Depression is a mood—a physiological state which causes a psychological state.
Nihilism is sometimes offered by depressed people as a rationalization/justification of their behavior. It is an effect, not a cause.
Chronic depression can be treated pharmaceutically. Episodes of depression often respond to physical activity. Running is a good suggestion for some people.
Nihilism, as a philosophical position, can be treated by reading better philosophy. However, treating nihilism does nothing to cure depression.
I’m not talking about philosophical nihilism. I’m talking about a kind of psychological state: lack of motivation, lack of pleasure and desire, temptation to give up on everything. It’s the sense that very little matters.
I didn’t want to call it “depression” because I didn’t want to deal with the issue of whether this is a part of normal life or a pathology—I thought I would describe the psychological state itself, and taboo the name for it. I actually don’t know when and for whom pharmacological solutions are appropriate. That’s something I’d like to understand better.
Me too considering I’ve been on an SSRI for 2.5 years and I’ve just gotten progressively worse. I’ve asked for a consultation with a psychiatrist so hopefully he or she can shed light on the matter.
4.5 years later still on SSRI’s, a bit suicidal. Seeing a therapist, looking for a psychiatrist. Feels like I’m going to lose my mind and believe any old thing, return to a community and a way of life I despise (because of mind loss). So I came here to see what LW’s have to say on this and noticed my old post. This has been going on for a while, no resolution in sight.
I have a friend who suffers from severe depression. He has stated on many occasions that he hates himself and wants to commit suicide, but he can’t go through with it because even that would be accomplishing something and he can’t accomplish anything.
He has a firm delusion that he cannot do anything worthwhile, that the world is going to hell in a handbasket and nothing can possibly be done by anyone about it, and everyone else feels the same way he does, but is repressing it.
This makes talking with him about many subjects exceedingly difficult, as he will ignore or rationalize away actual evidence as being, at best, an exception to the rule of pessimism. It’s like talking to a patient with a disorder like somatoparaphrenia, where the ordinary person can see quite obviously that the patient has a problem, but the patient confabulates. He literally cannot see reason on these subjects—his brain or this deep-seated delusion won’t let him.
To the best of my knowledge he has been seeing therapists and psychologists and they have been unable to help him.
How should a rationalist deal with such a situation? Even if Singularity-level technology were available to repair the causes of his depression, he would refuse it if able. If such technology were available, would it be ethical to improve his quality of life against his will by changing his mind? I must confess I am almost at the point of not protesting his desire for suicide; he seems genuinely unhappy, and incapable of changing that fact of his own volition.
he has been seeing therapists and psychologists and they have been unable to help him.
As you probably already know, therapists and psychologists generally cannot prescribe anti-depressants—that takes an MD (psychiatrist). I am not a psychiatrist, nor do I play one on the internet. I have no idea whether the cause of your friend’s depression is biological or purely psychological. I have no idea whether his therapists have advised him to see a psychiatrist, or whether they are the kind of quacks who “don’t buy into the biological model”. So I don’t have the information I think I need, and I don’t even know enough about depression to know what information I do need to help you and your friend.
How should a rationalist deal with such a situation?
If I were in your shoes, I would call the local suicide prevention hotline. Tell them the story. They can give you good advice, which may include referring you to even better resources. Do it now. Those hotlines are open 24hrs, and the people (volunteers) who man them know what they are doing much more than I do.
He lives halfway across the continent, and he has been talking like this for months without doing physical harm to himself. Is it right for me to cause the intrusion into his life such a call would surely bring without stronger evidence that it’s necessary?
He is probably safe unless he starts getting less depressed, because at that point he’ll probably still be suicidal but have enough energy to do something about it. If he’s been stably in that condition for months then I don’t think it’s an emergency.
I’m fairly torn on advice for this case. If he really has tried everything and it hasn’t helped, then I don’t think living is much of an end in and of itself and he should be assisted in his wishes, or at least not prevented.(Be aware that I am biased, this is my perspective as someone who empathises with your friend)
If you think he hasn’t tried everything, then the intrusion is completely warranted. He is at the point where he literally can’t help himself. Therapy can only work if the patient has an interest in getting better, which he doesn’t.
