Zapffe and the evolution of human consciousness
So Zapffe thought that humans "artificially limit the content of consciousness" in order to avoid panic, by way of isolation, attachment, distraction, and sublimation, and thought that humans were "overly-evolved" with their consciousness.
From a purely psychological view, this does seem to be rather accurate. People "hide" from reality, so to speak. Hence culture, art, religion, self-improvement television shows, fictional literature, etc. We try to hide under the bed sheets and make our own little world. A "reality tunnel" to use a more scientific and contemporary term. Humans seem to be the only animals that have existential crises, or are able of abstract thought so advance that philosophical/scientific discussion of the nature of abstract thought is even possible.
But it's hard to immediately see how this fits into the picture of the rest of reality, from a scientific and metaphysical perspective. Consciousness is a reflexive specimen in a world of things that aren't reflexive (is a rock reflexive upon itself? What about a stick? Or a star? Or a photon?)
Can something become "too-evolved"? It doesn't seem like something can, it merely becomes unsuited for the environment and thus selected against.
What I think Zapffe was going for here, though, is like an out-of-control evolution, like a car rolling down the hill without any gasoline, propelled by its own mass and ultimately aimed at self-destruction (suicide is the "natural death" from spiritual causes).
But on the metaphysical perspective, it's difficult to see how something as "weird" as consciousness could even come into existence in the first place if it's inherently malignant to itself. It's literally as if human consciousness is in a kind of metaphysical "exile", with no comfort or home in reality. Like an alien to the rest of the cosmos. Schopenhauer, if I recall correctly, mused that an "exile" was the only explanation of our condition, similar to that of the Garden of Eden story. Of course, Schopenhauer lived right before Darwin's theory of evolution came around and so didn't have the scientific knowledge that we have today.
For it's quite strange to think about what the mind's place in the world is. If we weren't "meant" to know about the world (as Zapffe thought), whence do we come from? If we don't "belong" in the universe, then why the hell are we here? Zapffe (and Schopenhauer) thought that the universe was "inadequate" to satiate the human consciousness (we get bored and restless), and they both put this phenomenon in the more metaphysical way, as if it were a cosmic principle that consciousness is listless and apt to boredom. But how does the universe even accommodate something like human consciousness? How is the big-brained "monkey mind" even physically possible? If human consciousness "does not belong" in nature, then how did it come to be a part of nature (like a pimple on an otherwise clean face)?
We can't expel the idea that we are the universe experiencing itself. Call it cliche, but it's true. Consciousness is an aspect of the world (or perhaps is the world if we're idealists).
There currently is only one explanation that I can think of:
Human consciousness is not a unique specimen, in the sense that it's not the only thing in the vast universe that is displaced, so to speak. Or, it's that human consciousness is a unique specimen in a literal sea of unique-ness.
This goes a bit into Spinoza's metaphysics: Spinoza thought there was one Substance, with various Modes of existence, and these Modes had Attributes. According to Spinoza, we humans have knowledge of two Modes: the Physical (extension) and the Mental (mind). And Spinoza thought there were infinite Modes.
Drawing from his metaphysics, could it not be argued that human consciousness (or consciousness in general) is just one of infinite manifestations of the Substance (or perhaps the Will if we're to follow Schopenhauer)? An uncaring Will would create, create, create, and we happen to just be one of the unlucky creations that isn't self-sufficient and "happy". Consciousness is just one of the fluke Modes in an infinity of Modes, completely unknowable by us. Some of these other Modes also have an "experience" of inadequacy and alienation, albeit in a different way that consciousness does. Or perhaps all Modes do.
The point being made here is that it's quite strange that consciousness, in all its infinite depth and contradictions, is even possible in the first place. It's so strange that I think it rather impossible for it to have evolved from unconscious matter. I hesitate to say this, since I have sympathy with naturalism, but the utter ridiculousness and weirdness of consciousness makes it seem as though there is a wider metaphysical narrative going on here (Neo-Platonism or Buddhism anyone?)
From a purely psychological view, this does seem to be rather accurate. People "hide" from reality, so to speak. Hence culture, art, religion, self-improvement television shows, fictional literature, etc. We try to hide under the bed sheets and make our own little world. A "reality tunnel" to use a more scientific and contemporary term. Humans seem to be the only animals that have existential crises, or are able of abstract thought so advance that philosophical/scientific discussion of the nature of abstract thought is even possible.
But it's hard to immediately see how this fits into the picture of the rest of reality, from a scientific and metaphysical perspective. Consciousness is a reflexive specimen in a world of things that aren't reflexive (is a rock reflexive upon itself? What about a stick? Or a star? Or a photon?)
Can something become "too-evolved"? It doesn't seem like something can, it merely becomes unsuited for the environment and thus selected against.
What I think Zapffe was going for here, though, is like an out-of-control evolution, like a car rolling down the hill without any gasoline, propelled by its own mass and ultimately aimed at self-destruction (suicide is the "natural death" from spiritual causes).
But on the metaphysical perspective, it's difficult to see how something as "weird" as consciousness could even come into existence in the first place if it's inherently malignant to itself. It's literally as if human consciousness is in a kind of metaphysical "exile", with no comfort or home in reality. Like an alien to the rest of the cosmos. Schopenhauer, if I recall correctly, mused that an "exile" was the only explanation of our condition, similar to that of the Garden of Eden story. Of course, Schopenhauer lived right before Darwin's theory of evolution came around and so didn't have the scientific knowledge that we have today.
For it's quite strange to think about what the mind's place in the world is. If we weren't "meant" to know about the world (as Zapffe thought), whence do we come from? If we don't "belong" in the universe, then why the hell are we here? Zapffe (and Schopenhauer) thought that the universe was "inadequate" to satiate the human consciousness (we get bored and restless), and they both put this phenomenon in the more metaphysical way, as if it were a cosmic principle that consciousness is listless and apt to boredom. But how does the universe even accommodate something like human consciousness? How is the big-brained "monkey mind" even physically possible? If human consciousness "does not belong" in nature, then how did it come to be a part of nature (like a pimple on an otherwise clean face)?
We can't expel the idea that we are the universe experiencing itself. Call it cliche, but it's true. Consciousness is an aspect of the world (or perhaps is the world if we're idealists).
There currently is only one explanation that I can think of:
Human consciousness is not a unique specimen, in the sense that it's not the only thing in the vast universe that is displaced, so to speak. Or, it's that human consciousness is a unique specimen in a literal sea of unique-ness.
This goes a bit into Spinoza's metaphysics: Spinoza thought there was one Substance, with various Modes of existence, and these Modes had Attributes. According to Spinoza, we humans have knowledge of two Modes: the Physical (extension) and the Mental (mind). And Spinoza thought there were infinite Modes.
Drawing from his metaphysics, could it not be argued that human consciousness (or consciousness in general) is just one of infinite manifestations of the Substance (or perhaps the Will if we're to follow Schopenhauer)? An uncaring Will would create, create, create, and we happen to just be one of the unlucky creations that isn't self-sufficient and "happy". Consciousness is just one of the fluke Modes in an infinity of Modes, completely unknowable by us. Some of these other Modes also have an "experience" of inadequacy and alienation, albeit in a different way that consciousness does. Or perhaps all Modes do.
The point being made here is that it's quite strange that consciousness, in all its infinite depth and contradictions, is even possible in the first place. It's so strange that I think it rather impossible for it to have evolved from unconscious matter. I hesitate to say this, since I have sympathy with naturalism, but the utter ridiculousness and weirdness of consciousness makes it seem as though there is a wider metaphysical narrative going on here (Neo-Platonism or Buddhism anyone?)
Comments (124)
If you've never watched Jill Bolte Taylor's famous TED talk, 'My Stroke of Insight', then have a listen to that as well. It makes a very similar point (although I think mescaline would be preferable to having a massive stroke).
So perhaps big brain is more about social competitiveness than dealing with the environment at large. But as a side effect, it allows the radical manipulation a 'conquest' of the environment.
Too much success, though, is also maladaptive. Consider the rampant success of Dutch Elm disease, spreads like wildfire, kills all the Elms, destroys its own niche. Unfortunately, our niche is the whole planet.
Here we are unfolding our peacock fans of mind, even though there are no ladies to impress, because we have them all the time and can't help it. It's a pain, but we keep doing it, as if the 'understanding' of a species of ape is the crown of creation.
You've fallen into the substance dualism Spinoza refutes here. Humans don't have knowledge in two realms of modes. Some states of knowledge are not "body" and others "mind."
Extension and mind refer not to different types of things in the world (e.g. different human experiences), but rather to the logical discintion between an existing state (extension) and a meaning in thought (mind). Any state of the world has both a form in existence but also an infinite logical expression of meaning. (and conversely, infinite logical expressions are expressed by extension when a state with a given meaning exists).
The former is the state of something's existence, while the latter is the meaning of the state in thought, which extends beyond that state's existence in the world-- thus, our experiences, which are not the existence of the things we experience, nevertheless hold the meaning of those state of existence, despite the states being entirely different (e.g. a tree is a different state to experience of a tree).
This goes back to my idea of instrumentality- especially when you describe "create, create, create". We do, we do, we do... But for no other reason than motives that ultimately come down to survival and boredom. To elaborate - there is Other (world)- imposed constraints of survival/culturo-survival needs. There is also the Other-imposed constraints of dealing with unwanted pain. Conversely, there are also self-imposed constraints of our own inner restlessness (angst/boredom/restlessness) which help sustain this situation of instrumentality (we are surviving, avoiding unwanted pain, and trying to convert our restless nature into pleasure-seeking and goal-seeking in genera ad infinitum). Ultimately a principle of a Will-for-nothing ensues (pace Schopenhauer).
It's interesting how survival manifests in a plethora of ways. When I use the word "survival" or "culturo-survival", what I mean is something as subtle as an office-worker taking upon themselves the yoke of "hard-worker". This ideal may come from a deep-seated enculturated idea that working hard at your job is just and right. Society in turn, would approve of this ethic as it sustains production for survival etc. [This example is just to prove that not all survival is directly related to the survival itself, but the culture and complex contingent/environmental factors surrounding it.]
To add a bit further here about our "unique" situation- humans have the unique "language-brain" caused by multiple environmental factors in our evolutionary development. This language-brain itself creates a unique framework to see the world, that may be a major layer in how we are "stuck" in consciousness which seems remote from the rest of nature. By being stuck in consciousness, are stuck in time, both projecting backwards and forwards. We try to make modern mantras of "living in the present", but our restless natures are part and parcel of the human condition. The fact that we even have to go on a "journey" to calm the Will (not that I think this happens really in any Buddhist/Ascetic fashion aka pipe dream), is enough to make this situation undesirable.
I don't understand the word 'Hence' here. All these genres or ways of acting seem to me attempts to come to terms with human experience, not to hide from it.
Not that I'm necessarily disagreeing with the overarching thesis. Maybe humans are creatures dissatisfied with their ecological niche but incapable of the wisdom required to moderate our behaviour now we're clothed and sheltered in inhospitable climes. 'The over-reacher' is a classic modern cultural notion from the plays and poetry of Marlowe onwards: we recognise this tendency in ourselves but seem powerless to negotiate with it.
In a certain sense, the brain does act as a filter. We're constantly bombarded by countless stimuli, and the brain has to narrow the focus down to the relevant stimuli. We aren't consciously aware of our toes, or our scalp, or the back of our throat. We aren't consciously aware of the corners of our eyesight, or the rhythmic beating of our heart in the ear canal.
But to say that there is an entire world that our brain "represses" without our control seems to be quite extravagant.
Interesting. This seems to support the idea that, when natural selection is not at its most brutal (survival or nothing), sophistication can really take off exponentially, like an out-of-control automobile racing down a hill.
What I was thinking was that, contra folk conceptions of a perfectly orderly universe that obeys timeless laws, you have "breaks" in the system that occur during key transitions within the system. Kind of like how when a computer fumbles and the processing goes haywire.
