/lit/ - Literature

So... what's going on in this thread?

I can answer any questions that you guys have about Nietzsche and nihilism

>No growing up path


smh

>>3694288
It was tempting to put it in. Some people really suffer from this, fall into depression,and ruin their lives for good. Simply "growing up" isn't a satisfactory answer.

>>3694278
fucking this. Lao Tzu had a response to nihilism over a millenium before it was even a thing

>>3694284
for yacking on about nihilism you sure do assume others care quite a bit. i'm sure a few high school knuckleheads will respond to help you feel validated. honestly i think you're a naive asshole for threads like this one.

the ego on you. oh my!

>>3694303
It's a never ending thread topic on /lit/, it's been popping up quite a bit lately. People seem to care about it.

>>3694284
You could start by explaining what Nietzsche actually means by nihilism. Don´t forget to include references to his works, please.

You left out Angst

If we all must die then what is the point in living?

5. Feel the Shrek, be the hipernihilist
best xxi philosophy of the year 10/10 *****
recomedn read:
my book
cows by stokoe
the price for peace by brayden summerflied

>>3694309
i'm sure many young adults here care about nihilism. i'm just saying that you're assuming a lot when you assume people care what you have to say about it.

>>3694309
>nihilism
>care
wut?

>>3694327

implying
nihilit isn
the school massacre
imylng it isn
topic of te
year
x
xi
impl if ia m
risky cat
imply me if you like
thank
diarrheda desconstruct
cats-ass

>>3694337
>By the way, Existentialism is fucking lame.
>can't into self-made man

>>3694332
While I like
Your style I
Feel you should
Break you lines
With greater regularity
To give the
Impression of a
Stream of consciousness
Better. And also
Make you appear
Deeper.

>>3694273
>implying nihilism means you have to be sad
>implying you need meaning
>implying nihilism means you have to be ambitionless
Just because there is no objective or absolute value, meaning, moral-correctness or truth doesn't mean I have to be an angsty faggot who sits in the corner all day.
To operate, I need to make assumptions. Among those are the assumptions that I am seeing reality on the same level as those around me and that truth exists.
I also follow a code of morals I have given myself, although I acknowledge they aren't absolute and they are arbitrary. They are useful.

I have my goals because I want to be happy.
I don't see the "nausea" (I actually referenced that faggot), despair, etc... in realizing there is no value or meaning in existence.
I can still have a life that I will enjoy.
My life is meaningful to me even though it has no actual meaning.
To wish that my life had actual meaning would be nothing more than vanity.

By the way, Existentialism is fucking lame.

>>3694337
>I also follow a code of morals I have given myself, although I acknowledge they aren't absolute and they are arbitrary. They are useful.
>By the way, Existentialism is fucking lame.

>>3694273
I do appreciate the books you listed, though.
>Beyond Good and Evil
patrician-tier
>Myth of Sisyphus
good-tier
Camus was a little immature as a thinker, but I think the majority of his ideas are good and I love his fiction.
>On Genealogy of Morality
patrician-tier
>Crime and Punishment
I haven't read it, actually. I plan on getting to it eventually.
>Brothers Karamazov
I haven't read this either. The only Dostoyevsky I have read is The Idiot.

>>3694284
Nietzsche wasn't a nihilist.
He also had a skewed image of what nihilism was.

>>3694348
>Nietzsche wasn't a nihilist
What was he then? Other than syphilitic

>>3694327
>being this ignorant

>>3694343
>>3694338
I don't think I can actually make morals or meaning.
I follow my own code, but I admit that I am not following the right path and I never claim to have "created meaning" because that it bullshit.
Meaning doesn't exist.
It is just useful to pretend it does.

>>3694345

Are you fucking serious, you /mu/ cunt? Using words like 'patrician-tier' to describe Nietzsche's works? Jesus fucking Christ, get the fuck out with your bullshit words and don't come back you faggot.

>>3694356
But that's like most of the point of existential ethics
It's right if it's ethical for you

>>3694358
>Your post.
Pleb-tier

>>3694358
>implying /lit/ doesn't use pleb
>implying it's possible to use a term without implying the existence of its converse

>>3694356
hello my little
friend
I Have 2 ? 4 you
WHY is X-tentialism laamee?
Do u kno
wath
risk
means?
>>3694358
helo my frien
nietszhe was th
e bes nihilits he
has billion
of esdsay
abot nihilis
recomedend
10//1
y like
i recomesnd
son of a bitch

>>3694352
I don't know if I could exactly categorize Nietzsche.
He had some elements of nihilism, but he made these absolute remarks about goals and shit, especially in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
He varies a bit. I try to ignore the bullshitty parts of his writing and look at the rest of his ideas.

