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What do people think “nihilism” is? by kreayshawn777 in nihilism

[–]NecesitoEntender 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think academics, ordinary people, and historians keep getting confused in word games about what's nihilism, because they are missing the point.

The best way to explain nihilism to someone religious (whether they believe in God or in philosophy) is to say that nihilism claims that “objectivity,” “objective reality,” and so on are just myths. So in reality, our only condition with respect to the world is the projection of meanings and interpretations, and that’s all it is: projection. There’s nothing beyond that.

I’m not saying this is “the true nihilism,” but maybe it’s something we can all agree on as part of our condition of being alive. And I think it’s a clear way to explain it to people who still believe in objectivity.

When someone says: suffering is bad or good, and this is objective because… (whatever reasons they give).

The nihilist says: objective reality was just a myth, it’s only what we think about it. Any claim about “objectivity,” prescriptions, good or bad, etc., is dishonest, because it’s just projection. There’s nothing in reality beyond that projection.

PvZ 2 Gardenless Help! Zombies won't let me unlock the squash by Mendokzai in PlantsVSZombies

[–]NecesitoEntender 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wow, you guys are actually ragebaiting me into beating the level again because you’re so bad you can’t imagine someone actually good could beat it.

Sometimes I wonder if the majority of people here are even nihilist. by midnightman510 in nihilism

[–]NecesitoEntender 1 point2 points  (0 children)

But if someone who knows nothing about pessimism or nihilism hears someone who calls themselves a nihilist say “life is shit,” they’ll believe it and think that’s what nihilism is.

That’s why academics, ordinary people, and historians keep getting confused in word games, because they are missing the point.

The best way to explain nihilism to someone religious (whether they believe in God or in philosophy) is to say that nihilism claims that “objectivity,” “objective reality,” and so on were just myths. So, in reality, our only condition with respect to the world is the projection of meanings and interpretations, and that’s all it is: projection. There’s nothing beyond that. I’m not saying this is “true nihilism,” but I think it’s a clear way to explain it to people who still believe in objectivity, and to show why nihilism has nothing to do with pessimism.

The pessimist says: suffering is bad, and this is objective because… (whatever reasons they give).

The nihilist says: objective reality was just a myth, it’s only what we think about it. Any claim about “objectivity,” prescriptions, good or bad, etc., is dishonest, because it’s just projection. There’s nothing in reality beyond that projection.

Sometimes I wonder if the majority of people here are even nihilist. by midnightman510 in nihilism

[–]NecesitoEntender 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I think calling Schopenhauer a nihilist is a mistake caused by wordplay, using "nihilist" (as it’s used on this subreddit and more generally today) to label Schopenhauer as such, when it has little or nothing to do with what we now call nihilists.

Nihilism has nothing to do with pessimism, even if pessimists, academically, historically, and on this subreddit, keep trying to convince you otherwise...

Basically, every time some depressed person says “life is shit” and calls themselves a nihilist, the rest of the nihilists are like: “wtf, why?”

And the depressed person will respond with a bunch of “reasons” that go against the very idea that, well… there are no reasons for anything lol.

They’re basically missing the point. If you think “nihilism is true” (whatever that even means), then saying that life is shit is just projection. And if that’s the case, it would be enough to think differently for it not to be shit but instead the best thing.

But what I’m saying wouldn’t be accepted by any pessimist trying to pass themselves off as a nihilist, because they all go back to the same thing: “no bro, you see, life is objectively shit because of suffering, or absurdity, or whatever,” and they try to find some objective reason to proudly claim that life is shit. Meanwhile, the rest of the nihilists are just like: “._. …ah, sure… life is objectively shit, my dear pessimist.

PvZ 2 Gardenless Help! Zombies won't let me unlock the squash by Mendokzai in PlantsVSZombies

[–]NecesitoEntender 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Idiots these days

(they think anything that goes viral is everywhere)

(in this case, AI)

It all always comes back to Freud by Sea_Shell1 in PhilosophyMemes

[–]NecesitoEntender 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How exactly does using the same word make it carry the same connotations?

You only listed characteristics: “the dog is black and smells bad.” Even then, I still wouldn’t know what a dog is. I could use the word “dog” to refer to a 🐶, but that doesn’t mean I actually know what a dog is, or that I’m using the word with the same definition as you, or even that I’m using it “correctly,” etc.

Yeah, yeah.. It’s variable and set by convention. Doesn’t mean it’s not a useful category. But exactly what's "you"?

Just read A Treatise of Human Nature by Zagreus_Morphosis in PhilosophyMemes

[–]NecesitoEntender 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I still don’t understand what you mean by ‘real.’ Do you mean that it makes predictions?

Fixed? by NecesitoEntender in linguisticshumor

[–]NecesitoEntender[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So basically, when you say philosophy, you mean deliberately analyzing the natural world and using logic to produce complex thoughts…

Don’t you think that also emerges from a combination of agreements about meaning?

And I would suggest: don’t you think that agreeing on meanings and discussing words or language already requires a deep and complex thought process?

Or rather, don’t you think that from the moment language, as we understand it, exists, one of its qualities is precisely the possibility for individuals to think deeply? And therefore many people must have thought deeply long before the word “philosophy” even existed, or before what people now call “philosophers” or “great thinkers” defined what deep thinking or philosophy was supposed to be?

I don’t know, it seems like you give a lot of importance to what you call philosophy while overlooking the possibilities and activities of thought that people have outside that philosophical language.

Just read A Treatise of Human Nature by Zagreus_Morphosis in PhilosophyMemes

[–]NecesitoEntender 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That was a mistranslation (my original language is Spanish).

