[dmreedy]

If you find this subject interesting, the different ways the sort of post-enlightenment intellectual diaspora has begun to try and chase fundamental "meaning" again (after realizing perhaps they could not arrive at it by deduction), and the deeper nature of "religion" beyond the thing your parents used to drag you to on Saturday/Sunday, the author of this piece, Burton, also has a book called Strange Rites.

I've always enjoyed the lighthearted analysis of the Nietzchean "God is Dead" moment as asking:

"Yes, God is Dead. Congratulations; that was the easy part. Now what?".

He had is own answer of course, but, as the characters in this piece have discovered, it's not necessarily an effective one.

edit: ah they mention the book in the postscript of course.

[bccdee]

These people somehow passed existentialism by entirely. Nietzsche was just the beginning of a whole wave of thought bent towards grappling with a meaningless world. It's so philosophically impoverished to commit yourself to "rationalism" and then immediately begin rebuilding religious ritual without ever applying your vaunted reason to actually dealing with the absurd head-on.

[dmreedy]

Yeah, I'm not sure whether they passed it or just never got to it. To be fair I guess, it's not exactly what I would call a productive philosophy, if your goal is "productivity" (by some material definition) and not the act of philosophy in and of itself.

I feel like they looked in the mirror, saw only themselves, and decided what was needed was a better mirror, because there must be something else there.

[computerphage]

I mean there's https://meaningness.com/ which is pretty central in post-rationalist thought if you ask me, but maybe it's less central these days.

[bccdee]

Wow, that's a whole little rabbit-hole.

It's got that distinctly rationalist style of writing where they dedicate loads of words to these grand overly-detailed models and then skim over the places in their argument where they actually need to be rigorous. The entire argument behind one of the book's most important claims—that it's impossible for meaning to be subjective—seems to be left as implied by an anecdote about gambling at a casino. I haven't even been able to find a definition of "meaning" anywhere, so the implications of that anecdote end up being really difficult to parse.