Also...
>implying Nietzsche was syphilitic
He had cadasil, which is a hereditary genetic disorder.
His father also had it and died from it. So did his grandfather. I believe another relative (a nephew or some shit?) also died from it. They didn't have neuroscience at the time, so the best diagnosis was Syphilis.

>>3694373
today
bert camels
wa inspired by the
mith of syphilis
to kill
in thrash metal rock car accident
start meteorite

>>3694360
I don't think that it is true in the slightest.
Right and wrong aren't objective.
My actions are no more right than anyone elses.
If I decide not to follo my moral code, I can just "create" a different meaning to support my actions. If I followed your logic, I could say that I have never done anything wrong even if I killed tons of people.

>>3694358
Retard.
Patrician is the opposite of Pleb.
What else would I say?

Back to /b/ with you.

>>3694383
>If I followed your logic, I could say that I have never done anything wrong even if I killed tons of people.
That's a major criticism of existential ethics
It's completely self-contained
And I don't adhere to it, it's de Beauvoir's idea

>>3694385
And that is why I don't buy it.
You can't create meaning.
Meaning, morality, truth and value are simply useful illusions.
Following a code doesn't make it right, because I am flexible and could change the code whenever.

>>3694392
>change the code whenever.
That's the whole fucking point of existential ethics
Every one changes, so why would anyone's personal code remain constant?

>>3694401
Then the concept of right or wrong is no longer needed.
The concept is relevant vs irrelevant. That is the judgement needed to make the artificial meanings useful to you.

>>3694403
>the concept of right or wrong is no longer needed
Of course it is
How else can you know what course to take?
You must take the one that is right for you cliche I know, but hey, the French! amirite?

>>3694392
people do create meaning. the language you're using to communicate with others is just one obvious example. if you didn't assume it was there you wouldn't be here having a conversation. there is an intersubjectivity and a convenience factor rolled into one as we all understand (with slight variations) the purpose of more common tools we create and their purpose (or meaning...even if you take it granted) that we all acknowledge together. otherwise you're just a hypocrite. which is okay because hypocrisy is inevitable.

>>3694413
No, I don't think you are right.
I think the choice you make shows which will is stronger, not which is right. One may be more relevant, but the word right implies an absolute condition.

>>3694273

>>3694448
I said that I ignore the lack of meaning because it is useful.
But when talking about philosophy I have to consider it.
I am not creating meaning through language.
My words have NO meaning if they are recorded and played on loop for a thousand years at the bottom of the ocean.

Meaning is subjective.
Meaning isn't really a noun. It is a verb.
The word was noun-ized, but you can even look at the word itself and see that it ends with "ing". That is because meaning is a function of the brain. The brain accredits a value to something perceived, but to say that a brain can have unquestionable common ground with another brain through language is ridiculous.

>>3694464
i think you create meaning not in the words used but in the very act of participating in using language and conversing. it's the dance where meaning is forever being born.

you don't know what meaning your words would have if they were recorded and played on loop for a thousand years. maybe could inspire a new kind of skyscraper, or a painting that inspires someone else to create a teleportation device. i'm just saying that the meaning you find arbitrary can manifest itself in the tangible world in a countless number of ways and it's out of your control. we agree that we create meaning, but we totally disagree on its value. i know you value it more than you claim. it's more than just convenient. if it were just convenient you would say what was necessary and that'd be it. but you actively engage online in conversation. you're going out of your way for it and i can tell you really do love me. and i love you too.

>The brain accredits a value to something perceived, but to say that a brain can have unquestionable common ground with another brain through language is ridiculous.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersubjectivity

i'm not saying that it's unquestionable. i'm just saying i know what you mean. xD

>>3694515
Yes, meaning is continuously born in conversing with you (assuming you actually exist and are actually reacting to the stimuli I provide).
But I argue that when I send off this comment full of my ideas, I am not creating a meaning. Your brain is in the act of meanING.
Your brain is taking stimuli and converting it into something that makes sense in relation to the presuppositions you operate off of.
I don't think that meaning is actually being created. I think you are creating an illusion of meaning.
I do it too. That is why it isn't hypocritical of me to talk to you. I admit that our conversation has the possibility of being misinterpreted grossly on both sides. I ignore that fact to operate, but when thinking about things on a philosophical level you have to consider the possibility.
And when I said the thing about the recording of my voice playing on loop on the bottom of the ocean, I meant that no one would ever encounter it. If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it mean anything?
Dig?

>>3694564
What does meaning matter?
Is existing not enough?

>>3694590
What?
Are you listening to me?
I am saying meaning isn't a thing.
I am saying the concept of meaning in the sense of essence or truth is an illusion.
I am saying that when you say something means something, your brain is assigning an answer to stumuli.

