Thomas Ligotti's Poetic Review of Human Consciousness

We're alive. No amount of bewailing will change that; in fact, it will likely make us miserable (more miserable, if you prefer). Horror can be self-imposed, particularly that horror claimed to be cosmic. This is the ultimate example of disturbing yourself over matters beyond your control.

We're alive. No amount of bewailing will change that; in fact, it will likely make us miserable (more miserable, if you prefer). Horror can be self-imposed, particularly that horror claimed to be cosmic. This is the ultimate example of disturbing yourself over matters beyond your control.

I did not state or imply that I agree with Ligotti (or Zapffe), only that his book inspired – reinforced – my own conclusion that 'anitnatalism is futile' (which I only characterize as 'Zapffean').

Ok, but how, why?

But this is a distraction. It is not natural, but like a kite, where we have to choose to get "caught up" in something to take our minds to the flow state.

Ligotti:...laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own...

Ligotti isn't really pessimistic enough (like e.g. P. Mainländer was) about his pessimism (which is kind of funny). Antinatalism proposes 'preventing future suffering' that neither undoes – compensates for – the suffering of past sufferers nor, more significantly, reduces the suffering of current, or already-born, sufferers. Useless, futile, absurd. :sweat:

It seems odd to me to regard this as 'not natural' when you've ascribed it as being like inside other animals' minds, where it presumably is 'natural'. I went back to your quotation of Ligotti in an old thread where he talks about

...laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own...
— Ligotti

Interestingly this is the opposite of how Aristotle in the Nichomachean Ethics counsels us to live. He explores what are common emotions and considers how to cultivate what he sees as those promoting eudaimonia/well-being, and how to limit the negative emotions. This is, as he sees it, a virtuous education or an education in virtue: we apply rationality to our emotional lives. Rationality is not the opposite of the emotional, these aspects of us need to work in concert

But Ligotti and perhaps you seem to claim that emotions are 'inaccurate', arbitrary'. For me, emotions - informed by rationality - are what guide us to the true, accurate, right, good. A 'flow state', to which I have committed myself by rational deliberation about my emotional life, is a way of living well.

Unlike other animals, even clever ones like certain corvids, or domestic animals, or even elephants, dolphins, and apes, we seem to have something totally different in our existential orientation. Whereas Schopenhauer's dissatisfaction personified as "will-to-live" is much more in the "now" and "immediate" and the "being", we are much more in the self-reflected now, the analysis, the planning of the future, the angst, the anxiety, the what ifs and what did I dos, the regret, the isolation, the inability to "turn off" for large portions of time unless dead asleep. We have exited Eden, and to gain some sanity we provide for ourselves stories and narratives, mainly to soothe ourselves that this situation is not so bad, but those are just salves, protective hedging.

Life isn't good or bad because I can't change it, nor is the cosmos. They merely are. My part is to live. I can (and do) live without judging the cosmos.

Zapffe's view is that humans are born with an overdeveloped skill (understanding, self-knowledge) which does not fit into nature's design. The human craving for justification on matters such as life and death cannot be satisfied, hence humanity has a need that nature cannot satisfy. The tragedy, following this theory, is that humans spend all their time trying not to be human. The human being, therefore, is a paradox.

In "The Last Messiah", Zapffe described four principal defense mechanisms that humankind uses to avoid facing this paradox:

Isolation is "a fully arbitrary dismissal from consciousness of all disturbing and destructive thought and feeling".[5]
Anchoring is the "fixation of points within, or construction of walls around, the liquid fray of consciousness".[5] The anchoring mechanism provides individuals with a value or an ideal to consistently focus their attention on. Zapffe also applied the anchoring principle to society and stated that "God, the Church, the State, morality, fate, the laws of life, the people, the future"[5] are all examples of collective primary anchoring firmaments.
Distraction is when "one limits attention to the critical bounds by constantly enthralling it with impressions".[5] Distraction focuses all of one's energy on a task or idea to prevent the mind from turning in on itself.
Sublimation is the refocusing of energy away from negative outlets, toward positive ones. The individuals distance themselves and look at their existence from an aesthetic point of view (e.g., writers, poets, painters). Zapffe himself pointed out that his produced works were the product of sublimation.

Instead, do the best you can with what is in your power and take the rest as it happens, to paraphrase Epictetus.

Zapffe's view is that humans are born with an overdeveloped skill (understanding, self-knowledge) which does not fit into nature's design. The human craving for justification on matters such as life and death cannot be satisfied, hence humanity has a need that nature cannot satisfy. The tragedy, following this theory, is that humans spend all their time trying not to be human. The human being, therefore, is a paradox.

I don't think its reasonable to dismiss Zen, true Stoicism, meditation etc.. as somehow arbitrary attempt to 'not be human'.
These things are human behaviours.

I'm not suggesting there is. I don't think there's any need to overcome anxiety about life and death. It's also part of human behaviour.

Of course, some people run to these things for comfort - But i would posit theism is a much, much, MUCH more ripe example that, according to some (even atheists) fulfills a 'human need'. My point is merely that these behaviours are human, and do not release or jettison humanity in the subject (imo).

Thomas Ligotti- Conspiracy Against the human Race:Everything changed once they had lives of their own and knew they had lives of their own. It even became impossible for them to believe things had ever been any other way. They were masters of their movements now, as it seemed, and never had there been anything like them. The epoch had passed when the whole of their being was open to the world and nothing divided them from the rest of creation. Something had happened. They did not know what it was,but they did know it as that which should not be. And something needed to be done if they were to flourish as they once had, if the very ground beneath their feet were not to fall out under them. For ages they had been without lives of their own. Now that they had such lives there was no turning back. The whole of their being was closed to the world, and they had been divided from the rest of creation. Nothing could be done about that, having as they did lives of their own. But something would have to be done if they were to live with that which should not be. And over time they discovered what could be done - what would have to be done - so that they could live the lives that were now theirs to live. This would not revive among them the way things had once been done in older times; it would only be the best they could do.

I don't think Ligotti / Zapffe is suggesting it's not human.

The tragedy, following this theory, is that humans spend all their time trying not to be human.

Thomas Ligotti- Conspiracy Against the human Race:The epoch had passed when the whole of their being was open to the world and nothing divided them from the rest of creation.

Thomas Ligotti- Conspiracy Against the human Race:that which should not be

Thomas Ligotti- Conspiracy Against the human Race:The whole of their being was closed to the world, and they had been divided from the rest of creation.

Thomas Ligotti- Conspiracy Against the human Race:what would have to be done

Thomas Ligotti- Conspiracy Against the human Race:This would not revive among them the way things had once been done in older times; it would only be the best they could do.

my own conclusion that 'anitnatalism is futile'

Really? I find that hard to parse from the material you've quoted.

What

That is to say, unlike other animals, we are not "being" but having to make concerted efforts to "get caught up in being". It is not our natural mode, which is rather, a mode of deliberation. This is part of that ever-discussed "human condition"- the excess of consciousness.

A further, what?

Getting into 'wtf' territory...

This sounds like the need you mentioned. I'm unsure why, then, I was asked to defend that position?

This passage seems to be some kind of chimera of Theistic creation thinking and the fallacy of pretending the past was a golden age (ironically, given the 'ideal past' concept from the OP). Obviously, this passage is out of it's wider context so i'm not able to say more than how the passage itself strikes.

The excess of consciousness is the "Human".. So to me, it is about bad faith trying to constantly keep away from the existential implications of this.. that we need to deliberate our way into being "caught up", that we know of our own dissatisfaction and must find ways to cope with it.

Unlike other animals, we are self-reflective, ripped asunder from a mode of being that other animals have access to. We instead have as I said:
That is to say, unlike other animals, we are not "being" but having to make concerted efforts to "get caught up in being". It is not our natural mode, which is rather, a mode of deliberation. This is part of that ever-discussed "human condition"- the excess of consciousness.
— schopenhauer1

Just emphasizing our unique isolated condition as opposed to the rest of nature. We developed self-reflection which puts an extra level of burden and responsibility upon us- one where we have to choose which mechanism to give us ballast.

Again, the "exile from Eden" imagery.

What would have to be done to live this new mode of being, cut off from being "in the moment", a fully existential being. Self-reflective, wholly different in kind, even if evolved from the same mechanism.

Older times, being a mode of being like how other animals live.

my own conclusion that 'anitnatalism is futile'
— 180 Proof

Hey mate - would you mind bumper-stickering your basic reasoning here?

Antinatalism proposes 'preventing future suffering' that neither undoes – compensates for – the suffering of past sufferers nor, more significantly, reduces the suffering of current, or already-born, sufferers.

I think you misread the point here, and which is why it seems like it is normative and descriptive. Ligotti is being descriptive here, not counseling (in what I have so-far quoted). That is to say, unlike other animals, we are not "being" but having to make concerted efforts to "get caught up in being". It is not our natural mode, which is rather, a mode of deliberation.

And like it or not, humans are as much a part of nature as any other animal.

i cannot see what the futility is in relation to?

neither undoes – compensates for – the suffering of past sufferers nor, more significantly, reduces the suffering of current, or already-born, sufferers.

In other wods, antinatalism as speculation or (voluntary) policy does not positively affect the quality of the lives of those who are suffering here and now.Thus, what's the point of opposing (human) reproduction (which can ony make most sufferers suffer even more (e.g. despair))? :mask:

Choosing (as I inadvertantly have, btw) to defy one's biological drives, or genetic programming, in order not to breed ...

There's nothing to be done about current suffering.

Sorry, but I don't think there is a "human craving for justification on matters of life and death." I think some humans crave that, but it's foolish to do so, and I know of nothing which makes it a necessary human characteristic, i.e. a part of being human. And like it or not, humans are as much a part of nature as any other animal.

than hit-and-run

I've stated and clarified my position. My apologies if it's still not clear enough. You antinatalists seem to worry yourselves about what you can't change or control and thereby make yourselves more miserable than you need to be, then spread that self-inflicted, pointless misery in order to have company. You wish were never born, or 'that is a better to never have been born', and yet, like other antinatalists, you're very much still here – apparently, surprise surprise, you'd rather suffer than 'not to be' – oh, but that's self-refuting, ain't it? Well anyway, good luck with all that, Amadeus – tediously spoon-feeding ain't my jam, so I'm off to find a more substantive topic to chew on.

Ive had his position explained to me, and respect it. If i've said something dumb, it must be super-challenging to address it after several years of doing it for other people.
It's unhelpful for me, but he has his reasons

But its not his circus if i say something stupid.

*slinks away*

'Humans are not the only animals capable of slow and thoughtful deliberation.' Orca hunting, corvid theory of mind, are other examples that demonstrate complex deliberative thought.

