify the Nobles/ 'Great men' who exist in an age of spiritual stability? The Great men who are merely custodians of a stable era, rather than manifestors of a new synthesized reality? They don't seem to be Ubermensch to me- I see the ubermensch as, in reality, a combination of a central executive will (napoleon) and an unstable cultural spirit, ready to buck the old rider (Louis 16). So the Ubermensch, to me, is not simply a man but a man in the right place at the right time.

I have a ton more questions but I'll leave it at that.

>>9050183
If your only response is a hackneyed internet meme you have no response at all.

It's like calling people racist - eventually it just stops working.

>>9050107
I'm curious to see where you'd place art (music, visual arts, literature) in the context of contemporary America and it's political situation of the last few decades.
I've been mulling over how any desire for transcendent artistic expression has been somehow lost to the right in North America. Is this the end result of puritanism? Post-modernism? Movements much further to the right in Europe have had robust artistic elements. The Italian futurists had all sorts of aeshete ambitions and even the third Reich had its somewhat kitschy neo-romanticism. What makes America different?

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>>9051752
>Movements much further to the right in Europe have had robust artistic elements

i think that this is in part why we don't. the american encounter with totalitarianism in the 20th century left a broad and looming shadow: not only in our incredible mistrust of centralized state information (yet one more contributing factor that, when mixed with our lineage of antinomeanism, has helped the current surge in populism), but, along with that, the TYPE of politics that were propagandized during the war and post-war period as "totalitarian" were a particular branch of rhetoric.
so you point to the italian futurists--other examples might be the theoretical works of sorel and schmitt--both who took the aesthetic image-myth as the ultimate and best way to weed beneath the endless conversations of a desiccated liberal parliamentarism and actually impact the minds of the proletariat/das volk.
so, point 1: aesthetics have been excised from the american political arena ever since it encountered first the volk-inspired anti-modernism of fascism, and then the full-scale integration of marxist aesthetics viz. the soviet encounter thereafter.
i think you are absolutely right: there is a reason why right-wing movements have such robust elements of aesthetics and art--this is simply because they understand, more than the dry coldness of leftism today (which is ironic, given marx/adorno/marcuse/ranciere's very passionate notions of art and politics), that one of the fundamental runestones of political existence is: romanticism. isaiah berlin is the thinker to check out if you are interested in how alt-righters both appropriate romanticism and simulatenously try to repress it. see, for instance, edmund burke for maybe the most enduring and most important figure on splicing aesthetics into what we might see as modern conservatism.

first point: after its encounter with fascism and totalitarianism, liberalism self-consciously rejected the romanticism and aestheticism of reactionary politics in favor of an ideal of rational deliberation based on individual freedom (locke, rawls, habermas).

great question, btw.

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>>9051752
>>9052076

point 2: i would say that this self-conscious rejection of reactionary aesthetics/romanticism is further linked to a deep tradition of anti-intellectualism in the united states.
to summarize a fantastic history written by hofstadter (see: "anti-intellectualism in the american tradition"), intellectuals and artists were an alienated and isolated group in the US 19th century. it was only after the genteelers (emerson, the James, Ryle, etc.) and the turn of the 20th century--lets say from 1890 to 1920--that american political culture began to embrace intellectuals in the form of "expert knowledge"--see the lippmann/dewey debate of the 1920s for a good example of the origins of this. the new deal escalated america's political commitment and use of experts, so the alienation intellectuals and experts felt in the 19th and early 20th centuries began to dissolve by the mid-2oth century when accredited institutions began to open their doors to intellectuals and artists. but this stabilization of the role of the artist had the ironic consequence of bringing to light the problem of alienation: just around the time when artists and intellectuals began to be recognized by the american public, those very same artists and intellectuals began to cling to their status as "alienated, starving artists" as never before. so, as soon as the long history of american anti-intellectualism began to where off, intellectuals, so used to their status as marginalized and misunderstood aesthetes, did not full embrace this new popularity.
so while in europe you see art and politics intersecting very self-consciously ever since louis XIV employed le brun, america has witnessed an incredibly vexed relation develop between its artistic class (which took form and grew exponentially in the post-war period) and its ruling elite.

so, point 2: american intelligentsia/artists today still have an ambiguous relation to their own identities as intellgentsia/artists. in america, art and power has never found a way to meet on acceptable common ground--and the popularization of art in the mid-20th century had the impact of further fracturing the identities and relations that produced and consumed that art.

look at the celebrity today, for instance. this is a good example of where "art" and "politics" now stand: silly, fractured speeches without much content; ridiculous actors who confuse a nation's appreciation for their films for an appreciation of their politics; a hollowed out form of political art totally subsumed under the capitalist system. but whatever, i benefit, so i'm ok with this.

thoughts?

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>>9051217
First, Nietzsche talks of the ubermensch almost as a meta human, yet you use the term as a man who manifests his vision of reality out of sheer force of will

i do think that this is a metaphor; nietzsche also has examples of potential overmen that are clearly not alien to our species as such, but alien in their capacities viz. the norm.

ima try to break this down a bit: i would say that nietzsche’s analysis of “rhetoric” should be read as a response to the phenomenon of the final man. contrary to this life-desiccating image, nietzsche obviously posits the possibility of the ubermensch. the ubermensch sees in the death of God the opportunity to exercise his own self-law-making capacity; the ubermensch invents the horizon of its own being, and accepts fully the indefinability of man as a final essence. nietzsche at one point refers to this ubermensch as, among other things, a “poet who does not lie”: where socrates posited an entirely other plane by which to judge the actual world, the ubermensch lives fully and instinctively in the world of appearances and instincts. if socrates killed the sensory experience of man for a narrowing idealism, the overman seems to in part reclaim this total exercise of the self, both intellectual (there is no going back after socrates) and sensorily. the overman creates a morality that is valuable for the ends he has set upon his own life--and the problem of valuation is really key to all this. but the creation of morality is, for Nietzsche, not an act of reason, but rhetoric.

