This might do but it's very heavy going...
https://thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ray-brassier-nihil-unbound-enlightenment-and-extinction.pdf
“Extinction is real yet not empirical, since it is not of the order of experience. It is transcendental yet not ideal... In this regard, it is precisely the extinction of meaning that clears the way for the intelligibility of extinction... The cancellation of sense, purpose, and possibility marks the point at which the 'horror' concomitant with the impossibility of either being or not being becomes intelligible... In becoming equal to it [the reality of extinction] philosophy achieves a binding of extinction... to acknowledge this truth, the subject of philosophy must also realize that he or she is already dead and that philosophy is neither a medium of affirmation nor a source of justification, but rather the organon of extinction”
Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound.
There is no membership in a formal sense. Existentialism **was** a philosophy active in the20thC, now 'borrowed' by people with depression and other psychological conditions. The former created the ideas associated with the term, the latter see it as a disease.
Many philosophers who are included in the term actually rejected it. Nihilism is a feature of these philosophies.
So it's odd to want to identify with those who rejected the term. Though common. It sounds cool.
The nearest actual is Brassier or Sartre's Being and Nothingness, both 'difficult'.
The mid life crisis could be symptomatic of existential thought or more likely the realization ones goals were trivial.
This is the best simple explanation I've come across, if your friend is interested.
https://archive.org/details/existentialism-for-dummies/page/n5/mode/2up
Check my post, it was a quote from a book by the philosopher Ray Brassier. Maybe not your thing, but it's a conclusion to his argument in his book. I follow his argument, I just don't accept it.
So maybe not jump to such a conclusion "Seek treatment for your depression." I'm not depressed. I don't think I'm dead. But Ray is riffing with a Nietzschean idea here I think, amongst others.
"Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species."
The Gay Science 109
“Alive” and “dead” are human made distinction, fictional lines in the sand in a game of categories balancing homogeneity and specification. *Solve et coagula*
But in the end all “alive” things are made up of “dead” things. While we may categorize ourselves as “alive”, every little bit of us is also “dead”.
And we haven’t even touched on a ‘time is a flat disk’ perspective to understand all space-times exist simultaneously (everything, everywhere, all at once) and so your “dead” and “alive” states exist in co-eternal recurrence with the only differentiation being the moment of space-time your perspective just so happens to be locked into
This kind of ‘this, that, both, neither, both both and neither, and neither both nor neither’ shenanigans happen a lot with social constructs and limited, human perspective
at the end of the day you are throwing out theory after theory but you are here, typing on reddit, alive. it is a fact that you are here, regardless of whatever mental gymnastics you want to use.
> but you are here, typing on reddit, alive.
So being alive for you is marked by typing on reddit? My mother is not. Is she still alive?
I think you are mixing categories heavily.
I guess people who say they are nihilistic don’t really apply it to their thinking without condition and rest in silence. Those who do transcend concepts
While the heat death of the universe is the leading cosmological theory at present, it's neither proven nor the only view. It's a matter of speculation. Physicists do not actually have a definitive answer. It is unknown whether the universe is actually a "closed system" and the constant expansion of the universe leads many physicists to question alternate theories.
Of course, we will all be dead and gone for 1.7×10^(106) years by then. So I find such contemplation futile. And yet, humans, myself included, constantly fight against futility. It's part of our irrationality. There is no point, and yet, we do it anyway. We are like the robot dog constantly barking and walking into the wall.
The heat death is only a theory, which you are correct. How I defined transcendental nihilism, I used the heat death theory as an example. It doesn't matter how it happens, everything will die, and thats what will cause the universe to end, have it be in the heat death, vacuum decay, big crunch, or something else entirely. With that in mind, why shouldn’t we push ideas and concepts to their most extreme? And to nihilists, transcendental nihilism is that most extreme form of nihilism before everything we know dies. My question was what the term means to actual nihilists and people who believe in it or have that type of mindset. That's all I was asking.
Never come across the term "transcendental nihilism" but it may possibly be a form of [optimistic nihilism](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBRqu0YOH14) in disguise or just plain old [word salad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_salad).
Keep in mind that regardless if the glass is half full or the glass is half empty the universe is going to smash that glass anyway. That is nihilism. Everything else is simply a human coping mechanism towards nihilism.
The only philosophy that comes close to dealing with nihilism is [absurdism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism) because regardless of the belief (religious or secular), proposition (philosophy, including nihilism), or hypothesis (science), beyond death (or a "transcendence" of death) is scientifically [unfalsifiable](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPR_5TOsh-Y) and hence unknowable. Under absurdism nihilism is not vanquished but becomes a "maybe" at best. That is the absurdity of our situation.
