From The Big Lebowski:
Walter Sobchak: Nihilists! F*** me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.
So there’s this dude. (Not The Dude, of course!) He spends 5 years writing a 1,905 page … well, 1,905 pages which he sums up this way:
Every word, every thought, and every emotion come back to one core problem: life is meaningless … The experiment in nihilism is to seek out and expose every illusion and every myth, wherever it may lead, no matter what, even if it kills us.
Than he blows his brains out. In public. I guess he wanted to make a statement. So do I, and you can read it below.
Applause
First of all, I want to applaud the fellow for coming to the correct philosophical conclusion given his premises: In the absence of God, life is, indeed, meaningless. It’s all just predetermined and irrelevant physical and chemical processes; to argue that any one thing or state of affairs is inherently preferable to another is foolishness.
This has always seemed obvious to me, but I guess it’s not so to everyone. The most poignant part of the Boston Globe story linked above is this bit:
[His sister] wishes she could have made him see more of the beauty of life, and how we create our own value and give our own meaning to life.
No, no, no! That wouldn’t help! His whole point seems to have been that self-generated “value” and “meaning” have no force.
Prosciutto
Now, personally, I’m not a nihilist. I believe in God and Mercy and all that. But, even assuming I didn’t, and even though I agree with this fellow’s philosophical conclusion given such a premise, I can’t quite understand how he gets from the philosophical conclusion to suicide.
The Globe story quotes him as saying that the “unreasoned conviction in the rightness of life over death is like a god or a mass delusion.” I don’t see where rightness has to come into it; for me, it’s all about ham.
In the absence of acute suffering, which I am spared for the moment, I can see no reason to give up on life and deny myself its many pleasures — which are real, even if a nihilist would consider them meaningless. I don’t know what awaits me after death, but I do know that there’s delicious prosciutto available here and now. There might not be in the next life.
That’s enough reason to put down the revolver all by itself.
Alternatively
Or, as Woody Allen put it:
We don’t know if there’s a God … but there are women. Not in some imaginary heaven, but right here on earth. And some of them … some of them … shop at Victoria’s Secret …
