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This began as a response to a question: If nihilists believe there's no value in things, how can they value their own views?
Wikipedia says that Existential Nihilism is: life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value.
Notice the underlined words.
To existentialists, people make meaning, create purpose, and value things. Repeated: meaning, purpose and value are created by people. Outside of people, these things have no meaning, purpose or value.
After people value something, there still is no objective value, only the subjective value. In fact, each person can value something differently.
To a nihilist, the common mistake people make is to
In English (and probably in most or all languages), it's common to say, "The sunset is beautiful." This phrasing separates the beauty of the sunset from the person watching. I've watched beautiful sunsets while walking my dog. My dog seems not to care in the least. He sees no beauty.
In English, we say, "The sun is bright." The brightness is a scientific fact. It can be tested and measured. Two different people can measure it and come out with the same facts. The brightness is part of the objective physical sun.
But they can't do that with the beauty of the sunset. There's no way to measure beauty except to ask people. Even then, there might be people who don't find a sunset particularly beautiful.
For instance, how would the sunset look to a colorblind person? Is it really beautiful?
How about to a blind person?
So when one says, "The sunset is beautiful," one is really saying, "I was moved by the beauty of the sunset" or "I find the sunset beautiful." Because we often say the first sentence, we hear ourselves attributing the beauty to the sunset, independent of us. Talking like this, and hearing others talk like this, we slip into the habit of speaking and thinking this way.
Previous cultures, and some modern people as well, think that God is not just the creator of all things, but is the only judge that matters. So if a sunset is beautiful, it is God who judges it so. To the existentialist, this is a monumental error, to presume that a human judgement is the same as God's. Perhaps God thinks sunsets are ugly, but necessary. Perhaps God shakes her head at the naivite of humans, entranced by atmospheric colors. Perhaps God can see the separate colors during daytime and by comparison, their is much less beauty in a sunset. We don't know. Truly, says the existentialist, any beauty is in the judgement of the beholder. There's no beauty in nature.
We don't know.
How do we know that a rock is real? We feel its weight and its hardness in our hand. We see a tree or a mountain and know, from a great distance, that they exist. We smell breakfast and know that someone nearby is cooking. We hear footsteps and know someone's approaching. At times, our senses can fool us, but mostly we know because we sense, we perceive, we feel.
But then we make the quintessential human mistake. We call our emotions "feelings" as if they are senses. When we touch a rock, we know something's there. When we are moved by the beauty of the sunset, we mistakenly think we've perceived beauty. We feel that it's real.
Feelings are emotional thoughts, emotional reactions. They're important and real, but they tell us mostly how we're feeling, not so much about what's real.
But our emotional feelings come so quickly at times, we start thinking they're perceiving something real. Someone scolds us and we feel they're a bad person. We think we're sensing their badness. Someone has something we want and we feel jealous. The feeling seems to mean that we should have it. We think we're perceiving the rightness of us possessing it.
It happens all the time with fear. If we feel fear, we think there's danger. And if one out of 10 times there turns out to really be a danger, instead of realizing our feelings are 90% wrong, we think, "Aha! I was right!"
Why do people walk down dark alleys? Because they feel fine about it, not scared. Why do people eat poison mushrooms? Because they felt they'd be good to eat. Perhaps they know a lot about mushrooms and determined they looked like edible ones. Our feelings are decent guides, but they're not infallible. They're generated by our brain's guesses. They're not perceptions about what's real.
Rigorous existentialists value their emotions and perceptions similar to everyone else. But they think this value is subjective, that it emerges from their own brain, rather than being a property of those thoughts and feelings.
As for the trueness of their perspective, there's a difference between thinking and feeling it's true and thinking about its trueness. To an existentialist, the beauty of a sunset may feel true, but they see the ways it's not true, too. But when they consider the beauty as a subjective feeling, that seems like it can always be true.
So existentialists do value lots of things, even while thinking there's no value out in the objective world.