A Thread for Posting Brutally Pessimistic Quotes by Anguished Philosophers

I liked this quote from the Charting the Slow Death of the Universe

"The Universe will decline from here on in, sliding gently into old age. The Universe has basically sat down on the sofa, pulled up a blanket and is about to nod off for an eternal doze,” concludes Simon Driver.

Since we're quoting news reports today:

On average, the effect of a new baby on a person's life is devastatingly bad — worse than divorce, worse than unemployment and worse even than the death of a partner.

lol that's great

but is it worse than marriage?

Sloterdijk, "Rules for the Human Zoo"

Two thousand years after Plato wrote it seems as if not only gods but the wise have abandoned us, and left us alone with our partial knowledge and our ignorance. What is left to us in the place of the wise is their writings, in their glinting brilliance and their increasing obscurity. They still lay in more or less accessible editions; they can still be read, if only one knew why one should bother. It is their fate--to stand in silent bookshelves, like posted letters no longer collected, sent to us by authors, of whom we no longer know whether or not they could be our friends.

allows the possibility of authors being friends; too optimistic

When suffering comes, we yearn for some sign from God, forgetting we have just had one. - Mignon McLaughlin

― mayhaps, Friday, May 11, 2007 9:17 AM (8 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Nice one--missed it the first time I read this thread.

Have been inspired to put half a dozen of these quotes into an email entitled 'Friday Funnies' and send it round the office.

Jacques Monod's Chance and Necessity

The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.

Thomas Bernhard: “The state is a construct eternally on the verge of foundering, the people one that is endlessly condemned to infamy and feeblemindedness, life a state of hopelessness in every philosophy and which will end in universal madness.”

The Jacques Monod quote doesn't seem that pessimistic to me.

Monod (a biochemist by trade) also believed that evolution of complex, intelligent life was so unlikely that we're likely the only ones. So our solitude is absolute.

http://nihilisa-frank.tumblr.com

Claude Levi-Strauss:

To establish a correlation between the emergence of writing and certain characteristic features of civilization, we must look in a quite different direction. The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. Such, at any rate, is the typical patter of development to be observed from Egypt to China, at the time when writing first emerged: it seems to have favoured the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment ... My hypothesis, if correct, would oblige us to recognize the fact that the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery. The use of writing for disinterested purposes, and as a source of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure, is a secondary result, and more often than not it may even be turned into a means of strengthening, justifying or concealing the other.

love that tumblr

here's one from an anguished cosmologist

The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated.

http://www.sns.ias.edu/pitp2/2011files/PhysRevD.21.3305.pdf

http://i975.photobucket.com/albums/ae232/daggerlee/0DDCEADD-CC33-4C29-B97D-5AC5E0AFB694_zpsjz2zhamg.jpg

^^ so into this

is it really worth starting a new thread? all these sites die eventually

― Cosmic Slop, Sunday, 20 September 2015 00:05 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

"We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence." -- more Cioran

https://66.media.tumblr.com/c627ef171c430ef153db578ba403632f/tumblr_oae9r1xqjw1qgktofo1_540.png

One night in long bygone times, man awoke and saw himself.

He saw that he was naked under cosmos, homeless in his own body. All things dissolved before his testing thought, wonder above wonder, horror above horror unfolded in his mind.

Then woman too awoke and said it was time to go and slay. And he fetched his bow and arrow, a fruit of the marriage of spirit and hand, and went outside beneath the stars. But as the beasts arrived at their waterholes where he expected them of habit, he felt no more the tiger’s bound in his blood, but a great psalm about the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive.

That day he did not return with prey, and when they found him by the next new moon, he was sitting dead by the waterhole.

Whatever happened? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn the one edge toward himself.

Peter Wessel Zappfe, The Last Messiah

A charmed life is so rare that for every one such life there are millions of wretched lives. Some know that their baby will be among the unfortunate. Nobody knows, however, that their baby will be one of the allegedly lucky few. Great suffering could await any person that is brought into existence. Even the most privileged people could give birth to a child that will suffer unbearably, be raped, assaulted, or be murdered brutally. The optimist surely bears the burden of justifying this procreational Russian roulette. Given that there are no real advantages over never existing for those who are brought into existence, it is hard to see how the significant risk of serious harm could be justified. If we count not only the unusually severe harms that anybody could endure, but also the quite routine ones of ordinary human life, then we find that matters are still worse for cheery procreators. It shows that they play Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun aimed, of course, not at their own heads, but at those of their future offspring.

