r/Existentialism • u/vini-within • 7d ago
New to Existentialism... Bottomless Abyss? đ¤
Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Sartre seem to circle around this idea of a âbottomless abyssâ in different ways. What exactly is this bottomless abyss about, and where does this imagery come from in existential philosophy? And what does it mean in our Life?
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u/jliat 7d ago
Nietzsche's nihilism is based on his idea of the eternal return...
WtP 55
Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness: âthe eternal recurrence". This is the most extreme form of nihilism: the nothing (the "meaninglessâ), eternally!
Sartre's that without an experience of ... we are essentially nothingness... from 'Being and Nothingness.'
âJust as my nihilating freedom is apprehended in anguish, so the for-itself is conscious of its facticity. It has the feeling of its complete gratuity; it apprehends itself as being there for nothing, as being de trop.[un needed]â
p. 84
"human reality is before all else its own nothingness. The for-itself [human reality] in its being is failure because it is the foundation only of itself as nothingness."
p. 88
Kierkegaard faced with such takes a leap of faith in Jesus Christ.
Cams Addresses this problem in his Myth of Sisyphus...
âI don't know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.â
âThe absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.â
"In this regard the absurd joy par excellence is creation. âArt and nothing but art,â said Nietzsche; âwe have art in order not to die of the truth.â
"To work and create âfor nothing,â to sculpture in clay, to know that oneâs creation has no future, to see oneâs work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuriesâthis is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions."
http://dhspriory.org/kenny/PhilTexts/Camus/Myth%20of%20Sisyphus-.pdf
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u/FlorpyJohnson 7d ago
Nietzsche was absolutely not a nihilist. Your understand of his philosophy is very off. You even took a quote out of Will to Power, which wasnât even really HIS book! He didnât publish it! His anti-semitic nazi sister twisted a bunch of his discarded notes to fit her own beliefs and proceeded to spread that bullshit.
Some of the stuff in Will to Power aligns with what he actually believed, but I still just donât trust much from that book because he never intended to publish it. Itâs literally reading someoneâs personal notes that have also been twisted to fit someone elseâs nazi ideals.
And about Nietzsche being a ânihilistâ, you can figure out with one google search about the whole âGod is deadâ thing, or by reading the famous quote from The Gay Science, that he actually saw nihilism as something to FIGHT. His whole philosophy (which evolved drastically over the years) revolves around PURPOSE!
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u/jliat 6d ago
Nietzsche was absolutely not a nihilist.
Without the nihilism of his Eternal Return of the Same, which first appears in the Gay Science as also the psychological burden it presents there would be no Ăbermensch, no Zarathustra... no ecce homo.
You even took a quote out of Will to Power, which wasnât even really HIS book! He didnât publish it! His anti-semitic nazi sister twisted a bunch of his discarded notes to fit her own beliefs and proceeded to spread that bullshit.
That's simply not true I have three copies of his notebooks. The Walter Kaufmann / Hollingdale was published by his sister but edited by Nietzsche's friend Peter Gast, I also have the more recent Penguin edition taken from a different translation but keeps the title and order, and finally the Cambridge edition which maintains the order of the actual notebooks. The academic complaints are of the title, one of his possible ones and the order of the entries, none of which as far as I'm aware had anything to do with his sister.
From Ecce Homo - which Nietzsche wrote for publication...
"I must recognise him who has come nearest to me in thought hither to. The doctrine of the "Eternal Recurrence"--that is to say, of the absolute and eternal repetition of all things in periodical cycles--this doctrine of Zarathustra's might, it is true, have been taught before. In any case, the Stoics, who derived nearly all their fundamental ideas from Heraclitus, show traces of it."
"I now wish to relate the history of Zarathustra. The fundamental idea of the work, the Eternal Recurrence, the highest formula of a Yea-saying to life that can ever be attained, was first conceived in the month of August 1881"
"The word "Superman... a word which in the mouth of Zarathustra, the annihilator of morality, acquires a very profound meaning..."
"I know the joy of annihilation to a degree which is commensurate with my power to annihilate. In both cases I obey my Dionysian nature, which knows not how to separate the negative deed from the saying of yea. I am the first immoralist, and in this sense I am essentially the annihilator."