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>>9051217
>Many more might not, your Caesars and Napoleons who just seem to be grabbing power for the fuck of it, but an ascetic, spiritual Ubermensch like Buddha or Jesus, I would assume, believes his interpretation

what stands under “reason” for Nietzsche is not further reason, but the more animal instincts of the ego. “reason” is thus the product of deeper instincts, rhetorically sublimated: reason stands not in contrast to rhetoric, but as one of its consequences. this is due to the nature of rhetoric being intertwined with the use of language, and comes to the fore when we consider the problem of “truth.” language does not convey truth, but rather opinion: language is, by definition, first and foremost a vehicle for persuasion. As such “language is rhetoric, because it desires to convey only a doxa, not an episteme.” for Nietzsche, truth is a social convention, a “movable host of metaphors,” rhetorically constructed; it is the correct assignment of words to things, mediated by the culture in which it exists--see hobbes' role of the sovereign, and schmitt's splicing of Nietzsche and Hobbes, to find in Nazism the birth of a new aesthetic sovereignty. but for neitzsche, words become concepts because they enjoin unlike things under an abstracted likeness, by “making equal what is unequal.” it is this act—which nietzsche sees as a form of lying—that is the first rhetorical and creative use of language. the ubermensch does not construct his morality by lying (as language itself is already a lie), but by accepting the rhetorical foundations of “truth” and creatively asserting a new standard. the attempt to do away with illusion entirely—the push of rationalism converted into science—is precisely what has lead man into nihilism. to this end, the ubermensch recognizes the irreducible necessity of illusion; he does not attempt to rid the world of illusion, but to produce an illusion that’s value to life may be affirmed and felt. rhetoric thus produces illusions; the more totalizing (not systematic) the illusion, the more it is “truth.” nietzsche complicates the original binary between philosophy and rhetoric by collapsing the binary entirely, seeing behind any and all philosophies the rhetorical foundations of an active “will to knowledge,” which nietzsche further defines as a valence of the will to power. to this end, nietzsche would say that the division between philosophy and rhetoric, rhetoric and reason is a false one that is itself a form of power operating on life to conform to given (life-rejecting) ends. rhetoric does not work on reason so much as it forges and creates regimes of reason; this power is reserved, for Nietzsche, in the ubermensch.

but can the overman ever live in a type of "bad faith" as you suggest? your division between the caesar's and the buddhas seems very relevant...not sure what nietzsche would say to that. perhaps this guy >>9050163 has some further thoughts.

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>>9052200
>>9051217

but you know, as far as the overman/man - ape/man metaphor goes, i do think that this is a super fucking important point, as it opens the way for the contemporary trends of transhumanism--see, for instance, ray kurzweil; and, on the dark underside, the misinterpretation in the form of nazism

the whole idea that "man is a bridge" and that the overman is yet to come--taken broadly, one can see how it doesnt even take a very serious misinterpretation to find in this the origins of something like support for artifical intelligence and the advent of the sentient machine age. of course, the manner by which this new age dawns/is fulfilled is also important: nietzsche would categorically reject the vanguardism of lenin or hitler, viz. their violence, to bring about this new future. e.g. if our new robot overlords decide just to kill us all, they aren't very nietzschean. but they might not care very much for these titles, so, you know...

that's just to say: the AESTHETIC image of the overman has yet to be written. i think this complicates a lot of what nietzsche has to say, and actually begins to pit us closer to the sociological contributions of weber, shils and geertz viz. the problem of charisma. or: does the overman create his own contexts, or does the overman respond to a context willing and ready to receive him? this reminds me deeply, too, of machiavelli and the problem of occazione: does the charismatic leader's charisma depend on context? or does the true charismatic/overman totally transcend context entirely?--here, weber's notion that the charismatic comes in the form of "So it is written in the law_____......BUT, I say unto you_______......" so does this charismatic transgression against the norm/preexisting law come with a limit? if geertz and shils see in charisma something like "being close to the center of things," e.g. as an aesthetic phenomenon instrumentalized into a source of political power, then is the overman/charismatic simply "close" to a pregiven center--or does he have the capacity to build and manufacture these centers where they otherwise do not exist? see, too, the aesthetics of burke, or the manner by which all faces are turned toward the sovereign in hobbes' frontispiece to the leviathan--thus disclosing the ultimate aesthetic grounds of their rhetorical commitments....

>>9052256
how many hours of reading does a phd/university professor commit to in a day? not the other guy, just curious.

>>9052119
The guy you were talking to before mentioned conceptualizing the overman as a triumvirate, one of the facets of which is artistic. It was briefly touched on in a previous post that for Nietzche one of the functions of a society is to create mechanisms and conditions from which an overman can emerge. If we accept that there is an aesthete, artistic, or creator element to the overman, does the North American rejection of the arts as valuable damage its capacity to create overmen?