The point I'm trying to make it kind of difficult to explain. But basically we're often told (reassuredly) that the universe "doesn't care" about us - aka it's neutral and not benevolent or malevolent.
But this contradicts the very experiences we have. The universe is capable of producing beings who suffer. It might not be anthropomorphized but it nevertheless can be characterized as bad. Harmful, malignant.
We can feel alienated from the rest of the world, as if we're the only ones who experience anything and everything else is just dead, lifeless matter. But isn't it quite peculiar that our of a vast ocean non-consciousness, there exist little islands of consciousness? Wouldn't it strange if we're the only beings that have consciousness?
The self-reflexivity of consciousness is a very strange aspect of it. That we're able to introspect and feel as though we don't belong is baffling. How is it physically possible that we feel as though we don't belong? Again we feel this way because the universe allows this to happen - a self-conscious and introspecting reflexive agent is a possibility of the universe. We are simultaneously at home in the universe and yet completely alienated from it.
So I have to criticize Zapffe a bit when he says that consciousness is "not-natural". On the contrary, everything in the universe is natural (nature doesn't exist exist in the first place, it's an empty word). It's natural that people can feel unnatural. Kind of disturbing, like an instance of cosmic self-hate.
"Celebration is self restraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating, is awaiting, is the step over into the more wakeful glimpse of the wonder- the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know all this."
So acute consciousness - free of comforting illusions - need not necessarily lead to despair, but can (admittedly in are cases) result in joyful affirmation or at least a more subdued sense of wonder and thankfulness. I waver on the issue quite a bit.
'Drugs' is a generalisation and in the context a pejorative. Different 'drugs' do many different things, obviously. Hallucinogenic agents, specifically psilocybin, mescaline, and LSD, do a great deal more than produce 'whoa-dude' catchphrases (not that I wish to advocate ingestion of illegal substances.)
Huxley's point, and indeed the essay in which the point was made, was fundamental to the counter-culture, which has given rise to huge changes in philosophy, attitude, science, technology, society, etc, since that time.
I don't know who 'Zappfe' is, but the fact that he or she assumes that 'panic' is at the basis of the unconscious does not incline me to want to investigate.
There is a sense in which it is an obvious truth, that has probably never been made explicit in quite that way. Not that it's an either or thing quite as you put it, but the process of abstraction is the removal of detail; to make sense of things is to simplify and classify. Instead of remembering every chicken image from every angle in every light, one abstracts the form of the generic chicken, along with along with some salient particularities of Gertrude and Florence perhaps. Instead of remembering every interaction with one's brother, one forms a kernel of character that is more powerfully predictive than the endless scenes in which he might have appeared.
But there is another sense in which repression is a response to fear and trauma. If one learns that one's own affective responses put one in danger - from a drunken parent perhaps - at an age when one cannot deal with the situation, then one learns to operate on oneself to repress one's responsiveness (other fuck ups are available). I would suggest that the major part of religion, the self-improvement industry, politics, philosophy and so on, are the insane attempts of the insane to cure or at least ameliorate our insanity.
I don't agree at all with 'antinatalism' except for in the case of those who propose it (by which time, of course, it is too late.)
This chap is not an anti-natalist or a pessimist...
[quote=J. Krishnamurti]We are occupied with one little corner of consciousness which is most of our life; the rest, which we call the subconscious, with all its motives, its fears, its racial and inherited qualities, we do not even know how to get into. Now I am asking you, is there such a thing as the subconscious at all? We use that word very freely. We have accepted that there is such a thing and all the phrases and jargon of the analysts and psychologists have seeped into the language; but is there such a thing? And why is it that we give such extraordinary importance to it? It seems to me that it is as trivial and stupid as the conscious mind - as narrow, bigoted, conditioned, anxious and tawdry.
So is it possible to be totally aware of the whole field of consciousness and not merely a part, a fragment, of it?
If you are able to be aware of the totality, then you are functioning all the time with your total attention, not partial attention. This is important to understand because when you are being totally aware of the whole field of consciousness there no friction. it is only when you divide consciousness, which is all thought, feeling and action, into different levels that there is friction.
We live in fragments. You are one thing at the office, another at home; you talk about democracy and in your heart you are autocratic; you talk about loving your neighbours, yet kill him with competition; there is one part of you working, looking, independently of the other. Are you aware of this fragmentary existence in yourself? And is it possible for a brain that has broken up its own functioning, its own thinking, into fragments - is it possible for such a brain to be aware of the whole field? Is it possible to look at the whole of consciousness completely, totally, which means to be a total human being?[/quote]
I agree that "natural" here may be the feeling rather than an actual metaphysical position. It is more of a poetic idiom. The closest we may get to "feeling" natural may be in a communal social setting. Knowing we came from a close-knit hunting/gathering way of life, and knowing that our species is one of "meme" sharing (concept-sharing) my guess is that humans are most in their "element" when socializing. This may be universal social interactions like sharing stories, laughing, teaching others, sharing creative achievements, customs, etc. The problem is that at any given time we may feel a "broken-tool" moment when the surfaces of our everyday "flow" of things gives way to existential dread. We are no longer in a flow. We become aware of our own restless nature. At this point of self-awareness we are always chasing after "flow" again. We must get our attention caught up in the moment again so as not to think of existence itself.
With the contingency of the human switch to industrial/post-industrial society comes more broken-tool moments. Rather than the "given" flow that living in a tribal or agricultural society affords, a post-industrial society must create ever more nuanced ways to achieve flow so as to avoid existential restlessness. So this is why we have self-help, exercise, technological distractions, extra hours spent at jobs (or finding "meaningful" jobs), hobbies, games, philosophizing, performing math/logic problems, reading, studying, poetry, writing, studying science, analyzing and discussing literature, inventing things, etc. etc. etc.
There is a real difference between natural and artificial stone which is reflected in the price of a slab at the builder's merchant. One can loosely define artifice as the product of the operation of mind on nature, and thus although such operations are as natural as mind is natural, yet there remains a useful distinction. Thus one can say consistently that the operation of mind on itself - by 'self-improvement', say - produces an artificial mind.
It seems obvious to me (although plainly it's not obvious to a lot of people) that this vision is based on a deep-rooted sense of estrangement or alienation. And I think it's indicative of the consequence of the 'death of God'. (No, this is not a conversion pitch, nor anything like an appeal to return to some golden past.)
But one could only feel like this, if one truly believes that existence is an accident, that there is no reason for it. And that attitude is characteristic of a lot of 20th century existentialism. Read, for example, the opening paragraphs of Bertrand Russell's A Free Man's Worship which is a landmark work for the beginning of the 20th century. (I believe that later in life, Russell felt this work was overly dramatic, but I don't think he ever formally renounced it.)
Nietszche famously foresaw the consequences of the death of God, which he himself prophesied; but Nietszche's was not atheist triumphalism. He understood the existential depths of angst which this would plunge mankind into. This finds expression the later existentialists, particularly Sartre and Camus. (You find a similar sentiment in ancient gnosticism, the sense of being thrown into a harsh and alien world, ruled by evil powers. However for the gnostics, at least, there was a way out, albeit through harsh asceticism and the rejection of the passions. I even wonder if the horror tales of H P Lovecraft are echoes of this sensibility.)
However now we've fetched up in this strange and alien world, but with no sense of there being any alternative to it, because this is 'what science tells us'. Science sees, after all (or says it sees) that the Universe is chaotic and things only arise because of chance. Life is kind of a runaway chemical reaction, which unfolds according to the merciless logic of adaptive necessity - but without any reason for doing so, beyond that of the selfish gene. Why are we 'doomed' to self-consciousness and language, if the only tales we can tell are 'told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifiying nothing'?
That, I think, is the background. 'There must be some kind of way out of here', said the joker to the thief. 'There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief. Businessmen, they drink my wine, ploughmen dig my earth. But none of them along the line, know what any of it is worth'. Welcome to modernity.
I can't even imagine what that could mean. How could we ever know that anything we are aware of is the totality of what it is possible to aware of?
The problem with Krishnamurti's teaching, is that he enters these states effortlessly, whereas most of us cannot. Hence the necessity of a 'sadhana', a spiritual discipline. We have to try and attain laboriously what a Krishnamurti seemed to manifest effortlessly.
In this respect spiritual discipline is often a hindrance because it frequently consists of the idea of how one needs to do something to get to total awareness-e.g. stepping towards Nirv??a in Buddhism.
Now this is not to say that those with a spiritual discipline cannot attain "total awareness." They can. It's just that it "effortlessly" occurs when engaged in spiritual discipline, rather than something given by hours of laborious work of spiritual practice, working to achieve a "total awareness."
The effortlessness of Krishnamurti is not a problem with his teaching, but a key feature-- it points out what being "total aware" entails. Rather than rambling about all over the place with allusions to some "total awareness" which we might get if we were "spiritual enough," Krishnamurti turns knowledge of ourselves over to us. We gain the knowledge "total awareness" comes not from laborious work of spiritual practice toward "total awareness", but in the Being of "seeing without any sense of me."
Like you I have been fascinated by Krishnamurti (and others purportedly like him such as Ramana Maharshi, Barry Long, Eckhart Tolle) who spontaneously attained what may be called a state of complete egolessness or non-dual awareness. At one time I read voraciously, and occasionally still read, works by and about these men and others including Buddhists and the great mystics of the Christian tradition. But I have come to think that such states of what are called 'non-dual awareness' are merely one kind among many of mystical states in general. There may also be mystical states which consist in experiences of radical otherness, the dialectical 'twin' , so to speak.
I self-administered a lot of LSD, Mescaline and Psilocybin when I was seventeen/eighteen and also LSD, Psilocybin, DMT, Salvia and a few other 'entheogens' for briefer periods in my twenties, thirties, forties and fifties. I have also practiced meditation diligently for various periods up to twelve years and sporadically at other times. So I am fairly well-versed in "altered states". The first time I ever took LSD, at first I was terrified, and actually experienced myself becoming transparent and beginning to disappear; I was convinced I was about to die, and the terror became so great that I was finally forced to give up fighting and simply let it go with a feeling of 'what will be, will be', upon which I entered an ecstatic state of consciousness in which I felt as if I knew the secrets of creation; and I looked upon the world as if for the first time (and yet it all seemed so familiar). I sat down to dinner with my family while 'peaking', in a state of indescribable ecstasy, with a feeling of utter ease and control and as if finally able to be myself; all this after having been cringing in my bedroom in terror of seeing anyone, feeling as if I was in Hell itself, for what seemed an eternity only an hour or so before.
I tell you all this only to preface the fact that I have concluded that 'altered' or 'mystical' states come in all 'shapes and sizes' depending on the 'soul development' of the one who experiences them, and that gnosis consists in the 'feeling of knowing', and that 'what is known' may be very diverse and apparently contradictory. One thing such states of 'knowing' have in common though, is that all intellectual forms of knowledge pale into relative insignificance by comparison with them. The problem is that whatever is known cannot be expressed as cogent propositional knowledge, which can be a significant problem if you are trying to communicate it to others who have not experienced that kind of thing. Like trying to explain colour to the blind.
In view of this I don't believe that any dogma at all is supportable, because the experiences which some may take to support it are so far beyond it. Dogma then only leads to confusion and ultimately conflict.
Now, I am not really convinced that Krishnamurti was even the 'real deal', but that he may have been just another charlatan playing to his audience. I would never say that about Ramana Maharshi, though.
But anyway that is a major detour from the OP so I better 'maintain noble silence' :)
Well, I wish you all the best fortune on your path! I tried to accommodate myself to Buddhism, since there are many communities of practice here in Sydney, but there were things about the doctrines that just did not sit right with me, and that I could not, in all sincerity, embrace.
Yes. It's one of those zen type questions that cannot be answered by the imagination or by a theory, or by knowledge, because these are the fragments, but only with your whole life.
I'm amenable to that.
I am reluctant to say anything that might be interpreted as a criticism of Buddhism, since I have great respect for it. I think Buddhism, being an eminently practical religion, has throughout history very often passed its teachings through various lenses to suit the understanding of its adherents.
