nihilism

People always want to make nihilism into the idea that is most convenient for them: do nothing but what you want to do.

They justify this with “but nothing is true, so nothing is real, so there’s no point to anything” and consider this profound. What they left out: they think nothing is true, except themselves.

Most human thought tends toward solipsism. We are after all just monkeys that got tossed a bone in the form of higher logic. That’s a mixed burden.

Having brains capable of processing logic means that we are forever schizoid, divided between two “modes” of thinking:

1. Logic: the logical mind calculates according to the rules of logic. It is completely detached from a consideration of self, time, physicality and emotion.
2. Self: we are intensely aware of our physical selves, and our immediate sensations and being, and when logic gets too intense, we retreat into this.

In other words, we can both think and have animal awareness.

We like animal awareness because it is a form of control. No matter what threatens, we have this moment and our own will, and we can do what we want (within limits) and this comforts us. We control us.

This is why nihilists identify nihilism as the gateway to all clear thought, including spirituality. It overcomes the solipsism inherent in being a thinking animal which leads us to prefer the thoughts we control to the logic we can only, at best, channel sometimes to do what we need it to.

Human solipsism creates a false inherency. We expect the universe to behave like our animal self, where there is an absolute conditioning to all of our thoughts provided by the self and its animal needs.

We expect the universe to exert control, and pass on to us absolute, innate, universal and inherent truths, like writing on a wall or the word of a controlling God.

More likely, we are projecting our own animal ego and social ego desires onto the universe, expecting it to act like us when we revert into our animal selves.

This solipsism — a lack of awareness of everything but the self — occurs when we seek control first, and logic second. It occurs in different frequencies among people. We can discipline ourselves to limit it.

Nihilism is that discipline.

By denying inherent truth, universals, absolute reality and belief, we are denying the projections of human solipsism that read those things into our world.

There is one truth — the world, including the vast universe and any metaphysical dimensions it has.

We are a small portion of that truth, and our thoughts of truth cannot supplant the whole.

No matter who we are, we live in the same world and it is consistent for all of us. However, our ability to perceive is different, because we are not all equally smart or self-actualized (the process by which one becomes mentally clear and can differentiate reality from self-projection).

Solipsism seems to give us power over this world because we are able, by virtue of existing in our own minds, to project our thoughts/judgments/feelings of the world over the sense-data from which we construct the world. It’s like seeing the world through colored lenses.

However, solipsism cuts us off from (a) the gritty realism for which nihilism is famous and (b) transcendence, which requires union with the cosmos through an understanding of its order.

For us to understand that order, we must accept that there is a singular reality, and we can at best offer up strategies of adapting to it and interpretations of it, but these are not “equal” to it.

In other words, there is not an absolute, inherent, innate “truth” to the universe. There is only the universe itself.

It exists; we interpret it and form truths. It has a logical origin, and that logical pattern (some would say “Platonic forms”) creates a messier physical reality, which we can analyze and understand to some degree, getting closer to those original patterns.

But the patterns in our heads are not identical to them, thus are not equal, thus are not “truths” so much as approximate interpretations. And not all interpretations are equal; the interpretations of a retarded person or idiot are much less accurate than those of a disciplined, self-actualized genius.

We could view it this way:

On the other hand, this is our mindset with solipsism:

Truths are a human creation. As said above, they are approximate descriptions of the singular reality in which we live.

We must clarify our minds in order to know reality, and from that, build up abstractions that reasonably describe (but are not equal to) its logical form.

The essence of nihilism is breaking free from solipsism, a vestige of our animal past. Cold, impersonal logic is not comforting at first, because it reminds us that we are small and have no control, but eventually, it becomes a warm friend.

Knowing that our universe is consistent, has an order, and that we can escape the insanity of solipsism and reasonably understand it, as time goes on, becomes a more comforting notion than subjecting it to the control of our reckless animal minds.

For this reason, nihilism is the opposite of “do whatever you want.” That statement reflects a solipsistic belief and is as irrationally religious as any dubious mystical cult.

