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Holden

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Nihilism
« on: November 24, 2014, 01:02:01 pm »
The man who said "I'd rather be lucky than good" saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It's scary to think so much is out of one's control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn't, and you lose.

The problem is I am one of the unluckiest man alive.







« Last Edit: November 24, 2014, 01:08:31 pm by Holden »
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

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Nation of One

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Re: Nihilism
« Reply #1 on: November 24, 2014, 05:17:26 pm »
I am going through Laughing At Nothing: Humor As a Response to Nihilism.

This attitude does not deny our suffering.  It just implements humor in a practical way to battle the general meaninglessness, pointlessness, and absurdity of being born.  Rather than leading to despair, it proves to ourselves and others our strength and intelligence in coming up with an alternative worldview.

I had met someone on a psychiatric ward, of all places (not difficult to imagine), who had this attitude in a nutshell.  During our evening snack-time he would have me cracking up muttering to himself about how, when the sun implodes and our entire solar system slips into the abyss, it will be as if nothing was ever here and nothing ever happened.  I reflect upon this when I find I am being systematically terrorized via court appearances over extremely petty offenses or threats of eviction for daring to even momentarily harbor fugitives in hiding from the War on People - so-called "war on drugs" ...

Anyway, Holden, I just like to keep you posted on what I am going over ... This way you can gleam insight into the direction I am moving in.   ;)
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

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Holden

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This way you can gleam insight into the direction I am moving in.

I have often wondered what Jesus's middle name was:Jesus H. Christ..


Father please forgive them, they know not what they do
I will be the sacrifice, for all they've done to You

I have no ego left to defend so I weep for us all..it might as well have been written by Him
« Last Edit: November 26, 2014, 09:22:46 am by Holden »
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

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Re: Nihilism
« Reply #3 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.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Re: Nihilism
« Reply #4 on: September 13, 2015, 09:01:18 am »
Nihilism Revisited:   

I want to experience existence as a comic drama that is amusing in its ultimate absurdity.

What resonates with me today, 10 months later:

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.

I feel both these psychological tendencies strongly.  I think these are exactly the impulses Hermann Hesse was alluding to in Steppenwolf, where the Wolf part represents the Dionysian and the man part represents the Apollonian.  The mathematics and the applying computer programming to numerical computations - that's all the Apollonian ... the irrational desire for the cosmos to just disappear --- is this the desire for uninhibited frenzy and expression of energetic impulses?  The failure and destruction of the principium individuationis? 

Do most people find the pursuit of knowledge unbearable?  At times I do sympathize with those who succumb to the epidemics of "pain relief" ... It is a razor's edge ... and so I hover in anxiety. 

How is one to fit into this world, into society? 

How would one "teach" computer programming or computer science or even algebra without going off onto philosophical and political tangents?  How does the world even function?  So much inauthenticity and people playing roles!   

When one sees right through the farce, what are they to do, label us mentally ill?

How many are able to make sense of our situation when so many fail to face the situation honestly?  It is all so frustratingly incommunicable!

Maybe I will at least attempt to impose some order on this chaos of irrepressible thinking by forking into two different threads, one in Why Bother? and one in Dark Humor ...

I have to admit that I find it very frustrating trying to explain to myself why I have invested so much time throughout my life to studying.  By society's metrics, whether I develop skills or sleep my life away is all the same.  I must still be condemned as a dead-beat reject. 

Many glorify soldiers.  I do not.

Why does society lionize soldiers and enforcers?  I am so at odds with my world.   Football culture ... automobile culture ... Even though I am into literature, philosophy, and math/computing, I even feel alienated from the academic world.  You know, I am extremely negative.    :D
« Last Edit: September 13, 2015, 10:25:53 pm by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

trachycarpus55

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Re: Nihilism
« Reply #5 on: September 13, 2015, 08:47:56 pm »
When you really think about what life is - just a bunch of other people that were thrown onto this earth at different times, acting out of their own unique upbringing which was influenced by people of another earlier time, and so on - it is pretty **** up.  All of the systems of power are observed and enforced from day one.  Or, more simply, once you start to wake up into the world and realize what it is, it becomes depressing on a whole other level.  How do you go on into the day knowing that each individual biased individual will most likely not change?  You have to live in a world where people oppose a homeless shelter being moved closer to their homes because of how it affects their property values and "quality of life" (this is happening in former Ft. Monmouth/Oceanport, Mike).  These people.  I'm sure people think of me just the same, though.

