The reason some art is felt as greater than others is because it is experienced by the self as being innately significant. The greater the art the more it is charged with significance; thus Beethoven is greater than Cliff Richard. And the only reason art can be experienced in this manner is because this category of significance is intrinsic to the mind & life. Were life denied of inner meaning then it would be impossible for art to resonate with this meaninglessness.
Words forming meaningful sentences are, tautologically, meaningful; an idea if true is meaningful. The imposition of this meaninglessness notion upon life is in itself an intellectual category which if true renders itself false; the point of an intellectual category being that it is meaningful, though there is no paradoxical 'if it is true' about it...it is simply a false & bizarre mental category when applied to life. Its only justified usage is for false ideas such as life being devoid of meaning, & the real issue here is how does one end up with such an atrophied, diseased notion of life. Dostoevsky called nhilism the "lackey of thought", & this is probably the key to this sickness. See here.
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5 comments:
anyone who claims Beethoven is better than Cliff Richards is an a-whole, and I can't allow such a slight, perhaps you don't fully appreciate what Cliff Richards has done for humanity, how he has taken Wimbledon through the rainy days almost single-handedly is truly awe-inspiring and breath-taking to say the least (we haven't seen Beethoven ever attempt such a feat), I feel you are disrepecting a true English icon, anyone who hasn't witnessed the pop-video with the ageing Richards roller-bladeing down the street has missed out on so much artistic expression. Sir Cliff isn't going even nearly far enough, Saint Cliff is how I would rate him!!!
Ha! Anonymous you coward for not even signing your name.
Cliff Richards a saint? Huh? So Beethoven never played Wimbledon. Well for that matter he didn't do Summer holiday either.
But let me ask you this? Did Saint Cliff get chosen to be brought back through time by Bill and Ted? Huh? Did Sir Cliff help those most excellent adventurers get an A grade? I don't flipping well think so.
You just remember that you son of a bitch, the next time your rollerblading pop-pap saint is singing his bilge.
San Dimas high school rules!
I may indeed have done Sir Cliff an injustice. Though right now I'm all confused...my world has been thrown into disorder.
'the real issue here is how does one end up with such an atrophied, diseased notion of life'
Yeah, why be a nihilist in the first place. What do the nihilists say? Can we ask them? Surely not that Reason itself compels them. Can they be that disinterested?
Would it be grossly patronising and out of order to suggest that the reason for nihilism might have something to do with the emotions?
Some kind of partial and biased dısappointment with life.
That seems the best justificatin for nihilism I can think of. Not of course that it is an intellectually compelling one.
When Im deeply suicidal I can become a philosophical nihilist. So thats some evidence from my life.
I'd say it's perhaps impossible to separate the intellectual & the emotional in how one ends up with meaninglessness. The inner world or emotional one would seem a deeper one than the reasoning self & I spose it'd make sense that the emotional dearth calls into being the reasoning that justifies this detachment from life. Though also you could argue that someone following the path of apparent reason that ends with nihilism via the death of God & the moral universe, arrives at this emotional death-place because of following the error-strewn pathway of reason. Dostoevsky believed in life being primarily a spiritual arena & that things like utilitarianism led inevitably to nihilism....in short the exaltation of Reason as a false God removed from life leading to inevitable false states, & he hinted at the notion that these ideas were themeslves dark spiritual entities designed to lead astray. He included the lines below of Pushkin's in his foreword to his novel about nihilism & its causes & effects- Demons :
Upon my life the tracks have vanished,
We've lost our way, what shall we do?
It must be a demon's leading us
This way & that around the fields.
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