Manticore Press posted the introduction to Brett Stevens‘ Nihilism on their website. Check it out fence-sitting American Nihilist Underground Society lickers. Let’s find out what lurks inside!
Tags: books, brett stevens, Manticore Press, Nihilism, Philosophy
A tone-poem to interpret the tome:
Proclivit redundancy.
Magnetic devilry.
Propensic delusionary.
Voluptuous recividist.
Abundant redactionism.
Attention monocle.
Cloaca enlightenment.
Projectile decision-maker.
Poetry is for faggots.
-Plato
10/10
Roger:
There are two aspects to consider:
1. The act of mentally representing the future consequences of an action (as opposed, say, to who it offends in the present), and:
2. One’s emotional reaction (read: value judgement) to this mental representation of the consequences of the action.
When it comes to (1), let’s assume that Brett is pretty accurately representing to himself the future consequences of, say, a policy supporting a world with an eventual 9.5 billion, multicultural, people living in it: environmental degradation, malls as far as the eye can see, plastic culture, etc.
When it comes to (2), however, or Brett’s emotional reaction to his mental representation of the consequences of such a policy, THIS IS COMPLETELY BASED ON ARBITRARY PREFERENCE
I.e. Brett might recoil, emotionally, at such a future. But some other person, say Hillary Clinton, might revel in it: safe spaces, no snakes to bite people, and no traditional religion censoring music and tv.
THERE IS NOTHING IN THE ACTUAL, PHYSICAL, WORLD TO DETERMINE THAT BRETT’S EMOTIONAL REACTION IS ‘CORRECT’, WHILE CLINTON’S IS ‘INCORRECT’.
Brett:
This is the point of Nihilism: the intent of individuals reflects who they are, not some “objective” and analytical stance.
Regoer:
Ok. So your project is essentially to show people that their values reflect who they are.
Then what, out of interest? I’m supposing it can’t be to reason them into things you deem worthy…
Or is the hope that when certain people ‘go through’ nihilism, they will, as a result of dropping belief in slave-morality, reach for higher things?
Some like to ingest copious amounts of feces. Should this be promoted and imposed on everyone?
Perhaps.
Dying from cholera might be the easy way out.
lol
What is your point?
Roger:
I love poop, is this not ‘okay’? After all, reality is whatever you perceive it to be, not something seen through a glass, darkly. I champion a dichotimistically subjective method of thought, though as I, in the same breath, berate those who I see as thinking the same way. Am I not a hypocrite?
Reality is not what you perceive it to be. Reality is what it is.
It’s just that, as it happens, our moral words ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ (and the mental judgments that go along with them) do not latch on to Reality.
Yours
Roger
More specifically:
Yours
Roger (who things that OK Computer is much better than The Bends, with both paling in comparison to Kid A)
The words good and evil are symbols for things that exist in reality, like all other words.
And, like other words, they are not always used to mean the same thing by ever user.
They are symbols for things that exist in reality, in the same way ‘unicorn’ is a symbol for something that exists in reality. IE: both attempt to refer, successfully, to something mind-independent; but fail.
Pain me as it may to say but yes, Roger is correct and Ludvig is incorrect. Good and evil do not refer to anything in reality any more than fun or boring refer to reality. Rock and tree refer to reality, because no two people would disagree on what those things are, and even without people to agree on what they are, they would still be a rock and a tree. Not so for good and evil. Remove the human element and the concepts vanish like so much wiener down your windpipe.
The problem however is that nothing normative latches on to reality in the same way “tree” does. Reality here meaning the mental epiphenomena we experience. So if we use this to assail morality or meaning then we must assail all of epistemology as well because there is nothing to “ground” what we ought to think – including even basic rational principles like the law of identity – in some external mind dependent object whose existence is inferred from the experience of mental processes. The summum bonum of life then becomes a matter of tastes and it’s ensuing war of all against all.
I call bullshit on this.
What makes you think it has not always been war of all against all?
Because at face value observations of the world do not reveal one in which all life is locked in a bitter struggle over finite resources. The position is akin to the one which states that the purpose of life is to propagate ones genes. Life does other activities as well like cooperate, live symbolically, sacrifice itself for the group and so forth. This doesn’t mean that life is an egalitarian paradise either.
Sorry. Mind-independent.
Which brings about point two: Occam’s razor – since mental epiphenomena are just figments of the mind trying to make sense of limited sensory input which is filtered and processed by monkey brains, monkey culture and the individual monkey, why not axe them as well? The ability of different monkeys to come together and witness the same phantom is only evidence of group delusion.
Understanding of learned men throughout history (not my own, to be clear) suggests that the mentally-external universe is governed on mechanical principles that operated without human observation, and continue to do so. This implies that our very observations are grounded in those same principles since we are bound by them. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t draw delineate objects that are mentally-interior and objects that are exterior, though they are both governed by those mechanical principles (temporal, spatial, cause-effect relationships).
So what I’m talking about is not waging a war against epistemology, but categorizing objects by their ‘experiential availability’. For example, I can think of a sound, and try to let you hear the sound as well by imitating that sound with my mouth or an instrument. However it may impossible; what you hear is just a crude replication and not the original sound, which can never be experienced in full by anyone but myself. That sound is an object that does not offer raw experience to just any individual. Same for joy or disappointment. Meanwhile, a rock or a tree is available for both of us to experience in much the same way, placing it in a category much different than the sound in my imagination.
Hope that clears up what I meant; I was not using specific enough wording earlier.
“But that doesn’t mean that we can’t delineate…”
“However it may be impossible…”
Fuck my inability proofread.
It isn’t that you were unclear it is that the same argument against moral facts can be turned against everything that would make the “understanding of learned men” true. Pointing this out is a sufficient way of showing how it is bullshit.