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Re: Nihilism
« Reply #6 on: September 13, 2015, 10:44:14 pm »
It is frustrating to even discuss, I know.  It gets depressing.  Even my own beloved mother has internalized these fears.  I mean, in her 55+ community, she is always complaining about how this "weird element" is moving in.  I try to patiently explain to her that life itself does this to people, that people are permanently damaged and traumatized by their experiences and just the general layout of our world:  cities, highways, factories, prisons, hospitals ... This changes people over time until they do reach a point where they radiate "that space cadet glow" and just shuffle about.

Society's metrics have more to do with the condition of one's teeth than the contents of our heads.

It can be maddening.  It feels like science-fiction.  I just was in my old hometown, Freehold, the other day when I went to court.  I see the 20-somethings all dressed in their young-professional suits eating lunch at the cafes.  You see it in towns and cities the world over.  Some people seem to have escaped great hard-ships, like they are living on some distant mother-ship in a space colony. 

It really is a nightmare world.  We have to live in a world where we are all afraid of each other.

Maybe this is why I still enjoy studying as a kind of hobby because it is a private world inside my head a million miles from concerns about social status.  I think of the systems of power you mention.  I wonder why more people are not disturbed by the things we take for granted.

Someone from even only a couple hundred years ago would be horrified by what our world has become after mass-industrial civilization ...  and yet life has probably always been a nightmare in some respects for all creatures who sleep in the dark who are other creatures' meals.

Spooky, right?

And we're supposed to be entertained by ... football???

Why aren't more people freaked out by all this?   I think this may be the creepiest aspect about our society, that people have become acclimated to it, that one is seen as "soft" or "emotionally disturbed" if one finds it all so damn depressing ... a swamp of misery, in fact.  There are some miserable places to live where one has to be thankful to have somewhere to lay.

For the time being, where I can hide in a room and set up a computer as a learning environment.  This is as good as it gets for me.  I know enough about what's out there to be content ...

I'm glad you are still as honest as ever.
« Last Edit: January 17, 2016, 12:08:00 pm by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Nihilism - Negative H
« Reply #7 on: January 17, 2016, 09:33:57 am »
This is just an aside because I happened to notice this while searching for "nihilism" with our local search engine.   I have something to add, but have this urge to get this "aside" out of the way first.

Quote from: Holden
I have often wondered what Jesus's middle name was:Jesus H. Christ.

When I was going through the state university, around 2001, I took an Humanities elective in literature.   The professor told me that the letter H meant "God" in ancient Hebrew.  I, of course, do not care to entertain the idea of the monotheistic godhead of the Abrahamic traditions, but, for what it's worth, that had a little to do with me choosing the symbol H since this is the first letter of my surname.   

Also, the choosing of one letter is kind of a play on Daniel Quinn's "The Story of B" where B is the Anti-Christ ... a good Anti-Christ who has come to lead the flock away from the herd of believers.

At the time of typing this, there is a pdf file of the book:  The Story of B

I guess the H in "Jesus H Christ" is just a way for people to curse, as in Holy Christ!

For what it's worth, I did some research and found this:

Quote
The letter ה is one of the letters in God's name in Hebrew, it's also the letter we use to write God because we don't use his holy names if it's not it context with the Torah and we bury every piece of paper with his holy name written on it so in order to avoid this we just write that letter which means God.

We do not believe in trinity so the holy spirit has no relevance to us or to the letter ה, that's just a Christian interpretation because Christians believe the holy spirit is a part of God.

Anyway, forging ahead into nihilism ... see next post.
« Last Edit: January 17, 2016, 12:21:32 pm by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Nihilism - On Knowing Nothing
« Reply #8 on: January 17, 2016, 10:02:48 am »
On Knowing Nothing

This may be related to the thread in the hidden forum (another uncanny pun which is surely not intended), Sandi's introductory thread where someone mentions Socratric Ignorance, and this leads us back to the obscure concept of Qualitas Occulta.

I was up late into the night, and a bit too depressed to continue solving Linear Algebra problems (constantly referring to the student solution manual  ??? to calm myself), I allowed myself to wind down reading David Peaks short little book, "The spectacle of the Void" ... Around 3AM, I was scribbling like a madman in my private notebook, but I made a mental note to mention this because I was reminded of the idea of Socratic Ignorance.  This is also similar to how I feel about mathematics as well.

Quote from: Holden
.Socrates found that men who did know things that he did not know -- various artisans [craftsmen] -- and who "to that extent were wiser than I was", also on that basis -- i.e. on the basis that they knew some things -- imagined that they also knew things that they did not know. And so Socrates asked himself "whether I would rather be as I was -- neither wise with their wisdom nor foolish with their foolishness [i.e. their presumption that they know what they don't know] -- or to possess both qualities [i.e. both wisdom and foolishness] as they did", and he answered that "it was best for me to be as I was".