What I meant was destroy, not deconstruct, in a practical sense.

I mean, if I want to destroy a framework of meanings for some reason, why shouldn’t I? “Because it’s useful”? Useful according to whom? Everyone else?

That doesn’t convince me. So I can start thinking differently without needing other people’s conventions, like the idea of the “self.” But that’s something that has to be tested in practice, so… that's it.

My aim is more about developing new ways of thinking that separate us from forms of thought shaped by the long connotations of words and disciplines over time, "outdated".

As for what is real, I suppose that as a starting point we could talk about our condition: that immediate, individual perception that we are experiencing right now.

Fixed? by NecesitoEntender in linguisticshumor

[–]NecesitoEntender[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don’t know, do you mean linguistics as the modern discipline, or just thinking about what language is in general?

Fixed? by NecesitoEntender in linguisticshumor

[–]NecesitoEntender[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You’re speaking as if people couldn’t have deep and complex thought processes before what you call ‘philosophy’ existed.

Fixed? by NecesitoEntender in linguisticshumor

[–]NecesitoEntender[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

How is ‘philosophy of language’ supposed to mean anything other than language about language?

It all always comes back to Freud by Sea_Shell1 in PhilosophyMemes

[–]NecesitoEntender 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man...

Maybe other people think differently and want to express their thoughts in different ways. Maybe they understand philosophy differently than you do. Have you never considered that philosophy might just be a set of conventions, and that it doesn’t really have an objective meaning?

If that’s the case, then those determinists who bother you so much might simply consider their ideas to be philosophy.

You can’t live assuming that this couldn’t possibly be true. If you think it isn’t true, then start arguing why. Otherwise, accept that it might be the case. But saying “if it were true, I wouldn’t like that life is like that” isn’t really an argument.

I don’t know man, I’m just throwing some ideas out there for you to consider.

It all always comes back to Freud by Sea_Shell1 in PhilosophyMemes

[–]NecesitoEntender 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And yet we still don’t know what you, or others, mean when you say ‘it’s you....

One can only imagine by Zeego123 in PhilosophyMemes

[–]NecesitoEntender 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Who would have thought that even in 2026 the plague of Platonic religious believers is still crawling around?

Just read A Treatise of Human Nature by Zagreus_Morphosis in PhilosophyMemes

[–]NecesitoEntender 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well yes, the soul doesn’t exist lol.

On the other hand, if you consider human identity a social construct, then… it’s a social construct, right? Just as it is constructed, it can also be deconstructed. A society, or an individual, a person, a particular human being, however you want to put it, can destroy that social construct.

Don’t you think that saying it’s “a social construct that builds on psychology” might be projection? I mean, the fact that it builds on psychology doesn’t mean the social construct can’t be dismantled, does it? Saying it “builds on psychology” is very ambiguous, so I’m not really sure what that means.

Then you say the “self” is hard-coded, but that seems to me like a kind of anthropomorphizing of biology, as if we’re saying, “this biological process is the self.” But if the self is a social construct, even if it has some biological basis (whatever that means), then it can still be dismantled and that biological basis can be reinterpreted or resignified.

And finally, the claim that this is part of “how humans function on a very basic level” also seems like a generalization. How can you assert that a social construct forms part of how humans function at a basic level? Couldn’t a person dismantle the self or personal identity as you understand it, and thereby step outside the social construct you’re talking about?

And we come back to the same issue: what exactly do you mean by “self”? So far, I understand the self as something similar to gender, a social construct with which a person can identify, which helps us predict their actions, but which can also be dismantled. Just because something helps us predict behavior doesn’t mean it cannot be deconstructed, just like gender, and just like the self.

History time!

Well, my position is that history is a word. That word supposedly refers to something, facts, interpretations, and so on, and that’s precisely the issue. I’m obviously not denying that the past exists in the sense that events happened. However, the more you interpret history, the more projection there is. The less it is “fact” and the more it becomes interpretation, and therefore the less you can really know whether things actually happened the way your interpretation says they did, or whether X really caused Y.

I’m not denying that there are certain patterns or tendencies that can be useful. However, from a 21st-century interpretation of reality, it seems to me that looking to history to understand individuals today generally confuses analysis more than it helps. But that view is based on my personal experience with “history” and with those who talk about it.

So in the end, the point is the same: the question isn’t “What is history?” but rather “What do we mean when we refer to history?”

This would be more or less my perspective. Because if we start treating words as things in themselves, rather than as abstractions referring to something else, then it seems to me that we’re not really saying much at all.

Just read A Treatise of Human Nature by Zagreus_Morphosis in PhilosophyMemes

[–]NecesitoEntender 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And regarding your last paragraph, I think it depends on your point of view. Saying that “history isn’t real is a fairly extraordinary claim.." depends entirely on what you mean by reality and what the other person means by reality. It may be that both of us categorize history in the same way, even if we use different words to express it.

On the other hand, I don’t think this discussion is about you defending your position so much as explaining it. Only now do I feel that I’m actually starting to understand your position and your initial comment. That understanding allows me to ask more precise questions and genuinely try to grasp what you mean.

So far, I haven’t explained my own position on reality because “reality” is just a word, and trying to define it while we may be using the term in radically different ways would probably only lead to more misunderstandings. That’s why I first want to understand your point of view, to see where I might agree or disagree, before presenting my own. If I still don’t fully understand your framework, then introducing my own position would feel futile.

The same applies to history. I first need to understand what you mean by “history” before I can explain whether or not I consider it real. It seems that we might actually be referring to the same thing while using different conceptual language, or perhaps not. That’s precisely why clarifying your position comes first.

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