It similar to what Camus said about making meaning, it’s a pointless and wasted effort -- Xain
He might have said something like that, but I doubt you have read The Myth of Sisyphus. Camus is much easier than Nietzsche and much more accessible that Buddhism. He made sure no liturgy would develop around his writings. So, we may be near the end of your journey after all Xain. Camus rejected all those earlier attempts at meaning, and rejected his contemporary philosophers. Yet he played soccer and won a Nobel Prize. He did this by accepting the meaningless, and saw that our desire to have it is absurd, then doing what everyone here told you a long time ago, go outside, smell some flowers.
The breeze is cool and the sky blue. I love this life with abandon and wish to speak of it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition. Yet people have often told me: there’s nothing to be proud of. Yes, there is: this sun, this sea, my heart leaping with youth, the salt taste of my body and this vast landscape in which tenderness and glory merge in blue and yellow. It is to conquer this that I need my strength and my resources. Everything here leaves me intact, I surrender nothing of myself, and don no mask: learning patiently and arduously how to live is enough for me, well worth all their arts of living.
Just like you confused the Buddhist concept of not getting attached with the idea of completely detaching from all feelings, now you are confusing lack of meaning with nihilism. The dictionary definition is very helpful with this.
Non attachment does mean to be detached from feelings. As they put it feeling are like clouds but you are the sky.
Campus dodged the issue but got closer than anyone else. He does what the author of the like calls ignoring it by assigning some meaning to living on when there isn’t any. He puts the blinders back on, he doesn’t accept things as meaningless otherwise he wouldn’t have said that quoted segment.
You guys are forgetting that there is no meaning in the flowers, the rivers, other people. To advise such a thing is a temporary distraction as the link had said. I know because I have done so, it didn’t help because the realization creeped in the same way it always does.
So no rat, you are wrong as you always are. There is no meaning and likely never was.
Non attachment does mean to be detached from feelings.
I have no idea where you got that. It means to have feelings, because you can't not have them, just don't get obsessed with them, don't chase after a feeling you once had, and don't try to make the one you're having go away. That's the cloud analogy.
Campus dodged the issue but got closer than anyone else.
Watch that spell checker! What do you mean "got closer". You seem to think you would know if someone solved this puzzle, but you never offer a solution.
by assigning some meaning to living
No, Camus does not do that. He couldn't possibly be more clear that he does not do that.
You guys are forgetting that there is no meaning in the flowers, the rivers, other people.
You are forgetting what is posted on this very page. You are telling us the thing we have said we know from the beginning of our conversations.
So, guess we’re done. You aren’t reading our words. You aren’t reading the works of the people you quote. You aren’t looking out your own window. You aren’t listening to your own thoughts or your own body. You have found meaning for yourself in complaining and putting others down and being right about something and pretending you have knowledge that others don’t.
Hal: "I think there is a very important meaning to human life and that is to perpetuate the success of the human species."
I think that can be important to a person's life, but it is not necessarily important each person.
Offspring keep a species going, but humans have no shortage of offspring, so there is no need at all to make that a point to your life. If it is important, cool, but if it’s not, that’s equally cool.
I know a few older people who have been single and childless by choice their whole life, and they are very fulfilled and happy with their choices. One lady is in her 50’s and has worked with the elderly for most of her life. She is a pillar of the community, writing articles in the paper, organizing all sorts of committees and fundraisers, volunteering at many places, travelling the world, and generally being an amazing person. Her life’s been so full of doing things that she never had the time nor inclination to take the time to have a family.
No fear of Homo sapiens going extinct because she had no children, but she has improved the lives of many thousands of people.
Do you really believe that participating in the success of the human species is not necessarily important to each person? I believe you are right because so many people challenge the validity of climate change or uncaringly or unknowingly support detromental action to the planet or the enumerable species of life that depend on this planet.
“Hal points to the survival instinct. Important, but I don’t think it provides meaning”.
My post doesent provide meaning because I didn’t provide sufficient clarity.