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>>9052329

oh absolutely. but nietzsche would say that openly: his attacks on david strauss and his contemporary german "culture" show this.

like adorno's critique and the frankfurt innovation that would follow, nietzsche’s critique of hegel’s historicism leads him to argue that the “peak” of human civilization is not the culmination of history in his contemporary era, but the early age of Greece. it was in pre-socratic greek philosophy, and tragedy especially, that Nietzsche found the affirmative elements of man’s suffering that would come to characterize much of his later philosophy. for Nietzsche, the health of a culture may be measured by how well that culture maximizes the outputs and channels of human creativity and strength; it is this instinctual and life affirming capacity that nietzsche appreciates in greek culture, and he comes to call this attitude toward reality as the “master morality.”

one doesn't have to take a stand on the whole huxley/orwell debate to see how categorically nietzsche would condemn contemporary american culture. so little of it offers to sort of resistance/challenge to the self that he admires; we generally seek comfort, supplication and validation in our consumption of "culture," thus rendering it 1. unaesthetic, and 2. therefore not a "culture" whatsoever.

though there are some great artists that america has produced, i don't think he would look to any of our leaders/thinkers/artists as true overmen--maybe whitman? and he would certainly say we do not have the cultural economy that produces overmen.

but, again--does the overman have to emerge in a certain context? or can the overman come to a totally corrupted world and redeem it? is the context least amenable to the overman's emergence the one that will ultimately and most passioantely witness his rise?--is this one of the great ironies of our age? i am not sure, and would care to hear your thoughts.

>>9052354
Your last point is something I was considering as well. I think in a way it links back to what you were saying about autodidactism. It's certainly possible for someone to achieve great learning on their own, but that's unfortunately not always the reality. The infrastructure and social capital of art has such an influence on how an artist develops. Try to imagine Joyce without his jesuit education. Even the artists that reject that infrastructure, like Baudelaire and his ilk rejecting salon art, are still responding to it.

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>>9052318

you are 100% american. you wanna know how i know? cause americans' love of quantity pervades everything: it is not a matter of what i've read, but how much i've read. anyone who thinks america is obsessed with money mistakes who we are: its an existential love of quantity, to be free from scarcity on a massive scale, to overcome the sheer abundance of this world by dominating it all--that's what drives us.

so to your question: i have no idea, it all depends on the person. as far as my colleagues go, i work with some very studious people, who can engulf a 300 p. book on obscure european history in a day and think nothing of it. whether this is sustainable is questionable; i tend to have extraordinary bursts of productivity followed by substantial periods of rests and reflection. like i'll read 8 books in a week and then not read anything for 2 months.

what is categorically more important than reading widely in academia is reading deeply. .or, rather: what i have is less a consistent work ethic (though this is extremely important from a professional angle, and i cannot stress the significance of discipline) in terms of consuming many books, but a good idea for what is actually worth reading. i swear, i've had courses where you could read 100 books and learn nothing, totally tread water in terms of time and energy; and i've encountered other courses whose reading lists are small, but who probably saved me a decade or more of research into whatever topic.

personally, i think that it's all a matter of choosing the right thing rather than choosing many things. of course, combine the two and you're golden. but, as a friend of mine from undergrad once said: "i haven't read much; but what i have read, i understand; and what i understand, i use"--this disposition always strikes my respect more than the "well-read bookworm"

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>>9052318
>>9052379

by example, if you came to me and said: "hey, i'm interested in learning about utopian thought in the western world, but i don't have a whole lot of time. build me a reading list for both its theoretical and political implications." i would retort:

for the theoretical:
frank manuel/fritzie manuel, "utopian thought in the western world"
greogry claeys, "dystopia"

for the political:
mark mazower, "governing the world"
henry kissinger, "world order"

and for a more time consuming but seminal series/work:
eric vogelin, "order and history"--vols. I-V
sheldon wolin, "politics and vision"


between the first four books--and as an educator i always encourage to read more/primary sources, but you don't even need to do so if you really don't want to--you will cover an extraordinary amount of ground, and will become one of the more educated human beings on the subject. with the introduction of the last series, i would say you could feign expertise; with enough discipline, you could do all this in a month or less, and probably buy yourself 50 years of an otherwise useless dedicated milling about.

>>9052471
Do you have a blog? I would nut if you made a series of efficient/short reading lists for various topics.

>>9038081
Nothing (See what I did there?)

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>>9052483

i did, and i wrote a lot of random reviews about contemporary authors/short stories. anyways, turns out those authors have their names on fucking google alerts and i ended up making more enemies among the american intelligentsia than i wanted, especially given my position as a young and hopeful phd candidate, so i shut it down. some day.

what topics are you interested in?

>>9052379
Thanks for the response

My bad for the delay.

>>9047982
I definitely agree with your two insights here, and wrt Hegel and N. I think H. would welcome the new modes of empowerment---unlike many who view the internet as heralding some endgame of anarchism, it's only continuing the master-slave dialectic because it ennobles what NRx calls a new 'technocratic aristocracy,' aka new masters whose superiority and 'distance' is maintained by technology. As for N., I think he'd see the sublimation a fresh aristocracy as a better thing too, based on his statements on how the truly great and creative work within the confines of a State, and his bemoaning of anarchists. But I could be biased by my 'right' interpretations of both.

