Why not nihilism

Once appeased, Thrasymachus defines justice as a trick invented by the strong in order to take advantage of the weak, as a way for the strong to seize power by manipulating society into believing that obedience is justice. Thrasymachus further argues that whenever possible people do what is unjust, except when they are too afraid of being caught and punished, and thus Thrasymachus concludes that injustice is better than justice.

Thrasymachus accuses Socrates of being naive and argues that Socrates is like a sheep who thinks the shepherd who protects and feeds the sheep does so because the shepherd is good rather than realizing that the shepherd is fattening them for the slaughter. Socrates is thus only able to counter cynicism in the visible world through faith in the existence of an invisible world, an invisible world that he argues is more real than the visible world.

Here we can see that nihilism is actually much more closely related to idealism than to cynicism. The cynic presents himself or herself as a realist, as someone who cares about actions, not intentions, who focuses on what people do rather than on what people hope to achieve, who remembers the failed promises of the past in order to avoid being swept up in the not-yet-failed promises about the future.

The idealist, however, rejects cynicism as hopelessly negative. By focusing on intentions, on hopes, and on the future, the idealist is able to provide a positive vision to oppose the negativity of the cynic. But in rejecting cynicism, does the idealist also reject reality?

These ideas may form a coherent logical story about reality, but that in no way guarantees that the ideas are anything more than just a story. As the idealist focuses more and more on how reality ought to be , the idealist becomes less and less concerned with how reality is. The utopian views of the idealist may be more compelling than the dystopian views of the cynic, but dystopian views are at least focused on this world , whereas utopian views are, by definition, focused on a world that does not exist.

It is for this reason that to use other-worldly idealism to refute this-worldly cynicism is to engage in nihilism. Along with pessimism and cynicism, nihilism is also frequently associated with apathy. To be apathetic is to be without pathos, to be without feeling, to be without desire. To be apathetic is thus to be seen as not caring about anything.

The pessimist feels despair, the cynic feels disdain, but the apathetic individual feels nothing. In other words, apathy is seen as nihilism. But apathy is not nihilism. However, in either case the apathetic individual is expressing a personal feeling or, to be more precise, feelinglessness and is not making a claim about how everyone should feel or, again, not feel. The apathetic individual understands perfectly well that other people feel differently insofar as they feel anything at all.

And because the apathetic individual feels nothing, the apathetic individual does not feel any desire to convince others that they should similarly feel nothing. Others may care, but the apathetic individual does not, and because they do not care, the apathetic individual does not care that others care. Yet apathy is still often seen as an affront, as an insult, as a rebuke by those who do care. JANE: It really makes you think.

Thanks a lot. JANE: No! Now this guy died and it makes me think and that hurts my little head and makes me stop smiling.

So, tell me how you cope with thinking all the time, Daria, until I can get back to my normal vegetable state. So why have you been avoiding me? The apathetic individual can thus, like the pessimist and the cynic, reveal the nihilism of others, though, unlike the pessimist and the cynic, the apathetic individual does this without actually trying to.

Whereas the pessimist and the cynic challenge others to explain their lack of either pessimism or cynicism, the apathetic individual is instead the one who is challenged, challenged by others to explain his or her lack of pathos.

In trying to get the apathetic individual to care, the person who does care is forced to explain why he or she cares, an explanation which can reveal just how meaningful or meaningless is the reason the person has for caring. However, not caring is not the same thing as caring about nothing. The apathetic individual feels nothing. But the nihilist has feelings. And indeed it is because the nihilist is able to have such strong feelings, strong feelings for something that is nothing, that the nihilist is not and cannot be apathetic.

Nihilists can have sympathy, empathy, and antipathy, but they cannot have apathy. Not caring is not the same thing as caring about nothing. The passive nihilist would rather navigate using a faulty compass than risk feeling completely lost. Here again we can find an important distinction between how the active nihilist and the passive nihilist respond to such moral skepticism. The ability to doubt the legitimacy of any possible foundation for morality can lead the active nihilist to either redefine morality or to reject morality.

In the first instance, actions can be judged using moral principles, but the active nihilist is the one who determines those principles. But what seems to be creative could in fact be derivative, as it is difficult to distinguish when we are thinking for ourselves as opposed to when we are thinking in accordance with how we were brought up.

