A Thread for Posting Brutally Pessimistic Quotes by Anguished Philosophers

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

albaniaaaaaa

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you border on

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aaand your main export is _______

someone tweeted this one today, from the master:

"Our existence is happiest when we perceive it least; from this it follows that it would be better not to have it." -- Schopenhauer

I dunno if Russell Hoban counts as an anguished philosopher but it's his birthday, from Turtle Diary:

People write books for children and other people write about the books written for children but I don't think it's for the children at all. I that all the people who worry so much about the children are really worrying about themselves, about keeping their world together and getting the children to help them do it, getting the children to agree that it is indeed a world. Each new generation of children has to be told: 'This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this.' Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say: 'This is not a world, this is nothing, there's no way to live at all.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C377vV6XAAAjb91.jpg

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/chapter4.html

The road dividing the two, as far as our well-being and enjoyment of life are concerned, is downhill; the dreaminess of childhood, the joyousness of youth, the troubles of middle age, the infirmity and frequent misery of old age, the agonies of our last illness, and finally the struggle with death — do all these not make one feel that existence is nothing but a mistake, the consequences of which are becoming gradually more and more obvious?

Schopenhauer was a pretty intense guy

he's so right

I don't think existence is a mistake, because we don't really have much of a choice in it; even committing suicide has biological roadblocks to it. Enjoy the ride, then you die, because it's going to happen anyway. What else can ya really do.

bitch about it in beautiful prose.

just going by that quote, the answer clearly is to commit suicide before you hit middle age

I've seen people have ball into their 80s. If Schopenhauer took the stick out of his ass and partied a little, maybe he would've had a different view of things.

* a ball

idk if u read enough about gnarly living conditions anytime pre-second half of 20th century, life really become intolerably painful a few decades in, i could see rational suicide just in that 'fuck it' mode. but middle age is much less troubling and old age much less infirm and miserable now than it was in Schope's day, so imo we ought not complain

If there's one thing I know, it's life in excruciating pain. Not only that, but there's a good chance I'm going to die a horrible death in my 40s or 50s, which is coming soon. Schopenhauer has no idea what he's talking about as far as that goes; Nietzsche was a thousand times worse off than him and somehow found out how to have a better attitude.

you're a lot less funny than schopenhauer

I'm a lot less a lot of things than Schopenhauer. Big deal.

i wonder if schopenhauer would feel so down in the dumps if he ate more fibre or took up badminton

Who knows, maybe his philosophical viewpoint was caused by a bad diet. That's about how deep and meaningful things are in life, I've found.

lots of things with simple causes can still be articulated spectacularly & profoundly, and something having a straightforward cause doesn't necessarily make it any more straightforward to deal with

"You've got forever; and somehow you can't do much with it. You've got forever; and it's a mile wide and an inch deep and full of alligators."

Jim Thompson

oooh I like that

I was curious about the regard for Cioran in his homeland:

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/45/36/9f/45369ffa1a48d1120144c62425fcb2ea.jpghttp://www.sculpture.ro/photos/1_1382548347.jpghttp://static4.evz.ro/image-gal-604/2014-11/bustul-lui-emil-cioran-in-rasinari.jpghttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ro/thumb/7/79/Emil_Cioran-bust.JPG/675px-Emil_Cioran-bust.JPG

Seriously doubt this would bring him any real pleasure, but perhaps a puckish chuckle.

Top right is brutal. It's like the Eiffel tower with his head stuck on top.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/09/scholarly-advice-for-dark-times