Inklesspen, I also believe in respecting the guy’s autonomy. But it sounds like he might be willing to listen to someone who accepts the possible validity of his negative feelings and treats those feelings with respect.
The best reason for going on living is simply to see what happens next. Tell your friend to find and watch the video “Little Miss Sunshine”. Suggest that suicide might make sense, but then so might taking anti-depressant medication. But if he wants to try both, he has to do it in the right order. Shift him from talking about suicide to joking about suicide.
But, as I’ve already said, there are people who can give better advice than mine. Find out what they say.
I believe he does take medication; I remember him saying his psychologist started him on Abilify and he was terrified that Abilify would cause permanent muscle tics, as apparently it does in rare cases.
If he has a psychologist then there’s not much you can do directly to help. That’s sort of their job. However, it may help to just be there for him. And when he says something that’s obviously negative about himself and likely to be wrong, explain why it is wrong. That won’t do much, but it might help a tiny bit.
I’m told that talking about suicide is a “cry for help”. If he is your friend, you have a right and duty to help him.
Call your local suicide hotline. Educate yourself more efficiently than you are doing by asking questions here. Ask their advice, if you wish without giving your friend’s name or geographic location. They can give you far better information and better moral arguments about whether and how to intervene.
Tentative: have you tried telling him that the universe isn’t keeping score?
It seems to me that he’s running a script of trying to prove that he deserves to live. Or possibly a script about whether he’s allowed to let himself feel good about what he does. Check for influence from Ayn Rand. Some of her ideas are good, some of them are utterly poisonous.
There’s some level where he’s still trying to live, even if all he’s doing is trying to feel a little better by talking about what he’s thinking.
On the therapy side, I think bodywork helps, though it isn’t the only route. (Strong belief here.) Habitual thoughts and emotions correlate with neuromuscular pattern—that’s why, if you know someone well, you can tell what they’re thinking about by looking at them. On the therapeutic side, giving a person the experience of not going into those patterns can be useful.
I don’t know know how much difference your protesting his desire for suicide makes—as far as I can tell, it depends on how emotionally close he feels to you. It seems fairly common for people to not commit suicide because there are particular people they don’t want to hurt.
Honestly, I don’t know how much you can do. I’m having a hard fight with less serious depression—some progress, which I’ll probably write up.
Meanwhile, I think Holy Basil is doing my mood some good. This is a very tasty holy basil and rooibos blend.
As for the larger rationalist question, I don’t know. I don’t believe FAI + uploading = immortality. There’s too much that can go wrong on the individual level even if the clade survives.
I have a friend who suffers from severe depression. He has stated on many occasions that he hates himself and wants to commit suicide, but he can’t go through with it because even that would be accomplishing something and he can’t accomplish anything. [...] To the best of my knowledge he has been seeing therapists and psychologists and they have been unable to help him. How should a rationalist deal with such a situation?
That is very serious business, and it is not likely that you can handle it yourself. The first thing to do is make sure he’s seeing a competent therapist. If he’s lapsed, or his therapist is actually a quack, or his therapist for some reason doesn’t know what’s going on, that could be very dangerous. So get a name, contact him or her, and pass along what you just said. In writing. That is the most important thing.
(EDIT: Actually, this is probably too slow; the time it’d take to do what the previous paragraph describes is a substantial unnecessary risk. Contact a suicide prevention hotline first, as Perplexed says.)
He has a firm delusion that he cannot do anything worthwhile, that the world is going to hell in a handbasket and nothing can possibly be done by anyone about it, and everyone else feels the same way he does, but is repressing it.
The cause of this is probably biochemical, and must be addressed at that level. Unfortunately, identifying the cause of this sort of thing is hard, and there are no good tools for it. I would start by checking the basics of his therapists’ work—diet (especially micronutrients; ask if he takes a multivitamin), a minimum amount of regular exercise (pressure him into playing a sport with you if necessary), and a minimum amount of recurring social contact (weekly events that happen automatically without him having to do anything to arrange them).
