Term Papers on Youre Really Nothing At All

Term Paper Title	Youre Really Nothing At All
# of Words	751
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	3

You're Really Nothing at All

Nihilism is the characteristic value-disease of our times. The word comes
from the Latin root for "nothing", with more ancient connexions with the
word for "trifle". Nihilism is the general phenomenon of human values
having no evocatory power, in that questions about meaning fail to yield
answers that are trustworthy or in the truth, but rather a void of
senseless silence. While episodes of nihilism could be identified
throughout our species' cultural history, the label is usually applied to
the crisis of valuation that now grips the planet's pre-eminent culture,
the so-called 'Western' or Euro-American culture.

The concept of nihilism recieves its most penetrating analysis in the work
of the German genius Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), who called nihilism
"the most uncanniest of guests". Writing in the twilight of the nineteenth
century, Nietzsche sketched an overall theory of value, in which the human
animal invents value mattrices with which to survive within, and perhaps to
dominate, his physical and psychological environments. Nihilism is the
result of a faulty value-system turning back on itself and its human
creators, ultimately devaluing itself and causing the experience of
nothingness on the many levels of human consciousness.

Specifically, Nietzsche accuses the platonic/christian schema of being
inadequate to the needs of superior human beings, in that it promotes an
anemic and unaesthetic worldview. This worldview is based on the illusion
of another, more real world than the one we inhabit on earth, a
supersensible world for which our actions here become merely derivative
rituals. Plato's Ideas and the Christian God become the guarantors of all
meaning for our lives. But Nietzsche maintained that this was a fiction
that detoured us from being human, and that made men and women into slaves
fettered to a herd mentality that strangled our profound creative urges.

Nietzsche saw this platonic/christian worldview coming apart at the seems
in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. The results, he said, would be
an increasingly frantic search for new sources of meaning by the European
mind, including cataclysmic wars and the pursuit of ever more powerful
forms of intoxication. The history of our century, with its global
conflicts and increasing chemical, sexual, and materialistic orgiastics are
instructive in this regard.

For even if we indul...

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