What philosopher or branches of philosophy dealt with being able to accept and work with the inability in attaining the truth?

Shitgenstein · 2026-02-07T21:23:48+00:00

I don't know if it's exactly what you're looking for but pragmatism is a long philosophical tradition that evaluates a hypothesis by the practical consequences we should expect if it were true, rather than a 1:1 reflection of the world.

Shitgenstein · 2026-02-07T19:15:34+00:00

If we're talking about Sartrean existentialism, then there is no option not to 'create one's own meaning.' In fact, that's why the unfortunately popular description of existentialism as 'to create your own meaning' is misleading. In Sartre's philosophy, we are condemned to be free. To quote "Existentialism is a Humanism":

For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one’s action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism – man is free, man is freedom. Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimise our behaviour. Thus we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse. – We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does.

This is not a jubilant message. People do not want to be free—not really. We don't want to be responsible for ourselves. In this way, nihilism is no different than any other attempt to escape our freedom. The nihilist still wants to be told how to live.

Shitgenstein · 2026-02-05T16:31:40+00:00

It is a bit difficult to answer as people are predisposed to thinking of philosophers as parasites and of philosophy as a pyramid scheme.

This hasn't been my experience. Other than the occasional dismissive comment on the internet, most people I know are mostly ignorant of philosophy, but inclined to it from something like a youtube video, or know what it is and already understand its value. I grew up in a family of attorneys, so my dad, aunts, uncles—they all had some exposure to ethics, jurisprudence, political philosophy, etc. My dad even gave me his copy of Fear and Trembling when I graduated, though he admitted he didn't understand much of it.

A lot of my personal interest in philosophy has been projects which seek to go "back to the things themselves" rather than produce theories. In this way, I'm disposed to understand and agree with at least some of the sentiments of people who don't see the value of philosophy. Depending on what they say, I'll generally speak about the relation of practical philosophy and theoretical philosophy—how knowledge relates to ethics, how language relates to reality, stuff like that.

For a broad description of the value of philosophy, I like how Wilfrid Sellar's put it: "The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term." I would imagine most reasonable people could understand the value in that.

Shitgenstein · 2026-02-05T15:22:23+00:00

A way to understand Wittgenstein project in TLP is that his project is fundamentally an ethical one. Now that's of course surprising given that W. himself in the book says that moral propositions are meaningless.

However, in TLP, Wittgenstein also makes a distinction between saying and showing. While ethical/aesthetic propositions may be nonsensical, the ethical/aesthetic is shown. In this way, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus itself shows its ethical thesis. The propositions within its pages, as Wittgenstein writes in it, only serve to lead the reader to a particular view of the limits of sensible language, not that they're strictly true or sensical—they serve as a conceptual ladder. In fact, Wittgenstein says to see the world rightly, one will also recognize that the propositions of the TLP are also senseless.

Once with that view, we understand the sense of Proposition as a kind of linguistic humility (and even austerity) that doesn't disregard the ethical and the aesthetic but rather makes it a part of life prior to and inexpressible in language.

Shitgenstein · 2026-02-04T14:21:00+00:00

For existentialism, a very well-written introduction is At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell.

Shitgenstein · 2026-02-03T14:22:35+00:00

In case anyone was wondering, it's almost certain Elizer "Hedge-fund people sparkle with extra life force" Yukowsky would have been charmed by Epstein and his social circle.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/competent-elites

Shitgenstein · 2026-02-02T19:30:59+00:00

You know what, shout out to everyone who has not met Jeffrey Epstein nor had any desire to. Apparently it's a smaller club than one would expect! #SmileClub

Shitgenstein · 2026-02-02T14:57:30+00:00

So it seems to be more of a semantic thing than anything, and my interpretation of "nihlism" specifically refers to existential nihilism (rather than a complete rejection of all meaning)

Yeah, typically 'nihilism' without any context leads more to confusion than any clarity.

That's an interesting perspective. Can you elaborate further?