Pat David Benatar

otm

I love that, although this part smacks of the kind of claim that gets very puzzling when you try argue it out:

there are no real advantages over never existing for those who are brought into existence

Like, does it even make sense to talk about the 'advantages' of existing over not existing? Does that mean comparing the conditions of existing things and non-existing things?

Well, that's his point. What he calls the 'asymmetry' between living and not existing. Someone who has never existing has not been deprived of anything (if we thought otherwise we think we had a duty to have as many children as possible) but those who suffer are worse off for having been born. So even a little bit of suffering makes life terrible, because you wouldn't have lost and of the good stuff by not existing (you wouldn't exist, obviously) but you would benefit from the absence of a little suffering.

I disagree with his position, but I think it's somewhat compelling.

Actually, ignore that. Aside from spelling errors and omissions I don't think I can really discuss that stuff atm.

good thread to revisit in these times

my wife changed her facebook profile pic to a photo of the cover of "the trouble with being born"

maybe this thread should be reserved for the thing itself, but i've been thinking about this mode of thinking/writing recently too. mostly in terms of defending it (i am an aficionado after all). but it's tricky because i'm not sure you can defend it on grounds of utility, or politics, or ethics (schopenhauer aside) because it seems to issue from some other absolutely necessary space that doesn't answer to those things. it's the shadow side of radically transcendent forms of religion but it seems occupied with vacating those forms of discourse/thought of value while holding on to the form.

gotta repost this one from Sartre because i'm feeling it rn. (plus now i can fix my typo)

With this third world war, which is going to break out one day, with this miserable ensemble that our planet is, despair returns to tempt me again: the idea that we will not ever finish it, there is not any goal, that there are only individual goals for which people struggle. People start small revolutions, but there is not a goal for humanity, there is nothing that interests mankind, there are only disruptions.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/philosopher-failure-emil-ciorans-heights-despair/

^^^haven't read that yet, but figured good or bad it was worth posting here.

oh yes, choice quotes in there.

“Before being a fundamental mistake, life is a failure of taste which neither death nor even poetry succeeds in correcting.”

the gods take no thought for our happiness. only for our punishment.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C2pcxo3XUAEF32S.jpg:small

-- bob marley seneca

stoicism is not pessimism!!!

More context for Seneca, Natural Questions Book III, 29.5-10:

So whenever the end of human history arrives, when the earth's parts have to perish and all be utterly destroyed, in order that primitive, innocent people may be created afresh and no teacher of worse behavior may survive, then more liquid will be produced than there has ever been before. For at present the elements are weighted out ous required. One of them needs to be increased so that an imbalance may upset the current equilibium. Water will be increased: for now there is enough to encircle the land, but not to cover it; whatever you add to it must overflow into alien territory.
So consider whether the earth does not also need to be diminished, so that the weaker may succumb to the stronger. So it will begin to decay, thent to decompose and turn to liquid, and to dissolve into a steady stream of putrefaction. Then rivers will spring up beneath mountains and make them crumble under the onslaught.
Then fields that are affected become soddon; the the ground will exude water; the mountaintops will bubble over. Just as healthy parts become diseased, and an ulcer spreads to adjacent areas, so the regions closed to land that is already awash will themselves dissolve and forme a trickle, then a fast current; then, as rocks gape apart all over the place, they will rush through the channels and join up all the seas. The Adriatic will be no more, nor the strats of the Sicilian sea, nor Charybdis, nor Scylla. The new sea will overwhelm all those myths, and the ocean that now encyrcles the land, assigned to its outer edges, will reach the center. What happens next? Winter will cling on to the months that do not belong to it, summer will be kept out, and all the heavenly bodies that dry up the earth will fade away, with their heat suppressed. So many famous names will disappear, the Caspian and Red seas, the Ambracian and Cretan gulfs, the Propontis and the Black Sea, when that deluge spreads a single sea over everything. All distinctions will disappear; everything that has its own place assigned by nature will be mixed together. No one will be protected by city walls or by towers. Temples will be no use to worshippers, nor the highest points of cities, for the waves will overtake them and pull them down even from the citadels.
Waters will converge from the west and from the east. A single day will bury the human race. All that fortune's indulgence has fostered for so long, all it has elevated above the rest, the noble and the honored alike, and the kingdoms of great nations, all will be sent to the bottom.

(typos all mine)

Anyway, Jerry Bruckheimer, 1st century style.

dunked right in fukuyama's jaw

sluices for douches

Still doesn't sound that pessimistic, he seems comforted by all that.

that's a beautiful passage.

(it is interesting to consider how something like stoicism or other pre-modern forms of wisdom--like buddhism maybe--tend to sound like pessimism to modern ears)

It is lovely.

Beautiful.

tosh

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