>>3694564
i wish i didn't delete my post. didn't think you'd respond anyways and i didn't want to perpetuate a thread i'd rather let die.

>Your brain is taking stimuli and converting it into something that makes sense in relation to the presuppositions you operate off of.

i don't think the reality of it is that simple nor clinical-sounding. you hope to convey meaning by organizing words in a particular way otherwise it would language would be useless. i think you're overcompensating for the inherent ambiguous nature of language and the way it's recieved.

also i don't think meaning is illusory when meaning can be made manifest in the physical world through art or other creative outlets like scientific progress and technological advancement. meaning is a little idealistic but idealism always has the potential for being tomorrow's realism. to play devil's advocate against myself i always think of don quixote. it's us pushing idealistic for a future world while being weary of madness which comes with being exceedingly idealistic. but who knows until after the fact? they say hindsight is always 20/20.

>>3694304
And just what was that? Enlightened one?

>>3694630
I was being post-modernist, faggot

>>3694345

>using the word "patrician" when he hasn't even read two of the most popular works from Dostoyevsky

Fuck off back to /mu/, kid.

if you think you've overcome nihilism or that it has a solution then you misinterpreted Nietzsche.

>>3694348
Nietzsche pretty much admits he was a nihilist, or was a symptom of European nihilism, somewhere in his later works. He says something like, "It only occurred to me recently that what I was aiming at was aimlessness itself."

>>3694808

Wasn't Nietzsche's ubermensch supposed to be to the solution the nihilism? Something to strive for given the vacuum left by the death of god?

>>3695558
supposed to be the*

>>3694808

>you misinterpreted nietzsche

How ironic.

>>3694808

HAHHAAHA, consider your philosophy privileges taken away.

>>3695570

The only Nietzsche I've read is the Gay Science, the one translated by Walter Kaufman and I just started Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

How would you have interpreted him?

>>3695573
Wrong reply

>>3695558
He gives something like a roadmap for cultivating human excellence. He doesn't strictly "solve" nihilism, but stuff like amor fati and morality in a pejorative sense are ways around it as it were. I don't think his intention is to replace the god head though, primarily because we in a sense know such a figure is absurd/useless, that's pretty much how he was killed in the first place. Just like the world will continue to go round with or without God, so it is the same for with or without an ubermensch.

>>3694808
Yes and no.

For Nietzsche, nihilism wasn't a lack of value. To the contrary, it was to hold metaphysical values, as it was a way to negate the real world, hence the use of the word nihilism.

As the pleb tried to seek comfort in a religion they didn't really believe in or in inane consumerism, a philospher would come to embrace amor fati, aka the love of your fate.

All that is real is good, for it is the hardships and sufferings you go through that makes you who you are. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

>>3695580
This. Overcoming nihilism isn't doing away with it, it's learning to live with it.

>>3695617

steady progress would ideally lead to a "doing away"

>>3695643
>ideally
Yes, deny life and go live in a world of dreams

>>3695650

goddamn it goats, is that you?

>>3695617
So much for fucking rationality and critical thinking. You know actual philosophy? Maybe thinking nihilism is wrong or maybe it isn't really a philosophical position? Maybe not being a stupid new-atheist and actually go and read theological works of some kind and actually try to understand them? You people really think that "God (using this as a placeholder for anything spiritual/theological) is dead"?

>>3695650
As if you know what "life" is.

Stupid arrogant kid.

>>3695656
Lel no, I was the first one you responded to though. I don't think it would lead to a "doing away" since you lose your grounding and get le tricked all over again into some shitty life denying value system. Without it you're drifting. To über at least some part of you must remain firmly nihilistic.

“But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthword, downword, into the dark, the deep - into evil.”

You're all so stupid

Just because someone's a nihilist doesn't mean they can't do things with their life. That's like saying if someone is a Zen Buddhist all they can ever do is sit in meditation so they are never outside of a state of Zen

>>3694273
Existentialists who try to convert Nihilists to Existentialism make me laugh and rustle my jimmies at the same time. They are just as arrogant and ignorant as Christians who try to talk Atheists and Anti-Theists into believing in God and becoming a member of their Church

>>3696534
sup dog?

>>3694808
Nietzsche did admit he was a décandent (in Contra Wagner, if I not mistaken) much like his former friend, only not exclusively as a symptom of the European nihilism triggered by the death of God, but as an herald of the Übermensch and its overcoming of morality (an active nihilism contrasted with Schopenhauer's passive nihilism).

>>3695602
It could be defined as the lack of value or hope in life itself (which is also what he meant by "décadence"), leading to the creation of metaphysical values and the rejection of world for something "beyond" it (the after-life, God, Nirvana, etc). Morality as Anti-Nature.