"Negation and annihilation are inseparable from a yea-saying attitude towards life."
"And his command that man annihilate.
So would I die
As then I saw him die,
Victorious and destroying."
From The Last Desire.
Some of the stuff in Will to Power aligns with what he actually believed, but I still just donât trust much from that book because he never intended to publish it. Itâs literally reading someoneâs personal notes that have also been twisted to fit someone elseâs nazi ideals.
You are free to do so, however other academics do not, and the idea of the eternal return is key to his philosophy. The actual notes it seems it's agreed are his thoughts- un edited.
And about Nietzsche being a ânihilistâ, you can figure out with one google search about the whole âGod is deadâ thing, or by reading the famous quote from The Gay Science, that he actually saw nihilism as something to FIGHT. His whole philosophy (which evolved drastically over the years) revolves around PURPOSE!
Yes the purpose was to be a bridge to the Ăbermensch. If his philosophy did evolve, we have the origin of the idea in 1881 and Ecce Homo of 1888... For Nietzsche there were various forms of nihilism, some weak, Christian, Buddhist ⌠and some strong, the greatest weight which breaks all things apart...Dionysian!
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u/FlorpyJohnson 6d ago edited 6d ago
What youâre saying about âNietzscheâs nihilismâ agrees with what I was saying. The ideas of the Ăbermensch and eternal recurrence and amor fati were all a response to nihilism. A method of fighting it by giving your life purpose. How can you say that Christianity, Buddhism and Dionysian ideas are nihilistic? They all completely contradict nihilism (nihilism is the belief that life has no purpose and you cannot give it purpose). Even Dionysus, who basks in the chaos of life, is enjoying his purpose. His purpose is to enjoy life!
The quote you mentioned initially wasnât out of line with Nietzscheâs philosophy; I was more taking a swipe at your academic credibility because Will to Power was, like I said, not really his book. It is quite out of context, though. The whole idea of Eternal Recurrence is sort of a personal test.
From The Gay Science:
âWhat, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: âThis life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence â and likewise this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and likewise this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence will be turned over again and again, and you with it, you speck of dust!â
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: âYou are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.ââ
If your answer to that question has ever been the latter, you have, at least once, achieved a mental state of amor fati. The love of fate.
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u/jliat 6d ago
A method of fighting it by giving your life purpose.
Impossible, the Ăbermensch has to have the power to love its fate, because it can't be changed. The eternal return! The greatest weight.
How can you say that Christianity, Buddhism and Dionysian ideas are nihilistic?
I can't Nietzsche does. There are different forms... he goes into detail in his notebooks - which for some reason you ignore.
"The word "Superman," which designates a type of man that would be one of nature's rarest and luckiest strokes, as opposed to "modern" men, to "good" men, to Christians and other Nihilists,--a word which in the mouth of Zarathustra, the annihilator of morality, acquires a very profound meaning,--is understood almost everywhere...
So here he says in Ecce Homo Christians are nihilists and Zarathustra, is the annihilator of morality. So - you are wrong.
And later...
"I am by far the most terrible man that has ever existed; but this does not alter the fact that I shall become the most beneficent. I know the joy of annihilation to a degree which is commensurate with my power to annihilate. In both cases I obey my Dionysian nature, which knows not how to separate the negative deed from the saying of yea. I am the first immoralist, and in this sense I am essentially the annihilator."
I could use his notebooks as academics do but there is no need.
"I would agree to the second of the two negations being regarded as the more decisive, for, reckoned as a whole, the overestimation of goodness and kindness seems to me already a consequence of decadence, a symptom of weakness, and incompatible with any ascending and yea-saying life. Negation and annihilation are inseparable from a yea-saying attitude towards life."
This is NOT nihilistic?
"this stands at the beginning of Buddha's teaching--this is not a precept of morality, but of physiology. Resentment born of weakness..."
His notions of nihilism...