So, I think much of the common understanding and symbolism which has accrued around the notions of karma and reincarnation may become a lure towards an unhealthy preoccupation with personal salvation, at least for modern Western aspirants. A similar phenomenon may be witnessed in relation to Christianity, I think. For me, the work to be done is to come to a stage where we can contribute more consciously (we all contribute unconsciously despite ourselves and in that sense nothing is lost) to the evolution of the human spirit. (Of course it is also true that the Bodhisattva ideal may be interpreted that way).
I also find the symbolism of Christianity more generally sympathetic to my imagination, feelings, and creative interests, and the associated idea of the spiritual evolution of humanity (which is absent from Buddhism as far as I know) more in keeping with my intellectual understanding and intuition. I prefer the "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest." of the Hebrew Bible more amenable than the tendency towards renunciation of life that may be found in Buddhism. Of course, I am not saying any of this is "cut and dry". When it comes to all the great religions there are complexities upon complexities and levels upon levels, and in the final analysis a deep commonality, or so I am convinced.
The thing that drew me to Zen in particular, was the emphasis in Soto Zen on 'just sit without any gaining idea' - but with constant application and persistence. Make a time, and a place, and, like Nike says, "Just Do It". In doing it, you go through all kinds of boredom, disillusionment, 'why am I doing this', 'this seems useless', and so on. And yet, if you persist, you learn something which you can't learn by other means. 'What is that', you might ask. Well, you have to try! That's the point. And it's also what changes your understanding, because despite its apparent passivity, it is actually very dynamic.
One of the 'marks' of Buddhism is 'ehi-passiko' - meaning 'come and see'. It can only be learned by doing. And the reason for that practical approach, is that it bypasses the verbal-symbolic mind, which sets up everything as the relationship between symbols. It spins a net, and then gets caught in it. This is a literal truth, it is something that is actually happening at each moment, albeit subtly. Seeing through that, or simply being aware that it is actually going on, is a large part of the skill.
Now you can learn the same understanding through other means - as many have noted, the contemplative aspects of Christianity have many parallels with the Buddhist approach. But again, it requires application through meditation, rather than clinging to belief or doctrinal analysis and so on.
One of the sayings that really got me started with all this is: 'my life has been a whole series of crises, most of which have never occured'. That made me realise how much of my apparent reality was actually just a projection.
Yes, I also believe, based on my own experience, that meditation or contemplation is of the highest importance, because it frees the intuitive imagination from the usual strictures of the discursive intellect.
Meditation may be understood in a narrow sense, as a formalized practice, but I think it can actually be practiced anywhere, at any time, in the midst of any activity. Of course this takes just as much discipline and practice as seated meditation does, it is certainly not merely a matter of allowing the mind to wander where it will...
It's definitely a Western thing, since afaik re-birth in Buddhism is more akin to the passing of a flame from one candle to the next. You obtain enlightenment not only for yourself but also for other people.
I don't have time for a more extensive reply. As I understand it the Buddhist notion is that there is no identity that is reincarnated but something like the accumulated attachments acquired throughout an entire life are passed like a flame to a single reincarnating being.
I tend to think that if there is any truth to the idea of reincarnation, it is infinitely more complex than that. So the flame may, in a spiritual sense, be passed to other human souls at every instance of action. Nothing remains but nothing is lost or wasted.
The emphasis in Buddhism is on the ideas of suffering, attachment and release, not on the ideas of purpose, love and creative redemption.
Mystery is not so much a matter of what is not yet known, but of what cannot ever be known discursively, but may be known through imagination, intuition and love.
As far as I can tell, humans are the only known organisms that have the capacity to reflect upon their existence to such a degree as to confront at least the possibility of meaninglessness, nihilism, the absurd, annihilation, etc.
This notion of possibility fits well with what Zapffe wrote in his essay:
[i]"But as he stands before imminent death, he grasps its nature also, and the cosmic import of the step to come. His creative imagination constructs new, fearful prospects behind the curtain of death, and he sees that even there is no sanctuary found. And now he can discern the outline of his biologicocosmic terms: He is the universe’s helpless captive, kept to fall into nameless possibilities.
From this moment on, he is in a state of relentless panic."[/i]
The medieval Scholastics also thought that modality was a critical aspect of the Intellect, and actually many of them went on to argue that our Imagination is what leads us away from the truth (which would be, in their eyes, their metaphysical structure and religion, somewhat begging the question - a great way to convert people, though).
Then we have Kant, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, etc who all were transcendental in their phenomenology, in that the realm of the possible created the conditions for actuality (in a top-down fashion). Especially in regards to Heidegger with his idea of "being-in-the-world": a person is not "apart" or "away" from the world, a person is inherently a "part" of the world, or a "manifestation" of the world itself. The human mind becomes no more special than a falling leaf, or a photon, or a nuclear warhead; furthermore, the failings of a human being become not just personal failures but cosmic failures as well (i.e. a catastrophe in Zapffe's terminology).
Put all these thoughts together and we get a basic idea of what could be a defining characteristic of a mind, that it is a hive for possibility-modelling. Even if these possibilities are in fact false in the naive correspondence realist theory of truth, they still hold sway for the self model that is emergent from the mind itself.
Indeed this is an important aspect of theories of cognition and rationality: the ability to think counterfactually by conceptually piecing together if-then propositions in an endless series of combinations, discarding the ones that are "problematic" and maintaining and/or rearranging those which are "useful" or "sensible".
How all this works, from the computational aspect to the semantic aspect to the metaphysical substrate aspect, is still a mystery. Perhaps finding the answer to these will give us a better understanding of what the mind's place in reality is; i.e. how the world is able to model itself, or how the world is able to create a functional, yet transparent system (i.e. "cosmic amnesia"), or how the world is able to host what Zapffe called "cosmic panic" (i.e. "cosmic insecurity").
Great theme.
Quoting darthbarracuda
I think people can be said to hide from one image of reality (or myth) in another image of reality (or myth). The unmediated "real" reality seems like an empty negation to me. I understand of course that a community will speak of a shared myth as a reality and then explain others in terms of hiding from this reality in an unshared myth or fantasy. So the irreligious man is hiding from God from the perspective of the religious man and the religious man is hiding from scientific objectivity from the perspective of the irreligious man. My point is that hiding is relative to the commitment of the one who accuses someone else of hiding.
Quoting darthbarracuda
I think Schopenhauer and Zapffe are just offering two more (relative) "fantasies" to hide in. But if all myth is adaptive (as I see it), then there's only an adaptive myth ("hiding is bad") from which to accuse it. The "bleak" existentialist view can itself be described as wishful thinking. Its complicated charm is that is appears too bleak to be an "escapist" fantasy. But it seems to be built on a heroism of intellectual courage. "I have the guts to look the Void in the eye." There's also the "assassination" of every authority in this view, so that the individual becomes a mortal god on earth (a twist on the incarnation myth). "Only the damned are grand." Boredom is the vice of kings along with contempt for anything higher. I posit that we want to feel like "kings."
We are seduced by myths that glorify us. (And this myth glorifies me as the possessor/co-creator of a glorious meta-myth.)
Quoting darthbarracuda
I think it's strange, too. I just really don't know. But then I have a theory of explanation that suggests that maybe I can't know. It seems that we judge the postulated necessities used to explain things in terms of accurate predictions and esthetic appeal. There's something about the totality (consciously experienced) that seems to exceed any little string of concepts that are always only embedded in it. It's like trying to explain the whole in terms of a part. The "whatness" of my experience remains what it is. What can I do with an explanation, a string of words? I'd say that there's something that exceeds metaphysics, an overflow. But (damn it!) I'm just hiding in my myth, right? From the perfect and eternal truth of consciousness somehow available to that consciousness, if only it has the courage?
I don't tend to think in terms of 'delusion' but rather 'distraction', when it comes to worldviews; I think all worldviews are equally delusory, because there is no attainable demonstrably 'correct' worldview. People just tend to take for granted that the worldview they favour, perhaps the one that makes them most comfortable, or the one that is most fashionable (the same thing in a way) or the one that serves their tendency towards self-hatred and so variously on and on, is the 'correct' one.
So, all worldviews are distractions in this sense, and the desire for "objectivity" you mention is often a neurotic desire to be correct, so as not to appear the 'fool' who is 'deluded'. How much this psychological dynamic seems to drive philosophical discussion on forums never ceases to amaze me. I think it is all a distraction from what really matters. What really matters is that you come to see what will change your life and take you away from holding worldviews; this is the meaning of life and there is no formula: it is different for each one.
Exactly!
I'm very glad someone else sees what I'm getting at. (I fixed my typo, too.) One might say that the idea of non-fantasy is a fantasy, but the distinction itself melts at this point. (It's distinction necessary to "common sense," but you see what I mean.)
Yes, I agree. I don't know if we can escape having some worldview, but I think it's useful to escape the worldview that there is a single, correct worldview. Every life is different, so it's reasonable to think that every successful worldview (dialectically evolved) is going to be different. We can affirm a plurality of strong or successful worldviews and trade ideas-as-tools as different but equal "kings." It's like master-to-master, peer-to-peer or adult-to-adult (transactional analysis) communication.
Certainly I agree that we cannot, and should not even if we could, escape holding certain lived attitudes and dispositions when it comes to events and people and so on. But I think we can escape clinging to any overarching worldviews, but only if the neurotic search is no longer compelling. I think to do this is to follow our ethical instincts or intuitions. This may well open us up to a very different kind of knowledge than we could ever imagine from the customary position of common discursive polemics.
I can agree with all of that. That's more or less what I get from "all is vanity" in Ecclesiastes. "A futile chasing after the wind," etc.
I see you've read Nietzsche. Interesting points.
This is perhaps the true existential crisis - when there seems no hope of a worldview at all.
The Pessimist is taking comforting refuge in a concrete belief there is no such hope. A life can be built around that. But what if even the absence of such hope can't be known for certain? What if that is as radically unsure?
So there is another big step beyond the self-comfort of Pessimism where instead of confronting the void, we are in confrontation with the vague. ;)
Possibilities rear their ugly head when they are seen as threats. When the Stoic sage tells us to ignore these possibilities and carry on with life serenely, they implicitly accept the fact that they are first and foremost threats. Ignoring these threats may give us some relief, but this is inherently an act of concealment. From a purely scientific point of view, this may be no more interesting than the fact that humans depend on oxygen to live, or that water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. But from an aesthetic, ethical, and existential perspective, the nature of this phenomenon threatens the very dignity of a human, the assumption-illusions underneath affirmative ethics that make it seem more like a religion than anything else.
The idea of hope is deconstructed as well - what does it say about man if what keeps him going is a twisted sense of fear projected into vanity? We must be a sad specimen indeed if this is what keeps our spirits up, the illusions that the grass is greener on the other side. If we're honest with ourselves, we won't bias our perceptions with ideas that might be fictions, i.e. self-deception. Once again, we have a threat to our dignity, our self of autonomy, uniqueness, value and importance, concepts that are not able to be destroyed without repercussions.
In any sense, I think the idea that there is no rational ground for hope has more support than the idea that there is. The fact that we depend on self-imposed delusions is, I think, evidence of the lack of any substantial justice or importance. As Zapffe said, any constructed meaning is a pseudo-solution to the metaphysical lack of it.
To say that pessimists should suck it up is then, from the perspective of a pessimist, akin to telling a domestic abuse victim to love their spouse.
Respectfully, I ask why we would we strive to be honest with ourselves? Just to be clear, I have intensely striven for self-honesty for many years, but the irony is that that same pursuit led me to question why I was so fascinated by self-honesty. Is there not a sort of heroism of the truth? I think the scientist is a sort of priest of physical objectivity, and perhaps a philosopher sometimes plays that sort of role on the level of metaphysical/ethical truth. There's a strange mixture of self-mutilation and self-exaltation in smashing one's own idols, but I wander whether any idol is ever smashed except in the name of yet another if not in the name of iconoclasm itself. "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image." (This is the trans-image, the non-image, the anti-image, the hole in being, etc.)
