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  • My "nihilism"


    I basically believe that nothing has any meaning.

    Part of me agrees with you. But I think the problem of nihilism is that if we embrace it, we will have to believe that anything that gives an illusion of value is more deceitful than things that frankly denote meaninglessness since the meaninglessness of the world should be the only truth for us. In a world void of meaning, the more meaningless a thing is, the more clearly it reflects the truth.
    Provided that everything is meaningless at its core, what is then the most meaningless thing in the world? Food, clothes, houses, money, books–they still seem to have some meaning. Love has also meaning, even if it's an illusion, because it unites men and women and thus contributes to our biological reproduction. Happiness, pleasure, hope, hatred–actually, to find something completely meaningless is as difficult as to find something completely meaningful: when we wanted the world full of meaning, everything seemed meaningless, but once we are prepared to accept the meaninglessness of the world, the world, every phenomenon of it, suddenly reveals itself to be full of petty meaning. So if we deny everything that gives us the illusion of meaningfulness as the shadows on the wall and try to find something that is completely void of any meaning, I think what our mind conceives to be the most meaningless thing in the world cannot be but God. I call this the negative God.
    It cannot be the Devil, obviously, because unlike the Devil, which must be deceitful, it reveals the truth to us, that is to say, it's the only thing in the world that reveals absolutely nothing at all. And since everything is meaningless and anything of value is nothing but a shadow on the wall, we can see the glory of this negative God everywhere. It's completely non-existent, does no miracle, says nothing and has no meaning. It's pure and clean.
    And this divine non-being is what connects us all since we human beings are made of dreams. We do meaningless things, think about meaningless things, and shed meaningless tears for meaningless affairs, knowing a gust of wind will wipe out all the traces of our existence some day. Our existence is fleeting, but our absence will be eternal. We will be one with the negative God when we all are dead.
    And since the whole universe is devoid of meaning, this negative God, the purest form of meaninglessness, may be considered, in a reversed way, omnipresent. Now that we are nihilists, we find the glory of the negative God where the saints of old found the glory of the Christian God. And we cannot escape from the hand of the negative God as long as we live in a meaningless world.
  • The Trinity
    Haydn was the Father.
    Mozart was the Holy Ghost.
    Beethoven was the Son.

    Thomas Jefferson was the Father.
    Aaron Burr was the Holy Ghost.
    Alexander Hamilton was the Son.

    Max Stirner was the Father.
    Kierkegaard was the Holy Ghost.
    Nietzsche was the Son.

    Can you get it?
  • Unfree will (determinism), special problem
    I love determinism. I think we don't have free will at all.

    There are choices you can make and choices that are already taken. And think how immensely the latter has influenced your life. You didn't choose your parents; you didn't choose your homeland; the age you were born into; your face; your race; and you can't freely determine which scientific hypothesis should be correct. Your parents themselves didn't choose such things either.
    Truth is like a fossil buried deep in our ignorance. Even if we have no idea about it, it's there, determined.
  • Another Universal Language and its Usage


    Thank you very much for taking a look at the list. Your queries are appropriate, and I really appreciate that you perceived that the categorisation was based upon some method rather than my personal preference. I try to explain.

    First, I would like to talk about my views on Wittgenstein, one of the key philosophers for the list along with Husserl and Kant.
    To put it simply, I took the later Wittgenstein seriously. The general opinion is that he was a serious thinker at first, but as years passed, he was somewhat softened with age and became naïve. My personal opinion differs: in his younger days, he believed that he could prove what he could not speak of by his actions; the proposition 6.43 suggests that he dreamt a happy world in which people, while keeping silent about the unspeakable, acted with goodwill, a world where the unspeakable was constantly proven by moral actions. Wittgenstein was a bit of a romantic at first.
    But I believe the later Wittgenstein saw hypocrisy in his early thoughts, that is to say, he did not feel it so moral, when there were real grieving people who had lost their dear family members in the war, to tend gardens alone while muttering, "Why can't they understand?" He thought initially that he could be a stoic in his silence while the whole world was indulging in nonsense, but in the end it was he who was indulging in his silence while the whole world was suffering nonsense. The gist of the later Wittgenstein's thoughts is that we have to reconcile the human mind and the world of facts by expressing the truth, contrary to his early thoughts, by some form of language. Obviously, the later Wittgenstein did not succeed, but I thought his self-criticism was reasonable.
    Returning to the list, I emphasise that it is, though constructed by language, silent. The list is supposed to indicate the unspeakable with silent words.

