“Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.” ― Albert Camus
The following three pictures follow a similar thematic idea of Nihilism, which follows the belief and concept of life being meaningless alongside rejecting religious, moral and other principles that are seen to be governing and limiting people’s mindset. The first picture follows Existentialism in Nihilism; the second with Absurdism in Nihilism uses an image of a man laughing; and the last one with Moralism in Nihilism. While my partner and I agree with some of these concepts on some level, there are definitely areas where we may find it too extreme or just opposing our personal views. It is interesting to explore certain aspects of beliefs and views and through these three pictures, we are trying to express what certain aspects Nihilism are and their philosophical importance.
Picture 1:
Existential by Deri maulana via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0
To start out, I would like to create an outline of sorts of Nihilism, particularly Existential Nihilism, with a term that contrasts it in a way, which is automatism. People living in a state of automatism often never ask themselves what the meaning of their own lives are, but rather they simply seek to do activities or things that they would find pleasurable and go on with their lives, repeating the same actions over and over again through their life, toiling in purposelessness. The difference between automatism and nihilism is the lack of self-awareness. You wake up, eat your breakfast, drive to work, spend the whole day at work, drive back, relax on the couch and watch TV, do more work, go to sleep, and repeat. These things can be found in many people without the awareness of the meaningless in what they are doing. That’s not to necessarily say being self-conscious about it would be better, however.
The word Nihilism got its name from “nihil”, a Latin root which means nothing. Nihilism is about everything having the value of worthlessness and therefore existential nihilism suggests there is no objective meaning to life. Historically, the world has found a purpose of sorts through religion and the social construct of the sense of morality, but in the modern world of a mostly secular society, many never seek religion as their purpose, perhaps focusing on one thing as their temporary answer. An example could be someone building their careers and forgetting all else in order to support their ego. The career becomes that person’s meaning of life and they would have no meaning without it.
This eventually leads us to the idea of how we can find meaning in life. If you’re ignoring the grand scheme of things and focusing on yourself, your satisfaction and happiness it’s not too hard to find; simply go out and do something you enjoy, just know that nothing would ever last. We believe that by making a choice and questioning ourselves as we continue on through life rather than just accepting things for what is given is what actually brings a sort of meaning to yourself. It’s important to note that, well, life’s meaning is simply subjective, but an entire life in the state of automatism or taking the path where you never truly examine yourself and your decisions would simply be a waste, and perhaps to many, truly meaningless.
Picture 2:
Laughing by Quinn Dombrowski via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0
For this picture, we’d like to focus on Absurdism in Nihilism. The belief of absurdism is about humans’ attempt to find meaning in their lives, and usually ends with two kind of conclusions: either we exist in a meaningless universe with no sort of intrinsic meaning or that everything has to be controlled by a higher power, probably by Religion. While God can’t necessarily be proven or disproven, historically religious beliefs have often times been disproven by science for me personally, the lack of evidence for any sort of higher power only ends with me in the conclusion that all around the world, billions of people are searching for the meaning to their existence when there probably isn’t one, yet kept on searching because they may want to or felt obligated to. In a way, many have found the irony to this quite funny. That the in the entire world full of people with their insignificant and meaningless lives trying to reach for something that isn’t there until every life as we know it eventually dies off and then one day, the universe dies off.
From a certain point of view, I see some connection with this to The Joker, the famous Batman villain from the comics and the films, particularly from the 2008 film The Dark Knight. In the film, the Joker sees the meaningless to life. He understands all the rules, the laws the entire social structure people yearn for in search of meaning in their lives and in the things they do to keep themselves in control of their lives and the idea that they believe there is always a certain order to things rather than just complete randomness, in a way, one big joke. He even says in the film, “You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it! I just do things. The mob has plans. The cops have plans. Gordon’s got plans. Y’know they’re schemers. Schemers trying to control their little worlds. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are. You know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even when the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I told the press that, like, a criminal would get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics. Because it’s all part of the plan. But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everybody loses their minds!”
By following the philosophy of the Joker, the billions of individuals around the world trying to control and understand their life kind of funny — the entire world is madness. That being said, I don’t think just because the needle in the haystack the billions of people are searching for doesn’t exist that people should just give up. To continue the analogy of the haystack, people should rather make the needle themselves. Knowing the meaningless in life should allow you to understand that the act of despairing over it itself is meaningless as well, so in conclusion, by keeping on moving forward despite the knowledge of the futility of life is all us humans can ever do to keep satisfaction and to perhaps be happy.
Picture 3:
Morality by Paulina_Cachero via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0
So for this picture, it continues the theme of nihilism and going into the path of moral nihilism. People who often believe in this often believe the concepts of right or wrong are social constructs rather than actually existing, seeing it more as whether to act on something that would either cause/prevent the existence of suffering. Moral would be about the prevention of suffering while immoral about the cause of suffering, but the concept is about the notion of these two ideas having no actual fundamental basis in reality.
This one is perhaps the one I disagree with the most as I highly doubt there are true ‘moral nihilists’ as anyone taking a stand against anything by saying that it would cause a negative effect or that it’s wrong would be a person taking a moral stand and therefore, contradicting the entire concept, though I do find this idea intriguing.
Reflection on the work:
I find the use of these images easily improve my work as rather than simply having the readers rely on the words I produce that may or may not communicate with them 100% effectively and completely, pictures can communicate twice the message with half the time. It’s been said that one picture is worth a thousand words and that is often times true – the brain has been trained to using images and visuals for communication far longer than it has with language and we can simply react in who knows how fast with just one image our eyes see. I’ve also noticed that through going through the pictures online that are available for free use that most of the time many of the images I come across aren’t necessarily ‘available’ in the technical sense, as most of them are copyrighted in a sense that it’s technically not legal for you to just take them off the web and use them, especially for commercial use. It’s my responsibility to at the very least give credit to the creator(s) or owner(s) of the image as they are truly the ones who have spent all the time and work on the images and it’s very much their right to have a say in whether you can simply take their work and use it to your convenience or not.