/lit/ - Literature

>>21812176
>>21806577
So then there are of course attempts to get around this: instead of meaning, there is the idea of nietzschean life-affirmation. A sort of experiential focus: the alternative to 'meaning' is the self-metric of whether or not, in the context of voidal nothingness and nihilism, if the very experience of your life was worth living, and possibly (if you're an eternal return kind of guy) worth living over and over again ad infinitum. In less formal terms, this would be the attitude of "making the most" of your life. Living with some nietzschean gravity.

This argument has some substance in it (maybe I'll get to this later), but it too suffers from a great weakness: life-affirmation, as a state of the self or soul, is tied to the deeper questions that themselves engender terror and nihilism. How are you to ever come to an understanding of whether or not you believe that your life was worth living if you cannot answer the following: "Who am I?", "What am I?", "What is the self?", "What do I want?", etc.

These questions, terrible and scary in their own right, require the substantive, certain evidence that we are trying to navigate around in the first place. Perhaps for the Nietzschean Ubermensch, this is no problem, self-generator of eternal gravity he is, but he is an ideal, not a human. In any case, certainty in any of these things would still amount to blind faith on some level, in this case the level of self-knowledge, the type of knowledge perhaps hardest to ever obtain.

And so we then come back to the crux of the issue: to restate, nihilism is all-consuming. So how do we resolve this? To further explore this issue, we must be very single-minded in our desire for truth over relief. We have to continue to think, here, with not the goal of soothing our existential terror but instead of trying to get at the truth of whatever deeper underlying mechanism afflicts our condition. The terror in your gut has to remain, for now.

The fact of the matter is, having taken you this far and assuming you've even read this shit, that I have no real answers and no certainty for you. And neither does anybody else. But, as someone else suffering from the same thing you are, I am going to at least try to offer something at least a little substantive to you.

I don't know how I feel about 'epistemic' truth. There is no certainty beyond the cogito, and so any claim to further truth by a subjective consciousness is possibly wrong. But personally, I believe that there are 'great truths', something that seems similar but perhaps only analogous to the definition of truth in that it appears to reflect reality, and that in reckoning with great truths there at least seems to be something substantive to be gained.

My wordy explanation isn't very clear, so let me try very hard to illustrate. The sincerity of this argument makes it easy to laugh at (thanks for the extra layer of self-consciousness, DFW) but I encourage you to take time to mull it over.
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