[MD] Nihilism for Ham

[MarshaV]

On Truth and Lies in an Nonmoral Sense  -  Friedrich Nietzsche

http://www.scribd.com/doc/425654/Friedrich-Nietzsche-On-Truth-and-Lies-in-a-Nonmoral-Sense 





At 05:20 AM 2/1/2009, you wrote:
>Philosophy.
>a. an extreme form of skepticism: the denial of 
>all real existence or the possibility of an objective basis for truth.
>Nihilism (from the Latin nihil, nothing) is a 
>philosophical position that argues that 
>existence is without objective meaning, purpose, 
>or intrinsic value. Nihilists generally assert 
>that objective morality does not exist, so 
>subsequently there is no objective moral value 
>with which to uphold a rule or to logically 
>prefer one action over another. Nihilists who 
>argue that there is no objective morality may 
>claim that existence has no intrinsic higher 
>meaning or goal. There is no reasonable proof or 
>argument for the existence of a higher ruler or 
>creator, or posit that even if higher rulers or 
>creators exist, humanity has no moral obligation 
>to worship them. There are no known sources that disprove the above claim.
>The term nihilism is sometimes used synonymously 
>with anomie to denote a general mood of despair 
>at the pointlessness of existence.[1] Movements 
>such as Futurism and deconstructionism,[2] among 
>others, have been identified by commentators as 
>"nihilistic" at various times in various 
>contexts. Often this means or is meant to imply 
>that the beliefs of the accuser are more 
>substantial or truthful, whereas the beliefs of 
>the accused are nihilistic, and thereby 
>comparatively amount to nothing (or are simply 
>claimed to be destructively amoralistic).
>Nihilism is also a characteristic that has been 
>ascribed to time periods: for example, Jean 
>Baudrillard and others have called postmodernity 
>a nihilistic epoch,[3] and some Christian 
>theologians and figures of religious authority 
>have asserted that postmodernity[4] and many 
>aspects of modernity[2] represent the rejection 
>of God, and therefore are nihilistic.
>
>-wiki
>Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
>Polemicist, socialite, and literary figure, 
>Jacobi was an outspoken critic, first of the 
>rationalism of German late Enlightenment 
>philosophy, then of Kant's Transcendental 
>Idealism, especially in the form that the early 
>Fichte gave to it, and finally of the Romantic 
>Idealism of the late Schelling. In all cases, 
>his opposition to the philosophers was based on 
>his belief that their passion for explanation 
>unwittingly led them to confuse conditions of 
>conceptualization with conditions of existence, 
>thereby denying all room for individual freedom 
>or for a personal God. Jacobi made this point, 
>in defence of individualism and personalistic 
>values, in a number of public controversies, in 
>the course of which he put in circulation 
>expressions and themes that resonate to this 
>day. He was the one who invited Lessing, who he 
>thought was walking on his head in the manner of 
>all philosophers, to perform a salto mortale (a 
>jump heels over head) that would redress his
>  position and thus allow him to move again on 
> the ground of common sense. He was also 
> responsible for forging the concept of 
> ‘nihilism’ -- a condition of which he accused 
> the philosophers -- and thereby initiating the 
> discourse associated with it. His battle cry, 
> which he first directed at the defenders of 
> Enlightenment rationalism and then at Kant and 
> his successors, was that ‘consistent philosophy 
> is Spinozist, hence pantheist, fatalist and 
> atheist’. The formula had the effect of 
> bringing Spinoza to the centre of the 
> philosophical discussion of the day. In the 
> face Kant and his idealistic successors, Jacobi 
> complained that they had subverted the language 
> of the ‘I’ by reintroducing it on the basis of 
> abstractions that in fact negated its original 
> value. They had thus replaced real selfhood 
> with the mere illusion of one.-stanford
>
>Some scholars regard Nietzsche's 1873 
>unpublished essay, “On Truth and Lies in an 
>Nonmoral Sense” (“Über Wahrheit und Lüge im 
>außermoralischen Sinn”) as a keystone in his 
>thought. In this essay, Nietzsche rejects the 
>idea of universal constants, and claims that 
>what we call “truth” is only “a mobile army of 
>metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms.” His 
>view at this time is that arbitrariness prevails 
>within human experience: concepts originate via 
>the transformation of nerve stimuli into images, 
>and “truth” is nothing more than the invention 
>of fixed conventions for practical purposes, 
>especially those of repose, security and 
>consistency. Viewing human existence from a 
>great distance, Nietzsche further notes that 
>there was an eternity before human beings came 
>into existence, and believes that after humanity 
>dies out, nothing significant will have changed 
>in the great scheme of things.-stanford
>
>
>


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