>how does the status of this type of lying relate to the status of lying, say, among the ubermensch you so wonderfully addressed here

Well, when it comes to state-sponsors/coordinated versions of 'fake news' psyops, it's merely another tool in subverting an opponent's citizens to further one's own WtP (see: Putin's propaganda on US citizens to further his Russian imperial desires). For the grassroots kind, my 'right' interpretation of the dialectical process leads me to believe the State will win out in the end, for, as we saw in the mass-choreographed outrage when the term 'fake news' was created, the elites are very upset about the average man disrupting their monopoly on this type of control and myth-making. I'm not so much talking about totalitarian control here, but the concept of 'useful idiots' we saw so much of during the election. i.e. "Great things remain for the great." - Nietzsche

>>9050107
Have your read Rorty's "Achieving Our Country?" It touches upon many of the same themes and thinkers as you are here.

Anyway, what an incredibly interesting thesis. America is certainly the postmodern society par excellence (see: Baudrillard's "America"), and I do agree without the American tradition (which I think your characterization is a fantastic one), all the tools they incorporated from Barthes, Husserl, et al. amount to very little, a psychoanalysis without a patient. This actually links up to a strain of thought I've heard from Catholics---would you say Martin Luther and the Protestant reformation is an even earlier progenitor of the kinds of antinomian, inward-focused ways of thinking Whitman and Emerson exemplify, or is the American brand a wholly new concept because the free-spirited, democratic spirit only ever achieves its apex because of its unique history (American Revolution, primarily, or perhaps something else entirely)?

>>9052506
Foreign policy, political philosophy, group psychology, human nature, mythology& its psychological origins, Aesthetics(I'm really behind on this), Propaganda.

Out of curiosity, why do you want a phd/ professorship? I'm a philosophy undergrad and plan on getting out of academia/ the Cathedral asap. The atmosphere is stifling, and I don't want to subconsciously limit my intellectual freedom to fit in with polite society

>>9038081
ITS POINTLESS FOR THE SAKE OF BEING POINTLESS

how long does it take you people to realize that the value attributed to anything is created by the person supposedly valuing it!!

Beauty is LITERALLY in eye of the beholder, you fucking morons!

The only reason people consider themselves to be nihilistic is because they're finding a way to accept their pitiful condition, rather than feel any conviction to improve.
i.e. "nothing matters so why do anything in the first place? Nothing matters so why feel enjoyment from this thing in the first place?"

Im the reason for my continual existance, fuckers. Saying existance is meaningless by comparing it to LE UNIVERSE XD is unfounded.
Fuckers.

>>9050118
>very interesting; how come? how did you land on this?

In danger of sounding like a fascist, I think leftism is the resentful last man ideology at its finest, and only in strife do we produce great people. Virtue ethics because it's a formalization of my intuitions developed in the recent years, in that it provides a moral flexibility and human excellence (eudamonia) I think are lacking in utilitarianism and deontology, in addition to a focus on the concept of 'tradition' and 'practice' outlined by MacIntyre---I think cohesive communities united by a common practice (aka a greek polis with a religion) and made-up of traditional family units created the best people. After all, like I said earlier I'm a Nietzchean through-and-through: “‘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 wtf are some of your relevant life circumstances that might explain your learnedness? where you from?

Just like I said to the other anon, I think it's silly to be uneducated in the information age. I mean there's all the usual stuff like solitude in youth (time to read), fostered creativity by one's guardian, writing fiction and poetry since a very young age, reading difficult novels as an adolescent (Lolita and Pale Fire at 13/14 changed my life) etc etc., but the real catalyst is the day I got my own laptop. And plus, even though I may from a lower-class family, two generations up were aristocrats displaced by war, so the whole culture of achieving a learned disposition and moral excellence was passed on. As a side note, for the record while addiction has made me a person with more depth and understanding, I'm definitely far short of where I should be because I never read when I'm on the junk, and that's everyday! Haha.

What about yourself? If I remember correctly from your old posts, you vote liberal, correct? What was your narcotics history?

>>9050130
>does mcintyre argue this?

Yep, in "After Virtue" his contention is that Nietzsche lead to a loss of all moral authority apart from the self, and the source of morality for the (average) self is just emotional preferences.

>in your opinion, is there any stock in it?

Mostly yes, only I do think (and as we've discussed in this very thread) Nietzsche prioritizes certain emotions or consequences. We both know "N. says do whatever you want!" is a common and terrible misreading. And that is the real crux of the matter; it's not so much what Nietzsche is about per se, but how the popular masses interpret him, and I would indeed say he encourages emotivism. To be honest, and this may be controversial or bizarre, but I think we all ought to adapt MacIntyre's solution in advocating moral realists like Aristotle, at least outwardly. What I mean by this is N. should really only be read by the Great Men in society anyway, and, back to the whole concept of fictionalism and lying, the best way to ensure social cohesion and flourishing in the rest of the populace is to have some sort of moral-referent for them to follow, even if the aristocratic-elites know it to be untrue. The one's who "should" live by their own self expression of Will are those who will overcome the restraints.

>if so, do you have an opinion on the matter?

Well, as someone with an 'aristocratic radicalism' interpretation of Nietzsche (words he said best described his project), compared to most of modern academia which has an "anti-authority, anti-hierarchy, pro-power in the hands of the people, etc." castration, let's just say I'm not a fan of such revisionism. But such is the modern mindset of such folk; if they cannot dismiss the thinker entirely (De Maistre, the nouvelle right), it must be neutered (Plato, Nietzsche) or come with a disclaimer (Heidegger).

>>9051217
>I've never felt so inadequate, and now so hungry.