The more general point I am making is that you and Ligotti are in my view mistakenly describing action driven by the 'emotional' as somehow inaccurate and wrong. What is the case for that? It seems to me to privilege an imagined 'rationality' that in action can't be separated from emotion: the two are intertwined.

Hold fast to the center

The cunning of Geist is to use your suffering and your despair to hold you to its purpose. One fantasy fights another.

I doubt anyone would claim we're the same as other animals in all respects, but our differences don't make us any less natural

I doubt anyone would claim we're the same as other animals in all respects,

We don't have to be like the other animals or the lilies of the field to avoid ruminating obsessively on the fact that our existence isn't sanctioned by the universe or justified by it in some sense.

If we speak of poetry we need only "cast a cold eye" on life and death, and pass by as Yeats put it in his poem Under Ben Bulben and his gravestone.

No one is saying that the "universe needs to sanction our existence". Rather the point is that we are not like the rest of existence and this leads to a unique circumstance and shifts our mode of being- one of deliberative means, and self-reflection.

I want to learn!!

So do I but I can't learn anything from time-wasting questions like yours which a close, or careful, reading of my posts make unnecessary. Lazy (shallow) responses get old quick – especially semantic muddles & word salads. Disagreements are great only when they are substantive and thereby facilitate reciprocal learning.

I find this take in existence interesting. It reminds me of the "blind idiot god": Humanity has found it's god, it's creator, only to discover that it's like a terrible monster, a blind idiot with neither desires nor goals that just shambles forwards mercilessly.

In that sense we can view humans as an "excess". Humans are the product of a runaway process of increased mental capacity, which randomly gave us consciousness. Less some crowning achievement and more some weird freak.

I think it's useful to keep such a perspective in your "arsenal", so to speak. The idea that life is not "about" anything and that there's no reason to assume your existence is built around happiness as some general state can be liberating.

Assuming you mean "abnormal" or "unnatural" in that sense, while it's true those words are sometimes used in reference to monsters and freaks, I don't see why our abnormality would in that case condemn us to the state of misery which seems to be referred to in this thread.

CATHR - Foreward:We know what verdict is reserved for those foolhardy enough to dissent
from the common conviction according to which “being alive is all right,”
to borrow an insistent phrase from the volume at hand. Disputants of the
normative buoyancy of our race can expect to be chastised for their
ingratitude, upbraided for their cowardice, patronized for their
shallowness. Where self-love provides the indubitable index of psychic
health, its default can only ever be seen as a symptom of psychic debility.
Philosophy, which once disdained opinion, becomes craven when the
opinion in question is whether or not being alive is all right. Suitably
ennobled by the epithet “tragic,” the approbation of life is immunized
against the charge of complacency and those who denigrate it condemned
as ingrates.
“Optimism”; “pessimism”: Thomas Ligotti takes the measure of these
discredited words, stripping them of the patina of familiarity that has
robbed them of their pertinence, and restoring to them some of their
original substance. The optimist fixes the exchange rate between joy and
woe, thereby determining the value of life. The pessimist, who refuses the
principle of exchange and the injunction to keep investing in the future no
matter how worthless life’s currency in the present, is stigmatized as an
unreliable investor.
The Conspiracy against the Human Race sets out what is perhaps the
most sustained challenge yet to the intellectual blackmail that would
oblige us to be eternally grateful for a “gift” we never invited. Being alive
is not all right: this simple not encapsulates the temerity of thinking better
than any platitude about the tragic nobility of a life characterized by a
surfeit of suffering, frustration, and self-deceit. There is no nature worth
revering or rejoining; there is no self to be re-enthroned as captain of its
own fate; there is no future worth working towards or hoping for. Life, in
Ligotti’s outsized stamp of disapproval, is MALIGNANTLY USELESS.
No doubt, critics will try to indict Ligotti of bad faith by claiming that the
writing of this book is itself driven by the imperatives of the life that he
seeks to excoriate. But the charge is trumped-up, since Ligotti explicitly
avows the impossibility for the living to successfully evade life’s grip.
This admission leaves the cogency of his diagnosis intact, for as Ligotti
knows full well, if living is lying, then even telling the truth about life’s
lie will be a sublimated lie.
9
Such sublimation is as close to truth-telling as Ligotti’s exacting nihilism
will allow. Unencumbered by the cringing deference towards social utility
that straightjackets most professional philosophers, Ligotti’s unsparing
dissection of the sophisms spun by life’s apologists proves him to be a
more acute pathologist of the human condition than any sanctimonious
philanthrope.

Just wondering- do you think there is a difference between an orca hunting in deliberative ways, or even playing games like toss the the human into the sea, and human levels of deliberation? I did not say that other animals can't deliberate, but that our being is of an existential one, whereby deliberation is our primary modus operendi.

Humans need s[e]lves for their being. They can't stand it. It does divide us from the rest of creation. We are aware that we are aware that we are aware, and that does make us a different kind of creature.

shuts down dialogue. If you are open to actually creating an interesting dialogue about that which you comment, let me know.

You're free to elucidate why you think humans are special, and lend some credibility to the OP passages. Doesn't seem to appear anywhere - and i think dismissing the objections in teh same fashion might be an issue?

It's not necessarily that its not built on happiness, though that is certainly the case.

As if this argument is about animal intelligence and not about existential differences in animal modes of life is the relevant issue.

equivalent of the peasants in a Monty Python sketch hearing the wrong things and giving their misinterpretations in an exaggerated cockney accent

I'm sorry, but what you're doing is mischaracterizing objections to paint them in a certain light. A particularly dismissive, and condescending light.

I can't say that flies with me. There's no bad faith whatsoever - but comparing questions and requests for elucidation as
equivalent of the peasants in a Monty Python sketch hearing the wrong things and giving their misinterpretations in an exaggerated cockney accent

Well I do also feel the "separation from nature" bit is the weakest part of the metaphor, largely because I see no reason to suppose other animals are somehow "in tune" with nature. They're also each separate, existing as their own little system.

Perhaps self consciousness, as being aware of your own awareness adds an extra filter that makes our experience of the outside world especially remote.

An interesting thought experiment, at some point some ancestor of ours, possibly not even a human, was presumably the first to be aware. But, being the first, they'd have no words to express this, nor anyone to mirror it back to them. So was awareness a group thing, that arose when a sufficient number of our ancestors, together, happend to have the brain capacity and just communally became aware of themselves and each other?

But that is exactly what is being done to the OP :lol: or turn it into a straw man/red herring to debate another point.

See your fellow OP-bashers to and see for yourself..

From the OP's own imagery, what do you think that means?

... the assumption that we humans are special. We're not. We're instead just another kind of creature in a vast universe, not special but different from others in some respects. I don't see this recognition as a defense mechanism; it's merely what is the case.

I don't accept that the result is we necessarily feel the way about ourselves and our lives that you, Brassier and Zigotti seem to think we do.

It doesn't follow that we do, or must. But I don't think you achieve anything towards establishing the claims made by maintaining that any statement that someone doesn't accept the dreary perspective set forth in this thread does so in bad faith--as if someone like me is really miserable because condemned to live but pretending not to be.

(à la atoms swirling in void ... modes of substance ... the mediocrity principle ... descent with modifications by natural selection ... entropy ...)

Yeah, and in the grand scheme of things those "issues" seem quite trivial.

Why are we even deliberating this kind of evaluation?

Rather, the "excess" of consciousness brings with it a set of issues that humans uniquely must face.

You see the "must" in that sentence, don't you?

No, it's not about morality, it's about the facts of the matter.

a certain sense of angst, existential dread, isolation, loneliness, ennui, and meaninglessness.

I face the issues of being human every day, they don't involve

'a certain sense of angst, existential dread, isolation, loneliness, ennui, and meaninglessness."
— schopenhauer1

Sorry.

Ligotti- CATHR:While a modicum of consciousness may have had survivalist
properties during an immemorial chapter of our evolution—so one
theory goes—this faculty soon enough became a seditious agent working
against us. As Zapffe concluded, we need to hamper our consciousness
for all we are worth or it will impose upon us a too clear vision of what
we do not want to see, which, as the Norwegian philosopher saw it,
along with every other pessimist, is “the brotherhood of suffering
between everything alive.” Whether or not one agrees that there is a
“brotherhood of suffering between everything alive,” we can all agree
that human beings are the only organisms that can have such a
conception of existence, or any conception period. [b]That we can conceive
of the phenomenon of suffering, our own as well as that of other
organisms, is a property unique to us as a dangerously conscious species.[/b]
We know there is suffering, and we do take action against it, which
includes downplaying it by “artificially limiting the content of
consciousness.” [b]Between taking action against and downplaying
suffering, mainly the latter, most of us do not worry that it has overly
sullied our existence.[/b]
As a fact, we cannot give suffering precedence in either our individual
or collective lives. [b]We have to get on with things, and those who give
precedence to suffering will be left behind.[/b] [ pace @Ciceronianus et al comments :) )
28
They fetter us with their sniveling. We have someplace to go and must
believe we can get there, wherever that may be. And to conceive that
there is a “brotherhood of suffering between everything alive” [b]would
disable us from getting anywhere[/b]. [b]We are preoccupied with the good
life, and step by step are working toward a better life. What we do, as a
conscious species, is set markers for ourselves.[/b] Once we reach one
marker, we advance to the next—as if we were playing a board game we
think will never end, despite the fact that it will, like it or not. And if you
are too conscious of not liking it, then you may conceive of yourself as a
biological paradox that cannot live with its consciousness and cannot
live without it. And in so living and not living, you take your place with
the undead and the human puppet.

Ligotti- CATHR:They fetter us with their sniveling.

Wow. Even I wouldn't go that far. But I must find a way to use this sentence in court. It's marvelous.