That's fine. Just give me the technical definition that would make this an important distinction here in your view.
Is it that your claim is the crisp possibility (like your fear of torture) can't be in anyway unthought or defused once experienced? I'm dubious of that as a psychological fact. I see it as the development of a psychological habit, and habits can be forgotten or at least be unlearned in ways which eventually render them vaguer.
Quoting darthbarracuda
I guess that the other point of view is that when you see a pessimist wallowing in learned helplessness, refusing sensible life advice because of some cosmological world view, then it is natural to lose patience.
If you want to construct a philosophy that naturalises a state which is down to your neurobiology or/and your circumstances - things you could take action on - then really the case is that the door stands open and you are refusing to leave the clutches of the very monster you have constructed
As I say, true existentialism would instead lead towards vagueness or a state of mindless neutrality - the kind of mind state that Eastern mysticism often advertises as its major benefit.
But it was bad metaphysics that did the deceiving - the idea that individual lives must have cosmic or divine significance.
And it is still bad metaphysics to jump to the other extreme of complaining of existence as a complete state of generalised contingency, brute fact, and cosmic insignificance.
Modern understanding confirms life and mind as special in being - in the cosmological sense - very highly developed in terms of complexity, or negentropic organisation. We are at the centre of creation in that way.
And a proper analysis of the human condition ought to respect that objective truth. Which is why the almost instinctive reply to the Pessimist is start paying more attention to the biological and social context that is actually psychologically forming you.
Stop thinking simply, start thinking in terms of reality's complexity if you want to talk accurately about what is true or right.
I can agree that we close off some perspectives as we embrace others. (I don't see how the world -apart-from-perspectives is useful, though, as we move away from the physical.)
I do think we can simultaneously have a sense of the" emptiness" of all things in one part of our mind and yet pursue "finite" projects. That's the wisdom I find in Ecclesiastes. We have one foot in the grave, and it's a pivot foot. So we can take every finite project lightly, and we can relate to other finite projects than our own more more tolerantly, since, after all, our project is no less empty from the ultimate foot-in-the-grave perspective than theirs.
I have suffered from the pessimistic vision before, intensely even. But it was never just intellectual. I would fall out of love with life. Then I'd fall back in love, without the least bit abandoning my (merely) intellectual position that "everything is [ultimately] empty."
Pessimism is generally less concerned with the lack of meaning than existentialism is. It's more of the combination of the lack of meaning + the inevitable and structurally inherent pain in life that makes life problematic. The abstract notion of the lack of meaning is actually relatively unimportant here, as we can see pessimistic ideas in the thinkers of the ancient world, during the time of luck, chance, and gods and before any serious nihilism was pursued.
You might personally find interest in Ray Brassier, who argues that scientific inquiry, instead of liberating us in the Enlightenment sense, reveals to us complete and utter nihilism. We are a species doomed to extinction. He is committed to a naturalistic metaphysics and draws heavily upon modern science to support his claims as well as the phenomenology of Heidegger and others.
Furthermore, Zapffe focuses more on the lack of cosmic justice than meaning. Accidents happen all the time for no reason. The struggle for space and resources due to a cosmic scarcity cause strife and conflict. To live is to be deprived. The universe is unable to support our dreams, and our novelty interests are merely distractions - objectively speaking there is nothing in the universe worthy of praise, as if the universe is a Spinozistic pantheistic god and whose priests are the pop-science dolts on the front page of Time magazine, proclaiming the wonder of life and universe while systematically ignoring the fundamental instrumentality of being and subsequent suffering this inflicts upon conscious beings. Life continues to continue to continue to continue to continue for absolutely no rational reason whatsoever. Hedonism is merely a distraction. An empty universe is not a tragedy. etc.
The overall point I was getting at is that Stoicism and your enlightened pragmatism and the like all are philosophies that affirm life without what I see to be a good enough justification. Your particular version focuses on the broadest holistic sense we get from physics while ignoring very real psychological phenomena, from Pollyanna-ism to the neurotic episodes to our disturbing desires and repressed memories and fears. The fact that we are having an argument about this is, I think, a point in favor of pessimism: what if you're actually right and I never agree with you and live my life in a less-than-positive state - wouldn't that be a tragedy? Is it my fault that I'm wrong? Let's not forget the Heideggerian notion of being-in-the-world: you and I and everyone else are manifestations of Being itself. The existence of pessimistic thinkers like Schopenhauer are not something to be ostracized as if they are less-than-natural manifestations of the world: instead, the world is capable of producing such miserable ideas. The world is capable of producing great suffering. And the world is oftentimes incapable of producing equally great experiences. From your perspective, these thinkers might be akin to a tumor on an organism that must be removed before it metastasizes - and yet this also means you are ignoring the ontological fact that an organism can be so flawed as to produce a tumor and instead focusing only on removing it.
Quoting apokrisis
As soon as a person is born, they are in a state of decay, or being-towards-death. When we live, we are in a state of defense even if we don't realize it. Defending against threats. And ultimately forgetting that we lose in the end.
Happiness, pleasure, and the like are thus distractions, or concealments, of our basic ontological structure. This structure is incompatible with our psyche due to an over-evolved brain. Thus our entire lives are basically one episode of neuroticism after another, which can be seen from Becker.
I'm not wrong about any of this. Maybe there's other aspects I'm forgetting about, or I'm exaggerating the importance of these claims. But they are nevertheless real aspects of reality that are inherently problematic. And I think that once these are seen, it is difficult to un-see without self-delusion.
I think you are touching on profound issues. I can relate to everything you say. But if there is indeed a fundamental instrumentality of being (and that's how I see it), then this puts "objectively speaking" into question. How does this grim vision of objective nullity escape instrumentality? I agree that life churns out suffering. Maybe throughout history life has been more sh*tty than not. And maybe most of us are just wired to suffer more than we enjoy. But I see everything you are talking about. I've contemplated it for almost 20 years. One might say that real philosophy begins with the death of god or a vision of life's ugly futility. But I still think there's a dark thrill in this vision. Job is one of my favorite books. It offers an amoral God at the center of things. God/Nature is not on our side. This is still wishful thinking compared to the sense of a God opposed to us rather than indifferent. But perhaps this is a mirror of some lawless freedom in man's dark heart.
Hero-myth, mixed with righteous indignation 8-) . Everyone's cool when they seem to where the proverbial sunglasses in their quotes 8-) .
I accept that. But that also makes pessimism less interesting here in being less a metaphysical issue and more a practical one - unless it is actually then related to the philosophy of biology.
Quoting darthbarracuda
But my position is not that life is bliss. Things being less than positive is not uncommon. We all know that. However what is histrionic is to then call it all a tragedy.
Quoting darthbarracuda
But that is hardly true. We spend a long time growing before we start decaying. So again your position - to the degree it has to depend on these kinds of histrionic claims - is unconvincing.
It's more phenomenological and existential than philosophy of science, concerning the qualitative experiences of a sentient organism, or a mind. A conglomerate of phenomenology, existentialism, philosophy of science and philosophy of mind and perhaps some others.
The claim that consciousness is a curse is not really a philosophy of biology claim. It's definitely more poetic although this does not necessarily take away its force, and it's fundamentally sourced from a reflection on the human condition than a reflection on a specific biological feature. Although I'm sure you could get to the same conclusion regardless of what method you take, so if you're a reliabilist about the scientific method I can see you coming to the same conclusions, albeit in a longer and annoyingly tedious way. Things need not be perfectly crisp or mathematically quantifiable to be meaningful, useful, and more importantly right.
So in a sense pessimism is indeed existentialism, but it's a different kind of existentialism that makes it unique in that it does not affirm life or existence whereas the famous existentialists like Camus or Sartre did.
Whereas some pessimistic thinkers like Schopenhauer made pressing observations about an isolated phenomenon (consciousness) and tried to explain the rest of the world based on it, we need not limit ourselves this way to make pessimistic claims. But generally pessimistic claims are going to center around the objects of ethical value - sentients - and the constraints imposed on them.
Just as your pragmatism has a rich history, pessimism has a rich, albeit neglected, history, extending as far back as the Sumerians and their Epic of Gilgamesh, or with Plato's condemnation of the immanent, or the Book of Ecclesiastes, or the Gnostics, or Shakespearean theater, or the comparatively radical nature of Buddhism and its focus on ending suffering. The modern pessimist rides on these ideas while attempting to find global similarities between them all and staying within the realm of the intelligible.
Not having a grandiose or systematic metaphysics does not usually affect pessimistic works, since pessimistic metaphysics is usually in response to the immanent objectivity of phenomenological studies. Whether or not Schopenhauer's metaphysics holds water does nothing to his evaluation of the human condition, although certainly metaphysics can be used as a rejoinder as discussed below.
Quoting apokrisis
I never said it had to be bliss in this case, although I might question why we ought to settle for less (the mediocre). The point is that I think generally life is far worse than mediocre and we're not willing to face this immediately accessible fact. As Ligotti said, life is malignantly useless.
Quoting apokrisis
It is in fact true, because at the ontological level Dasein is a being-towards-death. Heideggerian ontology implicitly places focus on possibilities more than the actualities, since Being is a process; there is never a complete thing. Actuals are quite simply an ever-tumbling series of possibilities falling over each other.
Our "telos", or end-point (not the functional point) is death. A tool's function may be to drill holes or hammer nails, but ultimately its final destination is with it breaking and being tossed out. The final destination of a star is a supernova or a white dwarf. The final destination of a human is death, regardless of all the existentially-heroic feats a human does in their life, just how a terrorist may go through many growth spurts before ultimately blowing himself up - in the end, we always knew what was coming, we were just kicking the can down the road. Claiming we grow and flourish during life does not change this fact, and claiming that death is not psychologically problematic is laughably absurd - on the contrary, death is exactly why we have culture, religion, political parties and the family unit as well as a host of other reassuring fictions, such as entertainment or pop-science.
In regards to the compatibility between instrumentality and objectivity, I don't know. I suppose this is one of the reasons I tend to be suspicious of pessimistic metaphysics, which seem more like narratives than insight into the reality of the world (as most metaphysics for that matter tend to be - elaborate fairy tales that trick us into believing that we know something).
Quoting darthbarracuda
I guess my theory was that there was a self-exaltation beneath the more conscious self-mutilation. It's not suave in the worldly sense. It's tortured and Christian (crucified on the T of Truth) in some complicated way. It's hard to imagine a better monster to wrestle with spiritually than a monster who mocks every spiritual pretension. It's a purified version of violence, an assault on the CPU.
Quoting darthbarracuda
I agree, except that I'm not sure that there is insight that isn't just more narrative. (I trust science about physical reality, but it's still just a narrative that's earned my acting-as-if.)
I'm not too sure what you are aiming at here apo.
I don't see the situation as being such that there is no hope of a worldview at all, but that there is altogether too much ( vain) hope for an all-encompassing worldview, and altogether too many worldviews, too tightly held. So, I don't see the fact that no worldview can be the one 'correct' worldview as sufficient reason for pessimistic feelings at all, but rather as a very good reason for optimistic celebration. How impoverished would life be, how devoid of creatively individual meanings, if there were one worldview so convincing that it would necessarily and unerringly recommend itself to every intelligence?
I'm not sure what you are driving at when you say "But what if even the absence of such hope can't be known for certain? What if that is as radically unsure?". I would certainly hope that there is no such overwhelmingly convincing worldview, and when I see that all worldviews are only as good as their premises, which cannot themselves be proven or even empirically demonstrated, and how people tend to favour the worldviews that give them most comfort, I feel amply entitled to entertain such a hope. But, nor do I hope for a plethora of worldviews as I have already said, because the best result would be obtained, I think, if people altogether lost their taste for clinging to this or that worldview for dear life; and got on with more creative pursuits, feeling comfortable instead with the mystery of being.
In a way we do confront the void; if by that is meant that we confront the lack of imposed meaning; but I think that is all to the good. Unfortunately instead of using their creative faculties to imagine and intuit the meaning of their own lives, people look for received meanings that they can then impose on others as the 'one true meaning or worldview'. Of course, the severity and persistence of such impositions varies from one individual to another, and we can always avoid those who become too tedious.