After that, start looking at pharmaceutical solutions. Don’t encourage him to change anything without the approval of a licensed professional, since if he’s already borderline suicidal then the wrong change could tip him over the edge; but do find out what he’s taking, look it up on PubMed, and ask a psychologist other than the one he’s currently seeing whether his regimen is reasonable. Whatever it is, your description suggests that either he’s not taking it, it’s not working, or it’s making things worse. You can probably distinguish between the first and the other two possibilities, but not between the second and third. That information would be useful to his therapist; but beware that it could be both that he’s not taking it and that it doesn’t work, in which case letting his therapist blame the problem on non-compliance could be a problem.
As I said to Perplexed, he lives halfway across the continent. I do know his name and mailing address, but I talk with him exclusively over IRC. I know some of the therapies and medicines he’s taken, but I don’t know what he’s taking right now.
Part of my reluctance to take matters into my own hands is that I don’t know how to reliably tell a qualified psychiatrist or psychologist from a quack. I can look up what Wikipedia says about a specific therapy like ECT, but how do I know whether what it says is accurate enough to trust my friend’s life to it? As the status quo seems unlikely to have a catastrophic turn for the worse, I’m reluctant to do anything that would change it without either a strong confidence in its efficacy or at the very least a strong confidence that it will do no harm.
As the status quo seems unlikely to have a catastrophic turn for the worse
Neither of us is qualified to judge whether that’s true.
The fact that you talk with this person exclusively over IRC limits your options a little, but it also changes things in one important respect; it greatly increases the probability that you’re the only person (or only responsible person) with this information. He might tell you things that he doesn’t tell any of the people he interacts with face to face. If you’re the only one who knows, then you can’t just sit on that information.
If you do call a hotline, the first thing they do will probably be to find out who your friend’s psychiatrist is and contact them. The information you have is sufficient to do this discretely. They are well aware that doing the wrong thing could be disastrous, and aren’t likely to do anything stupid.
There are several philosophical positions known as nihilism. I’ll take a quick crack at the moral dimension. I will first give reference to the doctoral thesis of Richard Volkman, “Why be Moral? The Ethical Individualist Response to Alienation from Morality”, conveniently available in closed stacks at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The fully general solution starts with understanding morality as simply asking, “What do I have the most reason to do or want?” (credit to Sidgwick). Then, in noting regularities in my own behavior I should be forced to admit that I actually do act as though there’s a fact of the matter here. Even when pretending to take nihilism seriously, I eat food instead of scrap metal or drain-o; I say, “I am a nihilist” instead of “Unrepentant the fish ba-zoop whirrr gharble!”
Now that it’s apparent that even the supporters of nihilism necessarily regard nihilism as false, one can proceed to ask “What do I care about?” and work from the obvious things like food and TV up to more complicated notions such as friendship and awesomeness. Along the way one might notice that one must develop good habits of behavior (what we call ‘virtues’) in order to actually succeed at things like having friends and consistently acquiring food.
Nihilism, as a philosophical position, can be treated by reading better philosophy.
Got any suggestions?
I should have forseen that someone would ask that question.
Well, actually, I know almost nothing about “meaning of life” philosophers, except that there is this position called Existentialism. According to wikipedia:
The early 19th century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, posthumously regarded as the father of existentialism, maintained that the individual is solely responsible for giving his or her own life meaning and for living that life passionately and sincerely, in spite of many existential obstacles and distractions including despair, angst, absurdity, alienation, and boredom.
I’ve never read Kierkegaard, but I first heard about him in my teens, learned roughly what that wikipedia quote says, and have ever since then called myself an existentialist regarding the meaning or purpose of life. It just made sense to me. And I now realize, to my embarrassment, that I never bothered to ask the question: “Why bother making up a meaning for life, if it doesn’t already have any intrinsic meaning?” Or, if I did ask, I must have answered the question in the obvious way.
“Why not?”