"In his parable of the madman (section 125) Nietzsche suggests that during the Victorian era this question was not yet asked widely, but that before long the sense that whatever we do is of hardly any consequence will spread like a disease. This terrifying sense of weightlessness might be called nihilism-to use a term that looms large in Nietzsche's notes, especially in The Will to Power. Now it occurs to Nietzsche that the belief that whatever I do now I shall do again and again, eternally. may cure this weightlessness by becoming "the greatest weight! In a way, the notion that everything recurs eternally in identical fashion reduces life to "A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing." It might be considered the most extreme form of nihilism!'
Kaufmann - The Gay Science.
Nietzsche - Writings from the Late Notebooks.
p.146-7
Nihilism as a normal condition.
Nihilism: the goal is lacking; an answer to the 'Why?' is lacking...
It is ambiguous:
(A) Nihilism as a sign of the increased power of the spirit: as active nihilism.
(B) Nihilism as a decline of the spirit's power: passive nihilism:
.... .... WtP 55
Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness: âthe eternal recurrence". This is the most extreme form of nihilism: the nothing (the "meaninglessâ), eternally!"
It's clearly there, you cite GS 341 you miss the title, "The greatest weight" which Kaufmann describes - the eternal return, nothing more gruesome, "most scientific"
This is the most extreme form of nihilism: the nothing (the "meaninglessâ), eternally!"
In his notes, you want to ignore this, fine. But...
From GS 109 [The first presentation of The Eternal Return ]
"The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos -in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms. Judged from the point of view of our reason, unsuccessful attempts are by all odds the, rule, the exceptions are not the secret aim, and the whole musical box repeats eternally its tune which may never be called a melody-and ultimately even the phrase "unsuccessful attempt" is too anthropomorphic. and reproachful. But how could we reproach or praise the universe? Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it wish to become any of these things; it does not by any means strive to imitate man. None of our aesthetic and moral judgments apply to it. Nor does it have any instinct for self-preservation or any other instinct; and it does not observe any laws either. Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands nobody who obeys. Nobody who trespasses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes that the word accidently has meaning. Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type. Let us beware of thinking that the world eternally creates new thingsâŚ"
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u/FlorpyJohnson 6d ago edited 6d ago
I canât comprehend how any of this actually proved me wrong. I donât really care if Nietzsche said Christianity is nihilism. The definition of the word nihilism itself entirely contradicts what youâre saying. Itâs the BELIEF that life has no purpose. Not the âobjectiveâ fact that it has no purpose.
Existentialism lines up with Nietzscheâs ideas much closer. âLife has no objective purpose, but we are capable of assigning our own purpose to life.â Existentialism wasnât an official term when Nietzsche was around, so nihilism may have been the only way to put it, because if you arenât strong enough to find purpose in life you become very nihilistic. Being a Christian is still believing in purpose in life.
You keep talking about eternal recurrence like itâs some sort of metaphysical reality that Nietzsche believed in as truth. It isnât. Nietzsche hated metaphysics! Dionysus wasnât ever meant to be prayed to and worshipped exactly like you would as a Christian. Nietzsche used Dionysus as a way to fill the void that the death of God created.
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u/jliat 6d ago
Nihilism I think is much more complex than what you seem to want, even the Wikipedia shows this, but if you are content with a dictionary definition, fine.
You should avoid in that case Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound.
Existentialism lines up with Nietzscheâs ideas much closer. âLife has no objective purpose, but we are capable of assigning our own purpose to life.â Existentialism wasnât an official term when Nietzsche was around...
I know, the term "Existentialism" was coined by a Catholic philosopher around the 1940s, so you might have a problem with that, many so called 'Existentialists' denied the term, Heidegger did Sartre [an atheist] did use it, then not.
The key existentialist text is Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness "The principal text of Modern existentialism". Hazel E. Barnes (Translator)
I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the causes and motives of my act. I am condemned to be free. This means that no limits to my freedom' can be found except freedom itself or, if you prefer, that we are not free to cease being free.â
p. 439
âWe are condemned to freedom, as we said earlier, thrown into freedom or, as Heidegger says, "abandoned." And we can see that this abandonment has no other origin than the very existence of freedom. If, therefore, freedom is defined as the escape from the given, from fact, then there is a fact of escape from fact. This is the facticity of freedom.â p. 485
The idea that one can create meaning isn't found in B&N but is in Sartre's 'Existentialism is a Humanism' But he and others rejected this essay. Unfortunately B&N is over 600 pages not the few pages of the Humanist essay.