A great source of educational inspiration :^)

> I do differ with you in that I don't think all Ubermensch/great men know that they are manifesting a fiction

I had this in the back my mind during the whole thread, and my response is while this is absolutely true for historical Great Men, the overmen of the future (post-Death of God, post-crisis of nihilism) embrace the fictional nature of moral/existential narratives and continue on anyway. In short, N. doesn't believe we can return to the proverbial womb of un-self-aware belief in transcendental truths.

>>9038081
Its pretty stupid because whether anything "matters" is relative.
On the cosmic scale of the universe, of course nothing we do would matter, but on a human scale things around us and our own actions have meaning because they affect us

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>>9052545

i like you. those are 100% my interests. how old are you/what do you study?

i could give you a lot in each of those fields. you seem pretty intelligent--please tell me EXACTLY what you want to learn. like you want to know about edmund burke? do you want to become knowledgable in applied marketing? are you interested in the history of US constitutionalism? are you curious about the rise of aestheticism in german political culture?

>>9052602
what is your take on the rise of contemporary american populism? i see in it a quasi-aristotelianism (a perversion! but an important one) that i would be curious your thoughts...

>>9038081

I don't know. Doesn't matter anyway.

>>9052329
I cannot for the life-of-me find the exact quote, but Nietzsche (or was it a secondary source) says something like "Napoleon used the political arena of Europe as a canvas for his art." So yes, I would say N. would agree with Plato and Adorno's view on the educational aspects of art via formal aspects, that bad/popular art (the Culture Industry), subdues us and inspires the very opposite of creative modes of thinking. And at this point we get to exactly what rapture said about does this really matter to Higher Men who are supposed to overcome anyway? It's a tough question, but I'm inclined to lean towards "yes" based on N.'s comments about the origins of slave morality in Semitic cultures, the origins of Buddhism because of the Asian diet, etc., so we can see he's a determinist when it comes to cultures and resulting production.

>>9052821
>what is your take on the rise of contemporary american populism?

The materialist origins are obvious and well-discussed, so on the idealistic front also see a type of aristotelianism involved. We see a MacIntyrean-type of provincial retreat in order to escape the end game of Enlightenment thought, what Leo Strauss called a 'soft nihilism' inherent to Western liberal democracies and, IMO, globalization. That's not to say they're anti-Enlightenment (entirely), but they've lost faith in the end game's ability to address their concerns and create a utopian, Heaven on Earth (this I see as a reaction to the failed Iraq War and neoconservative idealism---i.e. Fukuyama-ism where Western liberal democracy is Absolute end of the Hegelian dialectic, and all we have to do is introduce it to Middle Easterners/Muslims and they'll embrace it). So instead they've decided to close themselves off via Brexit and continue their communitarian hopes and dreams on their own.

I'm not a fan of populism always, but, as it was with Napoleon's conquests, it can lead to better societies when the elites are mistreating the populace.

>>9052874
Also, when I say 'anti-Enlightenment,' I don't mean to say these conservatives communities and thinkers in the US and the UK are seeking return to the Middle Ages, but that seeking to freeze the Enlightenment project at any given point in time (whether it be 1776 for those who worship the Founding Fathers or 1950 for Trump supporters) is a futile endeavor with disappointment as the only result. So a new line of thought is needed, I think, and pursuing an isolationist stance is a worthy attempt at halting the process before it's too late.

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>>9052874
>>9052890

that's a fascinating reading of the situation. what i had in mind by aristotelianism had something to do with the idea of the moral economy:
ima start with the fact that we exist in an age of neoliberalism. that is, we exist in an economic//capitalist environment whose major conservative discourse is predicated on the idea of deregulation: that the less regulated the economy is, the more it can function as a neutral, self-policing arena (except for key exceptions—trusts and monopolies, for instance, which do require government intervention and which stand as a rare exception in the conservative model). this arena operates (according to smith’s “invisible hand” theory, and later, hayek’s appropriation of that idea into a conservative political framework) to determine economic “winners and losers” based on in-built criteria: mainly, how prudent, strategic, cunning, frugal, etc. an individual or corporation actually is, e.g. the neutral judgments of the economy are based on the idea of meritocracy.

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>>9052874
>>9052890
>>9052994

but what do bannon’s alt-right and, for an example from leftist discourse, feminist economics, have in common? i see both as responses to, and rejections of, this neoliberal discourse. they reject it insofar as both the alt-right and feminist-left see in the idea of a neutrally judging, meritocratic economy only a myth, e.g. that “invisible hand” has not done a good job reflecting other moral standards that exist external to the economy and are sourced elsewhere from the world. to put it another way: for bannon and his followers (trumpers), the economy has not reflected the true “winners and losers,” who are composed of white males in the former category and the xenomorph, black, Hispanic, female, etc. in the latter; in that the economy may ever reflect the value of black or immigrant or female labor clearly means that the economy is askew and requires intervention of a reactionary/populist/racist kind. for the feminists, the economy has not reflected the basic premises of equality that otherwise inform our democratic sensibilities; by taking better account of the “female variable,” both our policies and distribution of justice may improve. but the point is that neither camp has much of a purely economic argument (perhaps you could point to certain statistical measurements viz. the employment of female CEOs/female staff and relative corporate profits): rather, both attempt to augment or substitute the economic with principles drawn from the moral/political sphere—both ask for an intervention into the economic on non-economic grounds. this is the idea of the “Moral Economy” that links aristotle to aquinas, locke and marx: the neutrality of the “regular economy” ought to serve certain moral ends of the political community, rather than the reverse. think the domination of ecclesiastical authorities in the middle ages: all economic activity was regulated by the church, and was supposed to support the local ever-subtler and more profound interference of the church into communal life. think, to, of aristotle's athens: wealthy patrons were supposed to fund the building of a warship or lyceum and donate it back to the state as a matter of moral, communal charity--the ideal cycle of "trickle down economics" that would be perverted in 1980s raeganism. i think that both feminist economics and alt-right politics have to account for this massive theoretical deficit—or neither has much of a program at stake at all. the irony of the alt-right is a side note to all this: they call for privatization and deregulation in all economic activities, so long as those economic activities ultimately reflect the progress of white supremacy; when the economy responds differently, then the alt-right invites all manner of intervention, and sees nothing in their blatant hypocrisy. so, too, why the alt-right isn't much concerned about who pays for the wall, and why the left/CNN cannot understand or fathom this

