Buderus69 t1_ix5ag2v wrote on November 20, 2022 at 9:21 PM

Reply to comment by PeenieWibbler in Engaging with philosophy gives you a toolkit that can help you lead a better and more meaningful life. by IAI_Admin

I will try to make a short example for a bigger thought pattern: imagine nihilism combined with the donkey paradox.

If you figure that existence is meaningless, in a sense that nothing has inherently any value, and the only way to give something subjective meaning is by choosing for it to have meaning, yet since every possibility to choose is equally meaningless you suddenly can't set yourself to choose any direction.

Like the donkey that can't choose if it wants to squelch it's thirst first or eat the hay and then starves to death, you are stuck in an endless void of not making any sensible choice for either "decision tree" to give anything meaning, and in such deteriorate into a mere observer, someone that does not participate in life and can do nothing else than be.

Trying to escape this would be meaningless, as we stated before one would find no value in trying to escape it, the baseline would not change.

Having come to such a conclusion would make it difficult if not impropable for one to get out of again, choice of improving perspective would be futile. One would have "thought" themselve into a figurative pigeon-hole.

This is just one example, there are (philosophical) thoughts that can possibly be harmful and permanently altering for a mind, like an abstract parasite that latches on and can't be removed, created by mere logic. And only a very specific set of information might help them out of this, which might be questionable if they ever find this 'key' in their lifetime, possibly being stuck with this thought-pattern till the end of their life (which in our example is even questionable if this person would even seek out such information).

PeenieWibbler t1_ixaqsl6 wrote on November 22, 2022 at 1:10 AM

I see what you're saying. It is a dilemma. To me neither the cause nor solution to that lie specifically in philosophy or stoicism, but rather in Buddhism. Existence is an illusion, none of it really matters or means anything but simultaneously it does all matter. Because what you do and how you handle it determines whether or not you will ever escape it and how much you will suffer in the meantime.

Stoics, as far as I've read, kind of touch on the existential crisis a bit, but the reality is we exist and therefore we suffer but we only suffer and only suffer so greatly because we think we exist. It can seem very convoluted and took me a long time to come around to but Buddha even said that a "dispassion for life" is one of the many steps to enlightenment and ultimately ending rebirth. Eventually you realize it is futile. You cannot escape the suffering, it is part of the world and part of nature, but you can learn and train yourself to escape your perception of suffering. There is meaning in living like this, but once again that meaning is just part of the overall illusion.

The bottom line, really, is just practice love and compassion. The rest sorts itself out but eventually most of us have to make a conscious choice to wake up, and only then do we see the illusion.