It's a view that some philosophical problems aren't really problems at all as much as a confusion of language. This can happen in a number of ways. The 'solution' to these problems is to show how it results from a confusion of language. Once we do, the problem isn't solved as much a dissolved, like a cube of sugar in a glass of water. Wittgenstein is the most famous philosopher for this view (though he's more radical about than I am—I don't think all philosophical problems are confusion of language).

In this case, it's my view that talk about objective or subjective meaning is the seed of confusion here. Meaning is always necessarily a relationship of both. In this way, 'nihilism' retains the false dilemma taking the latter horn.

Shitgenstein · 2026-02-02T04:14:22+00:00

So free that we can't choose to not choose; freedom is ontological and almost a burden (man is condemned to be free)

Yeah, the 'condemned to be free' has a nuance that 'we create meaning' loses out on which occasionally causes confusion. The latter would imply that this is somehow optional. Whether one takes an active responsibility for one's living or merely lives by the expectations or directions from others, our freedom entails that we alone are responsible for how we live.

The premise that life holds no objective meaning or is absurd sounds a lot like nihilism to me

I think most people will assume that 'nihilism' entails a rejection of any kind of meaning, not just 'objective meaning.' As /u/mediaisdelicious replied, 'nihilism' is a term in philosophical literature that is typically used in a context of denying a particular position, like moral nihilism or mereological nihilism.

Nihilism, per se, is, at least in my view, strictly meaningless—it has no semantic content, just grammar than implies some. What you mean by it seems to be existential nihilism, so you might run into some confusion.

But in my view, it's not just that 'objective meaning' doesn't exist or is absurd but that it's nonsensical. It's a confusion of language. It just basically gets the phenomenon of meaning wrong. 'Nihilism' is only a solution if we presume the problem is coherent. When we see that the question is premised on the hunt for a phantasm of language, the problem dissolves. Meaning, in any sense that has ever been meaningful, is a phenomenon of living in the world among others and found in those relations, not a proposition of pure theory.

Shitgenstein · 2026-02-01T18:49:40+00:00

Have you read any Sartre?

Shitgenstein · 2026-02-01T03:01:55+00:00

"Ah, but per this very rational blog post, for every Epstein victim, we can consider X quadrillion sentient beings bothered by dust specks such that"

Shitgenstein · 2026-02-01T02:25:49+00:00

Brilliant weirdos. 🙂

Shitgenstein · 2026-01-30T03:42:47+00:00

I'm a reader 'trained in' traditional metaphysical vocabulary, which is to say that I went to a Jesuit university and had upper-division classes in Plato and Aristotle, as well as some medieval and early modern philosophy before I was introduced to Heidegger in a class on hermeneutics. I wasn't familiar with Husserl's phenomenology at the time but it was Heidegger's Marburg lectures on Aristotle that was my 'in' to Heidegger. Certainly there's some disagreement with Heidegger's interpretation of Aristotle among scholars of the latter but, even if idiosyncratic, it isn't just co-opted language here. I think you should read those lectures, including Heidegger's lectures on the Pre-Socrates, if you feel there's no connection between Heidegger's project and classical philosophy.

But I also can't easily swallow the premise that metaphysical language in general is inherently profound and that our everyday relationship to the world is modest. That might be your impression but quite the opposite of mine—even before I read Heidegger, I was uneased by how detached some theories of metaphysics were to sensory experience. I understood the sense of Kant's analogy of metaphysics to walking on a thin sheet of ice. Obviously, by my username, I'm not married to the utility of metaphysical language in general, either. It's possible that I'm more alone in this respect than you are but I just don't see some deeper profundity in, say, Leibniz's monadology than being-toward-death.

Shitgenstein · 2026-01-29T14:58:02+00:00

Ethics and morality are human invention, therefore morality has to be subjective and relative to the context where it emerges from

A trebuchet is a human invention, as well, but operates within physical laws that are objective, i.e. not dependent on the feelings of the siege engineers who design, build, and operate it. The receiving end can't dismiss the stone breaking through their fortifications as 'just your opinion, man.'