Nihilism does not waste its time on human polemics and attempting to negate beliefs. Instead, it offers discipline of the mind and a clarity to perception, creating a doorway to a logical space in which one can discover what is realistic.

This will never be satisfying to those still in the grip of the logical mind. They want either an inherent “truth” spoken directly to us by an absolute deity, or a lack of any logic, so they can pursue control through their animal minds.

In other words, we can only know clarity through death — death to the monkey within, death to the human, and in that stillness of nothingness, an acceptance of what is all around us. We are a small part of a vast order.

This is not comforting to those in the grips of solipsism. But as in all things in life, appearances are deceiving, and understanding requires a good deal more thought than blind reaction.

Nihilism remains one of the hardest terms to define in philosophy.

We can easily confuse it with fatalism, which I define handily as “a belief in a lack of order or purpose to life itself.” Such thinking is obviously self-contradictory since we exist in a universe with logical rules, and in which species are squeezed by natural selection until we get higher-level species like humans. There may not be a “purpose,” since purpose is a matter of human faith and interpretation, but there is an order and a sense of a goal.

Nihilism, on the other hand, is an absence of faith in faith.

As self-conscious beings, we become aware of our separation from the universe at large. It is our environment; in it, we appear to be independent actors. This immediately prompts two viewpoints, each pivoting on one of the two actors:

• Human-centric. In this view, everything that happens to us has a purpose because we are the intended target. What matters is our desires, judgments and fears. The universe exists to serve us, and may in fact be part of our perception and under our control.
• Cosmos-centric. Those who take this view see themselves as the smaller of the two parties, and events as having bigger significance and incidental consequences on the self. The self exists as part of this bigger motion.

In the former, we have a reversed cause/effect relationship. We see ourselves as the initiating goal of actions that happen to us, as if we were the center of the universe. As a result, we judge actions by their effects (as we perceive them on ourselves) and not their actual cause.

Faith is what allows us to draw that fundamental assumption that actions in the world are somehow directed at us because they include us. When drought strikes, we wonder at first if we are cursed by the gods; only later does it occur to us that drought struck our whole region because of sunspot activity. In the same way, we make a mysticism out of science where we correlate one activity with a certain result and assume that the correlation implies cause.

If people who drink wine at dinner live longer, it must be the wine, not the relative opulence or healthy activities of people who like to drink wine at dinner. The implication is that if any random person starts drinking wine at dinner, they will live longer, because the wine must be the causal agent even though we have seen no proof of the exclusivity of that relationship.

The exclusivity factor is what bonds one action to a result as cause. When we mis-attribute this for reasons of our own desiring, we call that a type of faith. We can have faith in anything, including as mentioned above, science; when we inject faith into anything, including science, we corrupt it from having a view of the world as a functional sphere to viewing the world as a reaction to us personally, with intent regarding us instead of an agenda of its own in which we are caught up.

Nihilism rejects faith in favor of an understanding of causal relationships. Nihilists reject the first pivot mentioned above, where a human sees the universe as somehow convergent upon the human being. In seeking such a view, a nihilist arrives at clarity regarding the relationship of human to universe: we are small components within a far larger and more complex system.

In doing so, nihilists throw away all reasons centered in what a human wants to believe, and instead focus on what it is logical to deduce or induce from the world at large, keeping in mind that humans are but a tiny portion of that world. It is a removal of anthropomorphism, a rejection of solipsism and narcissism, and a militant refusal to let “faith” stand in for understanding.

That being said, a nihilist who found a credible logical pathway to any “belief” would not reject it, nor would he or she reject a belief because of a lack of proof for what cannot be proved. Nihilists are not atheists, but agnostics, meaning that they are not going to make positive or negative claims on that which they cannot know. If someone says the Loch Ness monster is real, a nihilist will take a middle path and say “Perhaps — but I will need proof to be interested.”

In turn this means the nihilist is aware of how little we know of our universe and ourselves. In our view, it is just as much an article of faith to assume that the material world is all that we see, as to assume that a mysterious sky god exists who judges our every movement and at death, sorts us between good and evil.