>>9052821
Hey rapture, different person here with some questions, if you don't mind me asking since you've written some invigorating responses. As another anon asked above, "How does one attempt a life of nothing from a starting point of something?" To delve more into that, how does one free themselves and become their own creator of values independent of their previous ideologies and morals (aka the Übermensch)?

In your opinion, why is Nietzsche's "will to power" more or less convincing than Schopenhauer's "will to live"? And how do you view Nietzsche's personal concept of "eternal recurrence" considering the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, the heat death of the universe and determinism that practically all modern science seems to point to?

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>>9053015

Thanks so much.

You a have a gift for clarity. Thanks for passing on your knowledge from all the posts you have made on this thread.

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>>9053015
>>9052874
>>9052890
>>9052994


i think that there is the mistaken tendency of academics and journalists today to constantly reduce political motives to other terms, e.g. the push to find behind political action economic/social motivations. so, we see the rise of populist politics as "explainable" through the economic framework of a rational-self-interest: it is economic downturn, matched with the influx of immigration, matched with a particularly out of touch leftist candidate, that sealed the deal. but of course this is about as surface as it comes: what is happening today is the opposite, where all those other motivations—like economic self-interest—are subsumed under political interests: we see now the “inexplicable” phenomenon of people who at times seemingly sacrifice economic gain for the expression of racial or gendered hatred. we are seeing a re-dawn of a particularly medeival outlook--but this may not be a terrible thing.

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>>9052874
>>9052890
>>9052994
>>9053015
>>9053032

but what is “inexplicable” about this--especially to the left, who seems to watch it all with mouth agape? it is inexplicable to an academic elite who don’t understand anything about the human anymore, who have divested the human of all his/her animal qualities, who have civilized/abstracted the human to fit into statistical models that depict a self-made phantasmagoria. in short, i think that this election showed nothing new: people hate, and they hate deeply; people are ignorant, they may be duped, and they may reject reality wholesale; people are intransigent, and may refuse change, even in the face of necessity. but what’s the story here? we do not approach the problem, for to approach the problem would be to implicate democracy and populism itself; all we can ever do is flirt with the symptoms. i want to say: the republican/democrat divide today has become the operative existential cleavage around which identities are now negotiated; today, political parties are no longer mere proxies of aggregate interests/ordering instruments, but have become valued interests in themselves, e.g. one no longer pursues political action to further economic interest, but submits economic interest to the development of political action. The difference here might be those who avoid racial violence on account of economic cost, and those who submit all economic costs to the payoff of racial violence. so it is with explaining away the supposed paradox of bannon’s “ethno-national globalism”: one the one hand, we see an economic network emerging that is devoted to the sole cause of furthering the “ethno” element of the equation (the moralization of the economy); on the other hand, bannon does not have to work through his project to its endgame, as 1. the nation state still operates as a particularly effective instrument for organizing these populist movements/ethno-oriented populations, and therefore has yet to exhaust its usefulness; and 2. its resilience can be accounted for without much problem, e.g. bannon can simply commit himself to the project of simply putting more white people sympathetic to his passionate form of racism in positions of global power, and through this network systematically working through the conversion and elimination of populations—a lengthy task that would prorogue the apparent paradox to a distant generation.

i have more to say on the modern political party and its contribution, but that's another topic...

what are your thoughts on trump?

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>>9053038
Not that guy, but I'd like to hear more of your thoughts on Bannon/Trump/Alt-Right/NRx/etc.

>an economic network emerging that is devoted to the sole cause of furthering the “ethno” element of the equation (the moralization of the economy)
This is an interesting idea. Explain more of what you mean by this also? Do you mean as in the pic related/Zizek sense or something else?

A 'moralized economy' would be a spectacular ideological fantasy, no doubt. I guess what I am wondering is if you mean this in the same sense that I am used to thinking about it: that consumption itself requires us to enjoy, and that in a sense is that moment of pleasure that, while not being moral in a philosophical sense, closes the ideological loop (until we desire again). That's what people have been doing for years in the regular neoliberal way; by 'moralization of the economy,' are you suggesting that Bannon has something other than this in mind?

Weirdly what comes to mind is something like Warhammer 40K (or the crusades): it's hard to have a more moralized political economy than a cultural holy war. Certainly there's enough fervent love on the right today to produce one - coupled with a nausea with capitalism so deeply ingrained that it drove Nick Land beyond reality and back...and I have to say, I find some of his arguments persuasive. And in a political sense NL's thought is next door to NRx and reaction, which takes us back to Trump...