So rather than such moral egoism, it is more likely that the active nihilism will simply reject morality altogether. Instead, actions are judged only in practical terms, such as what is more or less efficient towards achieving a desired end. Human actions are therefore seen as no different than the actions of an animal or a machine. If it seems like a mistake to say that an animal is evil for eating another animal when it is hungry, then the active nihilist will say it is likewise a mistake to say that humans are evil for stealing from another human when they are hungry.

Without morality, concepts such as theft, property or rights are seen as having only legal standing. Actions can be seen as criminal but not as immoral. An example of such active nihilism can be seen in the Ancient Greek sophist Thrasymachus. Instead, the passive nihilist rejects the idea that the legitimacy of morality really matters. The passive nihilist obeys morality, not for the sake of morality, but for the sake of obedience. To live in accordance with what is believed by others to be right and wrong, to be good and evil, is seen by the passive nihilist as preferable to having to live without any such moral standards to guide decision-making.

Moral standards provide a compass, and the passive nihilist would rather navigate life using a faulty compass than risk going through life feeling completely lost. Moral standards also provide the feeling of belonging to a community.

Sharing norms and values is as important for sharing a way of life as is sharing a language. In rejecting morality, the active nihilist is therefore also rejecting community.

But the passive nihilist is unwilling to risk feeling completely alone in the world. So, by rejecting moral legitimacy, the passive nihilist is embracing community. What matters to the passive nihilist then is not whether a moral claim is true, but whether a moral claim is popular. The passive nihilist values morality as a means to an end, not as an end in itself. Because the desire to belong and to be led outweighs the desire to have moral certainty, the passive nihilist cares only about the sense of direction and the sense of community that can come from accepting a moral system.

The passive nihilist supports moral standards just because they are accepted by the community to which the passive nihilist wants to belong. J ust as epistemological nihilism can lead to moral nihilism, so moral nihilism can lead to political nihilism. Political nihilism is typically understood as the rejection of authority. This was the case with the aforementioned self-identified nihilists of 19th-century Russia, who ultimately succeeded in assassinating the tsar.

However, this revolutionary form of political nihilism, which we can identify with active nihilism, does not capture the passive form of political nihilism. The danger of active nihilism comes from its anarchic willingness to destroy society for the sake of freedom. The danger of passive nihilism comes from its conformist willingness to destroy freedom for the sake of society. As we have already seen, the passive nihilist instrumentalises knowledge and morality by treating both as important only insofar as they serve as means to the ends of comfort and security.

The need to feel protected from the discomfort of doubt and from the insecurity of instability is what leads the passive nihilist to become ultimately more destructive than the active nihilist.

The danger here is that the moral and political systems that promote freedom and independence will be seen as less desirable to the passive nihilist than the moral and political systems that promote dogmatic acceptance of tradition and blind obedience to authority.

Though we might say we want to be free and independent, such liberation can feel like a terrible burden. Just think of how often being presented with a menu full of options leads restaurant-goers to ask the server for a recommendation. Nietzsche was worried by what he saw as the growing acceptance of selflessness, self-sacrifice and self-denial as moral ideals.

He saw the acceptance of such self-negating ideals as evidence that passive nihilism was spreading like a disease through 19th-century Europe. It was this worry that motivated the work of both critical theorists in Germany and of existentialists in France.

Arendt warned that we should be careful not to think of nihilism as merely a personal crisis of uncertainty. Rather, we must recognise that nihilism is a political crisis.

Nihilism can be promoted by those in power who benefit from such crises. Hence even metaphysical nihilism can carry political weight. Pointless, futile, meaningless. Nihilism has existed in one form or another for hundreds of years, but is usually associated with Friedrich Nietzsche , the 19th century German philosopher and pessimist of choice for high school kids with undercuts who proposed that existence is meaningless , moral codes worthless, and God is dead.

Entendiendo a las nuevas generaciones pic. Modern nihilism has been honed through memes and Twitter jokes. It manifests as teenagers eating Tide pods , fans begging celebrities to run them down with their cars , and a lot of weird TV shows. Turns out the descent into nothingness can be pretty funny. Are we witnessing a new, sunnier, generation of nihilists emerge?

If meaning and purpose are overrated illusions, then so is any sense that you are special or destined for greater things.

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