Maybe Kierkegaard has a better answer. Though I don’t see how he could.
You may find this hard to believe, but Nietzsche (in his better works) is a better philosophical remedy to nihilism. Kierkegaard invests too much in a particular (religious) form to the meaning that one can create.
I started reading Nietzsche when I thought only nihilism might be coherent; and by the time I realized he wasn’t actually a nihilist, neither was I.
ETA: However, I’m not sure I’d recommend Nietzsche to someone grappling with this problem. His tone is still too dark for most readers, unless the rest of their life is in good shape (as mine was).
I recommend The Gay Science- it was written at his peak. But whatever you read, it needs to be a Walter Kaufman translation (or else a very modern one); most translators mangle him.
this is tangential to the thread; but Nietzsche’s writings frequently seem to be quite religious actually, take his Übermensch theme for e.g., which makes the absolute/divine/god/etc become part of man, a theme prevalent in Christianity as well.
Well, he was going insane by the time of his later writings (especially by the point of Ecce Homo, which still contains some brilliance); and furthermore, Zarathustra (where some of the least rationalist quotes come from) was intentionally written in a religious style. But the point is otherwise well taken.
We don’t have to make up a meaning for life; evolution has already provided us with several built in. The real work is reconciling them and filling in details, because evolution left some parts of our utility functions to be acquired from the environment, and never bothered to optimize for internal consistency.
Check out Learning Methods—it’s something like Cognitive Behavior Therapy, except that the idea is that if you pin down a habitual obstructive thought very precisely and then analyze it thoroughly, it’s no longer attractive.
Learning Methods is a lot more meticulous about tracking down exactly what people are thinking that gets in their way, and identifying errors in that thinking.
What I’ve seen of CBT seems like much simpler pattern matching.
Nihilism, as a philosophical position, can be treated by reading better philosophy. However, treating nihilism does nothing to cure depression.
I expect to an extent one can establish behavior despite shifts in psychological drives, if there is something to protect and honest non-compartmentalized philosophical position says you ought to perform certain actions, even if you don’t feel adequately driven (or passive drives strive to overpower).
Are we talking about nihilism here or depression?
Nihilism is a philosophical position.
Depression is a mood—a physiological state which causes a psychological state.
Nihilism is sometimes offered by depressed people as a rationalization/justification of their behavior. It is an effect, not a cause.
Chronic depression can be treated pharmaceutically. Episodes of depression often respond to physical activity. Running is a good suggestion for some people.
Nihilism, as a philosophical position, can be treated by reading better philosophy. However, treating nihilism does nothing to cure depression.
I’m not talking about philosophical nihilism. I’m talking about a kind of psychological state: lack of motivation, lack of pleasure and desire, temptation to give up on everything. It’s the sense that very little matters.
I didn’t want to call it “depression” because I didn’t want to deal with the issue of whether this is a part of normal life or a pathology—I thought I would describe the psychological state itself, and taboo the name for it. I actually don’t know when and for whom pharmacological solutions are appropriate. That’s something I’d like to understand better.
Me too considering I’ve been on an SSRI for 2.5 years and I’ve just gotten progressively worse. I’ve asked for a consultation with a psychiatrist so hopefully he or she can shed light on the matter.
4.5 years later still on SSRI’s, a bit suicidal. Seeing a therapist, looking for a psychiatrist. Feels like I’m going to lose my mind and believe any old thing, return to a community and a way of life I despise (because of mind loss). So I came here to see what LW’s have to say on this and noticed my old post. This has been going on for a while, no resolution in sight.
I have a friend who suffers from severe depression. He has stated on many occasions that he hates himself and wants to commit suicide, but he can’t go through with it because even that would be accomplishing something and he can’t accomplish anything.
He has a firm delusion that he cannot do anything worthwhile, that the world is going to hell in a handbasket and nothing can possibly be done by anyone about it, and everyone else feels the same way he does, but is repressing it.
