Pragmatic Nihilism Quotes

A desire to attain short-term happiness while laboring under the weight a looming death sentence is an obvious paradox. Suicide, as distinguished from medical euthanasia, is an emotional reaction to the absurdity of life. Suicide is a panic-stricken reflex induced by the sinister twins of fear and foreboding. A rational person does not commit self-murder because their longing for happiness is incongruent with their present day reality. Suicide is a superficial response to hard times; suicide is a pusillanimous solution. A more measured reaction and, therefore, ultimately a braver and logical tactic is to meet life’s pillbox of irrationality headfirst. Upon soul-searching reflection, a thinking person accepts that while he or she might never comprehend a unifying meaning of life they still prefer to experience each permitted day of life to the fullest. A pragmatic person accepts the cold fact that happiness is fleeting and death is inevitable. By acknowledging and accepting the underlying absurdity of life, the prisoner awakens to discover his own humanity. By refusing to cooperate with death, by working each day to expand personal consciousness, by savoring each moment of life regardless of its hazards, adversities, misfortunes, and seemingly lack of overriding purpose, an impertinent ward of time transcends his or her incarnate incarceration.

The "pragmatic" position taken by many scientists and humanists who cannot be troubled to think about ultimate things--the position that these principles are no more than experimental hypotheses which collective experience finds reliable--is surely unsatisfactory; it may offer a psychological explanation of the faith these principles inspire, but since it does not establish the foundation of that faith in truth, it leaves the whole scientific edifice on shifting sands and provides no sure defense against the irrational winds that periodically attack it. [...] Every man, as we have seen, lives by faith; likewise every man--something less obvious but no less certain--is a metaphysician. The claim to any knowledge whatever--and no living man can refrain from this claim--implies a theory and standard of knowledge, and a notion of what is ultimately knowable and true. This ultimate truth, [...] is a metaphysical first principle, an absolute truth. But with the acknowledgement, logically unavoidable, of such a principle, the theory of the "relativity of truth" collapses, it itself being revealed as a selfcontradictory absolute.