NIHILISM
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You are currently reading a thread in /lit/ - Literature
You are currently reading a thread in /lit/ - Literature
For your listening pleasure, Concerto grosso, by His Eminence Hilarion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kC13O-GdMw
Are any of you familiar with Father Seraphim Rose's "Nihilism"? It was originally to be a chapter to a larger work, but he dropped it when he became a monk. For those who don't know, Father Seraphim, originally Eugene (monks take new names), was a homosexual who was into Nietzsche, and one of his lovers was a member of the Orthodox Church who was leaving it, but when he learned about it from him, he ended up being drawn to it, and it influenced him philosophically and politically to become a strong traditionalist.
Anyway, in Nihilism, Father Seraphim, interfacing with Nietzsche (but also condemning Nietzsche for being merely a new kind of nihilist), draws out a "dialectic" of nihilism. Different stages can and do overlap, but they still are broadly reactions against each other. Before the dialectic starts, truth is see as subject, it is God, truth is most ultimately known through revelation, truth revealing himself. The dialectic kicks in with liberalism, which started in the West with the Enlightenment. Liberalism redefines truth as an object, not something which reveals itself, but something discovered purely through reason, albeit still metaphysical. God here is deistic, just used to "tidy things up" and fix the loose ends of the system. Then Realism reacts against that, and says metaphysical truth is nonsense, what matters are material facts, which are found solely in the concrete world, not in gibberish like rights and so on. Then against realism reacts Vitalism, which observes that our perceptions all differ, and if perception of the material is the measure of fact or truth, then all perceptions are equally true, and truth therefore cannot be used to estimate the value of a statement; instead, statements should be valued by how much they affirm life, but even while saying this, vitalism rebels against the sanctity of life and often glorifies violence and evil as life-affirming. In reaction to vitalism comes Destructivism, which ceases to care about creativity, and is concerned only with worship of nothing, expressing itself through destruction (we see a bit of both of the last two movements in Stirner, who literally worships the creative nothing).
You can read the work here (you can skip the preface, which isn't by the author): http://oodegr.co/english/filosofia/nihilism_root_modern_age.htm
>>7989857
Pretty good summary. I'm familiar with Seraphim Rose but haven't read anyway.
> Liberalism redefines truth as an object, not something which reveals itself
Orthodoxy is stronger for having denied the modern impulse to equate "Truth" with "Knowledge." Rose is right to point out that from this mistaken position emerges a lot of problems of our age.
I will add, however, that a Thomist position should not fall into this trap.
>>7990799
I don't think it would, though I also think Scholasticism absolutely came out of the secularist movement in Islam, and Scholasticism absolutely laid the foundations for liberalism, although liberalism perverted it
>>7989857
>fell for the "Nietzsche was a nihilist" meme
But... There were relativists as far back as early Greece, I mean the sophists to an extent along with Pyrrho and who not. So what is this categorisation of stages.
I do not often engage your memes /lit/ do you guys actually take things like this and Nick Land seriously or is this just buklshittery.