This makes talking with him about many subjects exceedingly difficult, as he will ignore or rationalize away actual evidence as being, at best, an exception to the rule of pessimism. It’s like talking to a patient with a disorder like somatoparaphrenia, where the ordinary person can see quite obviously that the patient has a problem, but the patient confabulates. He literally cannot see reason on these subjects—his brain or this deep-seated delusion won’t let him.
To the best of my knowledge he has been seeing therapists and psychologists and they have been unable to help him.
How should a rationalist deal with such a situation? Even if Singularity-level technology were available to repair the causes of his depression, he would refuse it if able. If such technology were available, would it be ethical to improve his quality of life against his will by changing his mind? I must confess I am almost at the point of not protesting his desire for suicide; he seems genuinely unhappy, and incapable of changing that fact of his own volition.
As you probably already know, therapists and psychologists generally cannot prescribe anti-depressants—that takes an MD (psychiatrist). I am not a psychiatrist, nor do I play one on the internet. I have no idea whether the cause of your friend’s depression is biological or purely psychological. I have no idea whether his therapists have advised him to see a psychiatrist, or whether they are the kind of quacks who “don’t buy into the biological model”. So I don’t have the information I think I need, and I don’t even know enough about depression to know what information I do need to help you and your friend.
If I were in your shoes, I would call the local suicide prevention hotline. Tell them the story. They can give you good advice, which may include referring you to even better resources. Do it now. Those hotlines are open 24hrs, and the people (volunteers) who man them know what they are doing much more than I do.
He lives halfway across the continent, and he has been talking like this for months without doing physical harm to himself. Is it right for me to cause the intrusion into his life such a call would surely bring without stronger evidence that it’s necessary?
Yes. You already have the strongest evidence it is possible to get without him dying.
He is probably safe unless he starts getting less depressed, because at that point he’ll probably still be suicidal but have enough energy to do something about it. If he’s been stably in that condition for months then I don’t think it’s an emergency.
I’m fairly torn on advice for this case. If he really has tried everything and it hasn’t helped, then I don’t think living is much of an end in and of itself and he should be assisted in his wishes, or at least not prevented.(Be aware that I am biased, this is my perspective as someone who empathises with your friend)
If you think he hasn’t tried everything, then the intrusion is completely warranted. He is at the point where he literally can’t help himself. Therapy can only work if the patient has an interest in getting better, which he doesn’t.
Inklesspen, I also believe in respecting the guy’s autonomy. But it sounds like he might be willing to listen to someone who accepts the possible validity of his negative feelings and treats those feelings with respect.
The best reason for going on living is simply to see what happens next. Tell your friend to find and watch the video “Little Miss Sunshine”. Suggest that suicide might make sense, but then so might taking anti-depressant medication. But if he wants to try both, he has to do it in the right order. Shift him from talking about suicide to joking about suicide.
But, as I’ve already said, there are people who can give better advice than mine. Find out what they say.
I believe he does take medication; I remember him saying his psychologist started him on Abilify and he was terrified that Abilify would cause permanent muscle tics, as apparently it does in rare cases.
If he has a psychologist then there’s not much you can do directly to help. That’s sort of their job. However, it may help to just be there for him. And when he says something that’s obviously negative about himself and likely to be wrong, explain why it is wrong. That won’t do much, but it might help a tiny bit.
I’m told that talking about suicide is a “cry for help”. If he is your friend, you have a right and duty to help him.
Call your local suicide hotline. Educate yourself more efficiently than you are doing by asking questions here. Ask their advice, if you wish without giving your friend’s name or geographic location. They can give you far better information and better moral arguments about whether and how to intervene.
I called a suicide hotline once. I was put on hold for a long time, got frustrated, and hung up.
Tentative: have you tried telling him that the universe isn’t keeping score?
It seems to me that he’s running a script of trying to prove that he deserves to live. Or possibly a script about whether he’s allowed to let himself feel good about what he does. Check for influence from Ayn Rand. Some of her ideas are good, some of them are utterly poisonous.
There’s some level where he’s still trying to live, even if all he’s doing is trying to feel a little better by talking about what he’s thinking.