In the end, the amoral pleasure of Enjoy eventually reproduces itself as the dissident right's righteous love for capitalism; kind of amazing. A political mandate exonerates the perverse and guilt-ridden private angst of desiring things that don't ultimately make one happy, they don't really proffer the escape one wanted. Or maybe, rather, we always loved capitalism, because that is where Enlightenment reason manifests, in a Landian sense, and we only went astray for awhile in the 20C - though necessarily, in order to rectify many of the genuine social ills that thought produced. And now Bannon wants to take things back in that direction...?

The dissident right to me seems to be offering a return to Enlightenment thought which, at its best, displays an understanding of its defects, that reason is not always rational, while at its worst signalling a repetition of those same errors out of a combination of fury, loathing, and despair. The absence of communication between blue and red is not good, nor is the scarcity of politics-free media; but maybe these things had to happen. I do not, generally speaking, have a positive outlook about the future. But they are interesting times indeed.

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>>9053214
In other words, it would not be hard to imagine someone in Bannon's camp hearing the phrase "First as tragedy, then as farce," and then adding "...and then tragedy again? Okay, no problem. Tragedy is fine with me. I'm good with that." Never really realizing that the commedia dell'arte masks weren't really supposed to go to war with each other, but were part of a much larger phenomenon.

>>9052994
>>9053015
>>9053032
>>9053038
I definitely agree with your analysis here, especially that the current political climate is largely a reaction to the perceived failures of neoliberalism and Establishment interests stripping people of their 'rightful' place on the social ladder. And "moral economy" nails what I've read of Bannon's proclaimed beliefs, in that he desires a return to a moral capitalism directed by Judeo-Christian values, as opposed to strictly self-interested pursuits of capital to the detriment of one's own nation (Bannon said in his time working at Goldman Sachs, the culture was executives and bankers found comradery with other bankers in London, Hong Kong, et al.), and to this end I am very sympathetic. Along the Nietzschean project, the problem of capitalism isn't exploitation or injustice, as preached by the left, but commodification and instrumentalization, so you can see why I'm so sympathetic to the goals of the 'alt-right' and Bannon. The racial diagnosis is very tricky, and I can address that too if you'd like. Before anyone calls me a white supremacist, I'm only a quarter white.

What's a shame is because of the academic elites' myopia, the right goes to the contrasting mode of thinking, veering on total anti-intellectualism.

The thing you said about political parties is on point, and, to utilize MacIntryre once again, his reasons for this current state of divide and radically opposing political goals is due to the loss of any shared tradition or 'practice.' e.g when everyone is a white Christian conservative (in the grand sense), then debates about shifting capital, ala welfare or taxes, doesn't carry any real existential baggage. But when you have a country consisting of fundamentally incompatible interests, then it becomes quite literally a battle for existential survival.

>what are your thoughts on trump?

Here's the part where the spectators of /lit/ come to hate me. I think he's excellent, with some reservations of course. Like I said with my triplicate model of the Higher Men, Trump embodies the Warrior/Statesman type whereas Bannon is his philosopher-adviser (see: Alexander the Great and Aristotle, Hitler/Mussolini and Nietzsche, Stalin and Lenin/Marx [note: it's obviously not a 1:1 relationship, but that's the entire point of overmen, no?]). As for policies, I like conservative constitutionalists on the SCOTUS, less federal control in favor of the states, bilateral trade deals over multinational ones due to concerns of sovereignty, prioritizing the conflict with Islam over, say, Russia (ignoring whether preserving a Christian culture is even feasible), general culture war between the right and left, etc. I'm guessing you dislike him?

>>9053261
But you're missing a piece of your conception of the overman triumvirate. That seems so crucial especially when arguably every wartime American president ever has been warrior and statesman.

>>9053015
>think, to, of aristotle's athens: wealthy patrons were supposed to fund the building of a warship or lyceum and donate it back to the state as a matter of moral, communal charity--the ideal cycle of "trickle down economics" that would be perverted in 1980s raeganism.

This reminds me of Sloterdijk's criticism of the welfare state in that it breeds resentment from the lower-classes to the rich, and instead promotes a charitable, patronage system where the rich can support specific impoverished interests at will. I don't know about abolishing welfare entirely, myself, but the likes of Beethoven and Bernini receiving funding is worth 100 NEAs.

>>9053270
That's true, I am using 'higher men' very loosely here---I wouldn't place Bannon on the same level as, say, Goethe, of course. But the "Higher Man" as a specific term has to pursue a specific project, a gestation of a grand idea that births first and sublimates one's stamp onto the world. In short, I'd count FDR, but I wouldn't count Truman. So that's my mistake is mixing up the terms and using it so loosely.

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>>9053316
>instead promotes a charitable, patronage system where the rich can support specific impoverished interests at will

will reply to other posts in a bit, but in the meantime: are you familiar with peter singer's ethics? do you buy his "do as much good as you can"/drowning child in a pond argument? what is your feeling on his notion that donations to cultural programs are virtually categorically less moral/significant than donations to more "material" initiatives?

>>9053346
Hey rapture, I'm
>>9053214
>>9053234

I just noticed that you already gave a pretty thorough explication of moral economics re: Bannon already in that earlier post; I don't know how I didn't see that. Duh.

Anyways, I'd still be happy for you to respond, but there's obviously no need for you to repeat yourself b/c my oversight.