As we explore the world, the gap between what would “seem” to be how reality works, and how it works, lengthens:

The concept of time as a way to measure the duration of events is not only deeply intuitive, it also plays an important role in our mathematical descriptions of physical systems. For instance, we define an object’s speed as its displacement per a given time. But some researchers theorize that this Newtonian idea of time as an absolute quantity that flows on its own, along with the idea that time is the fourth dimension of spacetime, are incorrect. They propose to replace these concepts of time with a view that corresponds more accurately to the physical world: time as a measure of the numerical order of change. – PhysOrg

Time is iteration-space, meaning that the sequential interaction between objects in the cosmos creates time. Where there is no interaction, no time exists.

And space, is it relative, too?

Gravity warps space and time, and rotating objects like Earth stir up space and time around them, two of Einstein’s predictions from his theory of relativity confirmed by NASA’s Gravity Probe B, according to the space agency. – The Star

Space is relative to the objects within it, and is distorted by their presence. Another way to view this is that objects define the space around them. From this we see how both space, and time, are dependent upon the interactions of the objects within them. In this light our infinitely expanding universe could not be so much expanding in itself, but growing to accommodate the objects within it.

We even get a violation of all known rules, thanks to relativity:

At the center of a black hole lies the singularity, where matter is crushed to infinite density, the pull of gravity is infinitely strong, and spacetime has infinite curvature. Here it’s no longer meaningful to speak of space and time, much less spacetime. Jumbled up at the singularity, space and time cease to exist as we know them.

[...]

At the singularity, though, the laws of physics, including General Relativity, break down. Enter the strange world of quantum gravity. In this bizzare realm in which space and time are broken apart, cause and effect cannot be unraveled. Even today, there is no satisfactory theory for what happens at and beyond the singularity.

It’s no surprise that throughout his life Einstein rejected the possibility of singularities. So disturbing were the implications that, by the late 1960s, physicists conjectured that the universe forbade “naked singularities.” After all, if a singularity were “naked,” it could alter the whole universe unpredictably. – NCSA

We learn quickly how little we know.

At the extremes of relativity, the rules break down entirely and we have no idea what exists. When cause and effect are no longer linear, time does not exist; without any dimension to space, interaction does not exist. A strange state of both stasis and infinite change could exist, but in an acausal, non-temporal and placeless state.

Nihilism can accept the logical dimensions of what scientists tell us, and extend relativism to another idea: if non-causal parts of our universe exist, non-causality must be a fundamental part of how our universe is ordered. This means we can no longer separate our cosmos into matter and form as separate, but must look at the idea of an order the two have in common.

The idea of non-duality, or no separation between mind and universe as well as no “second realm” (like a heaven or hell) where the normal rules do not apply, is called monism. Under monism, there is one order to all and it manifests itself in both physical (matter) and informational (form) channels. Both physicality and idea obey the same set of rules.

Nihilism is a form of scientific monism. In it, we accept all of the uncertainty in the universe, including that as Kant suggested, we may be perceivers journeying through a vast data field and assembling a reality from the parts of it our brains can handle. How much of the universe do we know? If a bigger rule-set than the strictly material exists, we may know less than one percent, or even a hundredth of a percent.

Time and space reduce to idea. Physicality becomes an after-effect of a larger order. Do we claim we see God? We only know that we cannot know. What we do know is that we will not project ourselves onto this volatile situation, and will remain curious explorers, looking to further understand this magical place in which we exist.

There are many around you who use language for its flavor. They talk about what they want to believe, rather than what makes sense, because they are trying to construct an identity or an excuse for their own failings.

They’re not interested in anything but themselves and how cool they look to their friends.

The philosopher F.W. Nietzsche remains tied to nihilism because he was the first to intelligibly discuss it beyond the idea that some people just wanted to destroy everything. He realized that an impulse toward senseless destruction was not nihilism, but a reverse of it; it was in itself a belief.

Nietzsche’s realization was that we as a species were coming out of a time when we believed in an inherent order: a God above, a single right way of doing things inherited from nature, a divine order of kings and aristocrats, and even an exceptional position to humans and earth.