On the therapy side, I think bodywork helps, though it isn’t the only route. (Strong belief here.) Habitual thoughts and emotions correlate with neuromuscular pattern—that’s why, if you know someone well, you can tell what they’re thinking about by looking at them. On the therapeutic side, giving a person the experience of not going into those patterns can be useful.
I don’t know know how much difference your protesting his desire for suicide makes—as far as I can tell, it depends on how emotionally close he feels to you. It seems fairly common for people to not commit suicide because there are particular people they don’t want to hurt.
Honestly, I don’t know how much you can do. I’m having a hard fight with less serious depression—some progress, which I’ll probably write up.
Meanwhile, I think Holy Basil is doing my mood some good. This is a very tasty holy basil and rooibos blend.
As for the larger rationalist question, I don’t know. I don’t believe FAI + uploading = immortality. There’s too much that can go wrong on the individual level even if the clade survives.
That is very serious business, and it is not likely that you can handle it yourself. The first thing to do is make sure he’s seeing a competent therapist. If he’s lapsed, or his therapist is actually a quack, or his therapist for some reason doesn’t know what’s going on, that could be very dangerous. So get a name, contact him or her, and pass along what you just said. In writing. That is the most important thing.
(EDIT: Actually, this is probably too slow; the time it’d take to do what the previous paragraph describes is a substantial unnecessary risk. Contact a suicide prevention hotline first, as Perplexed says.)
The cause of this is probably biochemical, and must be addressed at that level. Unfortunately, identifying the cause of this sort of thing is hard, and there are no good tools for it. I would start by checking the basics of his therapists’ work—diet (especially micronutrients; ask if he takes a multivitamin), a minimum amount of regular exercise (pressure him into playing a sport with you if necessary), and a minimum amount of recurring social contact (weekly events that happen automatically without him having to do anything to arrange them).
After that, start looking at pharmaceutical solutions. Don’t encourage him to change anything without the approval of a licensed professional, since if he’s already borderline suicidal then the wrong change could tip him over the edge; but do find out what he’s taking, look it up on PubMed, and ask a psychologist other than the one he’s currently seeing whether his regimen is reasonable. Whatever it is, your description suggests that either he’s not taking it, it’s not working, or it’s making things worse. You can probably distinguish between the first and the other two possibilities, but not between the second and third. That information would be useful to his therapist; but beware that it could be both that he’s not taking it and that it doesn’t work, in which case letting his therapist blame the problem on non-compliance could be a problem.
As I said to Perplexed, he lives halfway across the continent. I do know his name and mailing address, but I talk with him exclusively over IRC. I know some of the therapies and medicines he’s taken, but I don’t know what he’s taking right now.
Part of my reluctance to take matters into my own hands is that I don’t know how to reliably tell a qualified psychiatrist or psychologist from a quack. I can look up what Wikipedia says about a specific therapy like ECT, but how do I know whether what it says is accurate enough to trust my friend’s life to it? As the status quo seems unlikely to have a catastrophic turn for the worse, I’m reluctant to do anything that would change it without either a strong confidence in its efficacy or at the very least a strong confidence that it will do no harm.
Neither of us is qualified to judge whether that’s true.
The fact that you talk with this person exclusively over IRC limits your options a little, but it also changes things in one important respect; it greatly increases the probability that you’re the only person (or only responsible person) with this information. He might tell you things that he doesn’t tell any of the people he interacts with face to face. If you’re the only one who knows, then you can’t just sit on that information.
If you do call a hotline, the first thing they do will probably be to find out who your friend’s psychiatrist is and contact them. The information you have is sufficient to do this discretely. They are well aware that doing the wrong thing could be disastrous, and aren’t likely to do anything stupid.
Most of the Wikipedia information on mental disorders and standard treatments for them is fairly accurate.
Got any suggestions? I’m pretty sure my own nihilism is caused by certain irrational beliefs I hold, but more weapons to use against it never hurts.
