Nothing & Everything: How to stop fearing nihilism and embrace the void - by Val N. Tine
Date read: 2023-08-13How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
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Very deep book on trying to define reality and how we truly can't justify our values. It will make you question everything.
My Notes
Do you ever think that 'nothing is true and everything is permitted'?
We can live our lives knowing in our hearts what we value, without asking our minds whether we are 'right' or 'correct' or 'justified' in doing so. So stop asking 'what is the meaning of life?' No answer is coming.
Values can never be justified - we can never know whether something is better than another thing, and it's likely that no quality of goodness exists.
Even if we naturally believe that some things are good and some things are bad, it doesn't follow that those things we naturally believe in are true. Thus, we can believe in values but we have no way of proving them to be true or false.
You might be able to get people to agree on some sort of incredibly vague commandment like 'Do good'. But then you'd just get disagreement about what 'good' is, or what it might mean to 'do' something or not. Anything general enough to get you across-the-board agreement could never be specific enough to provide actual guidance.
'Thou shalt not make moral judgements' is itself clearly a moral judgement. So if all judgments are lies and illusions, then so is that anti-moralistic judgement of judgements. And if all moral beliefs justify cruelty and exclusion, then so does that belief in the immorality of moral systems.
Believing in no judgement is in itself a judgement. Just like not making a decision is also a decision.
Here is some very minimal advice - ask yourself what sort of person you would like to be, and what sort of world you would like to exist in, and then try to create those as much as you can.
You are not bad, or worthless, or damned. No-one is. There is no objective standard against which you could be judged, no binding rules upon which you could be convicted. There are only those values that you impose upon yourself, and those that are imposed on you by others.
Are society's beliefs getting more accurate? Impossible to say. Social beliefs of the past become more aligned with current social beliefs the closer your gaze gets to the present. This creates an illusion of historical progress, but could be nothing more than a trick of perspective, nothing more than a product of the way that beliefs change over time.
Following reason must eventually involve casting aside its claims to truth, realizing that it provides instead only an internal justification. This means denying that truth is important for holding beliefs. The very notion of objective reality withers away as unnecessary.
Reason is destructive when it has a particular form. When it claims to lead to truth, or knowledge, then it becomes harmful. Then it subordinates other ways people have of trying to access the truth. Then it disenchants the world of things that are 'merely' subjective. Then it alienates us into a world of abstraction.
But if we remove reason's claims to truth then these problems largely disappear. We can instead use reason as a tool, a method of organization, without claiming for it any superiority or domination
"Before I sought enlightenment, mountains were mountains and rivers were rivers. While I sought enlightenment, mountains were no longer mountains and rivers were no longer rivers. After I attained enlightenment, mountains were again mountains and rivers again rivers." Zen Proverb.