Ligotti-CATR:In another orbit from the theologies of either Gnosticism or Catholicism,
the nineteenth-century German philosopher Philipp Mainländer (born
Phillip Batz) also envisaged non-coital existence as the surest path to
redemption for the sin of being congregants of this world. Our
extinction, however, would not be the outcome of an unnatural chastity,
but would be a naturally occurring phenomenon once we had evolved far
enough to apprehend our existence as so hopelessly pointless and
unsatisfactory that we would no longer be subject to generative
promptings. Paradoxically, this evolution toward life-sickness
35
would be promoted by a mounting happiness among us. This happiness
would be quickened by our following Mainländer’s evangelical
guidelines for achieving such things as universal justice and charity.
[b]Only by securing every good that could be gotten in life, Mainländer
figured, could we know that they were not as good as nonexistence.[/b]
While the abolishment of human life would be sufficient for the
average pessimist, the terminal stage of Mainländer’s wishful thought
was the full summoning of a “Will-to-die” that by his deduction resided
in all matter across the universe. Mainländer diagrammed this
brainstorm, along with others as riveting, in a treatise whose title has
been translated into English as The Philosophy of Redemption(1876).
Unsurprisingly, the work never set the philosophical world ablaze.
[b]Perhaps the author might have garnered greater celebrity if, like the
Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger in his infamous study translated
as Sex and Character (1903), he had devoted himself to gripping
ruminations on male and female matters rather than the redemptive
disappearance of everyone regardless of gender.[/b]4
As one who had a special plan for the human race, Mainländer was not
a modest thinker. “We are not everyday people,” he once wrote in the
royal third-person, “and must pay dearly for dining at the table of the
gods.” To top it off, suicide ran in his family. On the day his Philosophy
of Redemption was published, Mainländer killed himself, possibly in a
fit of megalomania but just as possibly in surrender to the extinction that
for him was so attractive and that he avouched for a most esoteric
reason—Deicide.
Mainländer was confident that the Will-to-die he believed would well
up in humanity had been spiritually grafted into us by a God who, in the
beginning, masterminded His own quietus. It seems that existence was a
horror to God. Unfortunately, God was impervious to the depredations
of time. This being so,
36
His only means to get free of Himself was by a divine form of suicide.
God’s plan to suicide himself could not work, though, as long as He
existed as a unified entity outside of space-time and matter. Seeking to
nullify His oneness so that He could be delivered into nothingness, he
shattered Himself—Big Bang-like—into the time-bound fragments of
the universe, that is, all those objects and organisms that have been
accumulating here and there for billions of years. [b]In Mainländer’s
philosophy, “God knew that he could change from a state of superreality into non-being only through the development of a real world of
multiformity.”[/b] Employing this strategy, He excluded Himself from
being. “God is dead,” wrote Mainländer, “and His death was the life of
the world.” [b]Once the great individuation had been initiated, the
momentum of its creator’s self-annihilation would continue until
everything became exhausted by its own existence, which for human
beings meant that the faster they learned that happiness was not as good
as they thought it would be, the happier they would be to die out.[/b]
So: The Will-to-live that Schopenhauer argued activates the world to
its torment was revised by his disciple Mainländer not only as evidence
of a tortured life within living beings,[b]but also as a cover for a
clandestine will in all things to burn themselves out as hastily as possible
in the fires of becoming.[/b] In this light, human progress is shown to be an
ironic symptom that our downfall into extinction has been progressing
nicely, because the more things change for the better, the more they
progress toward a reliable end. And those who committed suicide, as did
Mainländer, would only be forwarding God’s blueprint for bringing an
end to His Creation. Naturally, those who replaced themselves by
procreation were of no help: “Death is succeeded by the absolute
nothing; it is the perfect annihilation of each individual in appearance
and being, supposing that by him no
37
child has been begotten or born; for otherwise the individual would live
on in that.” [b]Mainländer’s argument that in the long run nonexistence is
superior to existence was cobbled together from his unorthodox
interpretation of Christian doctrines and from Buddhism as he
understood it.[/b]

CATHR- Ligotti:As the average conscious mortal knows, Christianity and Buddhism
[b]are all for leaving this world behind, with their leave-taking being for
destinations unknown and impossible to conceive.[/b] For Mainländer, these
destinations did not exist. His forecast was that one day our will to
survive in this life or any other will be universally extinguished by a
conscious will to die and stay dead, after the example of the Creator.
From the standpoint of Mainländer’s philosophy, Zapffe’s Last Messiah
would not be an unwelcome sage but a crowning force of the post-divine
era.[b]Rather than resist our end, as Mainländer concludes, we will come
to see that “the knowledge that life is worthless is the flower of all
human wisdom.” Elsewhere the philosopher states, “Life is hell, and the
sweet still night of absolute death is the annihilation of hell.”[/b]
Inhospitable to rationality as Mainländer’s cosmic scenario may seem,
it should nonetheless give pause to anyone who is keen to make sense of
the universe. Consider this: If something like God exists, or once
existed, what would He not be capable of doing, or undoing? Why
should God not want to be done with Himself because, unbeknownst to
us, suffering was the essence of His being? Why should He not have
brought forth a universe that is one great puppet show destined by Him
to be crunched or scattered until an absolute nothingness had been
established? Why should He fail to see the benefits of nonexistence, as
many of His lesser beings have? [b]Revealed scripture there may be that
tells a different story. But that does not mean it was revealed by a
reliable narrator. Just because He asserted it was all good does not mean
he meant what He said.[/b]

Ligotti and by extension you seem to me to be yearning for Grand Meanings. Why would there be such things? For a lifelong atheist like me these sound like the mere negation of a belief in a single god, or 'the unity of science' - some craving for an over-arching sense-making whojameflip, and a sense of grievous disappointment that it isn't to be found.

Perhaps there are only small meanings, built from small things: empirical discoveries in science that suggest bigger theories, striking works of art that suggest broader ways of thinking and feeling, profound personal experiences that seem to have big ramifications.

Ligotti, commenting on and summarizing Zapffe - CATHR:(4) SUBLIMATION. That we might annul a paralyzing stage fright at what
may happen to even the soundest bodies and minds, we sublimate our fears by
making an open display of them. In the Zapffean sense, sublimation is the
rarest technique utilized for conspiring against the human race. Putting into
play both deviousness and skill, this is what thinkers and artistic types do when
they recycle the most demoralizing and unnerving aspects of life as works in
which the worst fortunes of humanity are presented in a stylized and removed
manner as entertainment. In so many words, these thinkers and artistic types
confect products that provide an escape from our suffering by a bogus
simulation of it

Out of such things it turns out that humans have a propensity to suffer, yes, and also a propensity to enjoy, and a propensity to understand and to investigate, and to know, love and hate, like and be indifferent to one another. These all emerge in the small scale and create a larger picture, often clearer to me in a Shakespeare play, say, or Beethoven, or children's art about a city, or a night of folk song, than in anything 'about' philosophy. Here I find value.

I'd like to also conjure, BC and @Tom Storm and to wax brightly in the dim night of the black Locrian stage of madness.

After reading these passages, and your reflex to say, "That's just your opinion, man" bubbles up to the black miasmic surface of your thought-forms, what is value and axiology in light of pain, suffering, and the awareness thereof?

It is this idea of something wholly different in the human evolution, something "uncanny", that I would like to explore. The main philosopher he draws parallels to is Zapffe. Zapffe's themes are similar in that he thinks that humans have an "excess" of self-consciousness, that though allows us to survive in the ways we do, brings with it the existential excess of being too aware. And that over-abundance of awareness is really what separates humans from the rest of nature in the sense that we are existentially divided and torn asunder from the rest of nature in our awareness. Unlike other animals, even clever ones like certain corvids, or domestic animals, or even elephants, dolphins, and apes, we seem to have something totally different in our existential orientation. Whereas Schopenhauer's dissatisfaction personified as "will-to-live" is much more in the "now" and "immediate" and the "being", we are much more in the self-reflected now, the analysis, the planning of the future, the angst, the anxiety, the what ifs and what did I dos, the regret, the isolation, the inability to "turn off" for large portions of time unless dead asleep. We have exited Eden, and to gain some sanity we provide for ourselves stories and narratives, mainly to soothe ourselves that this situation is not so bad, but those are just salves, protective hedging.

Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.

I agree that life is a bucket of shit and that there's a menu of distractions or tools we can use to try to override the void and the suffering.

Ligotti, commenting on and summarizing Zapffe - CATHR:As adumbrated above, Zapffe arrived at two central determinations
regarding humanity’s “biological predicament.” The first was that
consciousness had overreached the point of being a sufferable property
of our species, and to minimize this problem we must minimize our
consciousness. From the many and various ways this may be done [schop1 note: acknowledgement this is simply a model, not exhaustive],
Zapffe chose to hone in on four principal strategies.
31
(1) ISOLATION. So that we may live without going into a free-fall of
trepidation, we isolate the dire facts of being alive by relegating them to a
remote compartment of our minds. They are the lunatic family members in the
attic whose existence we deny in a conspiracy of silence.
(2) ANCHORING. To stabilize our lives in the tempestuous waters of chaos,
we conspire to anchor them in metaphysical and institutional “verities””—God,
Morality, Natural Law, Country, Family—that inebriate us with a sense of
being official, authentic, and safe in our beds.
(3) DISTRACTION. To keep our minds unreflective of a world of horrors,
we distract them with a world of trifling or momentous trash. The most operant
method for furthering the conspiracy, it is in continuous employ and demands
only that people keep their eyes on the ball—or their television sets,
their government’s foreign policy, their science projects, their careers, their
place in society or the universe, etc.
(4) SUBLIMATION. That we might annul a paralyzing stage fright at what
may happen to even the soundest bodies and minds, we sublimate our fears by
making an open display of them. In the Zapffean sense, sublimation is the
rarest technique utilized for conspiring against the human race. Putting into
play both deviousness and skill, this is what thinkers and artistic types do when
they recycle the most demoralizing and unnerving aspects of life as works in
which the worst fortunes of humanity are presented in a stylized and removed
manner as entertainment. In so many words, these thinkers and artistic types
confect products that provide an escape from our suffering by a bogus
simulation of it—a tragic drama or philosophical woolgathering, for instance.
Zapffe uses “The Last Messiah” to showcase how a literary-philosophical
composition cannot perturb its creator or anyone else with the severity of trueto-life horrors but only provide a pale representation of these horrors, just as a
King Lear’s weep-
32
ing for his dead daughter Cordelia cannot rend its audience with the throes of
the real thing.
By watchful practice of the above connivances, we may keep ourselves
from scrutinizing too assiduously the startling and dreadful mishaps that
may befall us. These must come as a surprise, for if we expected them
then the conspiracy could not work its magic. Naturally, conspiracy
theories seldom pique the curiosity of “right-minded” individuals and are
met with disbelief and denial when they do. Best to immunize your
consciousness from any thoughts that are startling and dreadful so that
we can all go on conspiring to survive and reproduce as paradoxical
beings—puppets that can walk and talk all by themselves. At worst keep
your startling and dreadful thoughts to yourself. Hearken well: “None of
us wants to hear spoken the exact anxieties we keep locked up inside
ourselves. Smother that urge to go spreading news of your pain and
nightmares around town. Bury your dead but don’t leave a trace. And be
sure to get on with things Zombification [ schop1 note: This is Ligotti playing the optimistic interlocutor again.. to be read with heavy dose of cynicism of course ]

Sounds reasonable to me. Our reflective speculations and ruminations bring with them additional forms of suffering and dread. Many people accept that that our preference for narratives of transcendent meaning are all attempts to deal with anxiety. Our capacity for metacognitive experince enhances the pain. This observation by Schopenhauer has often resonated with me (is it from The Wisdom of Life?):

Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.

Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.

I think you again, strongly discount what Ligotti lays out here.

I know this Schopenhauer quote well. But does it stand up to scrutiny? Is there an evidential basis for it? A priori I would have thought it more likely that the opposite holds: that intelligence enables a greater understanding of one's pain, which might in turn mitigate its emotional effects. Over the centuries, many generals and industrialists have justified the sufferings of their soldiery and workforces with this sort of view - as humans have in inflicting pain on the animals they kill for food and pleasure.

But the notion that humans face a special kind of suffering leaves me cold. People eat another chicken for dinner that has been, out of sight, tortured throughout its short helpless life and, between chews, talk to each other about their profound suffering. They exchange messages on phones made by forced labour that they don't worry about, using rare metals whose mining causes great individual suffering and political strife where it is mined. They talk about wars in other places that their leaders are financing and arming where children die daily. If there is a calculus of suffering, the older I've got, the less I've come to count a generalised human anguish as important - though I still, myself, feel it - paradox remains.

I know this Schopenhauer quote well. But does it stand up to scrutiny? Is there an evidential basis for it? A priori I would have thought it more likely that the opposite holds: that intelligence enables a greater understanding of one's pain, which might in turn mitigate its emotional effects

intelligence enables a greater understanding of one's pain, which might in turn mitigate its emotional effects

CATR- Ligotti:Among the unpleasantries of human existence is the abashment we
suffer when we feel our lives to be destitute of meaning with respect to
who we are, what we do, and the general way
39
we believe things to be in the universe. If one doubts that felt meanings
are imperative to our developing or maintaining a state of good feeling,
[b]just lay your eyes on the staggering number of books and therapies for a
market of individuals who suffer from a deficiency of meanin[/b]g, either in
a limited and localized variant (“I am satisfied that my life has meaning
because I received an ‘A’ on my calculus exam”) or one that is
macrocosmic in scope (“I am satisfied that my life has meaning because
God loves me”). Few are the readers of Norman Vincent Peale’s The
Power of Positive Thinking (1952) who do not feel dissatisfied with who
they are, what they do, and the general way they believe things to be in
the universe. Millions of copies of Peale’s book and its imitations have
been sold; and they are not purchased by readers well satisfied with the
number or intensity of felt meanings in their lives and thus with their
place on the ladder of “subjective well being,” in the vernacular of
positive psychology, a movement that came into its own in the early
years of the twenty-first century with a spate of books about how almost
anyone could lead happily meaningful lives.6 Martin Seligman, the
architect of positive psychology, defines his brainchild as “the science of
what makes life worth living” and synopsized its principles in Authentic
Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your
Potential for Lasting Fulfillment (2002).
There is nothing new, of course, about people searching for a happily
meaningful life in a book. With the exception of sacred texts, possibly
the most successful self-help manual of all time is Emile Coué’s Self
Mastery through Conscious Autosuggestion (1922). Coué was an
advocate of self-hypnosis, and there is little doubt that he had an
authentically philanthropic desire to help others lead more salutary lives.
On his lecture tours, he was greeted by celebrities and dignitaries around
the world. Hordes turned out for his funeral in 1926.
40
Coué is best known for urging believers in his method to repeat the
following sentence: “Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and
better.” How could his readers not feel that their lives had meaning, or
were proceeding toward meaningfulness, by hypnotizing themselves
with these words day by day? While being alive is all right for the
world’s general population, some of us need to get it in writing that this
is so.
Every other creature in the world is insensate to meaning. But those of
us on the high ground of evolution are replete with this unnatural need
which any comprehensive encyclopedia of philosophy treats under the
heading LIFE, THE MEANING OF.[b]In its quest for a sense of meaning,
humanity has given countless answers to questions that were never
posed to it.[/b] But though our appetite for meaning may be appeased for a
time, we are deceived if we think it is ever gone for good. Years may
pass during which we are unmolested by LIFE, THE MEANING OF.
[b]Some days we wake up and innocently say, “It’s good to be alive.”
Broken down, this exclamation means that we are experiencing an acute
sense of well-being.[/b] [b]If everyone were in such elevated spirits all the
time, the topic of LIFE, THE MEANING OF would never enter our
minds or our philosophical reference books. But an ungrounded
jubilation—or even a neutral reading on the monitor of our moods—
must lapse, either intermittently or for the rest of our natural lives.[/b] Our
consciousness, having snoozed awhile in the garden of incuriosity, is
pricked by some thorn or other, perhaps DEATH, THE MEANING OF,
or spontaneously modulates to a [b]minor key due to the vagaries of our
brain chemistry, the weather, or for causes not confirmable[/b].[b]Then the
hunger returns for LIFE, THE MEANING OF, the emptiness must be
filled again, the pursuit resumed.[/b] (There is more on meaning in the
section Unpersons contained in the next chapter, “Who Goes There?”)
41
Perhaps we might gain some perspective on our earthly term if we
stopped thinking of ourselves as beings who enact a “life.” This word is
loaded with connotations to which it has no right. Instead, we should
substitute “existence” for “life” and forget about how well or badly we
enact it. [b]None of us “has a life” in the narrative-biographical way we
think of these words. What we have are so many years of existence. It
would not occur to us to say that any man or woman is in the “prime of
existence.” Speaking of “existence” rather than “life” unclothes the latter
word of its mystique. Who would ever claim that “existence is all right,
especially when you consider the alternative”?[/b]

Ligotti- CATHR:Pessimism I
Along with every other tendentious mindset, pessimism may be
construed as a fluke of temperament, a shifty word that will just have to
do until a better one comes along. Without the temperament that was
given to them in large portion, pessimists would not see existence as
basically undesirable. [b]Optimists may have fugitive doubts about the
basic desirability of existence, but pessimists never doubt that existence
is basically undesirable.[/b] If you interrupted them in the middle of an
ecstatic moment, which pessimists do have, and asked if existence is
basically undesirable, they would reply “Of course” before returning to
their ecstasy. Why they should answer in this way is a closed book. The
conclusions to which temperament lead an individual, whether or not
they are conclusions refractory to those of world society, are simply not
subject to analysis.
Composed of the same dross as all mortals, the pessimist cleaves to
whatever seems to validate his thoughts and emotions. Scarce among us
are those who not only want to think they are right, but also expect
others to affirm their least notion as unassailable. Pessimists are no
exception. [b]But they are few and do not show up on the radar of our race.
Immune to the blandishments of religions, countries, families, and
everything else that puts both average and above-average citizens in the
limelight, pessimists are sideliners in both history and the media.[/b]
Without belief in gods or ghosts, unmotivated by a comprehensive
delusion, they could never plant a bomb, plan a revolution, or shed blood
for a cause.
Identical with religions that ask of their believers more than they can
possibly make good on, pessimism is a set of ideals that none can follow
to the letter. Those who indict a pessimist of either pathology or
intellectual recalcitrance are only faking their competence to explain
what cannot be explained: the mystery of
44
why individuals are the way they are. To some extent, however, why
some individuals are the way they are is not a full-fledged mystery.
There are traits that run in families—legacies lurking in the genes of one
generation that may profit or impair those of another. Philosophical
pessimism has been called a maladaptation by those who are concerned
with such things. This call seems indisputably correct. The possibility
must be considered, then, that there is a genetic marker for philosophical
pessimism that nature has all but deselected from our race so that we
may keep on living as we have all these years. Allowing for the theory
that pessimism is weakly hereditary, and is getting weaker all the time
because it is maladaptive, the genes that make up the fiber of ordinary
folk may someday celebrate an everlasting triumph over those of the
congenitally pessimistic, ridding nature of all worry that its protocol of
survival and reproduction for its most conscious species will be
challenged—unless Zapffe is right and consciousness itself is
maladaptive, making philosophical pessimism the correct call despite its
unpopularity among those who think, or say they think, that being alive
is all right. But psycho-biographers do not often take what is adaptive or
maladaptive for our species into account when writing of a chosen
member of the questionably dying breed of pessimists. To them, their
subject’s temperament has a twofold inception: (1) life stories of
tribulation, even though the pessimistic caste has no sorrows exclusive to
it; (2) intractable wrongheadedness, a charge that pessimists could turn
against optimists if the argumentum ad populum were not the world’s
favorite fallacy.
[b]The major part of our species seems able to undergo any trauma without
significantly re-examining its household mantras, including “everything
happens for a reason,” “the show must go on,” “accept the things you
cannot change,” and any other adage that gets people to keep their chins
up.[/b] But pess-
45
imists cannot give themselves over to this program, and its catchwords
stick in their throats. To them, the Creation is objectionable and useless
on principle—the worst possible dispatch of bad news.[b]It seems so bad,
so wrong, that, should such authority be unwisely placed into their
hands, they would make it a prosecutable malfeasance to produce a
being who might turn out to be a pessimist.[/b]
Disenfranchised by nature, pessimists feel that they have been
impressed into this world by the reproductive liberty of positive thinkers
who are ever-thoughtful of the future. At whatever point in time one is
situated, the future always looks better than the present, just as the
present looks better than the past. No one today would write, as did the
British essayist Thomas De Quincey in the early nineteenth century: “A
quarter of man’s misery is toothache.” Knowing what we know of the
progress toward the alleviation of human misery throughout history, who
would damn their children to have a piteous toothache in the early
nineteenth century, or in times before it, back to the days when Homo
sapiens with toothaches scrounged to feed themselves and shivered in
the cold? To the regret of pessimists, our primitive ancestors could not
see that theirs was not a time in which to produce children.
So at what time was it that people knew enough to say, “This is the
time in which to produce children”? When did we think that enough
progress had been made toward the alleviation of human misery that
children could be produced without our being torn by a crisis of
conscience? The easy years of the Pharaohs and Western antiquity? The
lazy days of the Dark Ages? The palmy decades of the Industrial
Revolution as well as the other industry-driven periods that followed?
The breakthrough era in which advancements in dentistry allayed
humanity of one-quarter of its misery?
But few or none have ever had a crisis of conscience about
46
producing children, because all children have been born at the
best possible time in human history, or at least the one in which the most
progress toward the alleviation of human misery has been made, which
is always the time in which we live and have lived. While we have
always looked back on previous times and thought that their progress
toward the alleviation of human misery was not enough for us to want to
live then, we do not know any better than the earliest Homo
sapiens about what progress toward the alleviation of human misery will
be made in the future, reasonably presuming that such progress will be
made. And even though we may speculate about that progress, we feel
no resentment about not being able to take advantage of it, or not many
of us do. Nor will those of the future resent not living in the world of
their future because even greater progress toward the alleviation of
human misery will by then have been made in medicine, social
conditions, political arrangements, and other areas that are almost
universally regarded as domains in which human life could be better.
Will there ever be an end of the line in our progress toward the
alleviation of human misery when people can honestly say, “This is
without doubt the time produce children”? And will that really be the
time? No one would say, or even want to think that theirs is a time in
which people will look back on them from the future and thank their
stars that they did not live in such a barbaric age that had made so little
progress toward the alleviation of human misery and still produced
children. As if anyone ever cared or will ever care, this is what the
pessimist would say: “There has never been and never will be a time in
which to produce children. Now will forever be a bad time for doing
that.” Moreover, the pessimist would advise each of us not to look too
far into the future or we will see the reproachful faces of the unborn
looking back at us from the radiant mist of their nonexistence.