Quote from: David Peaks
If we have learned anything at all, we have learned that we know nothing.  And so we continue moving forward through time, spilling our words in great heaps, trying and failing again and again to let others know what it really means to be alive, to express our fear, our disgust, and our abjection.  Certainly I'm as guilty of that as anyone else who saw fit to set words to paper - and that guilt hangs heavy.

Crying out, we quiet down.

I have been trying  again and again, not to use words to instruct or to entertain, but to try to let others know that I am well aware of what it means to be alive, and so there is no sense in others thinking they can fool me somehow into believing that have a handle on anything whatsoever.  I can say I know there appears to be no God and that this universe is most likely some kind of cosmic accident.  I know what it means to be alive, how the stomach grumbles, how the sex drive makes monkeys out of us.  I know defecation and the stench of foul breath.

And yes, I know that, as powerful as the hold is that the "most beautiful women" have on the senses, under the skin is phlegm, mucus, snot, bile, blood and guts and stench ... Life is not a party.  Life is not television.

This I claim to know.  Shall I mimic Nietzsche's Zarathustra and say, "Thus spoke H" ??

What do I know?  Here I am again, spilling words in great heaps.  I do not intend to instruct or entertain, but merely to wail. 

Não sou nada.
Nunca serei nada.
Não posso querer ser nada.
À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo.

    I am nothing.
    I shall never be anything.
    I cannot even wish to be anything.
    Apart from this, I have within me all the dreams of the world.
« Last Edit: January 17, 2016, 11:25:05 am by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Holden

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Re: Nihilism
« Reply #9 on: January 17, 2016, 03:28:52 pm »
Disturbing non-Euclidean architecture repeatedly turns up in Lovecraft’s stories, whose inhospitable interiors, either simple or elaborate, feel like private prisons disturbed by lunatic geometry. Their spaces present vistas of grief-stricken vastness, combined with a steadfast inanimate hostility to any human endeavor. They cannot be a home to anybody. Any effort at domesticity within them would be laughable. No one would want to be there. The dysfunctional rooms, hallways, and staircases seem to have shunned any practical purpose they may have originally been designed for and instead project a malign subjectivity meant to madden whoever happens to enter them.

I have entered such a hallway.
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

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Re: Nihilism
« Reply #10 on: January 18, 2016, 12:40:23 pm »
The void creates a portal to the beyond - from within.

Essentially the internalization of horror ultimately leads to a cosmic understanding of one's own meaninglessness.

~ David Peak (The Spectacle of the Void)
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Holden

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Re: Nihilism
« Reply #11 on: January 18, 2016, 01:01:17 pm »


I am going to buy Against the World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq.This is the road for me.There is no turning back now-I must take this philosophy to its logical conclusion.
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

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Re: Nihilism
« Reply #12 on: January 18, 2016, 02:56:52 pm »
Against the World, Against Life ... It is waiting at the post office for me.  I think I will have it in my hands tomorrow evening. 

As far as there being no turning back, why would we even want to turn back now, now that we are glimpsing existence from beyond the principium individuationis?  I mean, there is something liberating about seeing the farce for what it is, acknowledging the vanity of existence.
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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« Last Edit: April 16, 2019, 07:53:52 pm by H(x) »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Re: Nihilism
« Reply #14 on: September 12, 2018, 08:04:44 am »
I started reading Remarks On Existential Nihilism last night, and while the repetition of such terms as "labeling" is annoyingly redundant, the gist of what the author is saying is that the less known we are, the less chance of being damaged psychologically by the labeling of others.  The author would benefit from a reading of Schopenhauer's works since the image we make in the minds of others cannot really harm us.

I agree with the author that many people are controlled by this fear people have of how they are perceived by others.  They seek romantic relationships not so much out of a "love" for the other person, but so as to show the herd that they are desirable.   Many people can't stand to be seen "alone".

He compares the obsession with being in romantic relationships with the tendency to have some kind of career.  I think it's a worthwhile reading experience and that Senor Raul, in particular, would find the author's philosophy quite in harmony with his own.

Raul, you can download the Kindle "App" and maybe use the on board translation tools for individual words.  The Kindle edition is free.   If you are unable to download it, I can see if I might be able to convert it to a PDF file and then we can run it through some automated online translation to Spanish if you are interested.

This writer, Jack Ernest, uses everyday language.
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~