This is post one of a series titled: Monica’s Mind-Blowing Trip Through Existential Philosophy.
It’s one of those wonderful questions if you do, and frightening, I’d-Rather-Not-Think-About-It questions if you don’t, or you’re not sure.
Because without God, there are no transcendental, absolute values. All values are invented. And once you’re in that territory, you’re in the terrifying realm of nihilism.
What’s nihilism? To answer that question I do, what I always do when I’m not sure of something. I turned to the internet. In this case, Wikipedia.
Existential nihilism argues that life is without meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. Moral nihilists assert that morality does not exist, and subsequently there are no moral values with which to uphold a rule or to logically prefer one action over another. The term nihilism is sometimes used in association with anomie to explain the general mood of despair at a perceived pointlessness of existence that one may develop upon realizing there are no necessary norms, rules, or laws.
ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING!!
If you’re not really sure what I’m talking about here, let me give you an example.
Murder is bad.
Most of us instinctively feel that the act of murder is intrinsically bad. That is, it has badness imbued in it. It has properties of bad. It is and always will be bad.
But in light of a nihilistic outlook, murder is only bad because we humans say it is bad. Not because the act itself is bad, in any way. And not only that, we humans saying it’s bad is an act of total, creative invention. It’s a made-up rule that serves it’s purpose because it’s useful for our society or survival.
In one of my previous posts I talked about the way I, almost arbitrarily, chose a life-calling; to improve the lives of the less fortunate. But from a nihilistic point of view, one would ask, well what’s the point in doing that? What’s the point in not-doing that? There is no way of discriminating between the two paths, because neither has, nor the results have, any intrinsic value.
At the end of the day, if there is no God, there is no one to tally the results and punish/ reward us. And so aren’t all actions deduced to, does it benefit me? And even the answer to that has no intrinsic value (as in, it doesn’t matter if you benefit or not … because nothing actually matters. Our puny lives make no difference to the cold and silent, eternal universe.)
One only has to look at the different attitudes cultures, civilizations and religions have towards sex, family, death, work, war, truth, community, the individual, politics, nature etc. to realise how diverse and inconstant perspectives are. And without faith in a higher being, no objective standard exists to judge them against. (These concepts are further explored in cultural and moral relativism, which I’ll look at in another post.)
And of course if you take nihilism to it’s nth degree you get this …
An extreme form of metaphysical nihilism is commonly defined as the belief that existence itself does not exist. One way of interpreting such a statement would be: It is impossible to distinguish ‘existence’ from ‘non-existence’ as there are no objective qualities, and thus a reality, that one state could possess in order to discern between the two. If one cannot discern existence from its negation, then the concept of existence has no meaning; or in other words, does not ‘exist’ in any meaningful way. ‘Meaning’ in this sense is used to argue that as existence has no higher state of reality, which is arguably its necessary and defining quality, existence itself means nothing. It could be argued that this belief, once combined with epistemological nihilism, leaves one with an all-encompassing nihilism in which nothing can be said to be real or true as such values do not exist.
Where lies our salvation from this paralysing realisation? Never fear, two centuries of philosophers have been on the case!
My existential journey has taken me through a forest of awesome Wikipedia pages, which I’ll write about over the next few weeks, and tag with “Monica’s Mind-Blowing Trip Through Existential Philosophy”; from Schopenhauer and Buddhism, to Camus and Absurdism!