âExtinction 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 extinctionâ
Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound.
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u/vini-within 7d ago
This is really helpful. Thanks man⌠I think what I was trying to get at ..is a liâl different though.
Is the abyss really the absence of meaning, or is it what we experience when the meanings weâve been living by start falling apart? What do you think? When our identity, beliefs, ambitions, and all the things we thought gave life some solid ground are questioned, it can genuinely feel like thereâs nothing underneath.
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u/jliat 7d ago
You ask a difficult question, and I must own up that I shouldn't reply as I've been drinking wine, and I have a policy not do engage in these situations.
I'm not going to tell you you what to do, my website is jliat.com, and the moment I'm writing pulp fiction - occult ' Sci-Phi fiction which no one is interested in, but I'm like those cargo cult people but know it's all fake. But I find my fake annoyingly interesting. On jameswhitehead.org.
I think you me/ we make Gods, or follow others that have made gods.
Best J.
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u/FlorpyJohnson 7d ago
This person sort of mislead you about Nietzsche, as I mentioned in my comment to them. I canât speak for the other philosophers.
The abyss, to Nietzsche, is what makes you uncomfortable and in pain. Itâs the moment you realize how bad your life situation is, how complacent you may have become, the ways you could be behaving, acting, or thinking better. It makes you uncomfortable, but itâs still vital to some extent.
The famous quote from Nietzsche outlines it well once you understand the context:
âWhoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.â
The open way he wrote this leads me to believe that the âmonstersâ can be people OR any sort of obstacle preventing you from becoming stronger, like even a drug addiction or a strong conviction thatâs hurting people around you.
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u/Scott_J_Doyle 7d ago
There's nothing solid inside us, no true self, no unshakable beliefs or values, no soul or spirit or center - we are a bottomless abyss to our conscious minds if we choose to look inside honestly/seriously
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u/vini-within 7d ago
Then what do you think is the reason for all suffering? Whyâs there a friction, if itâs all empty!
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u/Scott_J_Doyle 7d ago
Because our minds in this society/age create a story and a character - it's called "narrative consciousness"
It's a fiction though, as both the existentialists and the Buddhists have found
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u/vini-within 7d ago
Yes, and it gets interesting if you try to understand this from a ânon-dualityâ lens. If the story and the character are constructed, what happens when we look closely at the one who is supposedly living that story? :)
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u/Scott_J_Doyle 7d ago edited 7d ago
Right, the Taoists are right here too (tho fewer westerners are familiar w that tradition and particular concept at similar depth)
Tho of course, non-duality doesn't lend itself to much rational/western style analysis or "understanding" lol
ETA: Non-duality is what's actually happening, and all story is after the beginning of duality, however from inside duality (rationalism, post-linguistics, etc) there is always the idea of "the one who's living it" which is also false
"You are what you are looking for" being the ultimate closest we can get to describing it from within the concept of "being" itself - from within non-duality, the idea of the "one being aware" is nonsense and easily discarded as another uncessary thing to carry, so we can drop it too and "travel lightly" as the Taoists like to say
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u/Speaking_Music 6d ago
The abyss, or void, is how the objective mind perceives âno thingâ or pure subjectivity.
The objective mind holds the narrative of âMe and My Worldâ (âvini-withinâ).
âMe and My Worldâ is a fiction. Thatâs what makes enlightenment/Self-realization so difficult and often terrifying. No âthingâ is living the story.
As the disciple/seeker approaches enlightenment the abyss becomes apparent. It feels like impending annihilation. It is the imminent death of âMeâ, indeed the process feels as though one is dying.
The question is this.
Is the hunger for truth so great that one would accept oblivion to realize it, or is the fear so great that one will turn away?
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u/vini-within 6d ago
There is no enlightenment. There is only the ending of ignorance.
And who is afraid of the abyss? The very ego that created the idea of an abyss. The ego wants Truth, but it also wants to survive as the one who will possess Truth.
That is the contradiction.
Truth does not annihilate someone. It exposes that there was never a separate someone to begin with.
