It’s funny how many people who hate “nihilism” will, if forced to answer enough questions about their beliefs, ultimately refer to nothing but subjective experience, feelings, “a certain sense that,” intuition, etc— but deny this justification for others.

“You just know when you know”
“I know when I see it”
“My heart says it’s true”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense to me”

This is unassailable— because it is a form of silence— the answer has the same utility for someone else as silence or “Because I say so”— gestures toward the authority of “the authentic experience” beyond expression in speech.

It’s not true “because (as a result of the fact that) I say so”— but “because (it is the unsayable reason why) I say so.”

Or Wittgenstein: the fact THAT & not the REASON WHY. The enamored fact “that I can believe so” replaces the explicable reason “why I can believe so.”

Cynically— this is sentimentalism— & it is universally afforded for anyone to justify any belief at any time by means of gesturing toward the “private language” of subjective experience.

Anyone could say “I believe that I am the only real person in the world”— sentimental solipsism— “because it seems to me that way/because that’s how I feel” etc.

If this can be legit as the bedrock of belief— then the concept of Truth is itself a sentimental fiction— & this is the turn toward a peculiar hermeneutics we find ourselves enmeshed within— in which “the psychological motivations for sentimental fictions” are the true subject

If your beliefs are only explicable to yourself by means of subjective experience— the question is “what is the cause of your subjective experience?” — what “psychologically motivates/affords it”

“Perhaps your sentimental solipsism is a result of your sense of alienation, narcissism, self-aggrandizement, etc”

Thus— when you can only defend your beliefs in this fashion— the only one who can explain them in public speech is the “psychologist” or “people reader”— this is already the pathological domain. Clusters of psychologically motivated fictions as a sort of “epidemic”

This is where Politics as Hermeneutics of the Group Psychology replaces any real discourse— & it is this that characterizes our time more than anything.

This is post-philosophical discourse— as wisdom-in-speech is replaced with “technical understanding of the group-psychological production of sentimental fictions”

“This is reddit”— ie— “this is the sentimental fiction of a particular group psychology which I, personally, find distasteful/pernicious/dangerous to Community Wellbeing”

“This is SJW” — “This is Jewish”— “This is White Fragility” blahblahblah— when it comes to determining the proper “psychological reading”— there is only the meta-layer of psychologism motivating the psychological hermeneutic. Bad infinity, endless regress, hyperreality.

Who isn’t a Sentimental Nihilist today? How could you prove it?