Bookshelf

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

1. The main message of nihilism is that nothing is true, we can never know what is objectively good or bad, the reality we live in is just a creation our brains make out of sensory inputs, and there’s no meaning to life.
2. While this sounds like it can easily lead to despair and depression, it can also lay the foundation for a life spent free from oppression of thought, shaped to our own liking.
3. In that sense, nihilism is the foundation and starting point for creating a life with personal purpose and meaning, even though there isn’t any.

🎨 Impressions

I came to this book because I’ve seen it in the recommended literature section of the appendix of Derek Sivers’ latest book “Useful Not True” which I enjoyed. And since I’ve always been interested in the inner workings of the philosophic idea of nihilism and this here was supposed to be a benevolent introduction to it and not too long and dry, it fell into my hands.

It wasn’t a disappointment, but also no huge revelation. If you’re unfamiliar with nihilism, the main points can be summarized rather quickly, but I was curious to find out if there’s more to it. Now that I’ve read it, I’m sure that’s it. The important bit is what comes out of nihilism: many existentialist philosophers started from there and went on to create constructive and pragmatic ideas. Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, to name a few.

This book focusses on the base claims of nihilism and makes a case for why those are correct assumptions by using semantics. It is tedious at times to hear an argumentation chain spin around for many pages on why we can be so sure that we can never really know what the truth is about anything because there’s no basis for it. At times this twisted my head because I felt like the argumentation itself needed a definition for “true” and “false” in order to deny those phrases from existing. That circular paradox is talked about later in the book, but not satisfactorily.

The three main claims are that we can’t know what’s true or false, what’s good or bad, and what’s real. I’m on board with that. Good or bad differs from person to person, from society to society. It changes over time, never fixed. And the reality we perceive clearly is just a thing interpreted in our brains from the light received by our eyes, waves in our ears, and so on. For all we know everything could be grey or see-through in reality. This is dizzying for me at times, because when you get down to the actual physical phenomena underlying this, it gets weird quickly: everything is basically just buzzing energy waves, including the molecules at sub-atomic scale. But since physics aligns with this philosophic idea and it seems like an obvious conclusion to me, I’m here for it.

The question remains: where do we go from here? The subtitle of the book promises a sort of solution to it all, but I guess it just lies within the explanations. How we humans could go about “embracing the void” is a question for the existentialists and others to answer, not for the author of this book. Who goes by a weird pseudonym, by the way. I wonder why and if there’s a known writer behind it, but so far my short research hasn’t shown that.

I would not recommend reading this book unless you are not yet convinced that the main claims of nihilism make sense. It’s longer than it needs to be, but it’s not a long book.

🍀 How the Book Changed Me

• It has been a good reminder not to take life too seriously. I think it’s sensible to realize everything we perceive is just that: our individual perception. We can’t know what reality is, we’re locked in in our brains forever. To loosen the connection to what we hold as true and good in favor of a pragmatic approach to life can be a smart conclusion to take from that.

📔 Highlights

You are right to doubt. You have been told comforting stories about goodness and justice and truth that supposedly put these worries to rest, that give you a firm foundation on which to stand. Yet all those lessons you learnt don’t seem to be adding up. Something is wrong, deeply wrong. Something important. You feel the ground beginning to shift beneath your feet. 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.

Probabilistically, relativism means that any one judgement has only a tiny chance of being correct. This doesn’t mean that it cannot be true, of course. But to have confidence under these conditions would require strong evidence, evidence that never seems to appear.

And at the end of the day, believing that some judgements are correct, but acknowledging that you’ll never be able to know which ones are, isn’t all that different in practice from abandoning judgements altogether. A morality that is merely hypothetical is no morality at all.

Besides, purpose could never be a guide to the objective value of things, because purposes are assigned to things by humans. Nothing has a purpose in itself. It merely exists. A hammer without humanity is just a weird bit of wood and metal.

Most people reject nihilism not because they think it is wrong, but because they think accepting it would be too difficult for them and too destructive for society.

After all, becoming everything that you have been told is ‘bad’ is to be just as restricted, just as unfree, as remaining everything that you have been told is ‘good’.

We view people as inherently self-interested because we live in an economic system that emphasizes self-interest above all else, for example.

The most we can do, indeed all that we can do, is to imagine Sisyphus happy, perhaps walking back down the slope with a subtle smile on his lips and an ironic glint in his eye.

Perhaps the solution is not to accept this tension with a smile and a shrug, but to question whether we must indeed hold existence to such impossible standards. We do not.

I imagine him on strike, refusing to roll that accursed boulder even one more centimeter. Let the gods rage. Their thunderbolts frighten us no longer.

Your values could change quite dramatically after coming to hold them as choices instead of judgements, especially where what you think has been out of alignment with what you feel.

