Thread: Nihilism?
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Old 11-26-2004, 06:43 AM   #46 (permalink)
zen_tom
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I think that the misconception here is that nihlism is a permanent philosophy. It's not, it's a temporary condition, a passing phase. If you reject authority, and their belief systems, and architecture, and social customs, etc...because you see there is no worth to those things, is that wrong? However, once you've rejected and destroyed everything, you have to choose either to destroy yourself, or to create something. That tearing down is a precursor to building anew.

As some people have suggested, nihlism is the adolescant's philosophy, seeing the holes and the errors and the flaws in established things, and wanting to tear them down, and anything that's been built up on the back of them. As the article that Jynx linked to said, Nietzsche was worried about there being a growing trend for these kind of tendencies in the world's societies - and He may be right, perhaps it is time for our civilisation to go through its own adolescance - tearing down the things its built itself on to either find nothing, or some nub of truth on which to build itself afresh. Isn't that the same process as growing up? As kids we reject our family's ideals, we rebel, we think it's all so much bs, but, if we don't end up killing ourselves in the process, we do, after time, get an appreciation of the truth behind those ideals. And so the cycle continues. I think nihlism (adolescance) is a valid (if transitory) philosophy in that it helps weed-out weaker ideas, or those that really do have no merit, leaving behind the fitter survivors that really do have grains of truth buried within them.
 
 

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