Being a true nihilist is incredibly difficult. Because our brains are always telling us to care about stuff. Our brains are always saying, “I’m hungry;” “I’m lonely;” “This situation feels unpleasant,” etc. We can tell ourselves all day long that there is no absolute truth and that meaning is a human construction, but our stomachs will still be growling when it is dinner time, and our hearts will still skip when we see our lover’s face.
There’s just no easy way out of being human. We’re in these bodies, and they demand a lot of us. They are propelling us onward, even if we don’t really know where the hell we’re going. We’re like leaves floating down a river, completely swept up in the current. We fell into this thing called existence, and it is moving us.
And yet we really get caught up in thinking we know what we’re doing. We get these little plans of what we think we want to happen, how our lives should be. “I have to catch that bus!” “I hope he likes me!” “I don’t want to die!” But really, what do we know? Pleasure now might lead to suffering later, or vice versa; the future is never certain.
Still, we can’t help but care; we’re human. We can never fully understand the larger current that carries us. We only see hazily, just a little bit in front of us. And we care so much about that little bit. That is what we do.
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November 24, 2009 at 12:39 am
Sean Utt
“Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offers us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.” – Camus
November 24, 2009 at 1:04 am
Bram Pitoyo
I’d like to believe that much of life’s delights also comes from its mystery—from being unsure and hazy.
I often ask myself “what if I could really get what I wanted all along, and somehow be able to know the larger dynamics of everything?”
A part of me says “that would rock: having understanding means total fulfillment,” yet another part says “that would suck: with no knowledge left to yearn, all desire to learn and want becomes pointless.”
Surprisingly, many things are this way. For instance, we know what health feels like because we have a frame of reference of being sick.
Would this mean that we feel most human when we feel the least in control and in the know of everything? But, gosh darn it, the instinct and the brain means little to a true nihilist—and so we’re seemingly back to square one.
November 24, 2009 at 1:58 am
Reid Beels
To recognize that meaning is a human construction should not be construed as a mandate to renounce our humanity. It seems to me that nihilism (or any existential viewpoint, really) is a way to understand—or comprehend the impossibility of understanding—our existance, not a dictate on how to live it.
We are no different now than we were before our minds towards the topic of existence itself. We don’t suddenly stop perceiving hunger, pleasure, lust, and sadness. Our ambitions and instincts don’t fade away. Sure: there may be no truth, we can’t prove that our perceptions aren’t lying, and language and meaning are (patently flawed) constructions— but we’re the ones who built them.
“Being a true nihilist,” in my mind, isn’t hard at all. It requires only the (perception of) understanding that we cannot know the nature of existence, and that it likely doesn’t mean anything. Being a vocal nihilist— or even, dare I say, fitting the mold of our society’s archetypal nihilist —is another matter entirely.
November 24, 2009 at 12:14 pm
cheerfulnihilist
Reid, I like this a helluva lot. Nihilism, or any philosophy, is sort of like a facade on a building–the structure doesn’t change, just the exterior. It’s a higher-level thinking process that we sort of add on to the pre-existing structures in our brains.
At the same time, if we internalize the beliefs of any philosophy long and hard enough, it will change our behavior in some ways. For example, religions do just this; they change the way people live their lives, sometimes drastically. So, I agree with you, but only to a certain extent. Nihilism does not have to change how we live, but it can, if we let it.
November 24, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Karstan
I take a slightly different view of this. Since, as nihilists, “we believe in NOTHING, Lewboski.” “Ja! Nothing!” what do we have left? Well, as I see it, we have our own senses and feelings. And that’s it. So, of course it’s important to have him/her like us, or to feed our belly. I think recognizing this state gives our little leaves a little steering control over this rushing river. Now we’re more like little ducklings, paddling away in the current. It can be alarming at times, but we’ve got some control over our destination (how we react to out senses and emotions). And that makes me a sad panda.
Okay, I’m not sure that this comment makes any sense. But I’ll let you try to figure it out.
November 24, 2009 at 6:01 pm
cheerfulnihilist
Karstan, that sounds plausible to me. I like the analogy of ducklings over leaves, because we do certainly have the ability to take actions in life, even if we can’t control the larger forces. Also, it’s cuter.
November 25, 2009 at 12:06 am
Sean
Hi Rachel, I think your post is an insightful description of what we do as humans.
Of the flavors of nihilism described on Wikipedia, I would be an Existential and Epistemological Nihilist — if I wanted to label myself. I’m particularly fond of this one-sentence description:
Nihilism of an epistemological form can be seen as an extreme form of skepticism in which all knowledge is denied.
Using that definition, a true Nihilist would eventually turn the philosophy on itself, using the mind as an axe to hack away at the supporting framework, denying (with the tools of logic) even the foundations of Nihilism. This process leaves nothing to hang on to and offers no guidance about how to live.
What would be the point in going down this path? For me, it’s to expose the false for what it is so that any truth that exists may be revealed. I think this truth is found not in a framework or philosophy, but in the mystery that makes up our existence. If all knowledge is denied, there’s nothing left but mystery.
November 25, 2009 at 12:12 am
cheerfulnihilist
Sean, I completely relate to the sense of mystery and not-knowing. In fact, I was going to write another blog post about that. Awesome.
November 25, 2009 at 10:21 am
Bram Pitoyo
What if this mystery and not knowing is a cycle? Let me quote this post on post-nihilism:
Maybe the process that we go through is:
First, we become optimist about knowledge and its possibilities, constructing its frameworks.
Then, oh no, we continually find crevasses in its seams, so we become more pessimistic about its fallacies and pointless pursuit.
We continue exposing holes and stripping away all its supporting framework.
And here’s the tricky bit: we discover something helpful in the very process of stripping away. Maybe it’s neither complete or insightful, but it furthers our understanding.
Armed with this new “revelation”, we set out to reconstruct the framework again.
Step 1 repeats itself: this time, with us knowing better. Ad infinitum.
Perhaps it’s an endlessly recurrent cycle: but (quoting that post again) “just because it’s a cycle doesn’t mean it has to be a circle.”