Pill Pod 46 - Nihilism (Exclusive)
Added 2021-07-08 22:54:31 +0000 UTCHeyyo, here is your weekend podcast episode, featuring Uncle Bob, Baudrillard, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Lacan and the simple question: Dude, why not just bin meaningfulness as an evaluation of life?
For the curious here is the book we were referencing, A Defence of Nihilism https://amzn.to/3i6lmdl
Comments
Ok I’ve been listening to the pod for like a day. You need to introduce everyone at the beginning of every podcast because I can’t even tell how many people are talking sometimes and some of u sound too similar; use an eq. And that one guy should be kicked off—the guy who keeps saying the same shit over and over and sounds the most annoying in every pod. Unproductive.
Landon Rogers
2024-11-12 05:41:19 +0000 UTCCapitalism doesn't pressure you to find 'meaning' or 'live up to your potential' in a real sense: rather its logic twists their definitions into finding a job you're willing to grind yourself into paste for and to do the best job you could possibly do to maximise the surplus value your boss can skim off of you respectively. Ideology doing its thing, essentially. So yeah, taking a nihilistic attitude to this would feel liberating for sure. So yeah, totally agree with what Erik said re systems that impose evaluative structures. Also I feel that you're a nihilist if you encounter the Lacanian Real, in which you cannot function. You'd have to literally just lie on the floor until you died cause literally nothing matters, which as you all agreed is absurd, as a person can be clinically depressed and still have goals, still wake up in the morning, still take care of themselves. At least some of the time. Even Uncle Bob finds meaning in the pleasure he gets from his seemingly mundane activities. Totally agreed with Erik re the Christian secular society thing too: like, ok, we're all secular but there's a lot of Christian ideology present in modern society like the Protestant work ethic and even the concept of human rights, which as both Pills and Cuck Philosophy especially pointed out emerged out of the Christian, humanistic idea that humans are special, that today we substitute soul for 'inalienable human rights.' Great stuff as usual guys.
anacidcommie
2021-07-19 16:32:59 +0000 UTCbut… isn’t Bob also an attempt to escape the Other?
Zachary Manenti
2021-07-16 00:54:02 +0000 UTCfor the transcendence of the market combined w money.
Zachary Manenti
2021-07-15 22:01:41 +0000 UTCFinally, i think the only Nihilists today, unfortunately, are the centrist Neo liberals. In the impure def of nihilism where they deny ‘realities’’significance.
Zachary Manenti
2021-07-15 22:00:29 +0000 UTCoh, to clarify from above: pluralizes, as i understand it: meaning wd not be a transcendental ‘life meaning.’ Yet that does not fully address the problem of meaning at all.
Zachary Manenti
2021-07-15 21:50:27 +0000 UTCprovisional value. But of course that is not the case. Readings hold as something other than provisional. Anyway, they abandon or move on from nihilism, as is the general tendency i think. The diss of nihilism for or in itself. I think Bob is exemplar
Zachary Manenti
2021-07-15 21:48:45 +0000 UTCA ‘purer’ i.e. more consistent nihilism is more like non evaluative sociology/multiculturalism. Whereas FT’s ‘methodology’ of interrupting meaning , takes nihilism as a purgative to then produce a provional
Zachary Manenti
2021-07-15 21:46:59 +0000 UTCit seems nihilism is a purgative to moralism. And, at the same time as it tries not to posit anything, is in that gesture a form of ethics. I think this purgative aspect of nihilism which is itself a value of course,, is evident in all ‘French theory ‘ and in the thinkers FT is indebted to. Maybe this is the difference b/t theory and nonevaluative multiculturalism. Where the former uproots meaning as soon as it is instanciated, and the latter pluralizes meaning?
Zachary Manenti
2021-07-15 21:43:42 +0000 UTCPills: The Sufi Zikr is,’ la illa ha, ilallah hu,’ rough translation: ‘ There is nothing, (and in the zikr right there one pauses), but G-d.’ So, I believe u r correct. To say there is nothing or nothing matters does presume a belief in God. Either it is the nihilism in spiritual belief or it isn’t nihilism at all.
Zachary Manenti
2021-07-15 19:32:07 +0000 UTCso good.
Zachary Manenti
2021-07-13 22:17:34 +0000 UTCI wish I had friends like you guys! I would never be able to get anyone I know to have a discussion like this. They'd just start fiddling with their mobile phones. For fun, I tried listening to the discussion from a Chinese perspective: Confucianism (emphasis on education, values of cultivating social and familial harmony), Buddhism (I'm thinking especially of Nagarjuna and his inquiry into eternalism versus nihilism), and Taoism (respecting the subtle way of nature). The discussion sounded really different to me that way... Something about the question itself has a more or less Western flavour, maybe based on implicit assumptions about meaning in terms of logos. I'm not sure. I also heard the word "capitalism" used a few times in the discussion. I'm completely baffled by that term now! What does it actually mean? I can't find anything about it that didn't already exist in parts of Asia and Africa long before the Dutch East India Company, Jakob Fugger, the Monte di Pietà, Lombard street, and long, long, long before steam-powered textile mills in the English Midlands, not to speak of today's quant hedge funds. The word has become a catch-all, it seems, or maybe a kind of antithesis to other values?
Michael
2021-07-10 22:38:36 +0000 UTCAwesome discussion. Really digging the debate style podcasts!
Matt S
2021-07-10 21:01:56 +0000 UTCI was disappointed no one wanted to follow me down that trail, but "everything" and "nothing" are sides of the same coin as far as knowledge goes. The idea I proposed is that the evaluative judgement on something that could never be experienced (whether it is everything, or nothing--if we are finite we'd never experience either) assumes that everything/nothing could in principle be experienced and then judged as either mattering or not mattering. From a position of finitude you can't justify in the end what you say about everything or nothing, so to say anything about them, e.g. "nothing matters" you have assumed there's some position where that statement could be true. That position could only be one where you have knowledge of everything/nothing, or total knowledge, like God's. Personally I am not one who thinks language is very useful for ever going there, but I was trying to show that "consistency" is really just a stupid conceit that elbow-patch philosophers like to throw around.
Plastic Pills
2021-07-10 02:25:11 +0000 UTClol, the man has focus, I think he really wanted us to pick up his Kierkegaard refs but we had already sided with uncle Bob.
Plastic Pills
2021-07-10 02:03:15 +0000 UTCThis was a very interesting discussion, although would be nice if Matt would not try to make the same point over and over again.
Christos
2021-07-09 12:33:29 +0000 UTCThis was a great talk! I was wondering Pills if you’d be able to expand a little on the idea that in order to believe in nothing one has to believe in God. I think I almost grasped it but I feel like some threads aren’t quite pulled together for me
Will Thomas
2021-07-09 04:28:08 +0000 UTCLove the introduction:)
Matthew
2021-07-08 22:56:28 +0000 UTC