Ligotti- CATHR:Optimists may have fugitive doubts about the
basic desirability of existence, but pessimists never doubt that existence
is basically undesirable.

It's not something which constitutes a view of the greater world. I'm not "pessimistic" regarding the world; I don't think it will act in its own self-interest, or is lazy, or malicious, or inclined to act badly--those are human attributes.

I don't see any more reason to think that there is an objective fact of the matter as to the desireability of existence, than there is an objective fact of the matter as to the desireability of anchovy pizza.

FWIW, I took a look at my Kindle copy of CATHR and saw that I got 26% of the way before losing interest.

That said, I love the fiction, not all of the broader philosophy. It seems to me like it all hinges on the claim that the world is indeed meaningless, and even more the claim that freedom is illusory. I don't think there are good reasons to believe these claims.

Without these claims the rest of the pessimismtic claims collapse.

If we lived for 10,000 years? If we were the ruler of a galactic empire for five million years? If the entire universe only contained our solar system? If the entire universe consisted of one small town and we were one of its 80 residents? If our body grew to the size of a billion galaxies?

People often bring up the scale of the universe when they say life "obviously lacks meaning," but why exactly should fudging around the length of our lives or our size relative to everything else that exists have anything to do with meaning? It's a weird idea when you think about it.

People often bring up the scale of the universe when they say life "obviously lacks meaning," but why exactly should fudging around the length of our lives or our size relative to everything else that exists have anything to do with meaning? It's a weird idea when you think about it.

Surely if you can make a judgement on anchovy pizza, you can make a judgement about life.

Sure, I place positive or negative values on things routinely, but I also recognize that the way I do so is idiosyncratic aspect of the way I am and not some fact about about human existence. I don't see how you think it can be justified to generalize about the subject as you seem to.

Like I said, I might not be very helpful :rofl: . The whole scale thing is just something I've seen thrown out in favor of pessimism quite often. I used to think it had a great deal of merit and use it myself. And then one day it struck me that it is actually one of the sillier philosophical arguments out there.

What do you think of Ligotti's analysis of the pessimist? I actually think this is more a critique of the optimist, but indirectly.

Ligotti- CATHR:Will there ever be an end of the line in our progress toward the
alleviation of human misery when people can honestly say, “This is
without doubt the time produce children”?

Can't find much to disagree with. I think a lot of folk are afraid of pessimism and work hard to deny their own tendencies in this area just in case it makes things even worse. Whistling in the dark is a popular human reaction.

This raises another question for me. Is life worth living even if suffering is almost eliminated? Let's say there are no wars and there is economic and political equality and medicine can cure most diseases. What then? I think one still has to face the question is living worth all the work and effort? All the psychological exertion. I've had a fortunate life (so far) with minimal suffering, but if I had the choice would I want to do it all again or not be born at all? I suspect I would choose the latter. I think this may well be dispositional as Ligotti suggests. I have always been reluctant to universalise my own tendencies and acknowledge how many people who have suffered intensely still 'love life' and cherish their time.

I'll provide some more quotes to this effect, but I think Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is the closest to a "model" for the modern man's (supposed) antidote to such generalized ideas on "EXISTENCE". That is to say, whatever your beliefs this way or that, it is about peak experiences that make it worth it.. One must provide safety, security, social bonds, physical needs, and then at the top is supposedly "self-actualization", which I gather to be "peak experiences". One is being true to one's values (Nietzschean-esque).. I imagine the world-travelling, hobbyist, sports-enthusiast, mountain-climbing, civic duty participating, citizen, supposedly reveling in the balance between skill, challenge, preference, and aptitude.. The perfect balancer of personal interests and social interests.. Flow states are had readily and easily. One is able to express one's talents, etc.

I have no interest in setting challenges and consider the vulgar Nietzschean-esquee pretentions to be the opposite of my own inclinations.

I am quite happy to loiter around the foothills of Maslow and avoid the peaks.

I think hobbies and sport and travel are all distractions from meaninglessness. We used to have religion for this and now it's Instagram and TikTok. I don't think it makes much difference.

and then at the top is supposedly "self-actualization", which I gather to be "peak experiences". One is being true to one's values (Nietzschean-esque).. I imagine the world-travelling, hobbyist, sports-enthusiast, mountain-climbing, civic duty participating, citizen, supposedly reveling in the balance between skill, challenge, preference, and aptitude.. The perfect balancer of personal interests and social interests.. Flow states are had readily and easily. One is able to express one's talents, etc.

Ligotti- CATHR:As adumbrated above, Zapffe arrived at two central determinations
regarding humanity’s “biological predicament.” The first was that
consciousness had overreached the point of being a sufferable property
of our species, and to minimize this problem we must minimize our
consciousness. From the many and various ways this may be done [schop1 note: acknowledgement this is simply a model, not exhaustive],
Zapffe chose to hone in on four principal strategies.
31
(1) ISOLATION. So that we may live without going into a free-fall of
trepidation, we isolate the dire facts of being alive by relegating them to a
remote compartment of our minds. They are the lunatic family members in the
attic whose existence we deny in a conspiracy of silence.
(2) ANCHORING. To stabilize our lives in the tempestuous waters of chaos,
we conspire to anchor them in metaphysical and institutional “verities”—God,
Morality, Natural Law, Country, Family—that inebriate us with a sense of
being official, authentic, and safe in our beds.
(3) DISTRACTION. To keep our minds unreflective of a world of horrors,
we distract them with a world of trifling or momentous trash. The most operant
method for furthering the conspiracy, it is in continuous employ and demands
only that people keep their eyes on the ball—or their television sets,
their government’s foreign policy, their science projects, their careers, their
place in society or the universe, etc.
(4) SUBLIMATION. That we might annul a paralyzing stage fright at what
may happen to even the soundest bodies and minds, we sublimate our fears by
making an open display of them. In the Zapffean sense, sublimation is the
rarest technique utilized for conspiring against the human race. Putting into
play both deviousness and skill, this is what thinkers and artistic types do when
they recycle the most demoralizing and unnerving aspects of life as works in
which the worst fortunes of humanity are presented in a stylized and removed
manner as entertainment. In so many words, these thinkers and artistic types
confect products that provide an escape from our suffering by a bogus
simulation of it—a tragic drama or philosophical woolgathering, for instance.
Zapffe uses “The Last Messiah” to showcase how a literary-philosophical
composition cannot perturb its creator or anyone else with the severity of trueto-life horrors but only provide a pale representation of these horrors, just as a
King Lear’s weep-
32
ing for his dead daughter Cordelia cannot rend its audience with the throes of
the real thing.
By watchful practice of the above connivances, we may keep ourselves
from scrutinizing too assiduously the startling and dreadful mishaps that
may befall us.

but if I had the choice would I want to do it all again or not be born at all? I suspect I would choose the latter.

It seems to me that this difference of disposition speaks to there being no fact of the matter as to whether life is worth living.

I found this fascinating and immediately understood.

To mix the two up would be intentional for rhetorical purposes in a debate to deny Pessimism its proper place in philosophy, or it is simply ignorance of the difference. Which is it for you? Or am I missing what you have done here in your mixing the two?

I found this fascinating and immediately understood.

One can anticipate negative outcomes, or think that "the worst" will more likely happen than not, without making a general judgment regarding life or the world. I don't question whether there's such a thing as "philosophical pessimism."

Just curious, political and moral arguments for various sides are constantly defended and presented- why do you suppose there are still arguments made for various sides rather than people leaving it to “simply dispositions”?

There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.

I have come to consider that the matter of 'gods or not gods' is one of personal preference, a bit like sexual orientation. We are attracted to certain ideas aesthetically and because they fit in with our general sense making of the world. If stuff doesn't fit it is discarded and sometimes feared or resented. A lot of the more formal arguments seem to come post hoc. Which does not mean that they aren't important, just that they aren't primary.

I suppose one significant factor is that the dispositions of others are fairly invisible to us on superficial observation. I'd think most of us tend to assume that others share our dispositions until shown evidence to to the contrary.

I remember seeing an interview with Gore Vidal (who had an extraordinary life), he said that there were plenty of golden moments over his long and successful life (he was round 70 then) but he would never want relive a single one of them. I found this fascinating and immediately understood.

However, I think I'm just biologically disposed to appreciate the long strange trip humanity is on.

I think it really is a matter of disposition, and that globally pessimistic and optimistic dispositions may even simply be driven by different brain chemistries. It is common enough for humans to rationalize their own experiences and mind-sets after the fact.

I think it really is a matter of disposition, and that globally pessimistic and optimistic dispositions may even simply be driven by different brain chemistries. It is common enough for humans to rationalize their own experiences and mind-sets after the fact.

In other words I think the question of pessimism should not be bad faith dismissed as simply disposition, unless your view is that every claim should be dismissed for such reasons.

On the other hand, a claim that I should see the world, with the same emotional shadings as someone I am not, would sound like crazy talk to me.

Again, why can Philosophical Pessimism be dismissed as temperament based, but any other axiological debates like ethics and politics are fair game?

Pessimism is a choice, and I think, for you, the right one. You are exactly as you should be, right where you're needed.

That is what optimism sounds like.

I don't think it's all about disposition. You can be a pessimist or an optimist. That's just how great the world is. Freedom.

Again, why can Philosophical Pessimism be dismissed as temperament based, but any other axiological debates like ethics and politics are fair game?

I also think that people gravitate towards arguments that support their preferences. These arguments can certainly be debated and explored. I think this is about all we have - a conversation that coalesces around personal experience, preferences and the values and beliefs which result from these.