As I say, we do confront the void, as the ineluctable mystery of existence; and why would we have it any other way? Should we instead wish that the question of being be a prosaic matter that can be all sown up tidily and neatly disposed of forthwith, so that we all may conform to the one great irresistible worldview that will bind us together in mediocracy until the end?
I have read a little Nietzsche, more for the literary than the philosophical substance; he was a writer of some truly great poetically imaginative prose (well, at least judging from the English translations), but to be honest I don't think he really escaped the unfortunate tendency to entertain an overarching worldview.
Again, my point is that you start from the histrionic and personal position that suffering, in any degree, is an unbearable fact. But most people just don't think that do they? Life has it ups and downs but that doesn't make life not worth living.
So yes. It may be poetic - in being histrionic. But if we want to talk realistically about the place of suffering in human conscious existence, then we need some solid backdrop against which to make some judgement.
You are failing to convince me either on phenomenological or material grounds that there is a general issue as opposed to a personal issue.
Quoting darthbarracuda
So what is your argument against settling for average outcomes? Why would that be mediocre rather contented?
Again, an exaggerated notion of what you deem acceptable distorts every part of your exposition.
Quoting darthbarracuda
This is silly. Things with a telos in this fashion can't get worn out unless they are used to achieve things. So you could say living and dying without properly living is certainly a waste of a life. Thus the end point of a drill's existence or a person's existence would have to be judged in terms of the negentropy created as well as the entropy spent.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Your position relies on constant exaggeration. Mostly we have all those things to deal with the realities of life. To claim they are "exactly" fictions to hide death is more argument by histrionics.
Once you've understood the concept of instrumentality- everything can seem as if it is only in relation to it. All other concepts are suffused with the idea of instrumentality, thus its supremacy. Its like once you see it, it does not necessarily go away, though one can distract from it. The problem with internet forums is anyone can say they do anything in "real life", but who knows- you may live in more existential despair than anyone. I wouldn't or couldn't know- All I know is the Peircean traidic-semiotic-pragmatist that is displayed here or anything else you want to convey. This could be said of anyone on any internet forum of course. As histrionic as pessimism's theme of instrumentality is, it can equally be said that your underplaying of it also says something. However, just like your themes of semiotics, the theme of instrumentality may be just as earnest and important- perhaps more so because of its "practical" common understanding.
All attention- whether on discursive thought (logic, science, math, etc.) or simply playing a game has motivations. All humans can self-reflect on their own condition- looking at things from the point of view of that which constrains our very thought (i.e. boredom and survival) and that which we find ourselves situated in (an cultural and natural environment whereby our survival and entertainment/pleasure needs play out such that we do to do to do in a perpetual cycle of striving-for-nothing). This is more paramount than understanding the form of how we came to be- as if discovering this is going to get rid of the instrumentality rather than being another avenue to keep our bored brains satisfied with some sort of complex literature, dialectic, and logical synthesizing regarding a specific topic of preference.
Whether humans are defined in terms of their genetics, anatomy and physiology, their tool-use, their brain structure, their social grouping, their linguistic-conceptual cognitive framework, or a host of other characteristics, the world we live in phenomenologically, is that of the conditions I explained above- survival, boredom, and dealing with these constrains in a certain cultural/environmental context. This is why instrumentality, and "the human condition" is paramount to that which may take our fancy as a result of this very condition which motivates us to seek our attention to other things.
And though you may posit (which if I know your philosophy of things well enough, you will), that I am focusing too much on the individual and not enough on the social relations/environment setting that creates the individual (thus, subtly indicating that human nature is completely malleable to environmental conditions), this is simply overlooking the primacy of the phenomenological experience that we go through as individual beings. Our cognition, upbringing, socialization, etc. does happen in a cultural/social context, but it is always in relation to the our individual egos coping with the environment. As much as we are shaped by the environment, and are part of it, our individual perspective does not melt away, that is to say, the human conditions of survival, boredom, and our ability to understand the instrumentality of existence still happens to an individual within the social context. The social context does not take over this individual perspective and radically alters it, but simply helps in shaping it in some respect. This does not negate the conditions of survival, boredom, and ability to understand instrumentality for the individual who must contend with these things in a particular cultural/environmental setting that that person may have been shaped by.
I'm not just arguing that life has its ups and downs, I'm arguing that life has far more downs than ups (and that the down are structurally apparent), and that the reason most people don't find life unbearable is because they have found methods of dealing with the pain, just as Zapffe, Freud, Becker, Nietzsche, and others have argued. All of this leads to the idea that life is something to be endured - which a lot of the survivors of Auschwitz did but that doesn't mean it was good that they went through Auschwitz. Now of course Auschwitz is an extreme example, but in fact it's a poignant one as well since it shows the extreme polarity and unbalance of pain and pleasure as well as the systematic exploitation (instrumentalizing) of the structural pain within life itself.
Affirmative existential thinking can potentially justify the continuing of a life in a purely irrational, emotional and aesthetic way (pace Nietzshce) but that does not make starting a life totally fine. Indeed the reason we have to act this way is out of desperation.
So you have structural pain manifesting as tediousness, boredom, unremarkability, daily uncomfortable experiences, and a general sense of unease on the day-to-day while also having the prospect of extreme, utterly horrible pain, pain that can only be described as torturous, pain that would make us question continuing existing at that moment and which, pace Cabrera, removes us from our ability to act ethically (as in these situations we are solely concerned with ourselves and thus may neglect others). This is not an exaggeration, it is an absolutely real prospect. What if your entire life led up to you dying in horrible pain?\ Would all the good experiences in the past have any effect on you in that circumstance? No. The pain you experienced would be so intense that you would question the very decision to bring you into existence.
Ignoring this prospect is a classic example of Pollyannism and magical thinking.
Quoting apokrisis
Heidegger does indeed call achievement the essence of action. Doesn't change the fact that action is inherently predisposed to inevitable destruction, not to mention that many actions are quite terrible.
Quoting apokrisis
Unlike what you claim here, I actually have scientific data to support my views. I'm not just going to ignore an entire sector of inquiry because you personally don't like it.
I think we have to talk about suicide. Because we do have an emergency exit, life is not as irrational as it would otherwise be. We transcend desperation when we see the world or life as a whole that we can annihilate. We consent to suffering as if we were consumers paying to see a future that we expect to be better than our present suffering. If we generally have had pleasant lives (at least in the recent past), this is a "rational" transaction.
But, yeah, life is justified aesthetically, emotionally. I can only speak for myself, but I'm happy more often than not. I've been through the fire, though. These days (for about 10 years?) I'm grateful to have been born. So for me it's about homeostasis, maintaining this sincere gratitude. The dark visions in Ecclesiastes and Job are ultimately tools for this purpose, inoculations against "infinite" desire, a "chasing after the wind" or "cosmic closure."
That is why your argument is weak. You have to jump to unrepresentative extremes to make your case.
Your whole approach is flawed in trying to reduce human existence to some calculus of joy and anguish weighed on a set of scales. A life is a construction in which happiness and pain are useful signals. We need to focus on the nature of that construction - it's good or bad - rather than on the signals. This is because the signals themselves will be interpreted quite differently, depending on the kind of life being constructed.
I mean why is a rough sport like rugby so enjoyable. Why would anyone punish themselves climbing a mountain. How does suffering of this kind become the most fondly remembered aspects of a life?
Or for a more ordinary kind of basic hard work, who would have kids, a garden or a farm. These are tough gigs. Yet also what make life the most worthwhile.
Now you will just repeat your mantra that I am talking about exactly the self-delusion which you - in all your superiority - have the better sense to see through.
But bullshit my friend. Pessimism is a rationalisation for a failure to engage with existence in constructive fashion.
Quoting darthbarracuda
You have a flawed thesis. You think the point of life is not to feel the slightest discomfort, rather than to actually live it and make something of it.
All the science stands against you there - from biology through neuroscience, sociology and psychology.
Your case hinges on a mentality you have chosen to construct - one where you have got into the negative habit of focusing on the very worst possible outcomes and treating them as the sole determinants of your existence.
It's learned helplessness dressed up as "philosophy".
Not really, though. Extreme pain is indeed an extreme example but not because it's strange, unusual or anything like that. It's extreme because it's extremely intense. As Adorno said, how can we do poetry and metaphysics after Auschwitz?
And even if these extreme pains were unusual - does that change anything? Does the concept of unrelenting and useless torture not give you the chills or make you question the nature of the world?
And then of course there is the part of my argument that you keep missing, the parts about tediousness, boredom, unremarkability and suffocating emptiness.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't get what your getting at here. In the end, we have all sorts of experiences, good and bad and neutral depending on what our preferences are. I'll admit that I am indeed a utilitarian consequentialist which not all pessimists were/are, but only because I think other positions are untenable.
Quoting apokrisis
Pain is not equivalent to suffering. As Levinas said, suffering is useless, and that's also why Ligotti called life "malignantly useless". The pain you experience while playing rugby is acceptable...however I'm sure you'll agree that the pain that happens when you break your arm playing is not.
But anyway rugby, like most sports and entertainment, is fun because it challenges us within a certain threshold of security. We fundamentally trick ourselves into believing that we are heroes for overcoming the opposition in a purely fictional setting.
Zapffe was a prolific mountaineer, who climbed mountains because he thought it was the most pointless thing to do. A real irony, but then again, the aesthetic may be the only redeeming feature of a pessimistic worldview.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm not saying I'm superior. But once an illusion/concealment has been shown to be what it is, it's difficult to submerge yourself again. That's how you solve an existential crisis in the usual way, isn't it? Surround yourself with your comforts and securities and distract yourself for long enough that you eventually forget what was bothering you. Until something inevitably triggers the questioning again, usually in the form of something tragic.
You are here because countless other organisms have suffered uselessly. You are the product of their combined subjugation by the whims of the environment; a billion-year-old gladiatorial arena. None of this is worthy of praise - it is utterly useless, pointless and morally repugnant. But to come to this conclusion requires one to look past your favorite ice cream shop or the next order on Amazon.
Quoting apokrisis
I didn't say that was the point of life. In fact I'd argue the point of life, pace Nietzsche, is to make art and express oneself by the aesthetic.
Quoting apokrisis
No...it's not. Get out of your bubble and read some psychology, and none of that positive psychology bullshit. Go read Becker, go read Freud (the parts that don't involve penises), go read Zapffe, go read Heidegger, go read Adler, go read Rank, go read Fromm, go read Schopenhauer, Cioran, Ligotti, Brassier, Feltham, Darwin. They've said it better than I can, and a lot of it is free online.
What doesn't kill you will sometimes makes you wish it had.
Sure, he might have said it was as pointless as life. But still, he did it. And so there must have been some point to it. And thus also some point to life.
Note I'm not defending sports or climbing particularly. They are rather self-indulgent pursuits of course. The issue is instead that they show that suffering is intrinsic to having fun.
Climbing a mountain is as optional an activity as it gets. So it is not as though we have to go through the pain because life leaves us with no choice. Instead it must be the case that when modern life removes all real hardships and dangers, we - or at least a lot of us - go in active search of such risks. They make us feel more alive - being a natural part of the psychology of living.
So I am waiting for you to account for that with your narrow pessimism.
Quoting darthbarracuda
People usually solve their existential crises by growing up and getting stuck into life.
I agree of course that there is plenty to criticise about the way life is supposed to be lived in the modern consumer society, lost in romanticism and hedonism.
But to have that grown-up conversation, you have to be already past needy pessimism.
Quoting darthbarracuda
What do you know about psychology or positive psychology? Get out of your own bubble.
No, suffering is not intrinsic to having fun, otherwise it wouldn't be suffering! Pain may be but again pain is not equivalent to suffering.
Quoting apokrisis
Growing up - yes, the process of hiding one's scars and adopting a symbolic facade to appease the crowd. Truly an impressive phenomenon...
