[MD] Nihilism

[david buchanan]

Ham said to Case and a few others:
I think Quality is a weak substitute for Essence, but I also I don't think 
either term signifies Nothingness.  What I can't understand is why you, 
Case, and a few others here insist that Nothingness is the ultimate reality, 
yet claim that you are not nihilists.  Perhaps you can explain this to me.

Marsha replied:
This, to me, is an interesting subject.  I have read both RMP and the Dalai 
Lama reject nihilism.  I have called myself a happy nihilist, but I am 
really confused regarding this term.  Is the rejection a rejection of 
nihilism, or the depression that is so often associated with the word.  My 
dictionary defines it in the philosophical sense as: extreme skepticism, 
esp. with regard to value statements or moral judgements.  But this word 
also seems to carry a whole lot of negative connotation.  Should it?  Does 
'nothingness' or "understanding that absolute truth is beyond human 
knowledge" still deserve such a negative connotation?  I think some 
acceptance is in order.

dmb says:
I wonder if there is anyone in the world, other than religious fanatics, who 
thinks there is such a thing as the "absolute truth". This notion strikes me 
as so ridiculous that it hardly even merits rejection. As I see it, nihilism 
is what you get when you conclude that "value statements or moral 
judgements" can't be verified by the scientific method or otherwise 
validated by "objective" facts. In other words, its a creature of SOM. As I 
understand it, nihilism is what you get when a Positivists sees that 
Positivism has failed. It grows out of the failure of amoral scientific 
objectivity, the limited rationality that supposes sensory empiricism is the 
only valid kind. And since you can't see morals through a telescope or 
values in a microscope,...

The MOQ, by contrast, says that values are the whole shebang. The primary 
empirical reality is not nothingness in the sense of the dark vacuum of 
space, but rather as Gav says. In that sense, the primary empirical reality 
is simply experience prior to distinctions. This is nothingness in the sense 
that things have not yet been distinquished from the undifferentiated 
continuum of that first, basic experience. But, as in the hot stove and the 
new song examples, this primary empirical reality is directly known in terms 
of value. You know its good or bad right away and only only later do we find 
conceptual reasons to explain it. So, it seems to me that the MOQ is pretty 
much the opposite of nihilism. The MOQ says that everything is value. The 
laws of physics, of the jungle, of the tribe and of science are all based on 
different levels of value and all these static forms proceed from that 
primary experience of value so that there is no place for nihilism in the 
MOQ. Its a real concept and all that. I just mean that the MOQ paints a 
picture of reality such that everything is value, from dirt to divinity, as 
Ken Wilber puts it.

Thanks.
dmb

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