Philosophy & Poetry

[sMartins]

"Nihilism is a historical movement, not just any view or doctrine held by just anyone. Nihilism moves history in the way of a scarcely recognized fundamental process in the destiny of the Western peoples. Hence nihilism is not just one historical phenomenon among others, not just one spiritual-intellectual current that occurs within Western history after others have occurred, after Christianity, after humanism, and after the Enlightenment.

Nihilism, thought in its essence, is on the contrary the fundamental movement of the history of the West. Its roots are so deep that its development can entail only world catastrophes.
Nihilism is the world-historical movement of the peoples of the earth who have been drawn into modernity's arena of power. That is why it is not only a phenomenon of the present age, nor even a product originally of the nineteenth century, when admittedly a keen eye for nihilism awoke and its name became common. Nor is nihilism a product of particular nations whose thinkers and writers speak specifically of nihilism. Those who imagine themselves free of it are perhaps the ones advancing its development most fundamentally. Part of the eeriness of this eeriest guest is that it cannot name its own origin.

Nihilism does not prevail only when the Christian God has been denied, or when Christianity is embattled, or when a freethinking cheap atheism is still all that is preached. As long as we look exclusively at this unbelief which has abandoned Christianity and at its manifestations, our attention will be fixed externally on the meager fagades of nihilism. The speech of the madman says specifically that the word "God is dead" has nothing in common with the opinions of those standing about and talking confusedly, of those who "do not believe in God". To those merely lacking faith in this way, nihilism as the destiny of their own history has not yet penetrated at all".


Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 1950 - Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe Volume 5. This collection includes "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes" (1935–1936)

[sMartins]

They say to understand things better you have to talk about them, so here we are.
I would be more than happy to hear your opinion.
Be magnanimous to my English.

THE LOSS OF MEANING

What about Nihilism?
Nietzsche describes it to us in these terms: the purpose is missing, the why is missing, and all values are devalued.
As for the devaluation of values, it is not very significant, as values change, there used to be hierarchical values, then after the French Revolution, values of equality and fraternity, etc.If anything, we can begin to glimpse the problem when new values can no longer be founded.
But what happens when there is a lack of purpose, a lack of why?
When you don't see future ahead, or when the future is no longer a promise, that's when this retroacts as demotivation, why do I have to get busy? Why do I have to engage?
Here is where the lack of meaning begins to manifest itself.
Before Christianity, history was not inscribed with a meaning of meaning. Time was cyclical; those who had seen the most cycles were the elderly and were considered wiser than those who had seen few cycles, the young.
But here is Christianity's stroke of genius, Christianity tells us: you will never die.
Time stops being cyclical but becomes linear, a straight time where eventually what was promised in the beginning will be fulfilled at the end.
This type of time is called: eschatological.
History is born, for history, a period of time charged with meaning.
If you think about it, at least, in my language, when young people fall in love they say they had a story. What is that story? An exceptional time, a time full of meaning, a meaningfulness that was not there before or after.
But what if the Christian promise is broken? The story also loses meaning.

GOD IS DEAD

Nietzsche also tells us that God is dead. What does dead mean? Does He exist or does He not exist? Well, if He is dead, it means He was alive before.
Everything in the West is Christian (can be explored further).
However, it is enough for you to imagine that at one time God made world, things happened precisely as a result of the fact that it was believed that God existed.
So in the Middle Ages, literature, sacred art, even the angel woman.
If I take God out of the Middle Ages, I don't understand it anymore. So He was alive.
But if I take God out of the present day, do I still understand our era? Yes. I no longer understand it if I take away the word money for example.
Here again, the Christian promise fails, implosion of meaning, the promise no longer works to give meaning to our future.
Yet everything is Christian in the West, but if God is dead, what happens?

[sMartins]

REFLECTION

Nihilism has always been and today it is revealed, so far we have lived in a two-thousand-year-old lie, this lie is the philosophy of the West from Plato to Nietzsche and Christianity, which in Nietzsche's opinion is nothing but a Platonism explained to the people, has deceived us for two thousand years.
Now that we have revealed this great lie, that there is a true world which is called Hyperuranium for Plato and Paradise for Christians and there is a temporary world, a sensible world, valley of tears for Christians, place where one endures pain in view of, place where injustice is endured in view of, this time, characterized by the great lie, was also characterized by great optimism, there was still a remedy for pain, there was still a remedy for injustice, there was still a remedy for suffering.
A great optimism ran through the bimillennial lie constituted by metaphysics, from Plato to today and Christianity as a vulgarization of metaphysics, there was a great consolation within this bimillennial lie, and a lie works for two thousand years if it is able to persuade, if it consoles. If not, it immediately collapses.
A bimillennial lie works because it consoles.
If I try to persuade you that there is only the body and the soul does not exist, there is always resistance, because it is not consoling to think that the soul is not there or that when we die we become earth, it is not consoling.
Lies work if they bring benefits.
The collapse of the bimillennial lie without the birth of another lie, if it is true that facts are never facts but always interpretations, I need to enroll myself in a new interpretation and since this new interpretation I don't have it yet, and it is not easy to construct a new interpretation after two thousand years of Christian interpretation, where do I look for consolation? Because it is now that I have to live.
In this sense, nihilism is also a tragic dimension and we cannot exempt ourselves from this tragedy.

