The lower a man stands in an intellectual regard, the less of a problem is existence itself for him; everything, how it is and that it is, appears to him rather a matter of course.
A really stupid viewpoint. Hardly to be taken seriously. Some even acknowledge—one often reads that stuff on cesspools like YouTube—that extinction is our fate, but shrug it off, instead “we” have to “win” by getting our species to 21 (twenty-one) billion in the next centuries. I am not joking. Someone wrote this. Apparently, some people think this way. They want to imply that existence itself is self-explanatory and so great that simply existing is sufficient in terms of meaning.
Which is a lie. Philosophy itself and religion are a testimony against this rather modern view. Vox Day once summed it up: one reason for the lack of faith in the West today is the unsurpassed wealth we had and still have to an extent. Apparently, many people are fine with hedonism – or rather they pretend that they are. After all, many do wonder and ask metaphysical questions.
What if one is born sick, mentally ill, disabled? On the bottom rung of the status ladder? I would not even ascribe to shallow views like being itself is meaning enough if healthy and well-off.
Not only the Buddha: Holy Scripture itself—Ecclesiastes, for example—is opposing this view.
See also Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Representation: Volume II Chapter XVII. On Man’s Need of Metaphysics:
The lower a man stands in an intellectual regard, the less of a problem is existence itself for him; everything, how it is and that it is, appears to him rather a matter of course.
Great thinkers like Schopenhauer or Nietzsche were seekers who grappled with reality. They also knew what they rejected. And Schopenhauer was a lot less condemning of Christianity than Nietzsche.
As Don Colacho wrote:
Despite his fury regarding Christianity, Nietzsche’s genealogy is uncertain. Nietzsche is a Saulus who passed out on his way to Damascus.
And so there is a reason that atheist materialist philosophies are getting so much coverage. After all, if celebrities or even famous scientists—Stephen Hawking, for example—instead said that of course they are believing Christians and go to Church, drastic changes of our society would ensue.
Without God, no basis for either morality or meaning exists. (See also MGTOW.)
Says Gómez Dávila:
Man is important only if it is true that a God has died for him.
To live is modern man’s only value.
Even the modern hero does not die except in the name of life.