If everything is permitted, then care and respect for others is permitted. But it is not and can never be required.

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.

Yet no-one wins the other side to theirs with reason, for the simple reason that there is no rational answer to be found. The logical reasons and inferences in any moral system are built from a base that is illogical, a base that determines what those inferences and reasons will be.

Look at the great atrocities in this world and tell me which ones were not done in the name of ‘justice’ or ‘good’ or ‘progress’ or ‘morality’. The greatest cruelties are always committed in the names of the greatest goods.

And so we go on, working and building, until one day we think to examine the foundations and, unspeakably, find nothing there. On that day our belief in objective truth become a curse.

With this in mind, knowledge is usually taken to have two elements. Firstly, a statement must reflect what actually exists. Secondly, it can’t reflect the truth by accident. The reflection has to have come about as a result of applying some reliable method in the right way.

Yet we have no reason to believe that perception is anything of the sort. Reason is empty, and in it the objective reality which we seek is nowhere to be found.

Everything hinges on the information provided by perception. The question, then, is whether we can trust that information provided by perception as a reliable point of contact with an objective reality.

Perhaps imagine a worm, or a bacterium, and the limited world these must experience with their rudimentary senses. Would you say that either of those had a picture of objective reality? Our senses are just as much of a rudimentary snapshot.

And with this limited and distorted snapshot you would wish to claim truth? At most, we understand our brain’s representation of photons, of sound-waves, of olfactory particles, of resistance.

Let’s assume that those individual perceptions you experience correspond in some way to an objective reality. That, for argument’s sake, they are a fleeting glimpse of the real. What happens after that photon hits your eye and the corresponding electrical pulse hits your brain? You transform that sensory impression into something shadowy, abstract, and altogether different — something far more human even than it was before.

Any axioms chosen by a thinker say far more about the society they live in, its unquestioned foundations and uninterrogated assumptions, than any real truth.

Because of this infinity of explanations, there is always ambiguity over whether you’ve learnt the right lesson from experience.

We have no reason to think that reason leads us to statements that reflect some actual state of affairs in some hypothetical objective reality. The towers of science, philosophy, history that are built on that basis are undermined. Nothing is true.

When told that ‘nothing is true’ is a contradiction and therefore cannot be true, we could simply deny the law of non-contradiction. It is just another one of reason’s commandments, after all, one that cannot itself be justified.

So by framing internal correspondence (with the procedures of reason) as an alternative to external correspondence (with an objective reality), we can make statements within nihilism. This allows us to articulate our skepticism without contradicting ourselves at every turn, and escape the threatening silence.

The objective world might exist to correspond with our statements and make them true. But it, and this truth, will never be a part of our reality. So, for all intents and purposes, nothing is true. Appearance is the only reality. Or, more accurately, appearance is everything and reality is nothing at all.

We have tried to effect a Copernican revolution of the spirit, a heliocentrism of the mind. Such a feat can never be accomplished, nor would we be happier if it were. We should instead learn to love our humanity, our particularity, our stupidity and our innocence.

We make sure that we are being sensible, reasonable, rational and calculating, not like those fools wasting their life on subjective trivialities. Yet those trivialities, those consciously subjective aspects of our lives, are what makes our lives worth living.

we should be skeptical about perception, and view it as unreflective of any objective world. But perception is also the basis for so many other parts of our existence — of emotion, of imagination, of intuition, of values. It is, to a degree, the bedrock upon which all our human experiences rest.

Maybe you’re crushed by the insignificance of your life. That in the greater scheme of things (human society, all of human history, the Earth’s history, the vast inhuman cosmos, the infinitely vast multiverse of vast inhuman cosmoses and so on) your life is of absolutely no consequence, like a single dot of ink in a book or a single pixel on a computer screen. Sure. But just remember that these perspectives are ones that we ourselves have constructed.

Your own subjective experience is the only world you ever really inhabit, and from that perspective your life is not only important but is the sole basis of reality. So don’t feel insignificant.

That subjective experience is the only world you live in, the only reality worth your time — no matter what computer simulation, evil demon, butterfly’s dream, Veil of Maya or objective reality which that experience is nested within. It is that in which you must live and that which deserves the name ‘reality’, dream or no. That supposed waking life — objective reality — is the real illusion.

And what is this world that you are acting in and interpreting? It is no longer the objective reality of myth, but the subjective reality you have always existed in, a world defined and limited by your own consciousness. In this reality reason is a tool to be used, not a master to be obeyed. This book hopes to bring reason down from the throne we have placed it on, and return you to that rightful place instead.

I don’t know whether the unexamined life is worth living or not, never having lived that way myself. But a life that is only examined is never lived at all. The important thing is to live.