truth
Rufio, good questions. Granted, postmodernists seem to think that "nothing matters." But in this regard they are not nihilists in the sense that I described; they are nihilists in the sense of Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment wherein the character, Raskolnikov (sp?), felt that since God is dead anything was acceptable, even the murder of an old woman.
You ask, "if nothing is real, and it's all a construction, what's left?" Obviously, my answer is OUR CONSTRUCTIONS are what are left. And they ARE real, but they are OUR reality, not the reality of a theistic God.
Aside from this, you know by now that as a mystically-oriented chap, I sense that we ARE the universe. Consequently, I hold that we should not depend on the universe, in the form of some parental God, to take care of us. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam--all theisms--reflect their followers' childish need for an absolute reality separate from themselves to take care of them. This was the gist of Freud's interpretation of religion: a childish need for a macrofather to protect oneself from an otherwise chaotic reality. In Hinduism and Buddhism you are (once you awaken to the fact that you are) your own father, a grown up, not a helpless, dependent and worshipful child.
Accepting the existence of an objective reality doesn't necessitate either a god or anything that takes care you of you, though. You could dominate or control the objective reality rather than it controlling or looking after you. That's what most seem to do anyway.
Anyway, I thought that the integration of morality into things that are socially constructed and therefore not real was specifically nihilistic - postmodernism only goes so far as to apply that status to knowledge.
I think, to be a nihilist or a postmodernist, you can't also be a relativist - in order to dispair that the objective reality cannot be known or experienced, you first have to fully accept the idea of an outisde objective reality - right? If you think that anything you experience IS reality, and that we make our own reality, than it shouldn't matter that we can't know anything other than our own reality, since that's all that exists anyway.
How can we determine what is then noble if no universal truths exist? All we know is what is given to us by our senses. We reason from what our senses have told us. This is using our mind and ability to reason. By not using this ability we become impotent weaklings.
truth
Jaco, if there are no absolute/universal truths, that does not impede us from creating our own values. You are illustrating my position--and perhaps your own dependence on an objective support if you think otherwise. Also, do you think that sense impressions by themselves teach us anything without our imposing theoretical meaning to them? I am beginning to appreciate the difficulty people have with the notion of living without objective external supports. I DO believe that the world is bigger than my head. I am no solipsist. But that world is inherently meaningless (in human terms). We impose meaning onto it. The next most difficult notion for people to grasp is that that universe IS us. I see no need to think in terms of me versus it (subjective vs objective).
Rufio, it's my understanding that postmodernism has relativism as one of its principles.
@acepoly,
"... an attempt to divest ourselves of the institutions constructed in the past and to forge a new future which proclaims to be "of our own" is to lead human beings into a state of stagnation ..."
I would say the opposite is true. To not attempt to divest ourselves of these things leads to stagnation.
@Stooshie,
I agree, Stooshie. When Nietzsche declared that God is Dead (Plutarch and Hegel made the same declaration earlier) his was not making--as I see it--a theological claim; it was a historical realization that the middle ages were over, that mankind can no longer count on absolutes supported by The Church as foundations of meaning.
Nihilism has both negative and positive sides. The "negative" repudiation/denial of absolute (and I mean all absolute) principles and doctrines is necessary for a humanism in which we "positively" assert our own forever evolving and never dogmatic creations of meaning.
@JLNobody,
I feel that everything we come up with as explanations of Reality is delusional--insofar as it is human knowledge, not absolutely objective truth that would exist in our absence. But we can describe human experience, or human reality, and come up with explanations that WORK, at least for a duration--and then, hopefullly, they will be replaced with other effective explanations for human needs (applied science) and answers to human questions (basic science and philosophy).
