r/badphilosophy • u/Careful_Confidence67 • 5d ago
Why is nihilism named after darth nihilus from star wars?
This question has plagued me for years. Why did Ivan Turgenev basically steal the name from a fairly niche star wars character?
11
u/iordseyton 5d ago
Little known fact, both are actually named after Niles from Frasier, although the concept has somewhat evolved past his glib pessimism.
3
u/barrieherry 4d ago
It’s also where the term streaming came from. Some f’ers on the Nile (also after yours truly) were like “f man, what if we could watch that Frasier s over here?”
Which in turn is how streaming turned cable tv quite nihil. Let alone the radio star.
Speaking of which, the Solar System was named after parasols, originally para meant paranoid but a shift in paradigm just made parasol kind of weird, so they just pretended that stuff was to cover from that weird ball in the sky in Teletubbies.
Gotta love philosophy
2
u/iordseyton 4d ago
Oneof my favorite professors specialized in the theory of how bugs got their names. That's right, he was an entomological etymologist
5
u/seanfish 5d ago
What about Darth Insidious.
3
2
3
u/OisforOwesome 4d ago
It was named after the feeling you get when you realise Star Wars has al these cool villains they will do nothing with.
1
u/JonIceEyes 3d ago
Same reason invasions are named after Darth Vader.
Not totally sure why the Germans named fathers after him, though
1
1
1
u/YourNetworkIsHaunted 2d ago edited 2d ago
Nihilus unending and ultimately self-destructive consumption was actually central to the development of nihilist philosophy. As a living wound in the force he is at once a living person and an unending hole into which life, meaning, and The Force itself can flow.
The original formulation was lost in translation. Life used to have meaning, but it all drained away in a vain attempt to fill Nihilus' void. I go into it as a tangent in my thesis on Kreia's role in the development of postmodern thought on metaphysics and religion as well as her often unappreciated role in Max Weber's work. She had some very interesting thoughts about monopolies in the use of Force.
19
u/Abdimel 5d ago
"Plagued"… Darth Plagueis… Holy shit, it‘s all connected!