Nihilism

Nihilism - The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series - Nolen Gertz

I am like a prisoner who is enjoying an imaginary freedom while asleep; as he begins to suspect that he is asleep, he dreads being woken up, and goes along with the pleasant illusion as long as he can. In the same way, I happily slide back into my old opinions and dread being shaken out of them, for fear that my peaceful sleep may be followed by hard labour when I wake, and that I shall have to toil not in the light, but amid the inextricable darkness of the problems I have now raised. — 2025-07-19

To make God responsible for everything is to make humanity responsible for nothing, which is to make human existence meaningless, which is to make God’s judgment of our existence meaningless, which is to make God’s existence meaningless.

— 2025-07-19

To be with a pessimist is to know that you are with a pessimist. But you can be with a nihilist and have no idea. — 2025-07-20

Boredom and anxiety may reveal to us the meaninglessness of our activities, but since people—people who are not philosophers—are able to stop being bored or anxious and continue on with their lives, Tartaglia concludes that the truth of nihilism can be revealed to us without it making us suicidal or immoral. — 2025-07-29

I think that Nietzsche and many other philosophers have massively overestimated the motivational and moral significance of belief in overall purpose. Such belief is not essential to framework engagement, after all; if it were, then it is doubtful we would have ever heard of nihilism, since nobody would have been motivated enough to write about it. Perhaps such belief is very important to some religious people’s framework engagement, especially in the moral sphere. But it cannot always be essential, because people do sometimes lose their faith and carry on. — 2025-07-29

As to the question of what we should do upon realizing the truth of nihilism, then, there may be more than a little relevance in Lin-Chi’s advice to “Just act ordinary, without trying to do anything in particular. Move your bowels, piss, get dressed, eat your rice, and if you get tired, then lie down. — 2025-07-29

Black-and-white labels make life easier, but they do so by making life lifeless. — 2025-07-29

. As the events consumed are recorded and replayed for consumption, radio and television not only make it unnecessary to leave the house in order to witness events but also lead to events being staged such that they can be recorded and replayed for consumption. So rather than providing us experiences of real life, radio and television provide us with a pseudo-reality (events staged for mass consumption) that we can pseudo-experience (consumption from our couches) in our pseudo-lives (consuming near others rather than being with others).

— 2025-08-19

Blacksmiths, goldsmiths, silversmiths, and so forth were known to the rest of their communities for their smithing and so came to be known as Smith (or its etymological cousin in other languages, such as Schmidt, Kowalski, Kovac, Ferraro, Herrera, and Faber). — 2025-08-19

To be a worker, to have to work for a living, is to be—as George A. Romero made clear in multiple subtext-rich movies—a member of the living dead. — 2025-08-19

Yet, as Socrates warn us at the end of Plato’s Republic, such a feeling of emptiness does not lead us to realize that acquisition and consumption are actually unfulfilling pursuits. Instead this feeling leads us to endlessly pursue more and more acquisition and consumption. — 2025-08-20

Therefore, those who have no experience of reason or virtue, but are always occupied with feasts and the like, are brought down and then back up to the middle, as it seems, and wander in this way throughout their lives, never reaching beyond this to what is truly higher up, never looking up at it or being brought up to it, and so they aren’t filled with that which really is and never taste any stable or pure pleasure. They always look down at the table, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. To outdo others in these things, they kick and butt them with iron horns and hooves, killing each other, because their desires are insatiable. For the part that they’re trying to fill is like a vessel full of holes, and neither it nor the things they are trying to fill it with are among the things that are.8 — 2025-08-20

De Beauvoir here makes clear that self-exaltation leads to self-destruction. America is an individualistic nation, a ruggedly individualistic nation, a nation where citizens are supposed to have the life and liberty necessary to pursue happiness. However, rather than happiness, what de Beauvoir found in America was a nation of individuals who had become “so apathetic while being neither blind nor unconscious.” The Americans who de Beauvoir met were able to recognize that poverty, racism, and oppression in America made political change desperately necessary in order to avoid “the birth of a kind of fascism.” But they felt so powerless as individuals to effect political change that they responded instead by effecting the only change they were individually powerful enough to achieve: they became unfeeling. — 2025-08-21

Rather than discover whether others are similarly unhappy, the ideal of personal happiness motivates us to fear revealing our own unhappiness to others and to instead pretend to be happy to avoid the risk of being seen as abnormal. — 2025-08-21

Traditional definitions of privacy have thus come to be seen as outdated, and people who still want to live in accordance with a more traditional sense of privacy have come to be seen as antisocial. — 2025-08-21

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— 2025-07-19