Complete "nihilism" is impossible

[Leela]

Leela, saying that you(or me) find some value inherant in human life as individuals is fine.

From my understanding of the definition of nihilism, which is the definition I’m using, is that it is the belief that there is no “objective” meaning to human life.(Existential nihilism I think?).

But saying that a suicide bomber is nihilistic, because they find some inherant worth in ending a human life, to me is illogical.

The loss of life on 9/11 had meaning to the bombers. The deaths of 3000 people, had objective meaning. There was a point to those people’s deaths. So we can agree that total nihilism is most likely impossible, but saying that a meaningful act, and a meaningful end to human life(regardless of how distasteful that is to us), couldn’t be called nihilism.

Those poor unfortunate people who died? Their deaths, had an objective meaning to the bombers, and it is that meaning that I thik is important to recognize and understand. Calling it nihilism, doesn’t really assist us in understanding it.

Even some christians I know, say that there is meaning to getting old, and eventual human death. They are not nihilistic when they say death has meaning. Quite the opposite.

But perhaps our definitions of nihilism that we are using are different?

Yeah, I think it is just a matter of definitions. You say that the suicide bombers were not nihilistic because their deaths and the deaths of those they murdered had meaning to them. But the question of nihilism as I understand it is not whether death has meaning but whether living life has meaning. If someone values dying above living to me that is the extreme of nihilism.

As I see it, though religious people often say that without their faith life would be meaningless, we know that some people’s faith itself leads them to the same conclusion. What is life compared to Heaven? Life itself is merely a means to an end rather than having meaning in itself. It is not surprising that American voters are not too concerned about the environment when polls indicate that nearly half of us expect the second coming of Jesus and the end of the world within the next 50 years.

The first step toward nihilism is not disbelief in God. Disbelief in God is not at all necessary for nihilism as we saw in my post on Ecclesiastes. On the contrary, the first step toward nihilism is the impulse toward religion. It is the acceptance of the notion that for the existence of the world to be justified it must have some external purpose to guide it. It must be the shadow of some more true world than this one that has the power to grant meaning to this world, and if no such other world exists then this world ought not to exist.

An avowed religious person who takes this first step toward nihilism in unlikely to consider herself a nihilist but may be inclined to mistake those who accept this world as sufficient unto itself as nihilists. Such a religious person may not be a nihilist, but she is more nihilistic than those of us who never look to other worlds to justify this world.

Atheists who are inclined toward nihilism take the fact that the world seems to exists without such external justification as evidence for the absurdity of existence. Such an atheist may respond to the human condition by saying that we must live life in such a way to make it a worthy protest to the injustice of death. Such a response is one of a very religious sort of atheist. This is the sort of atheist existentialist who announce the death of God but seems to be angry and in great despair about that fact.

This sort of nihilism is an unconscious sort of nihilism that Nieztche called “religious nihilism.” It is the only kind. Such nihilism lies in the affirmation of another world as the source of all value and the denial of this world as able to sustain its own value. The nihilism of the religious is often not recognized as such because it is often an optimistic sort of nihilism. The promise of the next world is thought to be the assurance of everything that one could ever think to hope for. But then, we know how that sort of thinking in the suicide bomber works out for the rest of us, so even optimistic nihilism is something to be concerned about.

To be complete in the lack of nihilism is not to deny the “objective” meaning of life, but to stop thinking of the question as one worth asking–to stop looking for the justification the world to come from somewhere “out there.” The complete opposite of nihilism is not to be able to affirm the objective meaning of life, but to never go looking for meaning because meaning abounds. Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living, but asking bad questions like “what in one’s life has objective meaning?” if taken too seriously can also make life seem not worth living. I don’t need to be convinced by some philosophical or theological argument that life has meaning or feel at all like something is lacking in not being able to provide a Cartesian foundation that stands outside of time and space upon which meaning in my life can rest. How could anyone who loves another be convinced by a logical argument not to love them? Likewise, how could I become convinced that life has no meaning if I refuse to accept the premise that meaning must come from some “true” world of which this world is a mere shadow? Meaning abounds for all those who love so long as they don’t get fooled into thinking that love needs a philosophical foundation, that “why love?” is a question that needs an answer. Only the psychopath needs a philosophical reason to love, and philosophy won’t help the psychopath anyway.

Best,
Leela