[Mysia]

i find it curious to phase in and out of feeling as though life has a purpose
if we understand that our eyes do not actually see what we see, but rather our brain process it and creates something we can comprehend, the same must be true for our perceptions of life
how can you ponder a true meaning, when you do not even know the reality?

i met this homeless lady who was living in her car in a parking garage one day. I asked her if she had a job, she said no. Everyday she reads the bible and prays that one day she will be blessed with a home. i was not raised religious and have never been to church. my main exposure to religion was through popular culture which in America, typically makes fun of religion, but i was curious so i engaged her. She started telling me how my soul can still be saved and such. And how I could go to heaven.

She suddenly got very excited, giddy almost. Telling me how all animals through all of history exist in heaven, and they can talk! You can talk to dinosaurs, and rabbits, and frogs. Have a conversation with them and ask them all the things you want to know. She said she could not wait to go.

I could not help but almost laugh, and make a sarcastic comment. What a fantasy, complete and utter bullshit. but she believed it. Honestly I would rather there be no life after death, there needs to be some end or totality.
People need a purpose though, otherwise you end up suicidial like why the fuck am i still here dealing with this crap?
It must be our minds playing tricks on us.

Last night my uncle wrote a suicide note on facebook and then turned his phone off. I don't understand that shit, a cry for help? But then such people usually want to just be alone, unless someone can be lighthearted and make them forget. I went for a walk and smoked a couple cigarettes thinking I get it. It's his time, he wants this, he's ready. But my Mom was in a panic, calling everybody and everything trying to get a welfare check down to his home. She kept her cool for the most part but occasionally, like when she called her father, I could hear the panic and sadness in her voice. It absolutely devastated me because I know that ultimately I want the same thing, I cannot imagine another 50 years. But I could never do that to my mother, she would not understand.

i don't think our minds are capable of truly figuring any such things out, as to meaning of life. but then again I don't think so good, perhaps others can have better luck, but would it just be our brains telling us what we want to hear? better to fall victim to the ideologies. maybe a few concussions can stop the rambling in the back of the head xD

[gravesmerch]

Meaning is everything.

The problem is when god "died" back in the day, all meaning redirected to money. A regular god is usually more "democratic" than the money god. In the sense that even if you're stuck in a cave you can pray to your regular god and find some comfort according to your faith.

But the money god only blesses you if you're in the center of multiple networks of value and transactions. Many of those networks completely oblivious to any kind of morals and ethics. The money god only wants to go "viral" and usually that means accumulation at any invisible cost. There's no sacred dogmas or anything, except the self referential cult of the cult of the money god. So if the planet is consumed, water is polluted, people are crushed, nothing matters to the money god, it's all about going viral, like a meta-biologic organism growing of mankind.

In Matrix style, we're the biologic battery to something new. Someone said the Universe is a novelty machine - from a plasma soup right after Big-bang, to the current state of complexity - there's always something new. Seems this money thing growing of our backs is self-aware novelty and it's going places we might not want to go, but it doesn't care. AI and nano tech, bio-machine interfaces, all seems to concur to something new in the horizon, making us humans the next dinosaurs of Earth.

I could write a book about this sht but I fear someone could actually read and take it seriously, which would make me regret my beliefs instantly

[sMartins]

MYSIA

"If you've found an answer to all your questions, it signifies your questions were wrong".
Oscar Wilde


Mysia: "I don't think so good"

First of all, who put this crap in your head? I find what you wrote much more interesting than 99% of what I hear around in everyday life. Also what you wrote shows that you think and that is already much more than what most people do. I wouldn't feel sorry for myself by saying, well, I can't think that well anyway, at most I can say, I'm lazy and I don't feel like struggling to learn.


When one asks a question, maybe, it is not the right question, maybe one needs to deepen this question, to see if the terms in which it is asked are the correct ones and that it really responds to a need that formulated the question.
Then, the serious problem, is not to give answers, especially when it comes to the life world, but it is to radicalize the questions.
The problem is to stop by the question, stay within the question, the answers are inessential, history went on because there were questions to be asked, not because quick answers follow one another that close the circle of the question.

So it is best to start by asking, what is truth?
Let us begin by saying that truth must be sought.

We, in the West, have known basically two methods, the catechetical method, which is of Christian origin, according to which, there is a constituted knowledge and people who possess it, what is called "ecclesia docens", and then there are those who must learn this truth, which comes from above, which comes from authority, which comes from tradition, which comes from religion, which comes from habits.
This is the catechetical method: I teach you and you learn, unfortunately on this method the school is still organized today.

Whereas the other one is the Socratic method, which starts from the belief that truth dwells in all men and therefore is not the deposit of an elite of men. It dwells in all men, only it dwells in a confused way.
Plato says truth dwells in us like Glaucus at the bottom of the sea, where the shells, the brushwood, the weeds make Glaucus unrecognized but Glaucus is there. That is how the truth is, the truth is in each of us, the problem is to bring it out.
So what does it mean to stop by the question?
To take away from Glaucus the brushwoods, the shells, the mud so that this truth comes out.

[dafels]

"We live in a society. sMartins is the best guy I know. Take a minute to appreciate it."
Albert Einstein 1929

[Cogan]

Money is real.

God is not.

You can pretend God is real in order to make money off those that believe God is real.

Religion is a cash cow.

[Audiosmurf]

[gravesmerch]

the "real" aspect of money is what makes it way more dangerous than the old school gods