/grim/ - Death's Waiting Room

The stranger

>>288

The Road

>>290

> if you read anything by Nietzsche on nihilism, he pretty thoroughly despised it as a symptom of some deep problems in Western society that were linked strongly to Christianity. Nietzsche's famous challenge put forth against nihilism was to become an Ubermensch who creates their own values rather than subscribing to empty Christian values - although as people like me will tell you, he was full of shit for thinking that you can create your own values, and argue that he was ultimately a nihilist nonetheless. Worse, he was actively a nihilist without even knowing it.

I agreed with you until - "although as people like me will tell you, he was full of shit for thinking that you can create your own values..."

Tell me why.

>>449

Oh boy, I can tell this will be a long post.

In my opinion, Nietzsche's ideal of a value-creator is fundamentally flawed because it essentially exists in a vacuum. We are not the ones who create our values; our values are created for us primarily on the materialistic level and then secondarily on the psychological level. Herd mentality is a hell of a drug, and it absolutely does happen that the master class reinforces their own ideology and that the majority of people will listen even if it is directly against their material self-interests to do so (and not have a worker's revolution of some sort) because they're upholding narratives of morality that have been pushed on them by the ruling class. But ultimately, these narratives are shaped by the ruling class and their relationship with the materialistic world, with the allocation of resources and whatnot.

So from whence do these values we are supposed to create come from? You could argue that what Nietzsche was really saying what for the slave class to become the master class and thus the value-makers through a worker's revolution and some sort of dictatorship of the proletariat, but Nietzsche was pretty critical of socialists and anarchists. It could be that he was just being his usual facetious snarky self, I suppose. But in any event, even if there were that kind of worker's revolution and the former slaves were "creating" their own values, their existence would still ultimately be guided by the material plane. You can't divorce your ends from naturalism.

But then let's suppose that there is a post-scarcity society. Does this then mean that everyone is free to "create" their own values? Again, I ask: From whence do these values come from? You can't create meaning ex nihilo. Humans are worldly beings, and even if our values aren't derived directly from naturalism, we nevertheless rely on our environment for expression. Surely we have our own unique individual experiences of the world, but even on the lowest, most basic level of "meaning" creation or value creation, when we bring our subjective and wholly unique experience of the world into the material realm outside our minds, we make reference to a linguistic framework to express our experience logically and make reference to the cultural filter that we have been subjected to in our historical circumstances to decide what to say and what not to say. How can it be said that we're creating our own meaning when there is already so much we rely on outside ourselves? We cannot even make ourselves comprehensible without taking a stance in these material, linguistic, and cultural planes.

Basically, as far as I see it, Nietzsche's ideal of becoming a value creator just doesn't hold up to serious scrutiny. I think that he could have been making an important psychological point - that we do indeed phenomenologically "create value/meaning" in our own lived experience - but trying to consciously create meaning is just an absurd notion to me.

>>474

Okay, that was really interesting. Not being sarcastic in any way, for real.

However...

Given that there is no inherent or objective meaning, the only thing that could possibly be meant by the word "meaning" is subjective meaning. Meaning exists if someone subjectively finds meaning in something. One creates ones own meaning as soon as one believes that meaning exists. Meaning exists because I believe meaning exists. It is perfectly circular, but perfectly correct.

Where my subjective meaning has come from is irrelevant, what matters here in my eyes is your penultimate phrase: "we do indeed phenomenologically "create value/meaning" in our own lived experience" - this creation of value and meaning, this subjective belief that I have created meaning, or that meaning exists - that is ALL that meaning ever is anyway. In that sense, my created meaning exists as much as a "meaning" could ever be said to exist. All meaning is subjective phenomena anyway.

>>475

Yes, that's a fair position to take. You could very well argue that the issue all along was never whether or not meaning was "real" anyways, because meaning is a subjectively real phenomenon. But I think there's a little more to it than that.