But why is political ideology something to be debated, but Philosophical Pessimism is something you just choose, like a favorite band or some such? Why is Realism or Idealism a debate bit not Philosophical Pessimism?

It's why the Trump and Israel threads are dumpster fires.

How do you propose it be done? Is it a moral argument, as in, the greater good comes from being negative in perspective? That would be odd, considering happiness is often posited as the goal of the good.



Is it an epistemological goal, as in truth is found by being negative?

Present your thesis. Pessimism is a correct perspective because it does what better than optimism?

I also don't think we debate political ideology here. We argue current events, choosing our facts and conclusions to fit our narrative. Political debate would argue the nuances of a political theory without the personal commentary. It's rare to see capitalism or Marxism argued from a emotionally neutral perspective. It's why the Trump and Israel threads are dumpster fires.

Pessimism claims an impressive following?—?from Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, to Freud, Camus, and Foucault. Yet “pessimist” remains a term of abuse?—?an accusation of a bad attitude?—?or the diagnosis of an unhappy psychological state. Pessimism is thought of as an exclusively negative stance that inevitably leads to resignation or despair. Even when pessimism looks like utter truth, we are told that it makes the worst of a bad situation. Bad for the individual, worse for the species?—?who would actually counsel pessimism?

Philosophical pessimism is a family of philosophical views that assign a negative value to life or existence. Philosophical pessimists commonly argue that the world contains an empirical prevalence of pains over pleasures, that existence is ontologically or metaphysically adverse to living beings, and that life is fundamentally meaningless or without purpose. Philosophical pessimism is not a single coherent movement, but rather a loosely associated group of thinkers with similar ideas and a resemblance to each other.[1]:?7? Their responses to the condition of life are widely varied. Philosophical pessimists usually do not advocate for suicide as a solution to the human predicament; many favour the adoption of antinatalism, that is, non-procreation.

Pleasure doesn't add anything positive to our experience
A number of philosophers have put forward criticisms of pleasure, essentially denying that it adds anything positive to our well-being above the neutral state.

Pleasure as the mere removal of pain
A particular strand of criticism of pleasure goes as far back as to Plato, who said that most of the pleasures we experience are forms of relief from pain, and that the unwise confuse the neutral painless state with happiness.[28]:?286–287? Epicurus pushed this idea to its limit and claimed that, "[t]he limit of the greatness of the pleasures is the removal of everything which can give pain".[21]:?474? As such, according to Epicureans, one can not be better off than being free from pain, anxiety, distress, fear, irritation, regret, worry, etc. — in the state of tranquillity.[29][30]:?117–121?

According to Knutsson, there are a couple of reasons why we might think that. Firstly, we can say that one experience is better than another by recognizing that the first one lacks a particular discomfort. And we can do that with any number of experiences, thus explaining what it means to feel better, all that just with relying on taking away disturbances. Secondly, it's difficult to find a particular quality of experience that would make it better than a completely undisturbed state.[29]

Thirdly, we can explain behavior without invoking positive pleasures. Fourthly, it's easy to understand what it means for an experience to have certain imperfections (aversive qualities), while it's not clear what it would mean for an experience to be genuinely better than neutral. And lastly, a model with only negative and neutral states is theoretically simpler than one containing an additional class of positive experiences.[29]

No genuine positive states
A stronger version of this view is that there may be no states that are undisturbed or neutral. It's at least plausible that in every state we could notice some dissatisfactory quality such as tiredness, irritation, boredom, worry, feeling uncomfortable, etc. Instead of neutral states, there may simply be "default" states — states with recurrent but minor frustrations and discomforts that, over time, we got used to and learned not to do anything about.[29][31]:?255?[9]:?71–73?

Pleasure as the mere relief from striving
Schopenhauer maintained that only pain is positive. That is, only pain is actually felt, it's being experienced as something added to our consciousness. On the other hand, pleasure is only ever negative, which means it only takes away something already present in our experience. He put forward his negativity thesis — that pleasure is only ever a relief from pain.[5]:?50?[26][32][4] Later German pessimists — Julius Bahnsen, Eduard von Hartmann, and Philipp Mainländer — held very similar views.[5]:?154,?208,?268?

Pain can be removed in one of two ways. One way is to satisfy a desire. Since to strive is to suffer, once desire is satisfied, suffering stops. The second way is through distraction. When we're not paying attention to what we lack — and hence, desire — we are temporarily at peace. This happens in cases of intellectual and aesthetic experiences.[32]

A craving may arise when we direct our attention towards some external object, or when we notice something unwanted about our current situation. It's being experienced as a visceral need to change something about the current state. When we do not feel any such cravings, we are content or tranquil — we feel no urgency or need to change anything about our experience.[33][31]:?254–255?

No genuine counterpart to suffering
Alternatively, it can be argued that, for any purported pleasant state, we never find — under closer inspection — anything that would make it a positive or genuine counterpart to suffering. For an experience to be genuinely positive it would have to be an experiential opposite to suffering. However, it's difficult to understand what it would take for an experience to be an opposite of another experience — there just seem to be separate axes of experiences (hot and cold, loud and silent), which are noticed as contrasting. And even if we granted that the idea of an experiential opposite makes sense, it's difficult — if not impossible — to actually find a clear example of such an experience that would survive scrutiny.[34] There is some neuroscientific evidence that positive and negative experiences are not laid on the same axis, but rather comprise two distinct — albeit interacting — systems.[10][35]

Life contains uncompensated evils
One argument for the negative view on life is the recognition that evils are unconditionally unacceptable. A good life is not possible with evils in it. This line of thinking is based on Schopenhauer's statement that "the ill and evil in the world... even if they stood in the most just relation to each other, indeed even if they were far outweighed by the good, are nevertheless things that should absolutely never exist in any way, shape or form" in The World as Will and Representation.[36]:?181? The idea here is that no good can ever erase the experienced evils, because they are of a different quality or kind of importance.

Schopenhauer elaborates on the vital difference between the good and the bad, saying that, "it is fundamentally beside the point to argue whether there is more good or evil in the world: for the very existence of evil already decides the matter since it can never be cancelled out by any good that might exist alongside or after it, and cannot therefore be counterbalanced", and adding that, "even if thousands had lived in happiness and delight, this would never annul the anxiety and tortured death of a single person; and my present wellbeing does just as little to undo my earlier suffering."[36]:?591?

One way of interpreting the argument is by focusing on how one thing could compensate another. The goods can only compensate the evils, when they a) happen to the same subject, and b) happen at the same time. The reason why the good has to happen to the same subject is because the miserable cannot feel the happiness of the joyful, and hence it has no effect on him. The reason why the good has to happen at the same time is because the future joy does not act backwards in time, and so it has no effect on the present state of the suffering individual. But these conditions are not being met, and hence life is not worth living. Here, it doesn't matter whether there are any genuine positive pleasures, because since pleasures and pains are experientially separated, the evils are left unrepaid.[4][26]

Another interpretation of the negativity thesis — that goods are merely negative in character — uses metaphors of debt and repayment, and crime and punishment. Here, merely ceasing an evil does not count as paying it off, just like stopping committing a crime does not amount to making amends for it. The bad can only be compensated by something positively good, just like a crime has to be answered for by some punishment, or a debt has to be paid off by something valuable. If the good is merely taking away an evil, then it cannot compensate for the bad since it's not of the appropriate kind — it's not a positive thing that could "repay the debt" of the bad.[37]

Suffering is essential to life because of perpetual striving
Arthur Schopenhauer introduces an a priori argument for pessimism. The basis of the argument is the recognition that sentient organisms—animals—are embodied and inhabit specific niches in the environment. They struggle for their self-preservation. Striving to satisfy wants is the essence of all organic life.

Schopenhauer posits that striving is the essence of life. All striving, he argues, involves suffering. Thus, he concludes that suffering is unavoidable and inherent to existence. Given this, he says that the balance of good and bad is on the whole negative.

There are a couple of reasons why suffering is a fundamental aspect of life:

Satisfaction is elusive: organisms strive towards various things all the time. Whenever they satisfy one desire, they want something else and the striving begins anew.
Happiness is negative: while needs come to us seemingly out of themselves, we have to exert ourselves in order to experience some degree of joy. Moreover, pleasure is only ever a satisfaction—or elimination—of a particular desire. Therefore, it is only a negative experience as it temporarily takes away a striving or need.
Striving is suffering: as long as striving is not satisfied, it's being experienced as suffering.
Boredom is suffering: the lack of an object of desire is experienced as a discomforting state.[12][26]
The terminality of human life
According to Julio Cabrera's ontology, human life has a structurally negative value. Under this view, human life does not provoke discomfort in humans due to the particular events that happen in the lives of each individual, but due to the very being or nature of human existence as such. The following characteristics constitute what Cabrera calls the "terminality of being" — in other words, its structurally negative value:[38]:?23–24?

The being acquired by a human at birth is decreasing (or "decaying"), in the sense of a being that begins to end since its very emergence, following a single and irreversible direction of deterioration and decline, of which complete consummation can occur at any moment between some minutes and around one hundred years.
From the moment they come into being, humans are affected by three kinds of frictions: physical pain (in the form of illnesses, accidents, and natural catastrophes to which they are always exposed); discouragement (in the form of "lacking the will", or the "mood" or the "spirit", to continue to act, from mild taedium vitae to serious forms of depression), and finally, exposure to the aggressions of other humans (from gossip and slander to various forms of discrimination, persecution, and injustice); aggressions that we too can inflict on others (who are also submitted, like us, to the three kinds of friction).
To defend themselves against (a) and (b), human beings are equipped with mechanisms of creation of positive values (ethical, aesthetic, religious, entertaining, recreational, as well as values contained in human realizations of all kinds), which humans must keep constantly active. All positive values that appear within human life are reactive and palliative; they do not arise from the structure of life itself, but are introduced by the permanent and anxious struggle against the decaying life and its three kinds of friction, with such struggle however doomed to be defeated, at any moment, by any of the mentioned frictions or by the progressive decline of one's being.
For Cabrera, this situation is further worsened by a phenomenon he calls "moral impediment", that is, the structural impossibility of acting in the world without harming or manipulating someone at some given moment.[38]:?52? According to him, moral impediment happens not necessarily because of a moral fault in us, but due to the structural situation in which we have been placed. The positive values that are created in human life come into being within a narrow and anxious environment.[38]:?54?

Human beings are cornered by the presence of their decaying bodies as well as pain and discouragement, in a complicated and holistic web of actions, in which we are forced to quickly understand diversified social situations and take relevant decisions. It is difficult for our urgent need to build our own positive values, not to end up harming the projects of other humans who are also anxiously trying to do the same, that is, build their own positive values.[38]:?54?