What replaced that vision was modern science paired with the populist revolutions of 1789: we were one planet of many, the individual is alone in the universe, a lack of logical reasons for God and a democratic order replacing aristocrats. There was no inherent order to anything, only a baffling array of choices and science which revealed connections but could not prescribe a social order or meaningful direction to life.

As Nietzsche noted, our immediate tendency when confronted with this situation is to manufacture false inherencies. He saw Christianity as false: seeing the emptiness of existence, it invented pleasant symbols. Also false was liberalism, which originated in Christianity: the idea of a brotherhood of humans, all equal and pacifistically friendly with each other, was a false kind of inherency for Nietzsche.

He asked instead that we take a few moments to think, and look at the three paths available to us:

1. Inherency. Life was created by a single God for a single purpose, so we are means to that end.
2. Materialism. Nothing exists except us and our pleasures, so we make the right to those inherent.
3. Aestheticism. Life is the only thing that is inherent; we can choose an adaptation that brings beauty to our lives, or indulge in stupidity.

His point was that the radical reaction to the loss of God, which was the idea of a meaningless life in which self-pleasure was the only goal, was another type of false inherency. In this false inherency, we assume that because material objects exist, they are important. Starting with ourselves, which we view as a material object, of course.

As a good Schopenhauerian, Nietzsche knew that our “worlds” are composed our thoughts reflecting the world around us. We live in our heads. As a result, we need to look at all objects as how they relate to our consciousness, not their material role in a world “out there” that we can barely perceive. The self is the result of a physical thing, Nietzsche argued, but it is fundamentally an object of consciousness; perhaps, then, we should stop treating it as a material object because materialism feels more “inherent” than consciousness.

Nietzsche realized that the “nihilism” of the angry Russian mob was not an assertion of no-order, but an assertion of a simple material order: we exist, and we have desires, so we demand that others support us in the pursuit of those desires.

Why? Because we’re human too. We must all be equal, because we’re all human, and we all have these desires.

Nietzsche saw the above as parallel to Christianity, an assertion of inherent order based on shared humanity. Science and Nietzsche agree that humans vary so widely that to construct a universal “human nature” or “human morality” is a pointless endeavor toward false inherency. No such thing exists; some humans rise above others.

Anarchy, liberalism and other false social notions of equality and the inherent importance of man are entirely anti-nihilistic. In fact, they’re descendants of Christianity: they are falsely inherent orders based on human desires for the universe to be centered around humans. It is not. We are thinking monkeys, and it’s great we have come so far, but it’s not really that far. We’re not that great. And most of us are morons, perverts, lazybones, selfish people, criminals, or people who smoke in bed.

If you want to confront the true face of nihilism, you cannot do it through anarchy or liberalism. You need to instead reject all notions of the inherent, and entirely make a choice based on cause/effect reasoning toward beauty. What will the effects of my actions be? Will that get me closer to a life of grace, beauty, joy and wisdom, or will that make me more like the humonkeys around me, ignorant and proud of it?

Demanding that the universe center on the human form is the opposite of nihilism. Christianity, liberalism, anarchy and libertarianism demand that we consider a brotherhood of humanity where we all live as equals, but this is itself based on the false notion that the universe centers on humans and human desires, and that all of us are somehow important for magical religious reasons. There is no logic behind it.

Nihilism is transcendence of the need for inherency. We are products of a logical universe and our goal is to adapt to it — like any other species. If our consciousness has attributes of the universe, that’s because it shaped us, and not the other way around. Our desires, including the social desire for happy anarchy, are entirely irrelevant. What matters is what we do with this opportunity to live, perceive, decide, create and then die.

If in everyday life, you are asked about continued existence after death by one of those people who would like to know everything but refuse to learn anything, the most appropriate and approximately correct answer is: ‘After your death you will be what you were before your birth.’ For this answer implies that it is preposterous to demand that a species of existence which had a beginning should not have an end; in addition, however, it contains a hint that there may be two kinds of existence and, correspondingly, two kinds of nothingness.
-Arthur Schopenhauer

Nihilism means accepting the world as the source of reality. Not our thoughts, not our emotions/morals/aesthetics, but the world itself, much as we’d examine a machine.