I may, for instance, think that something called a Boogle exists. This idea I have of a Boogle might be a very significant part of my life, even. I may derive great pleasure from the idea of one day being able to see a Boogle with my own eyes, I might spent a lot of time and energy in pursuit of a Boogle and along the way might even do some real good for the world. But that doesn't mean that a Boogle exists, now does it? Boogles never existed, no matter how important they were to me.

I think it's essentially the same thing with meaning, only meaning just happens to be something that we all rely on quite a bit. It's a collective neuroses. Meaning corresponds to nothing in the real world; we merely use meaning as a sort of mediating false idea between ourselves and the material world to make our material existence more acceptable. I guess it's sort of like a psychological sleight-of-hand that we do to ourselves, in that sense. We trick ourselves into believing in the real existence of this idea we have of meaning in order to continue on with our lives, and unlike the Boogle example it isn't immediately apparent to us that meaning just isn't a real thing in the sense that we normally use the word "real".

We crave meaning, and the idea of meaninglessness is terrifying to us, but accepting meaninglessness also prepares us to meet the real horrors of existence. Even as a nihilist, one can never act, after all, as though meaning isn't a real thing; the implication of meaninglessness is precisely non-action. But knowing that meaning isn't real, much like we know that Stirnerite spooks aren't real, we can abuse it to our ends as much as we like and not worry about it.

Though one can aspire to non-action perhaps. It's a beautiful dream to be able to lie down completely void of any subjectivity and just expire in complete indifference.

>>476

I suppose the question here is really about what we mean by "real". I think the Boogle example is flawed, I must say. The Boogle is an object, something exterior to us that can be determined to exist or not by something other than our own personal phenomenal experience. It is not a "mental event", it is a "physical event". Meaning, on the other hand, is a purely subjective phenomenon.

A better example might be colours. I may think that colours exist, I may derive great pleasure from them, they may be a significant part of my life. My seeing the colours being a subjective, phenomenal experience means that they exist, because that is all that colour really is.

If all that meaning is, is the phenomenal experience of meaning, then it exists by virtue of my having that phenomenal experience. It is "real".

>>477

I've always found color to be a very philosophically interesting phenomenon. And yes, sure, I think that actually is probably more analogous an example to something like color.

What you're talking about then is actually a very Kantian move. Much of Kant's basic assertions in his transcendental idealism are that things need not be proven to be "real" outside of our own minds; things are real as appearances insofar as they are considered as appearances. It was the great mistake of philosophy in his view that we confused appearances with things-in-themselves and concluded that the appearance was thing-in-itself, rather than merely how we experience the thing-in-itself. Sort of like Lockean primary and secondary qualities.

The thing about color, however, and other appearances is that they do in fact still correspond to a real thing. Color is how the reflection of light off of a textured surface appears in our minds when it is interpreted by our eyes and all that. But can the same be said for meaning? Even if meaning, like color, can only be considered real insofar as it is a phenomenal subjective experience, I still insist that there has to be a question of from whence this meaning comes from. If meaning comes from no traceable source and is only the subjective phenomenal experience of itself, it's that a patently neurotic idea?

But I genuinely find that to be a hard question to answer. Meaning is a really philosophically problematic concept to me. The most I could say about it is that meaning seems to be a vague holistic account of all our experiences - or our experiences of particular objects and the way people talk about them if we're limiting our domain to linguistic meanings. It's a very slippery psychological issue more than anything, it seems to me.

>>478

*that meaning is actually probably more analogous

>>478

Very interesting response re. Kant, I will certainly have to think about that one, as I had always considered myself someone who opposed Kantian ideas but you've just thrown me on that one, I think. I suppose I am saying that the experience-of-the-thing = the thing-in-itself, but only with regard to phenomenal experiences i.e. where the thing-in-itself can only ever be the experience-of-the-thing. Does that make any sense?

So, given that by definition all meaning is subjective meaning, my experience of subjective meaning = the thing-in-itself; subjective meaning.