No “sky is falling” in my concept of the future, we are looking at at least a century or more before we start to understand the repercussions of go forth and subdue it.
We are all living in the current geological Holocene epoch. It began approximately 11,650 years ago. Most people are familiar with the last mass extinction that closed the Cretaceous Period 65 million years ago and resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs and the opourtunity for an insegnificant species to become a super global preditor.
Many scientists believe we are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction event caused by ourselves. Based on population numbers required to maintain genetic viability; it is estimated that as many as 30 percent of plant and animal species may become extinct within the next 100 years. Habitat destruction is the leading cause of species extinction today.
Not trying to be an alarmist, I just believe we should adjust our interaction with the planet and other species with renewed respect and care. And I believe it is of ultimate importance.
You are forgetting what is posted on this very page. You are telling us the thing we have said we know from the beginning of our conversations.
So, guess we’re done. You aren’t reading our words. You aren’t reading the works of the people you quote. You aren’t looking out your own window. You aren’t listening to your own thoughts or your own body. You have found meaning for yourself in complaining and putting others down and being right about something and pretending you have knowledge that others don’t.
I haven’t but I am pointing out the flaws in the examples you are putting forth. The analogy with Buddhism means to be detached from your feelings since they are not you, I didn’t say to not have them.
Also Camus is still very much making meaning, that whole phrase you quoted is essentially making meaning where none exists and I say that is pointless. Camus never truly addresses the “why bother” part of it all and doesn’t have a convincing counter argument against suicide besides saying that it removes the problem but not solves it. It sounds like it solves it to me.
Even the wiki page proves you wrong in that he does assign meaning to things which goes back to my point of “why bother”: Absurdism - Wikipedia
The analogy with Buddhism means to be detached from your feelings since they are not you, I didn’t say to not have them.
I don't think you understand what these words mean. So, I can't discuss them.
Camus never truly addresses the “why bother” part of it all
I don't think that is anyone's job. He points out that suicide is only an absurd act within an absurd world, that it has no more reason or meaning than anything else. It is no more of a "solution" than anything else. For me, knowing that results in a feeling of freedom and opens up pathways to to the joy of living.
Thanks for the link, cool chart. It’s a great depiction of you BTW. With all those interesting differences in the first three columns, then the column under Nihilism that says, “No”, “No”, “No”, “No”.
Because when it comes to Nihilism one can’t really deny that it is right. All those “no’s” are the truth of our existence and the problem is being able to cope with that or not. He says that suicide is the affirmation that life isn’t worth living, which is a decent argument. I don’t have an answer for why life is worth it because there is no meaning to anything I do in it. Most answers I see on the internet don’t seem to address that main problem and just dodge or dance around nihilism. Asserting that something is meaningful doesn’t make it so, it’s just pretending. That goes back to what I said before about how much of what we deem to be meaningful is a lie that we tell ourselves enough until we believe it. You can’t make meaning because the very act itself is void of meaning, or to coin a popular phrase “you can’t get something from nothing”.
According to Brassier, "the disenchantment of the world understood as a consequence of the process whereby the Enlightenment shattered the 'great chain of being' and defaced the 'book of the world' is a necessary consequence of the coruscating potency of reason, and hence an invigorating vector of intellectual discovery, rather than a calamitous diminishment".[5] "Philosophy", exhorts Brassier, "would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. It should strive to be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity."
To me the idea of making meaning is like trying to build a sand castle in the desert. It would have been better if I never read any of this stuff and gone on blissfully ignorant of all of it. Before I never really questioned why I was doing things but at least I felt purpose and meaning to what I was doing. But to realize that there is no real true purpose or point to the things I do I am left in a void. Nothing matters anymore, and it just feels like I'm doing what I did before out of some habit. I can't pretend anymore, there just isn't any logic or reason to it. Pretending something matters or has meaning is just dodging Nihilism.
I don’t have an answer for why life is worth it because there is no meaning to anything I do in it.
