• Robert Lockhart
    170
    A psychologically stable individual, his experience through good fortune circumscribed by a benign situation, necessarily thereby suspecting nothing outwith his resultant bliss.
    A psychologically unstable individual, his experience through misfortune circumscribed by a malign situation, likewise necessarily thereby suspecting nothing outwith his resultant misery.

    Such nihilism would in principle be an example of the degree of possible inequity innate to a situation descended solely from a logical reality - would it not? - its manifestation therefore perhaps being symptomatic of the nature of our situation.
  • Robert Lockhart
    170
    Once saw a burly hard-drinking GI weeping 'cause his Terrapin had died - I was equally puzzled...
  • Terrapin Station
    13.8k
    For example, your second paragraph begins with "Such nihilism," but I don't see how anything in the previous paragraph amounted to nihilism.
  • Robert Lockhart
    170
    -How unconcious chance produces extremes of fortune thereby creating mutually exclusive worlds of experience, its random nature meaning the most vulnerable may be dealt the worst hands, etc - phone running out of juice!
  • Terrapin Station
    13.8k
    How unconcious chance produces extremes of fortune thereby creating mutually exclusive worlds of experience, its random nature meaning the most vulnerable may be dealt the worst hands, etc -Robert Lockhart

    That makes sense to me. I just don't get what it's supposed to have to do with nihilism. Or "logical reality."
  • BC
    13.6k
    Chancy events, like one’s phone battery finding itself empty at the most inopportune time, can lead one to nihilism. Life begins with a chancy, quite often inopportune event, and the unfolding events that follow may lead those without a firm catechism of some sort to conclude that life sucks, the universe is meaningless (it is), and that, therefore one one should sit about whining, bitching, and carping instead of boldly imposing a shovel full of meaning on the face of the abyss.
  • RegularGuy
    2.6k
    That makes sense to me. I just don't get what it's supposed to have to do with nihilism. Or "logical reality."Terrapin Station

    He’s either a continental philosopher, a psychiatrist, or a schizophrenic. That’s what I’m thinking pending further evidence. Either way, I can tell that I like him already.
  • deletedusercb
    1.7k
    A psychologically stable individual, his experience through good fortune circumscribed by a benign situation, necessarily thereby suspecting nothing outwith his resultant bliss.Robert Lockhart
    And yet could be a nihilist, having the kind of luxury to put their morality and sense of meaning on a shelf, having less or little struggle and less need for the motivations inherent in non-nihilist belief systems.
    A psychologically unstable individual, his experience through misfortune circumscribed by a malign situation, likewise necessarily thereby suspecting nothing outwith his resultant misery.Robert Lockhart
    who might also be a nihilist, but then might suprise us (or not) and be deeply embedded in various objective value, transcendent or other meaning paradigmns.

    So then we get to the observer....

    Such nihilism would in principle be an example of the degree of possible inequity innate to a situation descended solely from a logical reality - would it not? - its manifestation therefore perhaps being symptomatic of the nature of our situation.Robert Lockhart

    Who might be a nihilist or become one, seeing the radically different experiences as contingent, since he or she cannot see any rhyme or reason to the fates of these two, if they are fates, as if this view is somehow neutral. Everyone has a tendency to see their position as the more default position and other people as having heavy onuses.

    Or the observer might no commit to nihilism, but leave the door open for things going on behind the scenes or somehow else note a pattern or the existence of patterns.

    We still in abeyance.
  • Drazjan
    40
    Hawking said words to the effect that any unified theory was without value, if is was not intelligible to the average person. I think it is also true of philosophical questions
  • thewonder
    1.4k
    A Nihilist does choose to become a Nihilist and can choose to unbecome one. There is no inherent inequity concerning the human psyche and the pathology of Nihilism.
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