To look at life without judgment in such a way, we must see our lives as the momentary animal existences they are — and then look at their troubling aspect, which is that through our intellect we can touch the organizational principles of this universe.

But I said “can.” There is no guarantee. And it is unclear if most people are doing more than reacting to their impulses/desires, then fabricating a “reason why” they did what they did, and then justifying that according to Big Epic Social Goods like fighting racism, stopping fascism, making money, helping the underprivileged and keeping the peace.

From a casual — and as D.A. Schuel will note, entirely unproven and anecdotal — viewpoint, most people seem more than half in love with easeful death. To me they seem more afraid of social censure than mortality, and so they are content to die so long as they are well thought of. Their fear is that their lives will go unnoticed, and while they do not seem to notice that in turn over generations those lives that remember vanish, they are content for family and friends to know they were here, and now are gone.

This seems almost sensual, in a post-sense way; how would I be treated, and what would I be eating, and would someone want to have sex with me, if they were considering my death, which then forces a summarizing of my life?

As the existentialists were fond of saying, our problem in modern existence is not a lack of life after death. It’s a lack of life after birth. Unlike the postmodernists, who are sure our mortal fear in the face of scientific knowledge is the culprit, I blame something else: there is no longer a single organizing narrative and values system so that as we fade away, we can say, “Well, I did well by all the values we hold dear together, and if I had some bad days or missed out on some things, it was in sacrifice to that.” No warrior wants to die for a numbered regulation, but they don’t seem to mind dying on the quest to obliterate a great evil or create a vast good.

So in life, as in death, we have two kinds of existence — and two kinds of nothingness.

Civilizations take thousands of years to fully die, or lapse into being a third-world ruin like the primitive people who clustered around Angkor Wat or Tenochtitlan with no understanding of the great civilization that went before them.

On the path to collapse, however, dying civilizations first burn any truth they can get their hands on.

Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy. – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Here we have a painfully simplistic view. The very statement “I have no values” is itself a value; while it negates the idea of values, that doesn’t let it off the hook for being a value statement itself. Without some inherent part of the universe that denies value, like the hand of God (H.O.G.) or science discovering it writ into the stars, there is no proof of a lack of values. So it becomes a preference like anything else, a choice to have no values based on an assessment of the universe. That in turn makes it a value system about like any other.

In this way, we see how nihilism rapidly reduces to a search for proof of nihilism. An extreme skeptic would say “well, there’s no reason to believe that any of these things” exist, to which a nihilist might point out that the human starting point, far from a blank slate, is already biased toward a number of different things and, by the nature of being biased, oblivious to much of what would be inherent. Further, that nihilist might point out that the search for inherent reasons is fundamentally doomed unless we can communicate with a Creator or Administrator who is a direct line to truth in the universe.

The fact is that we’re here alone, trying to figure it out for ourselves. If the gods or God exist, they’re mute to us in ways we can materially/objectively verify, and so we are here without any line to inherent value in the universe. We can make scientific observations and say “this action x consistently gets result y,” but unless we stumble across a big block of source code for the universe, we don’t know the entire mechanism. For there to be inherent value, there would have to be some central point of absolute truth that reflected the inner workings of the universe in a way that is not observed, but known.

So what do we have? The grandfather of the scientific method: the idea that we have no inherent (“full knowledge of God or from a God-like perspective”) knowledge of life, but we have empirical or observational knowledge, and we can communicate not “truths” but approximate representations of what we have observed (as good Schopenhauerians, we enjoy his statement that the self contains a representation of reality that is all we know of reality, and thus our “truths” are representations of representations and very far from “inherent”) — observe, hypothesize, test repeat. The closest modern philosophy gets toward this maturity is the correspondence theory of truth and/or language.

