Comments on “Nihilism: denying meaning”
Adding new comments is disabled for now.
Comments are for the page: Nihilism: denying meaning
Eternalist systems
Hi Sabio, nice to see you here again!
“Eternalist systems” is a recent page that might be relevant to your suggestion here.
You need drugs
What springs to my mind immediately for finding a way to experiencing more meaning in life is ingesting psilocybin. There’s a great documentary on it, “Fantastic Fungi”, which you can find on Netflix, which has a personal story of Paul Stamets. He had a mystical experience in a thunderstorm after ingesting a bag of of myocenae, which also completely cured a debilitating stuttering problem he had in his life…
I might try it too, except I heard from word of mouth that if people with schizophrenia take it, “you’re never coming back” is the direct quote.
"Loss of meaning results in rage, depression, and anxiety"
Citation needed; just because you feel those things does not in any way mean it is essential to the experience of nihilism.
Where is your evidence, besides speculation?
Abstractions need Meat
As we know, Nihilism and Eternalism (like Nebulosity, Meaningness, God and Freedom), are abstractions. Abstraction are short-hand for a class of things felt to share similar patterns. And these short-hands work best when a listen understands the particulars – the meat on the bones of the abstract skeletal framework.
When I read this and other articles in Meaningness, in order to really understand your paragraphs, I have to constantly remind myself of particulars of each abstraction you use, to really understand you points. I am one of those readers, who from the beginning, agreed with your positions and love the abstractions as quick tools to think about these patterns in human emotional and intellectual wrestling with life. But I have to remind myself that Eternalism = radical religion and Nihilism = radical atheism (for lack of other words). I wonder if it would be useful to more often give instantiations of the abstraction – hang meat on the bones – so that readers don’t get lost in the fuzzy world of abstractions, and are tempted to think we agree with you when we may not. As when Democrats and Republicans in the USA share the abstraction “Freedom” but have very different emotions, experiences, and imaginations tied onto that rarified word.
I enjoy when you give examples from the various sects of Buddhism and think there could be some from politics and science tribes as well as the obvious Abrahamic theisms and reductionist scientisms. I guess you really do all that, but just wanted to let you remind you that it is a discipline to remind myself, while reading your excellent writing, that there are meat on them bones.