Quoting apokrisis
I know a lot more than you do, apparently. Reality can be insulting but that doesn't change anything.
I didn't mean to imply that you were unhappy or anything like that. I was just reacting to "desperation." But I guess in a non-pejorative sense you are right. We abandon our hope to rationalize reality completely and then look to a (self-consciously) aesthetic justification. "I really don't need an imperishable rationalization of the real. Its apparent impossibility is even better in some ways."
This is taken out of context db; Levinas is referring only to passively endured suffering. The kind of suffering that is inflicted by an active evil agent. Torture would be an example. Torture is useless and evil. The kinds of suffering that are naturally entailed by life are not useless, unless they are passively or depressively endured; otherwise they may be useful because they build character and enable transformations; they are the fires that forge genuine mettle.
I couldn't help thinking that all this suffering did have a use and is worthy of praise as the cost of our presence. As to moral repugnance, I think that is lessened as one sees the devil in one's self. Part of us likes it exactly this way. So it's reframable as a disharmony in the individual soul?
Quoting darthbarracuda
And yet pain, stress and suffering can cause the release of endorphins, serotonin and adrenaline - which feel pretty good. So you are not respecting the complexity of the neuroscience.
Yet we don't go around breaking people's arms so they can feel a pulse of endorphins. Sure, maybe your emo cousin cuts herself to feel better, but is that seriously good behavior that ought to be condoned? Not all pain, in fact most pain, is not accompanied by any sort of endorphin balancing-act. It is clear that these endorphins are being used by you as an excuse for pain - i.e. the opposite (that the release of endorphins is accompanied by pain) is not how we would describe the situation.
The UN banned torture because torture is a human rights violation. It wouldn't be a violation if the endorphins released during these traumatic episodes "made up" for the pain experienced.
Eventually I think you will come to the same conclusion that I have and realize that life is not meant to be fair, balanced, or comfortable.
Right. It is instead a goal that has to be worked at.
But we seem a long way now from your original thesis that the very possibility of a nasty paper cut is sufficient reason to unwish the entirety of existence.
Not sure what you mean by this. Why does anything need to be worked out at all? Why do we need to give people problems?
Quoting apokrisis
That's a strawman.
Who is this "we"? Are you thinking of some malign god?
If you are going to claim your view is science-backed, it is going to have to be naturalistic. And so we can contrast two hypotheses here.
My argument is that brains evolved for problem solving. Pleasure and pain must exist to mark out the symbolised limits of that. We have to actually get feedback on whether we are getting hotter or colder in our problem solving. And nothing about such signalling is simple. For instance, a smart brain must be able to trade-off the short-term pain vs the long-term gain, and vice versa. Hence stuff like endorphins to help you keep climbing through the suffering.
Your argument is something about pain or suffering having phenomenal existence as a class of qualia. Somehow you treat situated feelings as if they were cosmic abstracta. Having thus separated them from reality, you can weigh their "existence" in isolation.
Welcome to Platonism, goodbye to realism, naturalism, science and commonsense.
And my argument is that this smart brain evolved this tendency in order to trick its captive self-model into continuing to exist. You seem to be implicitly favoring smartness as goodness (because survival is "obviously" good) when I'm arguing that our hyper-intellectual ability is what pins us to the ground more often than not. Our level of sophistication of consciousness does not "belong" in the environment; it has to support itself by its own flexibility. The phenomenal self-model is the brain's way of enslaving itself.
Good lordy. What did you say about bubbles and psychological science? Do you believe animals have to be protected in some way from their existential dread and the constant temptation of suicide?
Quoting darthbarracuda
Get back to me when you can link such lurid claims to real neuroscience.
Well, I mean I doubt most other animals have existential crises like we do. But certainly they have instincts that keep them from doing things that would destroy them. Like Lovecraft said, the first experience was fear. We don't get to decide whether or not life is to be continued - we are forced by our more primal instincts to continue whether we like it or not.
Quoting apokrisis
LOL, go read the neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger and his associates over at the ASSC.
Nope. Not getting much sense of science there. Lovecraft? :)
Quoting darthbarracuda
I've read him. I don't find him particularly insightful as he conflates the issues of biologically evolved consciousness and culturally evolved self-regulatory awareness.
Yes, Lovecraft. He's incredibly revealing in his phenomenology. You throw around the term "science" as if it's a get-out-of-jail-free card. "nuh-uh, Lovecraft wasn't a real scientist, so none of this matters". Absurd, the reason Lovecraft is so famous is because he made such provocative observations.
Quoting apokrisis
In any case this does not matter very much considering the main focal point - phenomenology - is still being pushed aside. Your argument is akin to telling a person who is afraid of heights that "it's just a chemical reaction" - that doesn't change anything. You're completely ignoring the phenomenon of extreme pain as well as tediousness and repetition in favor of an impersonal explanation that does nothing but ignore what I'm actually arguing about.
People like to live through other people. They like to see others persevere. They like to have children so they can re-live their own childhood (babies are aesthetic objects). They like to witness heroism. They like to escape their own lives. But they like to do this in the comfort of their own homes. They don't particularly enjoy going through hardship and pain, but they enjoy it when others do and when they "rise above", but interestingly enough they tend to forget about those who didn't and succumbed. So it's easy to dismiss all of what I'm saying here by telling me to "grow up" or "man up" but that's all it is - easy. And short-sighted as well.
Great. But I was trying to turn this discussion away from romantic histrionics towards science-backed naturalism.
As I said, show me that the brain isn't evolved for problem-solving. And that being so, it then follows we have to evaluate biological signals of pleasure and pain in that light.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Well hardly. My point is that phenomenology at the level we are discussing it is socially constructed and linguistic. That is the human condition.
The question then is whether culture is integrated with biology - whether as humans we are still essentially pragmatic problem-solvers and that is the basis for any philosophising? Or instead, there is your alternative hypothesis - the rather romantic and Freudian one - that the ego is culturally manufactured as some kind of self-deceptive bulwark against the death instinct, or some such garbled rubbish. If only we could shed the scales from our eyes and see existence as bad from the get-go, you wail - because for some it ends in torture and holocaust, even if you seem to have a life that only stretches as far as boredom, anxiety and some mild discontent.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Well again hardly. As a semiotician, I would say it is just a symbolic reaction - a state of interpretance.
It is natural to have some fear of heights if you don't want to fall. What is pathological in problem-solving terms is to become so overcome by the very idea of the possibility of falling that it takes over your entire life. Or what would be ridiculous as a philosophy would be to construct a whole ethics around the possibility that someone somewhere may fall in a really bad way, while ignoring the converse fact that mostly people manage to stand in a world that is well-organised - by a problem-solving attitude.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Yep. It is easy. Your whole position is built on catastrophising. I'm just waiting for you to make an argument that brains are not meant for problem-solving and so require some way to tell whether they are getting hotter or colder on that score.
How can it make sense for suffering not to exist for a mind that has to be able to make its mind up?
And sure, if such a mind decides the solution to its problems is suicide, that makes sense. A rational society supports voluntary euthanasia for terminal illness.
But I return to my point - the one that supports me saying "man up". Problem solving is meant to consider all its options. So show me the bit where your philosophy is doing that. In what way is it constuctive to become so obsessed by the very worst things that can happen - especially when you personally claim your life is quite content.
Or, we can also look at what it's like to experience pleasure and pain. Telling a person who is being tortured that it's just a bunch of signals in their brain meant to solve problems does nothing to help them. This is quite literally Zapffe's claim: we are both over and under evolved. We have an over-developed intellect and an under-developed signal mechanism. We are held down by a crude hedonic treadmill (a very well-established scientific fact) and are inherently slaves to our needs. The mind is filled with possibilities and wishes to be free, and yet the body and environment consistently disappoint and repress.
Quoting apokrisis
There is nothing socially constructed or linguistic about torture. There is nothing socially constructed or linguistic about boredom or repetition. Telling someone that they aren't actually experiencing any "qualitative" experience a la qualia is not only asinine but insulting.
Quoting apokrisis
And once again we have you diagnosing pessimists as being "unnatural" or "pathological", as if they are some sort of oddity in the universe. No, we are part of the universe, and therefore it stands that the universe is capable of producing these kinds of ideas.
Quoting apokrisis
Why would this be ridiculous? Certainly if you fell in a really bad way, no previous pleasures will help you out. When experiencing intense pain, you are literally suffocated by the experience. Nothing else matters.
To brush this aside and claim that the suffering of others is not important is highly suspicious. As Zapffe said, no future great triumph can justify the plight of an innocent against his will.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm waiting for you to tell me how problem-solving has anything to do with what I'm talking about. The function of pleasure and pain differs from how they are experienced.
Quoting apokrisis
Why is there a need for problem-solving in the first place? What is so great and special about life, other than the pleasure you experience? If you accept that it's pleasure that makes a life good, then you have to, on pain of contradiction, accept that it is pain that makes a life bad.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, or for anyone who views life itself as a terminal illness.
Quoting apokrisis
The rub of pessimism is that there is no way to solve this problem. Suicide doesn't solve the problem, it just eliminates it.
So please explain to me how you can simultaneously accept that the worst possible can actually happen (a tragic catastrophe) and yet somehow twist the responsibility onto me to find a solution. All you're doing is ignoring it.
You and Apo are both making strong points. Life creates suffering as well as consciousness ("false" or not) of this suffering as useless. And yet intelligence is problem solving. Diagonosing suffering as useless is itself useful as a reason to strictly avoid such suffering, where possible. We don't wait in line if we think the office will close before they'll see us, for instance. If an anticipated personal future is conceived of as a bunch of useless suffering, then euthanasia/suicide is a rational solution.
Quoting darthbarracuda
To me, this isn't axiomatic. One can affirm life/reality in its injustice and guilt. I read Job this way.
[quote= Job]
I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls.
[/quote]
Of course you or anyone else can hold to the impossibility of justifying coerced suffering. I won't say you're wrong. But I think it's a instrument of the problem solving brain, so I ask what's its purpose? It seems to assert implicitly "anti-thetical" or un-worldly values and point away from life's necessary guilt to the cold but innocent grave. There's an old German philosopher out there who thought humanity's consciousness would evolve so that it would willingly go extinct. It's a grand idea. But I think most people (these days, in wealthy countries) would say yes to being born again as the same person (memory wiped) and living it all again.
Yes from the personal view, but from the metaphysical side nothing is solved.
Metaphysically speaking I doubt the universe has any moral compass whatsoever. But this also means that catastrophes can happen, i.e. a tragedy. So from the perspective of a sentient being, the universe can come across as malignant. Metaphysically speaking the entire cosmos is not good or bad, but it is the case, metaphysically speaking, that sentients exists in such a way as to be affected by the arbitrary whims of the universe. Sentients are thus metaphysical captives.
Quoting Hoo
This is a major point that I had forgotten to bring up. Think about what you are experiencing right now, at this very moment. Can you honestly and indubitably tell yourself that you are happy, or that you are not suffering? Chance are that you will find that you have a general sense of unease. As soon as your tool-using brains stops using tools you start to fumble.
Apply this reasoning to pre-natal conditions. Are what you are experiencing right now worth being born for? People like to look in the future or the past contemplating what they have or might experience (part of my argument itself rests on this fact) - but in the case of birth it always tends to be about the good and never the bad, especially not the mediocrity currently being experienced in the present. It is a common and well-established psychological phenomenon (Pollyannism and magical thinking) that people's judgement of their own lives is skewed: from a pre-natal perspective, their lives would not be worth starting, and from a currently-living perspective they probably aren't worth living either but are maintained by the neurotic sense of vanity. If it is good to continue to exist, then it must be good to bring people into existence. If it's not good to bring people into existence, then it must be bad to continue to exist (for one's own sake). I accept this and the contradiction it is for me to continue to exist.
But treating torture as an issue that can be tackled via social institutions is pragmatic - of much more use in real life than telling the same torture victim that "yes, you are right, life is shit for everyone from the get-go, so don't think you are anything special in the fact you have electrodes attached to your gonads right at this moment."
