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Perplexed comments on Strategies for dealing with emotional nihilism - Less Wrong
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I should have forseen that someone would ask that question.
Well, actually, I know almost nothing about "meaning of life" philosophers, except that there is this position called Existentialism. According to wikipedia:
I've never read Kierkegaard, but I first heard about him in my teens, learned roughly what that wikipedia quote says, and have ever since then called myself an existentialist regarding the meaning or purpose of life. It just made sense to me. And I now realize, to my embarrassment, that I never bothered to ask the question: "Why bother making up a meaning for life, if it doesn't already have any intrinsic meaning?" Or, if I did ask, I must have answered the question in the obvious way.
"Why not?"
Maybe Kierkegaard has a better answer. Though I don't see how he could.
You may find this hard to believe, but Nietzsche (in his better works) is a better philosophical remedy to nihilism. Kierkegaard invests too much in a particular (religious) form to the meaning that one can create.
I started reading Nietzsche when I thought only nihilism might be coherent; and by the time I realized he wasn't actually a nihilist, neither was I.
ETA: However, I'm not sure I'd recommend Nietzsche to someone grappling with this problem. His tone is still too dark for most readers, unless the rest of their life is in good shape (as mine was).
Ok, I guess reading some Nietzsche won't kill me.
Indeed, it might make you stronger.
I recommend The Gay Science- it was written at his peak. But whatever you read, it needs to be a Walter Kaufman translation (or else a very modern one); most translators mangle him.
As I recall, Nietzsche was good about the impulse to action, but had the drawback of setting the threshold of respect too high.
this is tangential to the thread; but Nietzsche's writings frequently seem to be quite religious actually, take his Übermensch theme for e.g., which makes the absolute/divine/god/etc become part of man, a theme prevalent in Christianity as well.
Well, he was going insane by the time of his later writings (especially by the point of Ecce Homo, which still contains some brilliance); and furthermore, Zarathustra (where some of the least rationalist quotes come from) was intentionally written in a religious style. But the point is otherwise well taken.
We don't have to make up a meaning for life; evolution has already provided us with several built in. The real work is reconciling them and filling in details, because evolution left some parts of our utility functions to be acquired from the environment, and never bothered to optimize for internal consistency.