    What are the details of the method (algorithm) by which you assign a name under (i)Angel (ii)Demon (iii)Great in a grouping of 3. Are the grouped names refuting major points? Are they voices in a dialogue? — Nils Loc

    Some names were already grouped when I started making the list. Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael have always been regarded as "the three great painters of the Renaissance"; Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles as "the three great Greek tragedians"; similar things can be said about Plato, Socrates and Aristotle, or Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu. Each group often represents some sort of movement of a particular time and a region, so each of a trio is supposed to reflect the same movement, philosophical or artistic, in each different way. I collected those trios and compared them one with the others to see if there was a pattern.
    One simplistic explanation may be that I related the Angel tag to idealism and stoicism; the Demon tag to nihilism, hedonism and dogmatism; the Great tag to pragmatism and materialism - or realism in general, though it is too simplistic and will be misleading, given some big exceptions. But I thought Baudelaire and Poe being tagged as demons could be self-explanatory.

    Does the Great tag represent a synthesis or mediation of content associated with the preceding 2 names? — Nils Loc

    Yes, many names with the Great tag, such as Epicurus, Pierre Charron and Corneille, can be seen as representing a synthesis or mediation of preceding two, though I'm absolutely not a Hegelian. You poked the right spot.
  • Another Universal Language and its Usage


    Thank you for replying.

    What do you mean by universal language? One where everyone understands exactly what you mean? There are no universal languages like that, the devil is always in the detail. — Judaka

    Certainly, I did not mean that the name of Lincoln could always evoke the same feeling. Names sound differently in different ears. The name of George Washington sounds differently in the ears of Native Americans.
    What I meant is that the name of Abraham Lincoln always indicates one particular person that is Abraham Lincoln. We have different opinions about him. We have different historical views. But at least we can talk about the exact same person. The universality of names relies on the uniqueness of each person. When I say, "This desk I'm using right now," you don't know what it is; when I say, "Justice is beautiful," I myself am not sure what I'm talking about; when I say, "Abraham Lincoln," we both know at least who he is. That is the universality of names, and there are limits in this universality.

    He isn't a symbol of justice, he is a symbol of a man standing up for justice and that justice is characterised by the injustice of slavery. — Judaka

    You are right. I agree with you. I really did not mean that he was the ultimate incarnation of political justice. I suppose I wrote badly.

    Bringing up "justice is hard to define" is a red herring. That's got nothing to do with anything here. Justice is still hard to define even if we knock off chattel slavery as being universally wrong. — Judaka

    Again, I'm not disagreeing with you. I definitely did not mean that we should see some heroic act as the definition of justice. What I wanted to say is that we can see people, though we cannot see justice itself.
    For example, if there were two brothers equally loved by their parents, and one of them grew into a serial killer while the other ended up as a war hero who somehow saved the lives of his fellow soldiers by sacrificing his own, I believe most people would agree that the latter as a human being was more moral than the former, even though no one could define morality itself. That's the point. I wanted to find a philosophical equivalent to 2 + 2 = 4, forgetting about the definition of justice and quantum physics for a little while.

    I don't have anything constructive to say other than that this idea lacks nuance and I don't think you've had a real go at trying your best to understand how it could be wrong. — Judaka

    The idea has already produced a result, and there is a link in the synopsis. If you look at the list, you will find that not only General Lee and Stonewall Jackson but even Jefferson Davis is tagged as an angel there.
    The devil may well be in the detail. But where is the angel? The angel is on the surface, hiding nowhere.
  • Another Universal Language and its Usage


    Thank you for kind words. Thank you for replying.
    I actually respect Kant a lot, so I believe we will never see the essence of concepts as we see the blue sky. However, I think we can, even though we don't have definitions, discern inclinations by means of comparison. For example, if I showed a turquoise stone to people and asked them whether it was blue or green, their answers would divide, but if I showed a turquoise and a ruby and asked which was bluer, I think everyone would answer in the same way. Definitions are nowhere to be found, but hints and guesses are everywhere.

    And if you have missed the link in the synopsis, which is supposed to lead you to the list, I ask you to consider clicking on it. I tried to write something like an epic poem consisting of human names.