There are several philosophical positions known as nihilism. I’ll take a quick crack at the moral dimension. I will first give reference to the doctoral thesis of Richard Volkman, “Why be Moral? The Ethical Individualist Response to Alienation from Morality”, conveniently available in closed stacks at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The fully general solution starts with understanding morality as simply asking, “What do I have the most reason to do or want?” (credit to Sidgwick). Then, in noting regularities in my own behavior I should be forced to admit that I actually do act as though there’s a fact of the matter here. Even when pretending to take nihilism seriously, I eat food instead of scrap metal or drain-o; I say, “I am a nihilist” instead of “Unrepentant the fish ba-zoop whirrr gharble!”
Now that it’s apparent that even the supporters of nihilism necessarily regard nihilism as false, one can proceed to ask “What do I care about?” and work from the obvious things like food and TV up to more complicated notions such as friendship and awesomeness. Along the way one might notice that one must develop good habits of behavior (what we call ‘virtues’) in order to actually succeed at things like having friends and consistently acquiring food.
I should have forseen that someone would ask that question.
Well, actually, I know almost nothing about “meaning of life” philosophers, except that there is this position called Existentialism. According to wikipedia:
I’ve never read Kierkegaard, but I first heard about him in my teens, learned roughly what that wikipedia quote says, and have ever since then called myself an existentialist regarding the meaning or purpose of life. It just made sense to me. And I now realize, to my embarrassment, that I never bothered to ask the question: “Why bother making up a meaning for life, if it doesn’t already have any intrinsic meaning?” Or, if I did ask, I must have answered the question in the obvious way.
“Why not?”
Maybe Kierkegaard has a better answer. Though I don’t see how he could.
You may find this hard to believe, but Nietzsche (in his better works) is a better philosophical remedy to nihilism. Kierkegaard invests too much in a particular (religious) form to the meaning that one can create.
I started reading Nietzsche when I thought only nihilism might be coherent; and by the time I realized he wasn’t actually a nihilist, neither was I.
ETA: However, I’m not sure I’d recommend Nietzsche to someone grappling with this problem. His tone is still too dark for most readers, unless the rest of their life is in good shape (as mine was).
Ok, I guess reading some Nietzsche won’t kill me.
Indeed, it might make you stronger.
I recommend The Gay Science- it was written at his peak. But whatever you read, it needs to be a Walter Kaufman translation (or else a very modern one); most translators mangle him.
As I recall, Nietzsche was good about the impulse to action, but had the drawback of setting the threshold of respect too high.
this is tangential to the thread; but Nietzsche’s writings frequently seem to be quite religious actually, take his Übermensch theme for e.g., which makes the absolute/divine/god/etc become part of man, a theme prevalent in Christianity as well.
Well, he was going insane by the time of his later writings (especially by the point of Ecce Homo, which still contains some brilliance); and furthermore, Zarathustra (where some of the least rationalist quotes come from) was intentionally written in a religious style. But the point is otherwise well taken.
We don’t have to make up a meaning for life; evolution has already provided us with several built in. The real work is reconciling them and filling in details, because evolution left some parts of our utility functions to be acquired from the environment, and never bothered to optimize for internal consistency.
Check out Learning Methods—it’s something like Cognitive Behavior Therapy, except that the idea is that if you pin down a habitual obstructive thought very precisely and then analyze it thoroughly, it’s no longer attractive.
Thanks! I’m already CBTing but as I said, more weapons never hurt. :) What would you identify as the main differences between the two?
What flavor of CBT? Burns? MoodGym?
There are flavours?
Anyway, my therapist likes to use modules from the Centre for Clinical Intervention.
Thanks for the reference to MoodGym, I’ll check it out over the next couple of days.
Learning Methods is a lot more meticulous about tracking down exactly what people are thinking that gets in their way, and identifying errors in that thinking.
What I’ve seen of CBT seems like much simpler pattern matching.
I expect to an extent one can establish behavior despite shifts in psychological drives, if there is something to protect and honest non-compartmentalized philosophical position says you ought to perform certain actions, even if you don’t feel adequately driven (or passive drives strive to overpower).