Comment on Anon reads nihilist philosophy
sad_detective_man@sopuli.xyz 19 hours agoI can see the argument for that. It kind of fits the narrative of “slave morality”. Can I read these philosophers statements? I kind of want to know what they’re about
csolisr@hub.azkware.net 19 hours ago
On the rationalist hub per excellence, LessWrong: lesswrong.com/posts/NxYgL5nPMT…
Criticism of Nietzsche has been out there for a good while. Bertrand Russell, for example, wasn't a fan of Nietzsche, calling his ideology "an appeal to the emotions": reddit.com/r/Nietzsche/comment…
Calling Nietzsche's philosophy "irrationalist" is still a common trend: monthlyreview.org/articles/on-…
Even Marxists hammer on Nietzsche's hardcore individualism: queer-bolshevik.medium.com/a-c…
JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca 15 hours ago
The fact that I know about LessWrong because of Behind the Bastards should say a whole lot about how “moral” their “rationalism” really neither of those things and personally I feel like their thought predecessors would be pretty embarrassed by them
csolisr@hub.azkware.net 12 hours ago
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
Britt Hartley takes existentialists to the woodshed, pointing out that it’s a fine philosophy if you’re living a comfortable life, but if nothing means anything and your life sucks, might as well put a quarter in the suicide booth if existential philosophy is all you have.
ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 16 hours ago
Is that a refutation? I admit, when I consider how my distant ancestors and the majority of humans throughout history lived, I wonder why they chose to go on, and to create new generations who also lived lives like theirs, and the only answer I have is that they lacked perspective.
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
Correct, but maladaptive and evolutionarily unfit…
If you want to be entertained, you can watch True Detective Season 1. Someone brought up Rust, already.
If you want to ruin your life in ten pages, the source is The Last Messiah by Zapffe.
Antares@fedinsfw.app 10 hours ago
Lots more community. Relationships and physical play (e.g. sports, theater, art, ritual, dance etc.) were the primary form of entertainment. Brains were capable of enduring in silence for 10 minutes without exploding in anxiety. Plant medicines were socially acceptable including “drugs”.
Yeah there were diseases, famines, wars, etc. But these weren’t constant threats, often regional until empire developed with (inter)continental trade.
People had joy and fulfillment, a bit of boredom, and many lacked effective contraceptives, so kids happened.
JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca 15 hours ago
Rust Cohle explains why pretty well I think. Instinct, it’s burned into enough of us that the few who come to that conclusion don’t have any effect. And I agree with his solution
baines@lemmy.cafe 16 hours ago
when the world starts to really collapse in a few years we wont have to wonder
people will be rationally off themselves left and right
governments response will be to make suicide extra illegal lol
WhiteOakBayou@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Existentialism is a response to essentialism though. It isn’t that life has no meaning but that people can be free to choose the meaning and path of their lives. An acorn can only become an oak tree but a person is not born with their future path preordained. The idea is existence before essence instead of essence before existence.
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
Yes, read Simone Beauvoir along with Sartre. Sartre is kind of a comically a privileged white man. As you say people can be free to choose the path of their lives, but some more than others.
baines@lemmy.cafe 13 hours ago
modern people love thinking this but most people never move even 50 miles from where they were born and the single largest indictor of ‘success’ in life is your parents income
for example being born in gaza or ukraine right now is pretty damn bleak
sad_detective_man@sopuli.xyz 18 hours ago
Just quick short thoughts before I continue reading because I really thought these are immediately striking without further dissection;
Philosophy aside, the comment on LessWrong that said “Nietzsche is a great source of aphorisms, and may be able to trigger some Deep Thoughts in readers, but a lot of his writing seems more like a sort of performance art to me. At least on a superficial level, he’s much easier to read than Kant or Hegel, but that also means he does not even try to argue his point in a rigorous way”. Spot on, this is like the main barrier to his books. I see this as the first problem you’ll encounter before getting to how fascists twisted his words into justifications for doing fuck-all
Then, I REALLY this Monthly Review article. This passage pointed out a perspective of the problem initially sounding like a misread about how “this is just doing barbarism but with extra steps” but actually pretty accurately describes how greater powers in the world will take almost anything we try to do and turn it into barbarism: The liberalization and deregulation of the most intimate sphere of the person will completely achieve the fetishism of the commodity. And the sole revolt which will from here on be permitted to the Nietzschean by power, when an irreducible part of his disarmed consciousness has, through misunderstanding, fomented some insurrection, will be total annihilation, bestiality towards the other animal which his masters will have brought into the neighbouring cage.
I still need to finish it and get to the Marxist critique but thank you for this
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
Meh. If rigor were the path to the truth, wouldn’t we have the found the One True Philosophy? At the end of the day, all that matters is if the philosophy vibes with you, which you can discover just as well from a comic book version of the philosophy as painstakingly deriving every point.
I think thinking you’re using your rational mind to determine the capital-T Truth is delusional.
sad_detective_man@sopuli.xyz 1 hour ago
Yeah not so much that. It was kind of refreshing to read something where the author gives up on trying to preempt arguments against him early in the process of creating his work (exhausting, boring, and as time goes on inevitably futile).
I meant more that the prose is full of self-certain trueisms and has that superficiality to it. It doesn’t discount his points to me either, I’m often a vibes person myself. But it offloads a lot of the cognitive work of basically finishing his philosophy onto you as you’re reading it. I think that’s probably the deeper cause of most other problems people have with his philosophy, like how bad actors took and used it for nefarious shit. But, he was a lonely guy in a lot of pain who took to writing to manage it so that’s par for the course.
sad_detective_man@sopuli.xyz 19 hours ago
Ty! All the criticisms I’ve heard I’ve only really absorbed through cultural osmosis so I want to read some hard stuff