What nihilism acknowledges that other philosophies don’t

Most people instinctively think that there is some kind of meaning to life

They just sort of assume that it's there, in the same way that if you ask them, why are you getting out of bed to go to work

Why are you doing that to make money? Why? To provide for my family

Why? To bring up my children healthily. Why? Because I want my children to be healthy

Why? What do you mean, why? For some people, they just don't recognize the question

They're just like, what are you talking about? For other people, they hear that and they go, gosh, you know what

Fair enough. I actually don't know. The nihilist is someone who sort of takes a bird's eye view of it and realizes that it's all a little bit meaningless

It is nicer to think that you are here for some kind of reason that's written into the rules of the universe than that it all is just a happy or unhappy accident

My name's Alex O'Connor. I'm the host of the Within Reason podcast. I think I'm best described as a philosophy YouTuber and former edgy atheist

Meaning, I think, is used synonymously with purpose

And purpose is something like reason to act or reason to be. Whenever anybody acts in any way

when I pick up a glass of water to have a drink, when I walk to a bus stop or something

there will be a reason why I've done that. These kinds of behaviours don't just spring up ex nihilo

They exist for some kind of reason. And so if you ask me why it is that I'm reaching my arm over there

it might be because I'm trying to pick up a glass of water. Why am I doing that? I don't just do that randomly

Well, because I'm thirsty. Okay, well, why am I thirsty? Well, now we're kind of into some biological science

You might say, well, it's been a while since I've last had a drink. And then you might describe what it is about my biology that causes thirst

And you might even give an evolutionary explanation for why it is that we've developed this sensitivity to thirst

and eventually this kind of has to bottom out somewhere It will either have to bottom out in some evolutionary reason or this contingent chain of reasoning just essentially goes back forever or it terminates in something which is self

For the religious, it will be God. Everything they do, even if they don't cognize it all the time

will be for the glory of God. And if you're a secular person, it will likely be something else

For some people, their meaning in life might be the raising of their children. And for most people

it probably is relational. And when people say that they found their meaning in life

I think a lot of the time they found that self-justifying principle. The thing that the nihilist recognizes is that the values he or she holds are not grounded

in anything other than their own preferences or aesthetic preferences. Nihilism comes in many forms and depending on the context can mean many different things

But most broadly, it's the lack of belief in or belief that there is no such thing as an objective purpose to life or to the actions that we commit and the behaviors that we portray within life

A lot of people think that if you lived like a nihilist, you'd sort of rot away in bed

Some nihilists may do that. And I think there is actually a correlation, a strong correlation between philosophical nihilism and practical depression

However, nihilism is not about the actual consequences or the things that you're doing

It's about the purpose behind them. It's about the meaning behind them. And so suppose that you're feeling thirsty

I could explain to you that the only reason you're feeling thirst is because of some animalistic drive that you had no control over

But you're still thirsty. You still have that desire. You still have that value of quenching your thirst

And so you'll still do that. And the same applies in all areas of life, art and music and poetry, but also including relationships, friendships, that kind of stuff

You're still going to want to do those things. It like Camus famously described in The Myth of Sisyphus this person who suddenly recognizes the structure of their day waking up having breakfast getting in the car going to work taking a break work going back home eating some food going to sleep starting again

And you sort of start to notice that you're doing this. And it's not anything about what you're doing

it's realizing, taking a step back and realizing that there's no meaning to any of this

There's no, that there's nothing more than just my doing it. It doesn't go any deeper than that

One of the still greatest expositions of nihilism that can be found in the printed word

is the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament. Ecclesiastes takes us through the reflections of this man, this anonymous author

Some have tried to identify him, but it doesn't really matter who it is. We know that he was a great man, a king

He lived an illustrious life, but he saw no meaning in it

And he keeps coming back to this word, hevel. which means literally something like wind

And so it's translated as vanity by the King James. Vanity of vanities. Everything is vanity

Meaningless, meaningless. Everything is meaningless is one translation. Absurd, absurd. Everything is absurd is my favourite

He's like, I denied my eyes no pleasure that they saw. If I wanted something, I took it

I drank wine, I partied, I lived life. But in the end, I saw that it was all hevel

It was all just wind. It's just nothing. It just happens and then it's gone and it doesn't mean anything

But the most interesting thing is that it seems to suggest that everything that this guy was saying was true

That it is all just wind, but that somehow by just fearing God and keeping his commandments, you have somehow solved the problem

I don't think that that's a very satisfying solution, but then I think that that is the great theme of nihilistic literature

People try for a kind of solution, but ultimately, for me at least, they seem relatively unsatisfying

Fast forward thousands of years and you get Albert Camus' Myth of Sisyphus

which famously ends with this idea of imagining Sisyphus happy. In fact Camus is celebrated for the starkness of the opening line of the Myth of Sisyphus that there is one serious philosophical question and that is suicide because everything else you know how many dimensions there are to

space whether abstract numbers exist so all of that is secondary the most foundational question

is whether or not you're going to as he once put it have a cup of coffee or kill yourself today

you look at the seeming arbitrariness of the world around us the way that the environment and the

Organisms within it seem to just sort of almost randomly evolve according to literal just battles for survival

I think people want something a little bit more than that. They want something which feels worthwhile

that's somehow sort of justified by some universal principle. It's almost like a moral element, that it's a good thing to be alive

that it's a good thing to live a meaningful life. and that kind of thing i think is very difficult to to ground objectively in fact if somebody ever

asks me how i might console myself in the face of these existential woes genuinely at least

personally it is in agnosticism it's in the fact that i do not know the first thing about why any

of this exists of course i don't you know and sometimes people ask me in a context on a podcast

or on a stage or something, implicitly as if I'm going to have some answer

as if I've worked it out and I'm going to be able to communicate that to people

And I'm interested in philosophy, so I might have read something that helps to elucidate a concept

or I might be able to put a word on something that you've been thinking but didn't know

was also thought by other people. But we're doing the same thing here

and ultimately I have absolutely no idea what the ultimate answers are

And so that kind of consoles me. And I suppose I'm just not convicted of nihilism