The Folly Of Optimistic Nihilism

It is folly to believe that nihilism is true in light of the epistemological limitations that prevent beings like myself from knowing if meaning exists or not, but it is an even greater folly to believe in a more specific type of the ideology called optimistic nihilism.  This kind of existentialism holds that an absence of any objective values (which are only a subset of the much larger range of objective truths that would exist regardless) is liberating, empowering, and worth celebrating, as it means one can live as one pleases in a reality with no higher purpose than that.  Any sort of favorable existential outlook, though, is erroneous if nihilism is true.

It is one thing to celebrate subjective preferences when they do not conflict with values for which there is evidence, but it is something else entirely to pretend like there is any intellectual basis for optimism within a nihilistic lifestyle or belief system.  The latter is completely asinine, a delusion that any thinker should be able to easily falsify.  Absurdism (apart from the baseless addition of existential perseverance to its core concepts by Camus) is sound due being the epistemologically valid response to an ultimate inability to prove that meaning exists; optimistic nihilism is inherently contradictory.

Unless optimism is treated as nothing but a subjective reaction to indifferent logical facts--not that nihilism can be established with reason as anything more than an unverifiable possibility--it is incompatible with nihilism.  To say that nihilism, if it is true, would be a philosophical basis for optimism is to affirm two concepts that exclude each other.  Meaninglessness leaves no room for optimism or happiness outside of a subjective attitude rooted in personal psychology or a denial of nihilism's ramifications rather than in philosophical truth.

It is irrational to believe in any existential ideology that is assumed, as nihilism must be.  There are no logical facts from which is follows that there is no such thing as meaning, even if nihilism is logically possible--and it is even compatible with some forms of theism [1].  A nihilist is guilty of mere assumptions, but one that advocates for optimistic nihilism as a coherent existential framework is guilty of assuming two ideas that cannot both be true simultaneously.  Either optimism is warranted or there is nothing meaningful about any aspect of reality, but only one of these notions can be true.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/06/arguments-for-nihilism.html