Du?kha as the mark of existence
Constant dissatisfaction — du?kha — is an intrinsic mark of all sentient existence. All living creatures have to undergo the sufferings of birth, aging, sickness and death; want what they do not have, avoid what they do not like, and feel loss for the positive things they have lost. All of these types of striving (ta?h?) are sources of suffering, and they are not external but are rather inherent vices (such as greed, lust, envy, self-indulgence) of all living creatures.[39][14][16]:?130?

Since in Buddhism one of the central concepts is that of liberation or nirvana, this highlights the miserable character of existence, as there would be no need to make such a great effort to free oneself from a mere "less than ideal state". Since enlightenment is the goal of Buddhist practices through the Noble Eightfold Path, the value of life itself, under this perspective, appears as doubtful.[40][14][16]:?130?

The asymmetry between harms and benefits
Main article: Benatar's asymmetry argument
David Benatar argues that there is a significant difference between lack/presence of harms and benefits when comparing a situation when a person exists with a situation when said person never exists. The starting point of the argument is the following noncontroversial observation:
1. The presence of pain is bad.
2. The presence of pleasure is good.
However, the symmetry breaks when we consider the absence of pain and pleasure:
3. The absence of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone.
4. The absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation.

Based on the above, Benatar infers the following:

the absence of pain is better in the case where a person never exists than the presence of pain where a person does exist,
the absence of pleasure is not worse in the case where a person never exists than the presence of pleasure where a person does exists.
In short, the absence of pain is good, while the absence of pleasure is not bad. From this it follows that not coming into existence has advantages over coming into existence for the one who would be affected by coming into the world. This is the cornerstone of his argument for antinatalism — the view that coming into existence is bad.[11]:?28–59?[15]:?100–103?

Empirical differences between the pleasures and pains in life
To support his case for pessimism, Benatar mentions a series of empirical differences between the pleasures and pains in life. In a strictly temporal aspect, the most intense pleasures that can be experienced are short-lived (e.g. orgasms), whereas the most severe pains can be much more enduring, lasting for days, months, and even years.[9]:?77? The worst pains that can be experienced are also worse in quality or magnitude than the best pleasures are good, offering as an example the thought experiment of whether one would accept "an hour of the most delightful pleasures in exchange for an hour of the worst tortures".[9]:?77?

In addition to citing Schopenhauer, who made a similar argument, when asking his readers to "compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of that other";[41] the amount of time it may take for one's desires to be fulfilled, with some of our desires never being satisfied;[9]:?79? the quickness with which one's body can be injured, damaged, or fall ill, and the comparative slowness of recovery, with full recovery sometimes never being attained;[9]:?77–78? the existence of chronic pain, but the comparative non-existence of chronic pleasure;[9]:?77? the gradual and inevitable physical and mental decline to which every life is subjected through the process of ageing;[9]:?78–79? the effortless way in which the bad things in life naturally come to us, and the efforts one needs to muster in order to ward them off and obtain the good things;[9]:?80? the lack of a cosmic or transcendent meaning to human life as a whole, borrowing a term from Spinoza, according to Benatar our lives lack meaning from the perspective of the universe, that is, sub specie aeternitatis.[9]:?35–36?

Benatar concludes that, even if one argues that the bad things in life are in some sense necessary for human beings to appreciate the good things in life, or at least to appreciate them fully, he asserts that it is not clear that this appreciation requires as much bad as there is, and that our lives are worse than they would be if the bad things were not in such sense necessary.[9]:?85?

Human life would be vastly better if pain were fleeting and pleasure protracted; if the pleasures were much better than the pains were bad; if it were really difficult to be injured or get sick; if recovery were swift when injury or illness did befall us; and if our desires were fulfilled instantly and if they did not give way to new desires. Human life would also be immensely better if we lived for many thousands of years in good health and if we were much wiser, cleverer, and morally better than we are.[9]:?82–83?

*****

Defence mechanisms
Peter Wessel Zapffe viewed humans as animals with an overly developed consciousness who yearn for justice and meaning in a fundamentally meaningless and unjust universe — constantly struggling against feelings of existential dread as well as the knowledge of their own mortality. He identified four defence mechanisms that allow people to cope with disturbing thoughts about the nature of human existence:

Isolation: the troublesome facts of existence are simply repressed — they are not spoken about in public, and are not even thought about in private.

Anchoring: one fixates (anchors) oneself on cultural projects, religious beliefs, ideologies, etc.; and pursue goals appropriate to the objects of one's fixation. By dedicating oneself to a cause, one focuses one's attention on a specific value or ideal, thus achieving a communal or cultural sense of stability and safety from unsettling existential musings.

Distraction: through entertainment, career, status, etc., one distracts oneself from existentially disturbing thoughts. By constantly chasing for new pleasures, new goals, and new things to do, one is able to evade a direct confrontation against mankind's vulnerable and ill-fated situation in the cosmos.

Sublimation: artistic expression may act as a temporary means of respite from feelings of existential angst by transforming them into works of art that can be aesthetically appreciated from a distance.[44][15]:?91–94?

Non-procreation and extinction
See also: Antinatalism
Concern for those who will be coming into this world has been present throughout the history of pessimism. Notably, Arthur Schopenhauer asked:[45]:?318–319?

One should try to imagine that the act of procreation were neither a need, nor accompanied by sexual pleasure, but instead a matter of pure, rational reflection; could the human race even continue to exist? Would not everyone, on the contrary, have so much compassion for the coming generation that he would rather spare it the burden of existence, or at least refuse to take it upon himself to cold-bloodedly impose it on them?

Schopenhauer also compares life to a debt that's being collected through urgent needs and torturing wants. We live by paying off the interests on this debt by constantly satisfying the desires of life; and the entirety of such debt is contracted in procreation: when we come into the world.[36]:?595?

Right, but I guess I am perplexed because no one (Ligotti or I at least) is saying that you can't make a "the worst" anticipation of a negative outcome without "making a general judgement regarding life or the world"... So I am not sure what it is this straw man you are arguing against, as no one as I see it, is claiming thus.

I think the fact a word like "pessimism" means something in ordinary discourse makes its use to describe a philosophical position inadvisable, as confusing, but say no more than that regarding philosophical pessimism at this time. In other words, I think "pessimism" as it's apparently used in philosophy is something of a misnomer. That I'm not a philosophical pessimist should be obvious, and I think I've said why that's the case already.

Should we ditch Stoicism or the descriptor of "Stoic" or Epicureanism and the descriptor of "Epicurean" for similar reasons?

A. What makes certain things in conciousness "artificial?" What could this even mean? It seems like conciousness must include an ability to focus on some things and not others for it to be consciousness.

Ligotti- CATHR:As adumbrated above, Zapffe arrived at two central determinations
regarding humanity’s “biological predicament.” The first was that
consciousness had overreached the point of being a sufferable property
of our species, and to minimize this problem we must minimize our
consciousness. From the many and various ways this may be done [schop1 note: acknowledgement this is simply a model, not exhaustive],
Zapffe chose to hone in on four principal strategies.
31
(1) ISOLATION. So that we may live without going into a free-fall of
trepidation, we isolate the dire facts of being alive by relegating them to a
remote compartment of our minds. They are the lunatic family members in the
attic whose existence we deny in a conspiracy of silence.
(2) ANCHORING. To stabilize our lives in the tempestuous waters of chaos,
we conspire to anchor them in metaphysical and institutional “verities”—God,
Morality, Natural Law, Country, Family—that inebriate us with a sense of
being official, authentic, and safe in our beds.
(3) DISTRACTION. To keep our minds unreflective of a world of horrors,
we distract them with a world of trifling or momentous trash. The most operant
method for furthering the conspiracy, it is in continuous employ and demands
only that people keep their eyes on the ball—or their television sets,
their government’s foreign policy, their science projects, their careers, their
place in society or the universe, etc.
(4) SUBLIMATION. That we might annul a paralyzing stage fright at what
may happen to even the soundest bodies and minds, we sublimate our fears by
making an open display of them. In the Zapffean sense, sublimation is the
rarest technique utilized for conspiring against the human race. Putting into
play both deviousness and skill, this is what thinkers and artistic types do when
they recycle the most demoralizing and unnerving aspects of life as works in
which the worst fortunes of humanity are presented in a stylized and removed
manner as entertainment. In so many words, these thinkers and artistic types
confect products that provide an escape from our suffering by a bogus
simulation of it—a tragic drama or philosophical woolgathering, for instance.
Zapffe uses “The Last Messiah” to showcase how a literary-philosophical
composition cannot perturb its creator or anyone else with the severity of trueto-life horrors but only provide a pale representation of these horrors, just as a
King Lear’s weep-
32
ing for his dead daughter Cordelia cannot rend its audience with the throes of
the real thing.
By watchful practice of the above connivances, we may keep ourselves
from scrutinizing too assiduously the startling and dreadful mishaps that
may befall us. These must come as a surprise, for if we expected them
then the conspiracy could not work its magic. [b]Naturally, conspiracy
theories seldom pique the curiosity of “right-minded” individuals and are
met with disbelief and denial when they do. Best to immunize your
consciousness from any thoughts that are startling and dreadful so that
we can all go on conspiring to survive and reproduce as paradoxical
beings—puppets that can walk and talk all by themselves. At worst keep
your startling and dreadful thoughts to yourself. Hearken well: “None of
us wants to hear spoken the exact anxieties we keep locked up inside
ourselves. Smother that urge to go spreading news of your pain and
nightmares around town. Bury your dead but don’t leave a trace. And be
sure to get on with things.[/b][ schop1 note: This is Ligotti playing the optimistic interlocutor again.. to be read with heavy dose of cynicism of course ]

B. If human conciousness is such that most people who have it enjoy it, then doesn't that just show that it isn't actually that bad? The charge of "artificial" exclusion of some elements of conciousness doesn't really make sense. I don't get how focusing on what one finds relevant can ever be defined as somehow artificial or alien to consciousness.

This would seem to imply that pessimism of Zapffe's variety is defective conciousness, not that all human conciousness is defective.

