Nihilism, to my mind has a naturally corrosive effect on the horizon. This was part of Dostoevsky's criticism of it, who found God after wasting his youth amongst the angry intellectuals. Auden found god also and was saved. That segment by Baudelaire would suggest he also desired to believe, and perhaps was able to convince himself of something. But then it occurs to me that its meaning would depend on when he wrote it - I think when he was young, cause his mum was still alive. Nietzsche went the furthest with it, then went mad.
Mr Zapffe must have been fun at parties. I'm always cautious of the tendancy of nihilism to collapse into pessimism. As a purview, nihilism has this one disadvantage - it possesses few resources for the provision of consolation. Any major religion (including the various rationalisms) is far better equipped to assuage, conceal, disguise or otherwise mitigate the carnage of our mortality, whereas nihilism finds itself obliged to rather brutally confess to it in the starkest term available. Nihilism you might concede is somehow faithful to the truth in this, but I can't see what good it would do to someone who's world has just lost its meaning. Nihilism, after all, is not the idea that there is no meaning to life, but that there is no essential, universal meaning. For me this means that meaning is born as much as it dies, it mutates and glows, it turns and curdles, it dawns and sets and explodes and freezes and rots and blooms and communicates in all the illicit metaphors of nature. If we happen to need meaning, then that is our
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I thought the Baudelaire quote was late ni his career, but I guess it's just late in the Journals. It comes after the entry when he desribes having been "touched by the wings of madness," or somesuch ...
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