>>480

The thing about that, as I've heard it put, is that philosophy is suffering from a Kantian hangover. It's hard to escape him, even if you don't agree with him.

It does indeed make sense though. It's an interesting position to take. I guess the question I have regarding that, though, is whether it's really possible to have an experience of the subjective phenomena s.t. you experience it as thing-in-itself. Because that really would be the trick, to have an experience of anything at all as thing-in-itself. I have in fact had thingness and our experience of thingness in mind when talking about that. Specifically, the problem I see with talking about meaning the minute you try to connect it to the outside world where I insist it ultimately comes from is that meaning attempts to make a very final claim about the nature of our experiences and especially our experiences of things. But the thingness of things is that they are closed off and indifferent to us; Heidegger places great importance on them in his phenomenology because our being-in-the-world is primarily constituted by our experience of the world and things, but the things themselves are only meaningful to us in our relations with them. Absent us, things are nothing - quite literally in fact. In this line of thought at least, and Heidegger was very greatly influenced by Kant.

But anyways, I'm getting off topic. The point I wanted to get at w/r/t subjective phenomena is to bring Kant back into this. Kant actually addresses this idea of experiencing oneself, but kind of surprisingly he also says that the experience of oneself through "inner sense" is no more an experience of the thing-in-itself than the experience of an external object. We nevertheless appear to ourselves as an appearance; we cannot know who we "really are". And this actually is quite succinct with later works by the poststructuralists and psychoanalysis. As I understand Lacan's view on the Self or Ego or whatever he calls it (I'm far from an expert on Lacan), we cannot experience ourselves authentically because in attempting to do so a weird thing happens where we only look at ourselves in conformity with the personal narrative we've formed of who we want to be. This is perhaps even more biased an account of something than the external world, in fact, since at least then we aren't dealing with something as loaded as the Self. We act "on our best behavior" under our own scrutiny, in accordance with the superego I believe in Freudian terms.

And not only this, but taking a poststructuralist view in addition to that: Even this "true self" we hope to examine is very much a product of our culture. We are structured according to the larger collective meaning of our society that I was talking about earlier, and there's little we can do to get away from that. We simply have nothing else to hold onto. The best we can hope for is a rather *nihilistic* Stirnerite personal insurrection where we negate our own identity and desires as being nothing but products of the external world. They are spooks masquerading as who we truly are, when what we truly are is a wholly unique Ego that cannot be put into words without ceasing to be an Ego.

Same with meaning, in my opinion: Meaning is influenced by our environment, and even when the minute we realize this like Nietzsche would insist and try to consciously bring something into the world as our own meaning, we've lost even more by believing this is our own meaning.

>>481

Okay, I've never read any Heidegger and I fear I'm wading out of my depth, but this is really interesting stuff.

When you say "we negate our own identity and desires as being nothing but products of the external world... what we truly are is a wholly unique Ego that cannot be put into words without ceasing to be an Ego" are you saying that the Ego exists by necessity, but that any attributes or qualities the Ego has are products of the external world. i.e. not necessary? So, with regard to meaning, individual subjective meanings do not "exist", but subjective meaning exists, by virtue of the belief that subjective meaning exists?

I don't see what is lost per se by my false belief that my meaning is my own rather than the product of my external environment. It is still, phenomenally, subjectively, "my" meaning. Nothing is changed, is it?

>>483

Thank you for an enlightening conversation. PDF saved. I think you're spot on when you say that we cannot escape our belief in meaning, I suppose that is what I mean when I say that subjective meaning (and therefore meaning) exists. Even if we were all nihilists, I think the human psychology demands it, even if we know it to be an illusion.

>>484

I suppose it's just a semantic idiosyncrasy on my part to insist that meaning isn't real, but yeah it sounds like we're pretty much in agreement on the matter. I personally am interested in the possibility of abolishing the need for meaning in oneself, but that's a topic for another time when it's not late as fuck and I don't need to sleep.

Glad to talk. Come back sometime.