The Great Doubt

• Nihilistic questioning can be applied to any stable meaning, leading to an uncomfortable process of doubt.


• In Eastern thought, leaning into nihilism can trigger the "Great Doubt," a period of profound transformation through questioning established worldviews.

Transcript:

Stephen West

The nihilistic exercise of pulling the foundations

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philosopher from a specific cultural and historical background reflects upon how they conceive of the structure of their mind, and declares that what we might call their ‘self-referential abstraction’ is the universal model that theoretically applies to every sentient being across all space and time. (We should also not forget that, in practice,... See more

To bridge Aztec and ancient Greek ways of thinking, you could say that the basic sources for a lack of harmonic balance derive from: (1) metaphysical reasons, (2) observations about the complexity of the human psyche, and (3) observations about the role of moral luck. Even if we discard the Aztecs' view on metaphysical cosmology, the latter two

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