What is the meaning of eating a meal to fulfill your hunger? You don't need a philosophy to say there is none. The hunger is gone. You don't need Buddhism to detach from it. 'Not hungry' is better than hungry according to your physical needs. It's you that has added on this requirement that it mean something and attached your feelings to the lack of meaning.
Hal: "Not trying to be an alarmist, I just believe we should adjust our interaction with the planet and other species with renewed respect and care. And I believe it is of ultimate importance."
Anyone who cares about not only the survival of humanity, but survival of life on the planet, needs to decide how to deal with the only species that is responsible for the many threats in the first place.
I need help in seeing how procreation is going to do anything but make our situation exponentially worse.
This book makes a compelling argument for why humans attempts to project meaning on the world is just fear from taking nihilism to its ultimate conclusion. All philosophers get close but pull out at the last minute
So, I read the review, if it that’s what you meant to link. It says nothing that hasn’t been said in your many threads. Maybe a little more sciencey. But there is no logic to the idea that because everything will be gone trillions of years from now, there is nothing now, or no meaning to what is now. Actually, I’ve heard that idea expressed as a joke.
Anyway, it’s not quoted, so can’t be sure the reviewer got it right, but it ends with this,
It is the role of philosophy to clear the way for the advancement of science and to create a dialogue through which both can advance towards intellectual maturity.
So, the "meaning" of nihilism, the goal of exposing it, is to clear away the superstitions, myths, and thoughts about how great humans are, and advance toward intellectual maturity. But, you probably didn't mean to agree with that.
Brassier criticizes mainstream philosophy discourses because they obstinately hold on to the notion that humans are of consequence in the universe. He ridicules this visceral human yearning for cosmic importance, and chastises philosophers for softening the news in order to console "the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem" (Preface xi). Brassier wants none of this baby stuff. He demands that metaphysicians push nihilism to its most obvious conclusion: that extinction retroactively annihilates all meaning. He pierces into the depths of the bleak void of nothingness, stares at it in the eyes, and returns to tell us that extinction has "always already occurred." We are already dead.
First of all reader, you must know that in "one trillion, trillion, trillion (10^1728) years from now the accelerating expansion of the universe will have disintegrated the fabric of matter itself, terminating the possibility of embodiment" (228). Not only does this imply that life, thought, space, and time will perish, it also logically proves that it has already happened. As Brassier puts it "everything is already dead" (223). The extinction of all has "retroactively" annihilated everything. This post-asymptopian state of "eternal and unfathomable blackness" already encompasses all diachronic events and forces us to confront implications that are far beyond them (228). Extinction pervades the present by encompassing "a future that has already been, and a past that is perpetually yet to be" (230). This eternal, ever-expanding nothingness is the only thing that exists. That is to say everything is already nothingness.
Brassier’s nihilism does not reduce human existence to some sort of subjectivism. On the contrary, it strips it of all its clutter. Nihilism allows us to observe a reality that “is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the values' andmeanings’ which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable” (Prefrace xi). It is this atavistic need to urgently hold on to the illusion of meaning that impedes intellectual progress, and it is only by accepting that extinction and its subsequent nothingness eternally pervade all reality that humans can frame their ponderings appropriately. It is the role of philosophy to clear the way for the advancement of science and to create a dialogue through which both can advance towards intellectual maturity.
I need help in seeing how procreation is going to do anything but make our situation exponentially worse.
On the short term what you say makes sense. On the long term it breaks down. We need to double down as a species recognizing that there are other enemy species besides members of our own human species.
You can easily poke around online and get a lot of help. Thanks for asking me.
Hal: "We need to double down as a species recognizing that there are other enemy species besides members of our own human species."
What does that sentence? Are you talking about hippos, mosquitoes, sharks, rattlesnakes or what? By any criteria you want to measure by, humans are off the charts when ranking dangers to humans and other species.
We could limit our procreation to zero growth and we’ll still be over populated. If there are too many of us now only a period of negative growth will get us to where we should be. It would take centuries to do it responsibly and ethically, but the alternative is neither responsible nor ethical.
I’m not saying you’re wrong in what you’ve said, I’m saying I don’t understand you.