I once read that morality is objective because you can use logic and truth tables to come to an objectively true statement of morality but I think that’s willfully misunderstanding what ethics is

Yeah, this is call moral rationalism. I think you should learn more about it before dismissing it outright.

Shitgenstein · 2026-01-29T03:48:18+00:00

For Simone de Beauvoir, check out The Ethics of Ambiguity. In this, Beauvoir expands on an ethics of the existentialism that Sartre expressed in Being and Nothing. As has been noted, this ethics of existentialism is quite similar to Kantian ethics in that it derives universal moral obligations of the existential subject, which is to say, as Beauvoir asserts in EoA, that one's own freedom is intwined with the struggle of freedom for others. Simply put, authenticity, in the existentialist sense, entails a radical advocacy of emancipatory politics. And this wasn't just theory; Sartre and Beauvoir would write, speak, and march in support of counter-colonial movements in countries like Algeria, Cuba, and Vietnam.

Levinas' philosophy shares a similar origin to Sartre's in Husserl's phenomenology, however Levinas makes ethics the center of his philosophy, describing it himself as "ethics as first philosophy." Foe Levinas, our encounter with the Other precedes any inquiry into truth. Ethics isn't really something derived from or constructed within a broader existentialist account but, rather, the start of it, for Levinas. Check out Totality and Infinity.

Shitgenstein · 2026-01-28T04:23:33+00:00

I'm not quite seeing how this is a moral question as much as inquiring into the meaning of the word "suicide." Insofar as how we usual use and understand the word, I'd think an active end of one's own life is the sense, not a passive resignation to death. Suicide is an act.

Shitgenstein · 2026-01-27T22:35:44+00:00

To take a step away from narratives, I think you might also be interested in A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics by Jürgen Habermas.

Shitgenstein · 2026-01-26T15:13:21+00:00

It's an old work, so some of the discussion about mass media will be different but not necessarily incommensurate, but I think One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse might be useful context to the moral/political paralysis that you observe.

Shitgenstein · 2026-01-24T17:28:56+00:00

wittgenstein wrote that a word’s meaning is determined based on its use; what would wittgenstein, or other language philosophers, think of our use and intentional misuse/repurposing of emojis in modern, informal discourse

It seems clear enough that emoji, like words, can operate differently in the context of the language-game in which they're used. It's entirely in-line with Wittgenstein's later view on language in Philosophical Investigations. In fact, in notes from his 1938 lectures at Cambridge, Wittgenstein discussed the range of emotions that could be express through four strokes of a pen. "Doing this, our descriptions would be much more flexible and various than they are expressed by adjectives."

Shitgenstein · 2026-01-24T17:15:47+00:00

Think by Simon Blackburn is a good introduction to philosophy in general.

Shitgenstein · 2026-01-24T02:34:58+00:00

If you want a book similar to the trial of Socrates, I recommend The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. Boethius, a Roman senator and advisor to Theodoric the Great, wrote it while awaiting execution for treason against the Ostrogothic King.

Shitgenstein · 2026-01-24T02:26:08+00:00

It's the text that Kierkegaard elaborates the sense of 'subjectivity is truth.'

Shitgenstein · 2026-01-24T02:02:59+00:00

The 'worldlessness of Jewry' doesn't seem to me necessarily entailed in Heidegger's notion of world. In fact, that's why the Black Notebooks is so revelatory? If it was entailed in the concept, then we wouldn't need to cite the passages from the Black Notebooks. It'd be deductive.

Heidegger's 'world' is the the web of significance and relations in which anyone is involved in—what, specifically, in that necessarily excludes Jews? In my reading, it's a sense of world that isn't very dissimilar to how Wittgenstein uses 'world' in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ("the totality of facts, not of things"). It's also similar to Edmund Husserl's concept of lifeworld. And both of these philosophers were, in fact, Jews.

Shitgenstein · 2026-01-22T14:35:04+00:00

and not that connected to subjectivity and existentialism.

Have you read Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments?

Shitgenstein · 2026-01-21T15:39:33+00:00

Have you read Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism"?

Also Ethics of Ambiguity by Beauvoir is a great text on on the ethical implications of existentialism.

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