Narrowly speaking, the correspondence theory of truth is the view that truth is correspondence to a fact—a view that was advocated by Russell and Moore early in the 20th century. But the label is usually applied much more broadly to any view explicitly embracing the idea that truth consists in a relation to reality, i.e., that truth is a relational property involving a characteristic relation (to be specified) to some portion of reality (to be specified).

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The correspondence theory of truth is often associated with metaphysical realism. Its traditional competitors, coherentist, pragmatist, and verificationist theories of truth, are often associated with idealism, anti-realism, or relativism. – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Truths don’t exist, and divine insights into the universe are thus not “true” but representations from within ourselves. When we face this wisdom, we can return to life and treat it with maturity, instead of expecting some deus ex machina to hand us an absolute “truth” or “path” that we must then follow.

Shared ways of thinking, so called memes, are what make a culture. These memes are manifold and they change over time. For example, the green movement and the idea of sustainability are quite new memes. But on the other hand we live with many old memes – and among them is one that I think makes many of us miserable. It is an idea, a mighty one, which has already tortured many people. This idea is one we hol, no matter if we are religious or not, to be holy. It is: The meaning of life. Or, meaning in general. It is the idea that there are goals to achieve and reasons to do so. It is the idea that we shouldn’t do things for no reason. It is the idea that we shouldn’t “waste time” and that we should use our time productively and usefully.

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But in the process of our social evolution something else happened: Freedom. Freedom from the social boundaries that were laid upon us. Suddenly we have the freedom to become who we want to be, live where we want to live and do what we think is right for us. Suddenly we have the freedom to decide, and, as Sartre said, with it, we are forced to decide what to do with our lives. Officially we have “freedom” at least since the French revolution, but just in the last fifty or so years our world – and our socialisation – really took a form that allows and forces us to choose. – KDAS

Being thrown out there without any backup, and told to choose the meaning of life, is a formula for failure. It crushes people daily because they assume “meaning of life” means either (a) “inherent meaning of life” or (b) some personal meaning of life that’s entirely arbitrary, except for the part about our corporeal selves enjoying material comfort, which induces an “ethic of convenience” where we do what is comfortable and evade the rest. The resulting inability to form attachment to ideologies, peoples, families, etc. creates what Michel Houellebecq calls “atomized” individuals: entirely solipsistic, entirely isolated, and 100% free — but miserable, and spreading discontent and dysfunction through society, making it moribund.

Nihilism is the solution. The meaning of life — doesn’t exist. The personal meaning of life — doesn’t exist. Your goal is to be a good organism and adapt to your environment. In that process, you will find some things you enjoy. If you have half of a brain or more, you will also find some superior methods of adaptation, some of which suspiciously resemble a values system. If you want to avoid the false god of self along with other false gods, you will adopt this value systems, and pull yourself out of fatalism into a form of “active nihilism” where you no longer require inherent belief — you simply do what is logical.

We’ve re-dedicated this site to nihilism because there are no credible resources for nihilism on the internet.

Most people think of nihilism as fatalism, or the belief that no beliefs, values, communications or gods can exist.

We have a simpler definition:

Nihilism is the perception that no inherent value exists.

We can create values, beliefs, even gods, if they symbolize the reality that’s Out There waiting to be discovered. What we won’t do is claim that we got these ideas from a direct line to the one holy truth, whether that truth is a dualistic God, or simply the notion that human life is sacred.

We have liberated ourselves from your outdated notion that because humans choose to believe we are special, that we are; also from the insane notion that God talks to us directly. Neither notion makes sense. There is a reality; one reality. We perceive this one reality and adapt to it like any other species. Any other idea is metaphysical voodoo and we have thrown it out.

Humans are not special. That murder, oppression, hatred, cannibalism, sodomy and eugenics are “bad” and being nice to people is good — these are hateful illusions. These are means that humans use to control one another. Whether you say “God told us this” or “all people are equal,” both are illusions of inherency. We have broken free from that illusion and instead see a reality to adapt to.

We are free. You, addicted to control, have enslaved yourself. You can cut yourself free any minute that you choose to do so, but all but a handful of you will choose to remain enslaved.

Welcome to the Center for Nihilism and Nihilist Studies. Enjoy your stay.