(May 16, 2022 07:28 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: "Existential nihilism is the philosophical theory that life has no inherent meaning whatsoever, and that humanity, both in an individual sense and in a collective sense, has no purpose.

Quote:That is to say: while objects have the capacity for purpose or meaning, there is no universal truth that guides this individual purpose.

Quote:Thus, without a universal purpose, all meaning that objects could have does not exist, and the idea of any purpose or meaning attributed to something is untrue.

Quote:If this is taken as a given, then existential nihilism holds that humans are compelled to make up meaning for themselves and others in the absence of a universal, unilateral meaning in order to spare themselves from the negativity surrounding the inevitability of death.

Quote:Existential nihilism explores both the nature of this invention and the effectiveness of creating meaning for oneself and others, as well as whether the latter is even possible. It has received the most attention out of all forms of nihilism in both literary and popular media.

Quote:Like metaphysical nihilism, existential nihilism stumbles when it comes to the nature of its conceptual existence. Common precursors to the paradox ask questions like Hegarty's,[1] implying that, if universal truth does not exist to give meaning to life and therefore nothing is objectively true

Quote:existential nihilist theory would be the universal truth that it claims does not exist. Thus, existential nihilism is at best an extremely flawed interpretation of the universe and at worst entirely untrue, as a theory which contends that nothing objective exists must necessarily then be subjective.

In this case it is either untrue or has meaning, which would mean that there is a universal meaning (derived from the logical conclusion that the universal truth is nothingness) or even some meaning, which would be contrarian to the original claim."---- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_nihilism

Quote:"If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning."---  C.S.Lewis

(May 16, 2022 07:28 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: "Existential nihilism is the philosophical theory that life has no inherent meaning whatsoever, and that humanity, both in an individual sense and in a collective sense, has no purpose..."

Sartre: "Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does." --Being And Nothingness (1943)

Sartre argued that a central proposition of existentialism is that existence precedes essence, which is to say that individuals shape themselves by existing and cannot be perceived through preconceived and a-priori categories, an "essence". The actual life of the individual is what constitutes what could be called their "true essence" instead of an arbitrarily attributed essence others use to define them. Human beings, through their own consciousness, create their own values and determine a meaning to their life.  
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism#Existence_precedes_essence

"Nihilism" is the belief that nothing matters. Existentialism is the attempt to confront and deal with meaninglessness...to not succumb to nihilism or despair: to not give up or avoid responsibility.
https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/engl_258/lecture%20notes/existentialism%20quick%20and%20dirty.htm

Sartre: Existentialism and Marxism
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/#PolHisEng

. . . the political value to which Sartre remained committed throughout his life: the value of freedom as self-making.

This commitment finally led Sartre to hold that existentialism itself was only an “ideological” moment within Marxism, which he termed “the one philosophy of our time which we cannot go beyond” (Sartre 1960 [1968, xxxiv]). As this statement suggests, Sartre’s embrace of Marxism was a function of his sense of history as the factic situation in which the project of self-making takes place.

Because existing is self-making (action), philosophy—including existential philosophy—cannot be understood as a disinterested theorizing about timeless essences but is always a form of engagement, a diagnosis of the past and a projection of norms appropriate to a different future in light of which the present takes on significance. It therefore always arises from the historical-political situation and is a way of intervening in it. Marxism, like existentialism, makes this necessarily practical orientation of philosophy explicit.

- - - - - -

Marxism Versus Existentialism (a "they are not compatible" view, from that era)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/novack/works/history/ch12.htm

The development of Sartre has been especially paradoxical. He worked out his original existentialist ideas under the sway of nonmaterialist thinkers such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger as a deliberate challenge to Marxism. In Being and Nothingness (1943) and Materialism and Revolution (1947) Sartre presented his philosophy as an alternative to dialectical materialism. Then in the late 1950s he made a turnabout and embraced Marxism, at least in words—which for him, as he explains in the first volume of his recent autobiography, have had a reality greater than the objective world.

In his latest philosophical treatise, The Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), the first section of which has been published in English as Search for a Method, he declares that existentialism has become a subordinate branch of Marxism which aspires to renew and enrich it. Thus the phenomenologist of existence who condemned dialectical materialism as false and a foe to human freedom in the 1940s now proposes to marry Marxism and existentialism.

To what extent, if any, can these philosophies be conjoined? Can a synthesis of the two be viable? This article intends to show that the contending world outlooks cannot be harmonised or integrated into one containing “the best features” of both.

A legendary alchemist thought that by putting together fire and water he would concoct that most desirable of delights, “fire-water”. Actually, the one nullifies or extinguishes the other when they come into contact. It is the same with Marxism and existentialism. Their fundamental positions over a broad spectrum of problems extending from philosophy and sociology to morality and politics are so divergent that they cannot really be reconciled.

This piece can do no more than indicate the main lines of their disagreement on the most important issues...

[...] For existentialism the universe is irrational; for Marxism it is lawful. The propositions of existentialist metaphysics are set in a context of cataclysmic personal experience. They all flow from the agonising discovery that the world into which we are thrown has no sufficient or necessary reason for existence, no rational order. It is simply there and must be taken as we find it. Being is utterly contingent, totally without meaning, and superfluous.

For dialectical materialism, reality has developed in a lawful manner and is rationally explicable. The rationality of nature and human history is bound up with matter in motion. The concatenation of cosmic events gives rise to cause-and-effect relations that determine the qualities and evolution of things. The physical preceded and produced the biological, the biological the social, and the social the psychological in a historical series of mutually conditioned stages. The aim of science is to disclose their essential linkages and formulate these into laws that can help pilot human activity.

The rationality, determinism, and causality of the universal process of material development do not exclude but embrace the objective existence and significance of absurdity, indeterminism, and accident.

However, these random features of reality are no more fundamental than regularity. They are not immutable and irremovable aspects of nature and history but relative phenomena which in the course of development can change to the extent of becoming their own opposites. Chance, for example, is the antithesis of necessity. Yet chance has its own laws, which are lodged in the occurrence of statistical regularities. Quantum mechanics and the life insurance business exemplify how individual accidents are convertible into aggregate necessities...