>>3695602
>>3696819
nope, I don't think Nietzsche really gets us anywhere along the path to solving "nihilism", and I think in The Will to Power he more or less confesses it.

>What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here.

He diagnoses the sickness and some of its symptoms but I think it would be ridiculous to suggest that he provides anything like a cure. The existentialists thought they were providing a cure too but they were wrong, they merely reacted to the symptoms the best they could, like wiping your nose and taking a lie down when you have a cold. The existentialists were important though because though they all had very different ideas, they all had a reaction to nihilism common to them.

He said "the next two centuries" and I think Nietzsche's timeline of these events will prove to be fairly accurate. We're only halfway there so far.

With ideas like Amor Fati and Overman and existentialist ideas authenticity and the absurd, all they managed to do was what Kierkegaard says here:

>>3696878
>In vain do individual great men seek to mint new concepts and to set them in circulation — it is pointless. They are used for only a moment, and not by many, either, and they merely contribute to making the confusion even worse, for one idea seems to have become the fixed idea of the age: to get the better of one's superior. If the past may be charged with a certain indolent self-satisfaction in rejoicing over what it had, it would indeed be a shame to make the same charge against the present age (the minuet of the past and the gallop of the present).

>>3696882
isn't this quote exactly what we always try and do anyway? to "mint" a way of looking and understanding the world? the only way to do this is through "mint"ing concepts..

i am a bit confused

i also thought the point was to reject nihilism, so i'm also a bit confused here too..

>>3696907
>isn't this quote exactly what we always try and do anyway? to "mint" a way of looking and understanding the world
Yes, and he's saying that it is pointless, for this reason -
>They are used for only a moment, and not by many, either, and they merely contribute to making the confusion even worse
These is more pointed now than it was in Kierkegaard's time. See how Nietzsche minted the Overman and Amor Fati, there are very few individuals in society that will take these to heart and those that do for a time will likely abandon them as they grow older. This goes generally. There are so MANY different ideologies and groups and creeds and slogans, so many little FASHIONABLE "worldviews", or ways "of looking at and understanding the world", as you put it. There are people on /lit/ that will profess to me Platonists, Hegelians, Existentialists, Buddhists. This leads to a mess culturally, where you think, "anything can be believed, beliefs aren't taken seriously and mostly amount to a person's "personality", a reflection of a person's ego, that they drop when they find some other fashionable thing to follow", and this leads to dejection and feeling as though "nothing is sacred anymore". "Whatever", "YOLO", "nothing is sacred anymore" - these are all phrases of despair.
>i also thought the point was to reject nihilism
Nihilism can sort of be rejected on a personal level but on a cultural or sociological level it's more of an existing state of affairs that must be recognized.

>>3696882
>Know you not who is most needed by all? He who commands great things.

>To execute great things is difficult: but the more difficult task is to command great things.

>This is your most unpardonable obstinacy: you have the power, and you will not rule."-

>And I answered: "I lack the lion's voice for all commanding."

>Then was there again spoken to me as a whispering: "It is the still words which bring the storm. Thoughts that come with doves' footsteps guide the world.

>>3696954
cheers for the reply.

i saw what kierkegaard was saying, especially how "one idea seems to have become the fixed idea of the age", is in a sense looking at the culturally intellectual level of the people. of course we are going to have a wider understanding of how "things work", and one philosophical movement is always an extension to the next. i don't see it as adding confusing though, i saw it as just advancing. i don't see how expressing a new or original view, even if it is too be challenged and seen as pointless, is making a mess? everything so far has been a mess..

i'm trying to understand your longest part of the post though, haha. it sounds interesting and there's a lot to take in for me. i still don't see how many people, seeing and living in their own ways can be "messy"? i would prefer if everyone lived their own inner experiences uniquely and richly.

my view of nihilism expands the more i read about it. currently i'm over being in dispair about how meaningless, etc., the universe / life is. so i can see nihilism in this personal way, and then i can see how to reject it. but i don't understand how nihilism can work on a cultural level? i always saw nihilism as a personally held belief, so i don't see how it can apply to a mass of people.. would you mind expanding?

>>3696878
>He diagnoses the sickness and some of its symptoms but I think it would be ridiculous to suggest that he provides anything like a cure

Wine and orgies are the cure.

And Amor Fati.

>>3694284
Here's one: Would he have considered Sartre a nihilist?

>>3696882
ubermunch is a religion

lol holy fucking shit this thread is so gay

I didn't read anything in this thread because it's on the internet, the digital world, therefore it does not exist. The authors of these "posts" are in questionable existence as well. Did my words are big enough? Hurrduur #hashtag# TheRealNihilist.