>>9053346
As someone sympathetic to communitarian virtue ethics, I think distance and relation are relevant aspects to consider wrt moral decisions. And for effective altrusim as a whole, similar to my comment about the National Endowment of the Arts, as crass as this may sound, when the goal is about the production of great men, the exemplars in the life, giving money to the New York Philharmonic or a Shakespeare is more significant than donating money to fight world hunger.

>>9053383
But these great artists don't emerge in a vacuum. If you remove things like the national endowment for the arts, the only funding will be for commercial art, which genrally not what I think you have in mind.

Maybe I'm harping on this too much, but I can't help but feel that the American alt-right, by rejecting formalized efforts towards the arts, have crippled themselves in the long term

>>9053406
I was only using the NEA as an example of Sloterdijk's criticism of government-mandated assistance. The whole topic of whether or not the 'best' artists are supported through private or public endowments is another topic entirely, though there is something to be said about the upper-classes, with generally more refined tastes, making better decisions when it comes to art.

>Maybe I'm harping on this too much, but I can't help but feel that the American alt-right, by rejecting formalized efforts towards the arts, have crippled themselves in the long term

I agree. It remains to be seen if a free market without any unifying culture apart from money and commodification can make good decisions on its own when it comes to art, and with how small the NEA budget is as a percentage of the Federal budget, defunding it entirely just seems silly from a practical standpoint. The ideological viewpoint, though, I have no strong feelings either way.

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>>9053406

>formalized efforts towards the arts

i'm not quite sure this is such a deficit. i think the alt-right's anti-statism and anti-modernism coincides well on this point: it is about the celebration of the spontaneous folk artist, the one who contributes most to their brand of patriotism and usually comes from their own ranks and as an expression of their populism

hence it is that they can denounce the NEA and the celebrity culture all in one breadth. the latter is an overreach of governmental authority/spending, and the former is an overreach of art into the political as such. they don't care about formal art as a matter of principle; thus opening 1. the space of communal folk art that is pitted against leftist/state sponsored art; and 2. the ironic space for elites--bannon--to fill that hypothetical ground-up position with top-down propaganda in the form and phraseology of the folk

the more they rally against formal art, the more the weird idiosyncratic products of their bluegrass populism mixes with the advanced technological evangelism of bannon's ilk--an ironic relation between technology and anti-technology. relatedly, i am truly curious how the alt-right's love of corporate mentality will conflict with their hate of automated job replacement...

>>9053436
This is a great exposition of the 'ideological viewpoint' I mentioned.

Also:
>>9053406
>the only funding will be for commercial art, which genrally not what I think you have in mind.

You are very mistaken on this point, especially when the alt-right is attempting to create a more mindful use of capital (moral economy).

>>9053452
I didn't mean that they themselves would fund it, I mean that as long as there exist consumers willing to pay for broadly appealing (and often bland content) commercial art will survive, while for example, orchestras across the States will suffer without any federal funding.

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>>9053481

so you are saying that it is not in the alt-right's interest to allow for the growth of this "broadly appealing"/"bland" popular media while things like orchestras die off? i'm sorry, i'm trying to get at what your argument is exactly here--its a little unclear to me right now

>>9041965
Christianity is nihilism.

if the purpose of life is to survive and reproduce, and humans are in fact living, then the premise of nihilism is patently false, because life's meaning is all too clear

humans optimize their survival and reproduction through various social contracts, therefore society's constructs are purposeful also

no one describes themselves as a nihilist for long not only because the philosophy is lazy, but flawed as well

questioning the purpose of optimizing your survival and maximizing your happiness is as absurd as playing a soccer game and questioning the purpose of playing defense or scoring goals

this is where the lies begin, because only those who cease playing can sincerely say that they saw no meaning in the pursuit at hand

sincerely nihilist soccer players exit the stadium, sincerely nihilist people commit suicide

that's why this philosophy is considered "bad"

>>9044970
i bet you thought that post was really clever
lurk more before posting, faggot

The Cosmos is essentially nihilistic. Insofar we are the Cosmos perceiving itself, we give the Cosmos meaning, despite the fact that we're essentially determined beings simply unable to fully grasp how determined we are. Yet, our short and spurious lives isn't truly enough to give meaning. Our own meaning is an illusion in the eyes of that vast chasm that is the indifferent Universe.

In order for there to be true meaning and for us to defeat nihilism, we must therefore first become immortal. The mortal coil negates our meaning, and once we've transcended this meaningless existence of the mortal coil we'll have until the supposed end of the Universe to improve our own existence and moreover truly be the Cosmos perceiving itself, thereby attaining true existential meaning.

Alas, then there's the multiverse, and our mortal coil will haunt us once again supposing our Universe can die. But the principle remains the same; only through immortality do we gain meaning.

Therefore, the ultimate goal is to obtain immortality (even if imperfect to start), thereby vanquish nihilism, and finally achieve the meaning of life which is to exist indefinitely, for eternity.

Plebs.

>>9055546
nah

question, can one go about changing their on personality to fit a philosophical idea or do you choose the philosophy that fits you?

>>9056469
Some are capable of change and inspiration, some aren't.

>>9056469
you do both, you pick the personality and the clothes your brain wears.

Men like Alexander and Napoleon dragged me out of it. Existence may be inherently meaningless but within existence I find a relative hierarchy of being, if that makes sense. I don't want to die a worm and while I'm here I want to experience what it is to be a man

>>9038081
"If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning."
t. Camus

btfo nihilists