Modern man has made it about as you said "sucking the marrow out of life" by accumulating (and projecting) being at the peak of something (well, when everyone isn't as you say "distracting themselves with social media"). That is to say, if you notice, everyone wants to project the same intense experiences... TRAVEL (the more exotic the better, so better have some obscure African/Asian/South American destination there too), OUTDOORS (better show pictures at X landmark and showed you really struggled to get there in an arduous hike), EVENTS (concerts, political rallies, whatever), EXTREME stuff (fast X.. cars, trains, planes, rides, adventure stuff), or simply playing games (electronic or analog) markers like this. I can try to tie this in to the commodification of human experience, but I am not really trying to do that. Rather, I am just showcasing the struggle for humans to come up with modern ways to inject meaning. Thus, sporting, games, hobbies, travel, and various experiences become the default for modern man to hang their hat on. But, as you said, it doesn't make a difference. As I stated this represents:

and then at the top is supposedly "self-actualization", which I gather to be "peak experiences". One is being true to one's values (Nietzschean-esque).. I imagine the world-travelling, hobbyist, sports-enthusiast, mountain-climbing, civic duty participating, citizen, supposedly reveling in the balance between skill, challenge, preference, and aptitude.. The perfect balancer of personal interests and social interests.. Flow states are had readily and easily. One is able to express one's talents, etc.
— schopenhauer1

They are all doing what Zapffe explained (ignoring, isolating, anchoring, and sublimating).

I'm still finding the OP and attempts to justify it totally nonsensical. I'm really trying here...

They are all part of the same whole. There is no "true level" of human misery and suffering that we can discover by "cutting through illusion."

I would agree that life has no intrinsic positive value, but I also think it is nonsensical to claim that it has negative intrinsic value.

Philosophical Pessimism is debatable...

I've read a great deal on this topic (including all the "pessimists" cited by T. Ligotti & JF Dienstag) and the arguments either way seem ad hoc (or rationalizations) because the premises are often merely anecdotal.

A pupil is a good thing. It isn't "running away from the truth of how much light is in the room," to have your pupil constrict, just like the release of endorphins isn't some sort of "illusion-making to hide the real levels of pain in the body." The "real level of pain," is determined, in part, by the endorphins.

They are all part of the same whole. There is no "true level" of human misery and suffering that we can discover by "cutting through illusion."

I would agree that life has no intrinsic positive value, but I also think it is nonsensical to claim that it has negative intrinsic value.

Some argue that if life has no overarching purpose that it follows that it has a negative intrinsic value, but I think it is arguable that having no overarching purpose is a positive thing, in that it allows us to be free to create our own purposes, rather than submitting to an imposed purpose or else suffer punishment, karmic consequences and so on.

Of course, even so-called overarching purposes are culturally imposed, since they are matters of faith, not something which could be obvious to any unbiased or free minded individual.

How?

The value is squarely on the being-in-the-world. It is rather about not the universe devoid of being, but the universe with a being that can feel, comprehend, and in the case of the human, self-reflect.

I don't view "no purpose" as positive or negative either on its face. Rather, it is suffering that is paramount to the pessimist. Suffering can show itself in peculiar ways to the human animal. When doing something tedious, or in prolonged bouts of melancholy, one might see an immense worthlessness to it all.

Indeed, what better way to be motivated than some external, culturally derived and tested way?

The value or meaning or purpose life has for living beings is diverse just as are the living beings. Trying to dismiss (your version of) what I said as "surface-y" seems a rather desperate tactic.

Sure, some minority of people, not animals I would think, may feel something like this. It may be driven by brain chemistry, or it may be on account of trauma, or something else; but whatever its origin might be, it is a subjective emotional state, not a universal truth. Life involves suffering, but it also involves joy, and the proportions of each will vary from living being to living being: seeking to absolutize the characterization of life as suffering is a fool's errand.

How so? You said there is no intrinsic value. That is missing the point, that it is only beings that perceive value, and human beings that are self-aware they are perceiving value. And that is what matters, not what the universe is devoid of beings who have value. If that was the case, we wouldn't need to talk about anything. We just wouldn't "be".

We have discussed this before, and I believe I have answered you before regarding this.

I have said that value, meaning, purpose is only to be found in the volitions, cognitions and judgements of beings. The value of life as assessed by human beings, and arguably not other animals, may be either positive or negative, depending on the human being doing the assessing, so it seems obvious that there is no intrinsic, universally negative or positive value to life.

If you have something to say in response to the passage you quoted, then say it. Vague references to some previous answer you purport to have given are next to useless. If you want to bring in past discussions, then at least bother to cite particular statements.

Whether or not one agrees that there is a
“brotherhood of suffering between everything alive,” we can all agree
that human beings are the only organisms that can have such a
conception of existence, or any conception period. That we can conceive
of the phenomenon of suffering, our own as well as that of other
organisms, is a property unique to us as a dangerously conscious species.
We know there is suffering, and we do take action against it, which
includes downplaying it by “artificially limiting the content of
consciousness.” Between taking action against and downplaying
suffering, mainly the latter, most of us do not worry that it has overly
sullied our existence.
As a fact, we cannot give suffering precedence in either our individual
or collective lives. We have to get on with things, and those who give
precedence to suffering will be left behind. [ pace @Ciceronianus et al comments :) )
28
They fetter us with their sniveling. We have someplace to go and must
believe we can get there, wherever that may be. And to conceive that
there is a “brotherhood of suffering between everything alive” would
disable us from getting anywhere. We are preoccupied with the good
life, and step by step are working toward a better life. What we do, as a
conscious species, is set markers for ourselves. Once we reach one
marker, we advance to the next—as if we were playing a board game we
think will never end, despite the fact that it will, like it or not. And if you
are too conscious of not liking it, then you may conceive of yourself as a
biological paradox that cannot live with its consciousness and cannot
live without it. And in so living and not living, you take your place with
the undead and the human puppet.

Yeah, that is not what I or Ligotti was claiming in the sense of "meaninglessness". So that is a moot argument.

can anyone else see the validity in this idea of "excess" in existence, especially for the human experience?

5. Human Mind, and thus, all human experience, is a structure of excess Signifiers stored in memory, "acting" autonomously to trigger the Body to respond with feelings and actions. The feelings etc in turn trigger more Signiers which, in turn trigger more feelings and actions, all of which are "experienced" in that form, and the Real aware-ing is inevitably displaced thereby. No longer are we motivated to feel and to act by natural drives; now it is tge desire of/for these Signifiers motivating us.


So yes, there is excess in the human experience relative to all other species; even those whose intelligence etc. resembles ours. We alone are motivated by the excess chatter taking place autonomously inside our bodies and believed by us to be real, essential, spiritual even, when all along it is autonomously moving Fiction.

1. that there is a Real consciousness shared by many if not all "sophisticated" organisms, including humans. It is the natural aware-ing of our Bodies in the natural environment, motivated by natural drives, including survival, bonding, reproduction.

2. one of the characteristics of this aware-ing for many species including "pre-historic" humans was a system of "shortcuts" to trigger expedient responses akin to classical conditioning, "designed" to fast-track our drives. Images are stored in memory and are autonomously called up to trigger efficiency in response. Eg. hear a tiger roar, run. See a red berry, don't eat. The roar and the color red is a Signifier in memory called up for survival.

3. For humans only (as far as we know) this system of shortcuts/signifiers grew to an astronomical surplus level (your: "excess"). By some point pre-history becomes History and the word "tiger" Signifies in the same way the sound of a roar once did.

4. This excess of Signifiers evolved into a System with grammar/logic/reason/fantasy etc etc. And Human Consciousness emerged displacing Real consciousness, I.e., natural aware-ing with the system of Signifiers (for simplicity, "Language")

5. Human Mind, and thus, all human experience, is a structure of excess Signifiers stored in memory, "acting" autonomously to trigger the Body to respond with feelings and actions. The feelings etc in turn trigger more Signiers which, in turn trigger more feelings and actions, all of which are "experienced" in that form, and the Real aware-ing is inevitably displaced thereby. No longer are we motivated to feel and to act by natural drives; now it is tge desire of/for these Signifiers motivating us.

we become in a way "exiled" from how other animals are "Real aware-ing"

And with only the possible exception of timeless "moments" in Zazen, I feat, there is no way of returning from exile. Our Real Being is far too displaced by the inescapable chatter.

• The longing for the tranquility of sleep.
• The restive state of a meditative state.
• The "being there" presence of being fully immersed in an activity (flow state).
• Trying to simply be "present" when it is so difficult most of the time.

These and other examples seem to be this longing for "Our Real Being", but in a way, they are vain attempts because once "crossing the divide" of the kind of consciousness of Signifiers et al, it is only like looking at a far distant shore that may or may not really be there. They are artificial/secondary ways of getting there, in other words.

So I guess a question I can pose here, with all this in mind, is can anyone else see the validity in this idea of"excess" in existence, especially for the human experience? There is something that we are deluding ourselves in, with our goals, narratives, and ignoring of the situation, so that we don't have to "feel" or "sense" the excess. The excess might be akin to a certain sense of angst, existential dread, isolation, loneliness, ennui, and meaninglessness. Ligotti, used a term which is quite "horror" sounding with all caps- MALIGNANTLY USELESS. That might get at the feeling better.

Human beings are unique in their ability to engage in thinking and reflection, which allows them to shape their own identities and find meaning in their lives."

ENOAH was pretty right on with his summary here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/882856
. Do you have a response ENOAH?

But besides the eloquent ways in which Arendt, Et. Al. construct their meaning, their is nothing noble in it. It's actually what we do with the Fiction (Signifiers structuring Mind) all the time: construct meaning. Simple eg. body organically is presently paining; Mind constructs "I stubbed my toe," out of the autonomously moving Signifiers available; the pronouns so assimilated into the Narrative which Body is fed, that its mechanics as signifier of (usually, but not always) Body is ordained with belief, and we "think" there is this poor I who stubbed its very own toe.

My point with respect to Gnomon's obviously great point, is that what Arendt and (I'm thinking most post Kantian) other Western thinkers are addressing is the ever present intuition that Mind is a Fiction. And that surfaces as a double edged sword. On the one hand, oh shit, Mind is Fiction. On the other hand, that means there are astronomical possibilities.

A ton more can be said, but for now, just one more thing. It's not like we have any way out. Although Nature did not construct Mind, and it is Fictional, it is precisely that which has seemingly permanently alienated us from Truth: organic, natural reality. Even as I write this the intuition arises in each of us, the mechanism of belief built into the structure. I hear that voice whispering, "you mean Truth is those meaningless organic drives? "F" that then, give me the Fiction." See? We construct meaning, Arendt. We don't discover anything.

Yes, accept that, I don't think Sartre's authenticity was Real in the ultimate sense. I think he knew he was providing instructions, not on how to "attain" authenticity as in Reality, or Truth. But how to make the Narrative authentic within the inescapable Truth of its ultimate inauthenticity.

What do you think?

there is almost no reason we "must" do anything.