So stop straw-manning my position.
Quoting darthbarracuda
I can't help it if you are wedded to extreme simplicity. All I can do is point out the structural complexity of my own position. I am careful to separate the biology of the "under-developed signal mechanism" from the sociology of the "over-developed intellect" so as not to make these kinds of basic ontological blunders.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Or instead, it means you don't understand psychology well enough to understand what is meant by social constructionism.
Quoting darthbarracuda
The only kind of universe that can produce these kinds of ideas is one where life has become so generally safe and easy on the whole that the self-indulgent have to pathologise the very fact of their own existence.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Even if you want to be supremely simplistic in this fashion, that still makes it a problem to solve.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Exactly. Suicide solves something in the case of an already imminent painful death. But generally, solving the problem involves getting a life and learning to stop whining.
Pessimism is so histrionic that nothing can fix its psychic state. Time would have to be wound back to its beginning and existence itself annihilated to make things right.
Emos wondered why people laughed at them. It wasn't only the bad haircuts and wristbands meant to signal "potential cutter here".
It can be malign beyond expectation and benevolent beyond expectation, terrible and wonderful. We are in the "hand" of an amoral "God" (reality that envelopes us). Or rather that's a dialectically established vision/myth I think we share and act on.. Reality/nature/god transcends/violates human intuitions of justice. And yet works of fiction like Job are new conceptualizations of justice or negative theologies that trade justice for beauty. Ever read Blood Meridian? I think there's a beast in the heart of man, the flip side of concern for that "infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering" thing in "Preludes."
On some level we are super-predators, and the religion of our blood is total war. If we give careful, pious justifications of self-extinction with one face, the other is laughing with the gods at (or participating in) the orgy and slaughter that has and asks no reason why.
Quoting darthbarracuda
There are aches and pains, allergies, inconveniences, occasional thoughts of the body breaking down with age, imaginations of possible terrible accidents or unpredictable violence. I see the world as a collision of narcissism and hunger in the context of threatened humiliation and scarcity. But I still find life good. It's largely about always returning to a state of creative play. Life could become shitty without warning. But there's always the emergency exit. So I live with it. Then there's Blake:
[quote=Blake]
Evil is burnt up when men cease to behold it.
[/quote]
We get absorbed become-one-with in our finite projects (including this spiel in my case). I'm almost never not thinking/playing. Pain/threat interrupts, is dealt with. I climb back on the hobby hose. I'm pretty damned lucky, so far, really, though I paid my angst-dues in a serious way in my teens and 20s. The altruistic pose is a cage. The finder/teller-of universal-truth pose is a cage. The system of poses falls forward into its contradictions. Until it stabilizes. Then one enjoys detail work at what feels like an end of (personal) ideological history. Or that's my story. I don't need it to be everybody's, but I do like publishing it. The right kind of person will (so the fantasy goes) appreciate the shortcut and hopefully the style.
Quoting darthbarracuda
But the pre-natal perspective is exactly what I brought up. I can't see how the value of life can be judged objectively. So what is our judgement skewed in relation to? Yet another skewed judgment? Respectfully, how does your position escape being skewed? It seems to rely on the assumption that the "grim" view is more realistic because it "obviously" isn't wishful thinking. But what if this grim view is wishful thinking? What if all thinking is wishful? It's still possibly just the assertion of the self as a hero of truth, darkly beautiful really. I'll grant that vanity/self-love is a big issue. But I embrace self-love and egoism self-consciously. Beyond genuine empathy, there is 'sacred' altruism (Stirner) as badge of superiority. "Give alms in secret." Neurotic vanity would, in my view, be an unstable hero myth in transition. This is spiritual pain itself, in my view. Being caught between incompatible investments/myths. I experience life as an ascent because I feel that I am improving this sculpture of the self for the self. I'm striving for a PhD. That'll feel good. Then I'll strive to write the great American novel or something. The connection to the grand and the heroic is (seems to me) inescapable. I posit it as a necessary structure. We consent to go back to our ignorant, confused state (or I do) knowing that we (I) will re-attain "self-consciousness" or my current myth-system. The dragon's gold is his mirror, his self-recognition as dragon, earned through a series of evolving "alienations" or unstable self-conceptions. (I found this in the Hegelian Stirner after cooking it up on my own w/ the help of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and so many others.) So for me pessimism is a fascinating version of the hero myth, the black dragon. But I like the golden dragon. Maybe it's just my "truth," my "software." Of course. Of course.
This does not change the fact that torture can occur beyond human interaction. The point is that there is a contingency factor here, in that we have the possibility that life can become unbearable. A risk factor of proportion that cannot be ignored.
Quoting apokrisis
Or it means that I don't see the usefulness of applying social constructionism to this debate as it is not relevant. Regardless of what causes us to feel a certain way, we nevertheless do feel. Deconstructing our experiences does nothing to them, and may even disillusion us.
Quoting apokrisis
Or it's the life of the contemplative who are able to reflect upon the condition of humanity, the conditions that other people are too busy trying to survive to even reflect upon them. This life would be one that isn't entirely focused on mitigating anxiety and avoiding things we fear.
Quoting apokrisis
Or to be less naively optimistic, it's a problem that cannot be solved and thus must be eliminated. A conspiracy.
Quoting apokrisis
Ad hominem. Nobody is forcing you to participate in this debate. Nobody is on your lawn or front porch. It never ceases to amaze me how pessimism rustles people's jimmies so much if it is indeed wrong. Nobody reacts like this unless it's to an uncomfortable truth.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, indeed if I had the choice I don't think I would condone abiogenesis. Too much suffering for no net gain.
Only if you change torture's definition.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Could it get any more laughable?
Let me know when you are ready to deal with nature in terms of what is natural rather than imagining yourself sitting at God's right hand, tugging his sleeve as He is doing his creating, and murmuring: "Do you really think this last little DNA thing is wise?".
But not its immanent objectivity.
Quoting apokrisis
What is natural is not what is good per se.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't know, you're setting the precedent here. I mean, we can a more cordial discussion, or we can descend into useless name-calling.
The core issue seems to be that you treat phenomenology as brute fact - we can't help what we feel - whereas I say scientific naturalism supports the position that what we feel is controllable on many levels. So if a feeling is a problem, it is also a problem that can be tackled. Or at least solution seeking becomes the first natural response.
So there are two models in play. And in mine, getting completely rid of suffering, pain, anxiety and other negative signals is self-evidently an unnatural desire. What is natural is obviously behaviour that seeks to minimise the signal. But you would still want to be able to feel it as a possibility.
You on the other hand are taking an abstracted, cosmological and dualistic approach where "bad feelings" stand alone as concrete "mental things". Pain is just pain in an uncontextual, Platonic ideal, way. That is the basis on which you could even want to rule it out as a class of being by fiat.
Pain is a bad thing because it can grow to any scale and become the worst thing in existence. So even the most marginal forms of pain - like unease or boredom - need to be banished too. Hence your continual resort to slippery slope argumentation. One minute we are suffering a papercut or aching neck, the next thing we know, it is going to be genital electrodes and the Holocaust.
So we have two quite different metaphysics in play. And where I lose patience is when you claim that your ontology is also founded on scientific naturalism. Just be honest. It is not.
You have avoided dealing with my arguments against your simple-minded phenomenalism. It is basic to my position that phenomenology - as an introspective level of awareness - is a socially constructed linguistic habit. And all you say in reply is that you can't see the point in talking about social constructionism (as it is indeed "pointless" in within your mind-stuff paradigm).
Likewise you have not dealt with my claim that a natural evolutionary understanding of the brain would see it as a problem solving organ. The importance of that is this is what makes it necessary to be able to evaluate alternative actions in terms of - broadly speaking - reward and punishment. So to imagine a world without punishment is to make being a problem solver impossible.
Thus in my view pain is both necessary and controllable. The existence of pain is mostly not a big deal because there is a bigger game that should be going on - the one of living a life. If you focus on that, pain can be put in its proper perspective.
But you are arguing for some simplistic calculus where pain should not exist, and so from that premise, life should not exist. Yet it is an unnatural claim to treat pain as if its degrees of difference make no difference. And as if it is not controllable in practice.
So your position relies on a number of socially constructed delusions. The obviousness of that is why one would ask what it is exactly that you are psychologically shielding yourself from?
Yes, you don't like the tables being turned in that fashion. You want to be the one calling the rest of us self-deluded and unable to see the truth of existence. But there you go.
I agree that solution seeking becomes the first natural response. When I get a headache, I take ibuprofen. When I balance my checkbook, I use a calculator to assist me.
But the nature of the pessimistic argument is that some problems are just not solvable. They can be pushed aside, mentally rearranged, or eliminated, but never satisfactorily solved. And in this case, such problems are existential, i.e. structurally unremovable from life, i.e. a necessary condition for life as we know it.
Indeed, when I get a headache, taking a pill seems to only solve a surface problem. The problem may re-surface when the pill wears off, or the pain is a symptom of an underlying problem, or perhaps the ibuprofen isn't enough. In any case, it's worth noting how much of our problem-solving involves a dependency on other things. Thanks to our creativity, we have tools, medicine, and gadgets that help us and keep us in a relatively comfortable state today. But the key point in this case is that we have creativity just because we are inadequate without it.
Some of these existential problems are thus:
Quoting apokrisis
But just to be clear, you haven't really provided anything of scientific worth. Your scientific background is not sufficient for evidence. Whereas I have explicitly given you more than sufficient data.
Again you keep slapping around the word science as if it's the end-all be-all method of obtaining truth, when in reality there are many things that are more obvious and easy to understand without a specific scientific method.
In any case, all of what I have said is either backed by scientific data or is not inherently in contradiction to the established medium.
Quoting apokrisis
The extreme pain is the practical argument, the one that is most pressing and striking. Yet you still ignore it as if there is a justification for it happening (because you're not experiencing it right now?) The tediousness and uneasiness is also uncomfortable, but it draws more from the aesthetic. It's disillusioning to see ourselves naked and afraid. It's something that I think we aren't able to completely get over. Underneath all our actions is this ever-present rumbling of need, desire, dissatisfaction, concern, fear, anxiety. It's what is there if nothing else is, what everything else is built on. So like I said before, life is not meant to be comfortable.
Quoting apokrisis
Because it doesn't change the fact that we still suffer. Deconstructing our experiences doesn't just dissolve them away. Such is the conviction of a lucky person.
Quoting apokrisis
Just like anyone else, I'm shielding myself from the above ideas. What makes me a pessimist is that I'm not too good at it.
Yes, they are part of the structure of life. We both agree that. But I say necessary for a reason, while you claim it to be an unreasonable fact.
I ask how you can talk about "life" when you don't even seem to believe in life's naturalism in this regard. The logic of your position requires you to argue that life is unnatural in some deep fashion. I'm waiting for you to resolve that paradox.
Quoting darthbarracuda
My argument is that we would be simply replacing one construction with another in switching out your ridiculously negative construction for a more balanced view of existence.
Indeed this was kind of the point of this thread to begin with. From a phenomenological perspective, we don't seem to belong. We're aliens to the world. We're able to self-reflect. Existentialism 101. How the hell is the universe even capable of hosting something like us?
You can see this applied in psychology by learning about Terror Management Theory and the psychoanalytic/humanistic theories of Rank and Becker.
Quoting apokrisis
What would this "balanced" view consist of? Certainly we can't just magically think away our pains and fears.
If a certain intense subset of life's pains and fears is the result of simple identifications with the True and the Good, then what I'd expect (from personal experience) is the eventual abandonment or reconfiguration of these identifications. But I don't think there is a "magic" leap. Self-esteem collapses without such identifications. Self-esteem just is identification with some mask of the generalized hero. The young man will almost have to identify with an anti-worldly notion the hero at first, for he is too young to have done anything in the world. He is patricidal. The "father" (worldly, selfish, 'cynical', ironic, laughing) must be profane, illegitimate. Because life isn't funny from the perspective of the humiliated-by-his-worldly-nullity youth.