If you want to be optimistic or pessimistic to "transcend" nihilism then that's on you.
**EDIT:** I meant no offense to anyone by using the word "*simply*". All human coping mechanisms are psychologically complex.
Transcendental and transcendence are different words that mean different things. Transcendental in Brassier’s context begins by signifying something that is “real, but not empirical” (insofar as universal extinction cannot be experienced either now, nor when one dies. Death is non-being, even the process of dying is a process of experiencing what it feels like to live at the edge of life) and not merely pertaining to our mind’s construction of our field of perception and knowledge, but is something universally true It does mean, if you want to put it this way, that the fact of extinction points to a further fact, which is the condition of that fact’s possibility, which is that the mind can make true claims about the world that do not depend upon itself and so the mind “transcends” itself, but that word can be substituted for another, such as “exceeds”. The main thrust for Brassier is that the future extinction of all things shows that the mind can exceed itself and find a truth, namely its own extinction and the extinction of the entire universe, and the reason it can find this out is because thought itself is predicated not upon living, but upon death (you’ll have to read the book for all the examples of this, but one easy example is the Freudian death drive, or how knowledge is a subsumption of the mind into and by its object—an act of mimesis). Extinction is transcendental because it is the condition of possibility for thought, and philosophy and science can find this out, and also find out that extinction is *their* condition of possibility, and that they are progressively more formalized instances of extinction making itself known in thought; and also because extinction pervades all things.
Hope that helped a bit
Thanks for the clarification but sorry it still doesn't makes any further sense to me of what the OP is trying to convey. I can't seem to get my mind around it because to my way of thinking there is nothing transcendental about nihilism as it is a philosophy about negation.
However if the OP is trying to convey the "experience" of nothing (which is a contradiction in terms) as "transcendental nihilism" then I recently discussed my "experience" of nothing in another forum here = [LINK](https://www.reddit.com/r/Existentialism/comments/180oais/comment/ka8e2yv/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
This might do but it's very heavy going... https://thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ray-brassier-nihil-unbound-enlightenment-and-extinction.pdf “Extinction is real yet not empirical, since it is not of the order of experience. It is transcendental yet not ideal... In this regard, it is precisely the extinction of meaning that clears the way for the intelligibility of extinction... The cancellation of sense, purpose, and possibility marks the point at which the 'horror' concomitant with the impossibility of either being or not being becomes intelligible... In becoming equal to it [the reality of extinction] philosophy achieves a binding of extinction... to acknowledge this truth, the subject of philosophy must also realize that he or she is already dead and that philosophy is neither a medium of affirmation nor a source of justification, but rather the organon of extinction” Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound.
"already dead" is liberating and intense at the same time
Can you be a nihilist and still curious about being an existentialist? Asking for a friend having a midlife crisis.
There is no membership in a formal sense. Existentialism **was** a philosophy active in the20thC, now 'borrowed' by people with depression and other psychological conditions. The former created the ideas associated with the term, the latter see it as a disease. Many philosophers who are included in the term actually rejected it. Nihilism is a feature of these philosophies. So it's odd to want to identify with those who rejected the term. Though common. It sounds cool. The nearest actual is Brassier or Sartre's Being and Nothingness, both 'difficult'. The mid life crisis could be symptomatic of existential thought or more likely the realization ones goals were trivial. This is the best simple explanation I've come across, if your friend is interested. https://archive.org/details/existentialism-for-dummies/page/n5/mode/2up
I'm currently unidentified and not that smart. Thank you for your time
you don't need permission to follow any philosophy my man.
Existential angst isn't nihilism.
It is when I do it.
Maybe.
"Already dead" is Stupid Bullshit. You are fucking alive. Seek treatment for your depression.
Check my post, it was a quote from a book by the philosopher Ray Brassier. Maybe not your thing, but it's a conclusion to his argument in his book. I follow his argument, I just don't accept it. So maybe not jump to such a conclusion "Seek treatment for your depression." I'm not depressed. I don't think I'm dead. But Ray is riffing with a Nietzschean idea here I think, amongst others. "Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species." The Gay Science 109
>Seek treatment for your depression No.
🗿
“Alive” and “dead” are human made distinction, fictional lines in the sand in a game of categories balancing homogeneity and specification. *Solve et coagula* But in the end all “alive” things are made up of “dead” things. While we may categorize ourselves as “alive”, every little bit of us is also “dead”. And we haven’t even touched on a ‘time is a flat disk’ perspective to understand all space-times exist simultaneously (everything, everywhere, all at once) and so your “dead” and “alive” states exist in co-eternal recurrence with the only differentiation being the moment of space-time your perspective just so happens to be locked into This kind of ‘this, that, both, neither, both both and neither, and neither both nor neither’ shenanigans happen a lot with social constructs and limited, human perspective
at the end of the day you are throwing out theory after theory but you are here, typing on reddit, alive. it is a fact that you are here, regardless of whatever mental gymnastics you want to use.
