First, the music. I've been pretty sloppy about putting these together, but basically, the idea is you click the playlist file in the folder and either listen or burn. I had something specific in mind with the track order in each of them, but it's no big deal I guess. Anyway, for this entry we have:
Sermonizing Nihilism
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=VWN0N6H3
Description: 10 tracks completely worth spacing out to. The title decsribes it better than my typing another paragraph would.
Recommended for: People who are normally used to listening to densely produced music and need a break.
A friend of mine recently wrote about Nihilism. From an emotional perspective. Truthfully, it was more of an existential crisis he described - he discussed questioning the worth of his experiences, of his impact, and of his direction and expressed an overwhelming sentiment of purposelessness (the humor in my typing about this on a Friday night while listening to "Re-offender" by Travis is not lost on me). He specifically requested that I not sermonize at length on Nihilism (I do that), so I found myself instead warning of the dangers inherent in the marriage between philosophies and those brief, intense emotional states people find themselves in. I guess that was pretty decent because honestly, in all likelihood, the last thing a person in that shape needs is to be taken hold of by "the nothing". But is it a symptom, or a source? Having had my share of dissociative-depersonalized moments (I often think I could look a Mack truck in the face and doubt its reality; don't even get me started on old photographs, either - this will probably be an entry in the future and maybe i should edit out this lengthy digression), I know a fair amount about doubt and nothing. Truthfully, the basis of just about every argument I form comes from deconstruction and doubt, ultimately embracing uncertainty instead of nothingness. So where am I going with all of this loosely connected thought? Back to the question of symptom/source. First, source. Perhaps the "nihil" is natural in some sense (see how I brought my personal considerations into play?) , a part of a collective solipsism-syndrome, a part of comfortable distance from the naked-dirt reality predating the industrial revolution (I'm aware of the ridiculous generalities I use here - I'm glossing over the surface of something). How would anything just mentioned relate to that "nihil"? It's a possibility that the subconscious doubt of a reality's truth would go hand in hand with the question of its worth, I think. As a symptom, I see it most clearly as a comparison complex. Vague questions of why we're here (for those of us who believe there's a "we" and a "here") plague us to varying degrees until our death. In juxtaposing that against standards of acheivement, service, purpose and a few billion stellar people, we become miniscule. We look to ourselves and all of what we have been and could be and think "nihil". As our great plans verge on the meaningless, it's hard not to see it that way. Everything I've said still seems distant from my friend, and from those introductory sentences. I guess the best way to wrap it neatly would be to say that his experience served as a prompt for me in evaluating how I see the emotional experience in the philosophy.
I changed tone a lot here. My ideas were frequently disconnected.They were even at times out of order. This was not an argument or an assertion. It was a meditation.
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