I found the author's chauvinism unbearable: dismissing nihilism and eternalism as "obviously wrong" throughout just re-raised the same question in me every time - why?
I'll start with something that absolutely made me nearly snap my neck from shaking my head.
> The way out is to recognize that meaningness is neither subjective nor objective. It is a collaborative accomplishment of dynamic interaction. One might say that it lives in the space-between subject and object; or that it pervades the situation in which it manifests, including both subject and object. But these metaphors are misleading; meanings simply don’t have locations.
First - what? This is the kind of drivel people in drum circles mutter about, not rigorous thought. This is pseudo-religious psychobabble, informed and supported by nothing but a hunch. To reject all of the worlds religious traditions, authors from Camus to Nietzsche, and several thousand years of disciplined human thought in favor of this guy's musings on a website would be the height of insanity. To be more specific:
I understand that eternalism is unfavorable in the scientific mind, and don't feel too much need to explain or defend it. Though I will say this: if we live in a deterministic and finite universe, then everything has some sense of meaning or purpose, at least insofar as its relationship to the other moving parts. Eastern philosophy hints at this sort of part-to-whole meaningfulness constantly, to dismiss it wholesale in favor of your prejudice for your own wonky beliefs is the height of chauvinism.
His bias towards nihilism was sickening as well as wholly circular. First, nihilists generally believe that "life has no meaning" - which is a good place to start the debate. If we believe that rocks have no meaning, that plants or clouds have no meaning, then what makes us so special? What exactly gives us meaning? Are we not a coincidence in the great book of history? Are we to just blindly commit the fallacy of placing ourselves at the center of our beliefs about how the universe works? I'm not saying that nihilism is the one true way or anything (as I'm not with Eastern religion) but I am saying that it's more coherent and rational than this dude's blog.
Furthermore, it is okay to be a nihilist and have preferences about things while accepting that those preferences are either arbitrary, irrelevant to the world outside of them, pre-determined, unstable, or in some other way meaningless. In support of his belief that nihilism is obviously wrong, he generally points to a belief that "it doesn't work" or that meaning is obvious - when it clearly isn't. If meaning were obvious, why the hell would you have to write a half baked e-book about it? That which is truly obvious doesn't need the kind of straw-grasping this guy attempts to rationalize his worldview.
In closing, I give this article a 2/10. I did like his emphasis on the practical, and on stances over ideologies. But the actual content is barren- marred by a need to make up new words while ignoring the work of others, as well as a totally lackluster conclusion that gets in its own way for lack of supporting detail. This is what happens when you give someone with apparently no formal understanding of the history of thought a platform to espouse their Freshman-level beliefs about the way the universe works to a crowd of interested onlookers.
I'll start with something that absolutely made me nearly snap my neck from shaking my head.
> The way out is to recognize that meaningness is neither subjective nor objective. It is a collaborative accomplishment of dynamic interaction. One might say that it lives in the space-between subject and object; or that it pervades the situation in which it manifests, including both subject and object. But these metaphors are misleading; meanings simply don’t have locations.
First - what? This is the kind of drivel people in drum circles mutter about, not rigorous thought. This is pseudo-religious psychobabble, informed and supported by nothing but a hunch. To reject all of the worlds religious traditions, authors from Camus to Nietzsche, and several thousand years of disciplined human thought in favor of this guy's musings on a website would be the height of insanity. To be more specific:
I understand that eternalism is unfavorable in the scientific mind, and don't feel too much need to explain or defend it. Though I will say this: if we live in a deterministic and finite universe, then everything has some sense of meaning or purpose, at least insofar as its relationship to the other moving parts. Eastern philosophy hints at this sort of part-to-whole meaningfulness constantly, to dismiss it wholesale in favor of your prejudice for your own wonky beliefs is the height of chauvinism.
His bias towards nihilism was sickening as well as wholly circular. First, nihilists generally believe that "life has no meaning" - which is a good place to start the debate. If we believe that rocks have no meaning, that plants or clouds have no meaning, then what makes us so special? What exactly gives us meaning? Are we not a coincidence in the great book of history? Are we to just blindly commit the fallacy of placing ourselves at the center of our beliefs about how the universe works? I'm not saying that nihilism is the one true way or anything (as I'm not with Eastern religion) but I am saying that it's more coherent and rational than this dude's blog.
Furthermore, it is okay to be a nihilist and have preferences about things while accepting that those preferences are either arbitrary, irrelevant to the world outside of them, pre-determined, unstable, or in some other way meaningless. In support of his belief that nihilism is obviously wrong, he generally points to a belief that "it doesn't work" or that meaning is obvious - when it clearly isn't. If meaning were obvious, why the hell would you have to write a half baked e-book about it? That which is truly obvious doesn't need the kind of straw-grasping this guy attempts to rationalize his worldview.
In closing, I give this article a 2/10. I did like his emphasis on the practical, and on stances over ideologies. But the actual content is barren- marred by a need to make up new words while ignoring the work of others, as well as a totally lackluster conclusion that gets in its own way for lack of supporting detail. This is what happens when you give someone with apparently no formal understanding of the history of thought a platform to espouse their Freshman-level beliefs about the way the universe works to a crowd of interested onlookers.