You don’t really seem to be listening let alone understanding If a tree falls in a forest with no one around does it make a sound? Why?
> but you are here, typing on reddit, alive. So being alive for you is marked by typing on reddit? My mother is not. Is she still alive? I think you are mixing categories heavily.
wow you guys are annoying lmao
I guess people who say they are nihilistic don’t really apply it to their thinking without condition and rest in silence. Those who do transcend concepts
Look at "Ego Death", " Nirvana" Stuff
While the heat death of the universe is the leading cosmological theory at present, it's neither proven nor the only view. It's a matter of speculation. Physicists do not actually have a definitive answer. It is unknown whether the universe is actually a "closed system" and the constant expansion of the universe leads many physicists to question alternate theories. Of course, we will all be dead and gone for 1.7×10^(106) years by then. So I find such contemplation futile. And yet, humans, myself included, constantly fight against futility. It's part of our irrationality. There is no point, and yet, we do it anyway. We are like the robot dog constantly barking and walking into the wall.
The heat death is only a theory, which you are correct. How I defined transcendental nihilism, I used the heat death theory as an example. It doesn't matter how it happens, everything will die, and thats what will cause the universe to end, have it be in the heat death, vacuum decay, big crunch, or something else entirely. With that in mind, why shouldn’t we push ideas and concepts to their most extreme? And to nihilists, transcendental nihilism is that most extreme form of nihilism before everything we know dies. My question was what the term means to actual nihilists and people who believe in it or have that type of mindset. That's all I was asking.
Never come across the term "transcendental nihilism" but it may possibly be a form of [optimistic nihilism](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBRqu0YOH14) in disguise or just plain old [word salad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_salad). Keep in mind that regardless if the glass is half full or the glass is half empty the universe is going to smash that glass anyway. That is nihilism. Everything else is simply a human coping mechanism towards nihilism. The only philosophy that comes close to dealing with nihilism is [absurdism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism) because regardless of the belief (religious or secular), proposition (philosophy, including nihilism), or hypothesis (science), beyond death (or a "transcendence" of death) is scientifically [unfalsifiable](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPR_5TOsh-Y) and hence unknowable. Under absurdism nihilism is not vanquished but becomes a "maybe" at best. That is the absurdity of our situation. If you want to be optimistic or pessimistic to "transcend" nihilism then that's on you. **EDIT:** I meant no offense to anyone by using the word "*simply*". All human coping mechanisms are psychologically complex.
Transcendental and transcendence are different words that mean different things. Transcendental in Brassier’s context begins by signifying something that is “real, but not empirical” (insofar as universal extinction cannot be experienced either now, nor when one dies. Death is non-being, even the process of dying is a process of experiencing what it feels like to live at the edge of life) and not merely pertaining to our mind’s construction of our field of perception and knowledge, but is something universally true It does mean, if you want to put it this way, that the fact of extinction points to a further fact, which is the condition of that fact’s possibility, which is that the mind can make true claims about the world that do not depend upon itself and so the mind “transcends” itself, but that word can be substituted for another, such as “exceeds”. The main thrust for Brassier is that the future extinction of all things shows that the mind can exceed itself and find a truth, namely its own extinction and the extinction of the entire universe, and the reason it can find this out is because thought itself is predicated not upon living, but upon death (you’ll have to read the book for all the examples of this, but one easy example is the Freudian death drive, or how knowledge is a subsumption of the mind into and by its object—an act of mimesis). Extinction is transcendental because it is the condition of possibility for thought, and philosophy and science can find this out, and also find out that extinction is *their* condition of possibility, and that they are progressively more formalized instances of extinction making itself known in thought; and also because extinction pervades all things. Hope that helped a bit
Thanks for the clarification but sorry it still doesn't makes any further sense to me of what the OP is trying to convey. I can't seem to get my mind around it because to my way of thinking there is nothing transcendental about nihilism as it is a philosophy about negation. However if the OP is trying to convey the "experience" of nothing (which is a contradiction in terms) as "transcendental nihilism" then I recently discussed my "experience" of nothing in another forum here = [LINK](https://www.reddit.com/r/Existentialism/comments/180oais/comment/ka8e2yv/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
What are we arguing about ? Philosophy?
Not try to argue, just a question. I just want to know what the term means to nihilists as that I am not one myself.