D05 · Despair and Nihilism
Meaninglessness and nihilism
The existential vacuum: feeling that life has no point, values are hollow or achievement is empty.
Cues
Showing 11 of 11 cues
“To be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain understanding must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself ... the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.”
“I am less convinced that intimate personal relationships are the only source of health and happiness. In the present climate, there is a danger that love is being idealized as the only path to salvation. When Freud was asked what constituted psychological health, he gave as his answer the ability to love and work. We have over-emphasized the former, and paid too little attention to the latter ...”
“I know that it gives one great inner force, calmness, and happiness to communicate with such great thinkers as Socrates, Epictetus, Arnold, Parker. ... They tell us about what is most important for humanity, about the meaning of life and about virtue.”
“A scholar knows many books; a well-educated person has knowledge and skills; an enlightened person understands the meaning and purpose of his life.”
“For you see what our discussions are all about - and is there anything about which a man of even small intelligence would be more serious than this: what is the way we ought to live?”
“The capacity to be alone is a valuable resource when changes of mental attitude are required. After major alterations in circumstances, fundamental reappraisal of the significance and meaning of existence may be needed. In a culture in which interpersonal relationships are generally considered to provide the answer to every form of distress, it is sometimes difficult to persuade well-meaning helpers that solitude can be as therapeutic as emotional support.”
“The difficulties of our psychotherapeutic work teach us to take truth, goodness, and beauty where we find them. They are not always found where we look for them: often they are hidden in the dirt or are in the keeping of the dragon.”
“The man whose interests are all outside is never satisfied with what is necessary, but is perpetually hankering after something more and better which, true to his bias, he always seeks outside himself. He forgets completely that, for all his outward successes, he himself remains the same inwardly ... Obviously the outward lives of men could do with a lot more bettering and beautifying, but those things lose their meaning when the inner man does not keep pace with them.”
“To be satiated with the “necessities” [of external success] is no doubt an inestimable source of happiness, yet the inner man continues to raise his claim, and this can be satisfied by no outward possessions.”
“Man, the bravest of animals, and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far.”
Fallacy of misplaced concreteness
Mistaking abstract concepts for concrete reality: abstracting away life, value and purpose to model billiard balls or rockets, then falsely concluding that concrete reality itself is senseless, valueless and purposeless.