I like your objection, but it doesn’t go through. This is because there is an important (pragmatic) difference between epistemic normativity and moral normativity.
Although nothing ‘grounds’ both kinds of normative claims, surely PRAGMATIC considerations indicate the utility of epistemic normativity. If you want to go around thinking 1+1=3, and that you can hold blatantly contradictory beliefs, then fine. But you won’t fulfill many of your own goals (unless you goals are to die or to be locked up in the asylum).
However, it is less obvious to me that going around thinking that moral normativity is bullshit will lead you to failure. In fact, it might lead you to greater success.
Moreover, it might actually be the case that explicit moralizing (as opposed to pro-social EMOTIONS) was never even beneficial to human cooperation, from an evolutionary point of view.
http://www.analyse-und-kritik.net/2012-1/AK_Sterelny_2012.pdf
“Although nothing ‘grounds’ both kinds of normative claims, surely PRAGMATIC considerations indicate the utility of epistemic normativity.”
I completely disagree. Epistemology can be grounded in deductive and inductive reasoning. Furthermore you beg the question, is all knowledge valuable instrumentally?
“If you want to go around thinking 1+1=3, and that you can hold blatantly contradictory beliefs, then fine. But you won’t fulfill many of your own goals (unless you goals are to die or to be locked up in the asylum).”
Mathematical claims are checked by their consistency rather than their relationship to trees elephants or beans. 1+1=3 is not invalidated by a bag of beans you have in your hand. It’s invalidated because the equation is not consistent with mathematical deductive theorem not because of some real world instrumental purpose. We later find that we can map real world stuff with mathematics.
“it is less obvious to me that going around thinking that moral normativity is bullshit will lead you to failure. In fact, it might lead you to greater success.”
Quite the contrary. If there is no way to distinguish what we ought to do from what we feel like doing we lose the basis for community and civility; which at that point requires the state or some autocrat to point enough guns at everyone to keep them in line. I would imagine you don’t like post modern relativism but thats exactly where this sort of thinking leads: Nietzschean might makes right irrationalism.
“The summum bonum of life then becomes a matter of tastes and it’s ensuing war of all against all.”
To even state an argument with a conclusion like this implies you buy into epistemic norms. The ability to think and speak implies at least some significant degree of rationality (see Daniel Dennett on this).
So don’t tell me epistemic norms are ultimately as sketchy as moral norms. I agree there are no simple ‘truth-makers’ for either, like there is a truth-maker for the claim ‘that tree is 10 feet tall’, etc. But that is to simple and too crude a criteria.
Of course I buy into them, that’s the point.
What? Epistemological norms can’t be grounded by deductive and inductive reasoning. Nothing in deductive or inductive logic tells me I *ought to use deductive and inductive logic*! For Christ’s sake, you yourself said in your initial response “ there is nothing to “ground” what we ought to think – including even basic rational principles like the law of identity – in some external mind dependent object whose existence is inferred from the experience of mental processes.”
What justifies adhering to deductive logic, inductive logic, the law of excluded middle etc are not those logics/laws themselves, but rather their past record of success (OK this is inductive, but hopefully enough of the point goes through).
“If there is no way to distinguish what we ought to do from what we feel like doing we lose the basis for community and civility.”
I (and no doubt many other naturalists) believe moral claims largely stem from some mixture of emotion, power, and herd-like emulation of what the majority are doing. But I’m not going around raping and pillaging. So you are making a claim that is really questionable. moreover, Christians, Muslims and Jews, who DO believe morality is absolute, have a long history of being cunts to each other and wasting a massive amount of the social surplus on pointless violence and shitfighting.
The measurement depends on what is used to measure it, as well as what is being measured.
Yewh you completely misunderstood what I was arguing.
Nihilism – meaning has no real existence.
Meaning cannot be demonstrated as a property of objects.
Meaning can be demonstrated as a property of subjects.
If life has no inherent meaning then properties of subjects do not exist.
if a thing has no properties then it cannot exist
It must be concluded that subjects have no real existence
But, subjects exist prima facie and as a necessary condition for knowledge
Therefore meaning has real existence
Gil Grimore says:
November 2, 2016 at 8:14 pm
Yewh you completely misunderstood what I was arguing.
Well, you are free to correct me rather than merely whining about it…
You’re free to re-read what I actually wrote.
PS how autistic does one need to be to interpret my statement as whining?
I have re-read it. I don’t see how I was mis-interpreting you. It might be your fault, or it might be mine. Who the fuck cares. Again: why don’t you help me out instead of being a precious princess?
In other words, stop being a faggot would you.
You’ve argued that, if we reject explicit moral norms, we must also reject epistemological norms. The law of the excluded middle, the requirement not to hold contradictory beliefs, etc, must also be rejected. Why? Like with moral norms, there are no simple ‘truth-makers’ that ground epistemological norms. So if we reject moral norms on the grounds that there are no simple ‘truth-makers’, we must also reject epistemological norms. As a result, we have no objective basis on which to criticize people who go round claiming that murder is both right and wrong, or who hold that 1+1=3, etc.
I argued that there are clear pragmatic grounds for criticizing people who reject epistemology. I have suggested, slightly more tentatively, that the pragmatic grounds for criticizing people who reject the project of explicit moralizing are less clear: it might even lead to more discussion, less absolutist posturing, and more cooperation. I also presented a peer-reviewed published argument by a respected philosopher and evolutionary theorist that explicit moralizing wasn’t what enhanced cooperation in the evolution of human socializing, as opposed to moral emotions.
He doesn’t have to be autistic, he just has to be Roger.
Roger is Kid A