WIBCI if we really BELIEVED or really didn’t?
Wouldn’t It Be Cool If we truly understood what it is we believed, not what we were told/brought up/influenced into believing? WIBCI there was a moment in time when we were hit with the full force of what we believed, or what we DIDN’T believe?
(Per Wikipedia) Nihilism: is a family of philosophical views that reject the existence of any objectively meaningful purpose, moral value, truth, knowledge, or related concepts. Nihilistic views span several branches of philosophy, including ethics, value theory, epistemology, and metaphysics.
Existential nihilism asserts that life has no objective meaning or purpose. The idea that all individual and societal values are ultimately pointless has been associated with various responses.
Medusa has sometimes appeared as representing notions of scientific determinism and nihilism, especially in contrast with romantic idealism. In this interpretation of Medusa, attempts to avoid looking into her eyes represent avoiding the ostensibly depressing reality that the universe is meaningless. Jack London uses Medusa in this way in his novel The Mutiny of the Elsinore:
“I cannot help remembering a remark of De Casseres. It was over the wine in Mouquin’s. Said he: ‘The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie.’ “
— Jack London, The Mutiny of the Elsinore
Morbid, yes. Devastating, yes. Thoughtful, yes. His own………YES.
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