Pyrrho and the ancient skeptics didn't want us to have beliefs, but also somehow wanted us to believe (or entertain the notion?) that "nothing matters" -- or so we're told in our CoPhi chapter on them. But would it matter, if nothing matters? This is no deep paradox, just a shallow confusion. But it makes for good animated satire.
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Nothing Matters Part 2: Rick and Morty and Nietzsche ... buff.ly/2yavB9d
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In any event, much matters. The late Christopher Hitchens' statement about nihilism and meaning matters to me:
A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Hitch-22 [10.4.18... More old "skeptics" posts]==
But enough of skeptics and nihilists, I want to think instead of Josiah Royce and his 1892 Spirit of Modern Philosophy. It so earnestly affirmed that life and ideas matter, and that philosophy is the discipline most directly devoted to their articulation, that it would never have occurred to me back in 1978, when I first picked it up as a green undergrad (when green still just meant naive and uninstructed), to give either nihilism or extreme Pyrrhonic skepticism a moment's consideration. It helped me, back then, to imagine I had a clue of what the German pre-Heglian metaphysical idealists Fichte and Schelling were up to, with their mystifying talk of the autonomous noumenal self, objective transcendental consciousness, etc. I'm scheduled to share that reconstructed imagination with a gathering of Royce scholars at Vanderbilt in a little over two weeks. I begin with this text:
No, the philosopher's work is not lost when, in one sense, his system seems to have been refuted by death, and when time seems to have scattered to scorn the words of his dust-filled mouth. His immediate end may have been unattained; but thousands of years may not be long enough to develop for humanity the full significance of his reflective thought.This early (for undergrad me) statement of the long view, always the best philosophers' reflexive purview, anticipated (I see now in retrospect, looking back) the radically mind-expanding shift of perspective I'd find in The Long Now - the raised-consciousness commitment to deep time as ours, in our present, and the eponymous Stewart Brand-led foundation that's been raising consciousness and ethical acuity with projects like the Clock of the Long Now. The concept of a 10,000 year clock, meant to symbolize and motivate the long-term thinking we need to break our cycle of addiction to unsustainable short-sighted consumerism, was Danny Hillis's idea. Announcing it in Wired in the millennial year 01995, in the spirit of Royce's Spirit of Modern Philosophy, he professed:
I cannot imagine the future, but I care about it. I know I am a part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me. I sense that I am alive at a time of important change, and I feel a responsibility to make sure that the change comes out well. I plant my acorns knowing that I will never live to harvest the oaks.
I have hope for the future.Of course, as Greta Thunberg has reminded us, you can't just hope. You have to earn it. You have to do something.
This is really interesting and something I never really thought about but find really true. We can come to terms with ourselves that life is pointless but while living it, we still find ways to enjoy and value it. Unless you're completely despondent, you will still enjoy an ice-cream cone on a hot day or crack a smile when finding a dollar on the sidewalk. And when your life is at risk, you will most likely try anything you can to survive. If it is subconscious or not, people value living rather than not even if they think there is no intrinsic value to be had.
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