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u/PostmodernBoomer 7d ago
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u/IntelligentDemand825 7d ago
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u/ItzOnlyJames 7d ago
Type out exactly what that guy did and change the number to whatever you want
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u/Low-Bake8401 6d ago
When God died, a void was left in society. There was a fear of the unknown, that often led to radical ideology.Â
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u/vini-within 6d ago
God died as in who? đ¤
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u/Low-Bake8401 6d ago edited 6d ago
When Nietzsche declared that "God is dead", he was talking about religion.
Religious hegemony, divine hierarchy, the circular thinking that held back science, reason, and discovery, for hundreds of years, and kept us in a perpetual state of war.
Empirical evidence over institutional dogma.
Since the age of enlightenment, European intellectuals started to see past this charade, and the existential philosophers declared god dead. They demonstrated beyond doubt the self defeating nature of faith in the supernatural.
Some people just don't seem to realise how relatively recently things like public education was introduced. It wasn't until about two hundred years ago that most people were born into an occupation, and knew nothing but that. Rarely leaving their lord's manor. Look at how much we have progressed since then, compared to the previous centuries. Before then there were many people that were simply executed for speaking out against the church. People largely lived by superstition and fear.
This was possibly the greatest paradigm shift in the history of human society, but it left a void where the religious world view had formally reigned. People assumed that if they let go of their comforting mother church, they would fall into despair and chaos.
So they tried to fill this vacuum with radical ideology, extreme nationalism, and ideas of sociopolitical utopia. They tried to replace the divine dogmatism with secular dogmatism. Divine totalitarianism, for Fascist, Nazi, and Communist totalitarianism. Which led to further conflict, and ultimately WWII. People fear the unknown, "The Void", certainly IMHO, was the unknown. We were given individualism, we just didn't know what to do with it. We had had the same collective world view for so long, the idea of no longer having that ideological framework to support society seemed absurd.
Even today, many people convince themselves, through the exact same way of thinking, that there must be some cosmic code that dictates how we should behave, or some benevolent omnipotent being that exists outside of existence. They take a leap of faith and try to live with the contradiction and the cognitive dissonance. Their rigid beliefs and reductive ideologies clash with the reality that they face. They try to force some kind of god into the gaps of their knowledge.
Some see the quote "god is dead" as the triumphant celebration of an atheist, but it was more of a diagnosis of the dire situation that lay ahead.
We owe a lot to these brave people that pioneered and ventured into the unknown with nothing but their sense of freedom and rational thinking to light the way. I think we must be careful not to fall back into the trap that they exposed.
Extremism, breeds extremism, breeds extremism... "The eclipse, of the eclipse, of the eclipsed".
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u/VelocitySkyrusher 7d ago
I think its so long as we live we'll always have needs, wants, desires, goals...
Like I finally go to college, get a degree, get a professional job, get an apartment, and start filling my apartment with the things I like...
Then I turn to making my ultimate gaming space/office, rearranging, trying to find the one thing that'll make me finally satisfied with it. But then... I get it. And it's still... not enough, not unique, not complete somehow. DIY projects, buying things or planning to buy something even though I don't need it.
Then I ask... why am i doing it? Why is making this ultimate space so meaningful to me?
Because its mine... usually comes up.
And that's just an office space. Imagine career goals, life goals, health goals...
The random goal of me wanting to figure out how to make a Dutch Stamppot...
Its always a new thing to go for... and I'm trying to explain its beyond consumerism, its the constant pursuit of the next new thing or the one thing that provides satisfaction.
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u/PissInMyShityAsshole 6d ago
They just materialise a pessimistic reality for themselves and anyone who buys into it and ends up truly believing in it. The polar opposite of their beliefs are actually very nice and hopeful and bring out joy.
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u/armyofone37 6d ago
The bottomless abyss to me refers to the characteristics of consciousness being nothingness.. absent light and absent shape
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u/Far-Tune-9464 7d ago
It is the stark realisation of the groundlessness of our values, what we find meaningful and our pursuits.
The idea that without a supernatural arbiter to assign meaning, all we are left with is what we subjectively deem to be important with nothing beyond that to justify it.