Author Topic: Nihilism  (Read 4866 times)

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Nation of One

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Re: Nihilism
« on: November 30, 2014, 12:13:05 pm »
NOTES FROM Laughing At Nothing:Humor As a Response to Nihilism

"Laughing At Nothing" is not simply an abstract academic exercise.  It aspires to offer practical suggestions for those who are engaged in the battle with meaninglessness.

A Bit of a Prelude: Life of Brian (Monty Python)



1. Nihilism has been deemed both a “disease” and a “cure”; something to be feared as well as welcomed. In short, it is a phenomenon that has been considered both an evil and a good.

2. Because of the emphasis that nihilism places upon the hopelessness and vanity of life’s struggles, it has often been assumed that it always necessarily leads to an attitude dominated by despair. This is untrue.  A second goal of this book is to demonstrate that nihilism is compatible with, and indeed preferably accompanied by, a more well-balanced attitude that includes a sense of humor.

3. With humor, though we abandon the usual way of looking at things, we still have an avenue of retreat open to us, and as we withdraw in this direction, we demonstrate to ourselves and others that we are strong enough and clever enough to find alternatives to our run-of-the-mill viewpoints.

4. With humor the individual might understand life, and all of the failures that we endure during its course, as part of a comic drama that is amusing in its ultimate absurdity.

5. The Apollonian and the Dionysian are two opposite psychological tendencies that pull humans back and forth in a struggle between the need for order and contemplative representation and the desire for uninhibited frenzy and expression of energetic impulses.

6. The Apollonian is the principium individuationis, organizing reality and making it representable. The Dionysian, on the other hand, is the failure and destruction of the principium individuationis. It resists the imposition of form and structure, delighting instead in the uninhibited expression of frenzied activity. Dance, drunkenness, and music exhibit a predominance of the Dionysian impulse.

7. Marmysz classifies personalities into certain types. The highest type are the spiritual ones. They are the strongest humans and enjoy the tasks that all others find unbearable, namely the activity of creation and the pursuit of knowledge (perhaps contemplating on the riddle of existence or the qualitas occulta of the phenomenal world we experience as reality). Their role is unenviable to the lower humans, and the rewards they receive for their service are of a nature not appreciated by those of a lower rank (a clear example is how those who toil away to rise in social status or to acquire more possessions would not appreciate the reward of leisure which allows for hours of the enjoyment of the higher mental faculties ... they would see leisure as a burden or a waste of precious time that could have been spent in toiling after some goal).  Yet these highest humans thrive in the outer reaches of human possibility where the conditions are severe and uncertain and so they are often misunderstood by the masses.

8. Question: Are we up to the task of finding value even in the most painful and unpleasant moments of our lives?

9. Being is not a being.  Being is not a thing.  Our existence is not a thing but an event.

10. Anxiety reveals the nothing.  We "hover" in anxiety.

11. Nothing is the negation of all individuated beings. 

12. Nothing is a part of Being itself.  "Nothing" and "Being" are one in the same. 

13. According to Heidegger, we are guilty of nihilistic thinking any time that we fail to recognize the fact that language, and the rational and logical tools it utilizes, necessarily chops up what “is” into fragments, and so falsifies and “covers over” Being itself. In the struggle to articulate and clarify the essence of what “is,” we entangle ourselves in language and so necessarily conceal the very thing that we hope to reveal. Yet, this concealment is not total. Since Being touches everything that “is,” even in concealment there remains the possibility of a fleeting and transitory glimpse of Being, distorted though it may be by the limitations of the human perspective.

14. The Being of beings is just the constant and unending pushing forward of force. In fact, according to Heidegger, the term power is simply a clarification of the essence of the term
will, so that the phrase will to power is really somewhat redundant. Will is
power, and power is will.

15. Nietzsche avoids thinking about “the nothing” by means of the eternal return, and so is doomed to an inauthentic relationship to Being itself. Being is nothing. But nothing has Being. The anxious recognition of this allows what “is” to manifest itself freely through us, according to Heidegger.

16. True thinking is not so much an activity as it is an event that happens.

17. Nietzsche collapsed into insanity in 1889, and his writings leading up to this collapse became more and more eccentric and polemical. After his collapse, when Nietzsche’s sister took him under her care, he was enshrined as a mystical prophet, dressed in white robes and worshiped by a circle of followers who took his insanity as a sign of higher genius. The Antichrist became a religious figure himself.

18. The mystical and religious parallels that may be drawn between Heidegger’s and Nietzsche’s thought have a major stumbling block, however. Nietzsche’s irrationalism was the result of insanity and so his emergence as a quasireligious figure, and eventually a Nazi icon, was not his own decision. His thought was exploited by others. Heidegger, on the other hand, seemed eager to attain fame and power, and was an exploiter himself. He is infamous for joining the Nazi Party and expelling Jewish scholars from their positions at Freiburg University.

19.  [Heidegger's] students—including such figures as Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Karl Jaspers, and Jean-Paul Sartre—have struggled to understand these actions, but Heidegger resolutely refused during his lifetime to offer any sort of apology or justification. One suspects that to do so would be inauthentic according to Heidegger. To regret or to attempt to excuse the advent of Being in any of its manifestations is, according to the Heideggerian way of thinking, a kind of “covering over” of Being. Better to let what “is” speak to us itself rather than entangling ourselves in intricate and inauthentic interactions with others. Such entanglement is, of course, nihilism, something that Heidegger believed himself to have transcended, or at least to have been in the process of transcending.

TO BE CONTINUED under the heading "NOTES FROM Laughing At Nothing:Humor As a Response to Nihilism"
« Last Edit: November 30, 2014, 02:34:42 pm by { } »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

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