So he inherits a notion of the absolute, or actually conflicting notions of the absolute. There's an idea of moral purity in altruism, but also an idea of intellectual purity in truth. Obviously we want to hold both absolutes in a single vision. The true is altruistic is the true. But commitment to truth leads to epistmological concerns. Others with other myths/truths bring cognitive dissonance. Some of them look successful. Maybe they do know something we don't. Epistemology becomes "prayer" in a religion of truth. Maybe we don't have it, but we pursue it, and are hence ennobled by the intensity and seriousness of this pursuit. Somehow, all along, the truth must be good-for-all, via conflation of altruism and truth. But our knight of truth-and-altruism finds only lies and selfishness in the world, which is to say disagreement and the assertions of other notions of value. Instead of putting his axioms into question, he projects this impasse as a universal situation. Solving his own problem would be 'selfish' and insufficiently grand orbanal.
So the sough truth seems to be bad-for-all. It's a rigged system, a world run by the devil. How then can our dialectical knight save the good demanded in the true? Simple. It becomes a tool that aids in the renunciation of life = bad. All that can be hoped for the cessation of suffering. The good is now just the absence of the bad, its void-empty negation. Since all happiness is illusion that binds us to the bad, happiness is false and bad. Self-extinction is nobility itself. What a twist! Selfish and bad man can (so it seems) will his own extinction in the name of the good and the true. Because "he who despises himself still respects himself as one who despises." If feeling like a superior person (true and good) demands universal extinction, so be it. But this is violence at its heart, ultra-violence that wants to see itself as the perfection of pacifism.
I've answered all this already. So you are simply returning me to your assertions rather than dealing with my arguments against them.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Yes, you can certainly make a case that there is a socially constructed fear of death because there is also the precondition of a socially constructed sense of self. Culture must react in some way to the sharpness of failing to exist, after leading to a sharp notion of being a self in existence (in a soul-like fashion).
The question then is what metaphysically is the correct way to respond - responding in terms of notions of souls and other traditional social mythology not being a very naturalistic/scientific way of framing the issues.
So again, we are back to the same situation. I defend a naturalistic/scientific ontology. You seem to take the other road - the romantic, dualistic, idealistic path. For you, the organic whole that is the world is divided ontically into brute material objects and sensuous being. And from that broken duality, all kinds of confusion flows.
I did not mean that you hadn't, only that we have strayed far away from the original intent of the thread. And your arguments aren't even arguments either. You've mentioned, what, one scientific theory that doesn't even do anything to the phenomenology of my argument. And then you claim that ignoring my arguments, counts as an argument, since you still have not addressed anything I'm saying but merely handwaved it away as childish, as if it's not worth the effort to actually explain to me how anything I listed before is unproblematic.
Quoting apokrisis
Nor did I ever mention souls...? Sellar's manifest image doesn't just dissolve away after looking at the scientific image of man.
What do you mean by "metaphysically correct" way to respond? There is no correct way to respond, that's the rub of pessimism. Not everything can be solved, not everything belongs. Just like bugs in computer software, they must be eliminated, not allowed to continue. They're not meant to be there and yet they are thanks to lucky coincidental conditions.
Quoting apokrisis
How you got any of that from what I've written is beyond me. None of what I have written depends on a dualistic notion of anything aside from the identification of powerful phenomenological experiences that cannot be dissolved under investigation, which is more in line with idealism than anything else.
Honestly whenever anyone argues against you you always either pull the science™ card or the dualism card without explaining anything else as if your position is self-evident or as if the authority of science today is an automatic trump card for anything that isn't explicitly empirically pragmatic. It's really annoying and patronizing.
Err....so nothing dualistic in your position because it is claiming the reality of "phenomenology" in terms of the idealistic?
OK.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Yeah. I never explain how my philosophical naturalism and pragmatism is quite different from Scientism, or reductionism, and other authorised forms of dualism....
It's quite annoying that no matter how many times I explain the difference, you keep jumping to one side or other of your good old dualism. Either my metaphysics is insufficiently phenomenological, or insufficiently material, for you.
What this means is that your metaphysics can stay intact but is ultimately insufficient, just as my phenomenological analysis is insufficient for a global metaphysics. In terms of pessimism we're not talking about metaphysics more than we are talking phenomenology and existentialism. The metaphysics is derived from the phenomenology and existentialism and more often than not looks like a story than a rigorous metaphysics. In any case it's phenomenology and existentialism that is first-and-foremost and the center of attention and is what should be taken as the main argument.
If your unrevealed scientific arguments are good enough to diffuse my own, then you wouldn't have to result to clearly unscientific [s]arguments[/s] handwaves like "stop being childish" or "stop exaggerating". Instead you have participated in these handwaves and thus your critique of my argument as being unscientific (which it's not) applies to your own argument as well.
That's silly because instead I have pointed out that the phenomenology - particular feelings - are shaped or individuated within a socio-cultural, and a biological, context.
So my approach is not just contextual in a way that connects the world and the ideas. It recognises the different levels on which this is happening - the biological and the social - as well as then talking about the further fact of their integration.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Alternatively, you actually are parroting childish and exaggerated "philosophy" here. And you talk past any science I mention rather than answering it.
Don't forget that it is you who started this by telling me how I ought to feel about the facts of my own existence. And that if I claimed to feel any other way, then I was simply being delusional.
So you have gotten the robust response which that kind of tripe deserves. Suck it up.
AND THAT IS PERFECTLY FINE (in fact what I was originally focused on in the OP)...
...except when you start to argue that the overall holistic context can replace the immediate specificity of immanent objectivity, thus somehow "disproving" my pessimism by ignoring phenomenology entirely. Assessing the origins and constraints imposed on phenomenology is what we would call metaphysics, and yet this does not have much relevance to the pessimistic argument in general, since the pessimistic argument starts from phenomenology, while you are starting with metaphysics.
Quoting apokrisis
What science, other than the social constructivism that you mentioned in passing and your signal argument that I don't particularly doubt but neither am appreciative of the utter lack of any citation?
The biological and social context challenges that phenomenology in a basic way. Even pain can be pleasure as any masochist knows.
So the counter-argument is that your pessimism is based on a particular social construction - a negative habit of thought which you have mastered to the extent it seems completely real and undeniable to you.
Are you willing even to consider that you are the victim of this kind of self-delusion? How are you going to demonstrate that you are not?
This is hardly a challenge, as you have ignored the point I made several times about how pain is not equivalent to suffering. A mashochist who enjoys pain is not suffering, because they are enjoying it which makes them a masochist.
Certainly even a masochist would not enjoy being impaled through the stomach. There are levels of pain outside the realm of enjoyment or even endurance.
Quoting apokrisis
Instead I would argue that my pessimism is the result of an honest look at the human condition and a compassionate connection to the unfortunate and tragic. The stegosaurus died by being mauled to death by a hoard of velociraptors - what was the use of this? So you could read philosophy or eat ice cream or have sex? That's instrumentality right there and anyone of any moral worth, I think, ought to find it repugnant.
So I think you perceive my pessimism as going about in a rather moat-and-bailey fashion, when I see it as an all-encompassing philosophy that takes into account the gutters of reality that nobody likes to talk about. My pessimism isn't comfortable, nor does it feel natural (it's not in our usual interests to think about death and suffering) - however I consistently see it manifest in the world (even just in possibility) and when I am in a relatively serene state I usually end up wondering what made me forget about all the bad. And yet these bads are real facts of life regardless of how I or anyone else wants them to be. As soon as you realize just how endemic Pollyannism and magical thinking is, you become disillusioned with the concept of happiness and security and realize that they're built on a throne of lies and concealment.
Quoting apokrisis
I will need to have a good reason to believe that I am self-deluded, otherwise it's:
1.) irrationally believing in something based on hope
2.) setting oneself up for the inevitable disappointment when you realize you were right after all (happened to me with the various individual-centered philosophies (although Buddhism left a lasting influence because of its kernel pessimism), as well as positive psychology and the transhumanist movement)
So no, I don't doubt myself for no reason.
So define suffering for me - in a way that doesn't include everything (like being tickled, vaguely bored or uneasy, laughing until it hurts, satiated until its uncomfortable, etc).
And also define pain for me - in a way that is different from your usual claim that it represents suffering of the worst kind, and hence the most important suffering to mention (as in torture, being left trapped in a car wreck, etc).
Quoting darthbarracuda
You should have been a Christian monk. You would have loved the hair shirt and flagellation. God forbid that you might have a positive outlook on life here among all us unholy sinners.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Yes, beware of false gods. There is only room in Heaven for the self-abnegating.
Quoting darthbarracuda
So the worst that could happen is that you might have hope and that you would end up disappointed all over again?
Yeah. I can understand why that is a risk not to be endured, a fate ten times worse than remaining convinced that a life in a hair shirt, scourge in hand, is best preparation for a likely horrible death.
And this self-conscious repugnance looks like an instrument for the attainment of a sense not only of moral worth but of moral superiority. While aspects of life are certainly repugnant, a pessimistic system rewards the pessimist for exaggerating this repugnance. Disgust as virtue.
Damn right.
Discomfort that is not wanted. An experience that does not match with a person's preferences. Something that must be endured or eliminated because it is self-evidently bad. Useless and meaningless harm.
Quoting apokrisis
Any sort of discomfort that, in normal circumstances, would promote action and therefore a response. A signal, as you said, or as I say, a way for the body to enslave itself. But pain is not equivalent to suffering as we often undergo pain for the greater good.
However if we had the choice to live without any pain (and instead have an analogous signal that doesn't hurt us) we would all choose this option over the crude apparatus nature has given us.
Quoting apokrisis
I should have been a Buddhist monk if anything, although any asceticism is wishy-washy pipe dreaming that focuses too much on the self and not enough on other people and their plights.
Quoting apokrisis
Are you telling me to lie to myself? What happened to Diogenes' "truth above all else"?
Every papercut turns into the Holocaust with you. Did I tell you to lie to yourself or did I say stop presuming that you own the truth?
I like that you went all in. I can respect the style without agreeing.
Quoting apokrisis
You told me to ask myself if I had considered the possibility that I am wrong, in which case I responded by saying yes, I have, and that no, I will not change my beliefs without good reason, and stupid possible hopeful futures are not a good reason.
Quoting apokrisis
No, no they don't. In fact you're the one downplaying Holocausts as if they're papercuts.
Quoting darthbarracuda
I think apokrisis is saying that all problems can be magically made to go away with social action. He does not like the idea that pessimist phenomena does not just go away. Some things are in the mix of what it means to be an animal/human etc. I believe he calls this idea dualistic because it is not "dissolved' in semiotic-pragmatist change. He also downplays the problems such that they are "really" non-problems. I don't think he addresses the problems- he only knows how to belittle them. So, if he can side step it with invective, being patronizing, etc. then he can at least try to gain rhetorical points, even if the issues are never addressed.
What I was trying to say before is that I think most of what we consider to be enjoyable or pleasurable moments are actually just a reaction to a need or a desire: the relief of anxiety, or suffering-in-disguise.
This is why I think that although the Benatar's procreative asymmetry is not logically valid, it really strikes us as intuitive and difficult to immediately reject. The various things we typically call good are not actually really that good, for their absence doesn't seem to be bad at all. If they were truly good then their absence would be worse, but at first glance it doesn't seem as though me not being able to play my favorite video game is actually a bad thing if I had never existed, since the video game is inherently connected to a discomfort which seems to disqualify any good feelings we derive from the satisfaction of this desire. Ice cream, acquaintanceship, walks on the beach, etc - these are all enjoyable but they come with a condition: an unwanted need or a discomfort precedes them. This applies even to our quest for meaning - what meaning we do derive from our lives seems to be fundamentally reactionary. Tragedy leads to meaning.
And this is where I will disagree with your own views Schop1 on deprivation. Certainly we do have some goods that are truly good, whose absence would be bad regardless of whether or not there is already a person around. It's too bad more people can't be authentically eudaimonic (happy), the one pure, good experience we do have; in other words, it's not incoherent to look at an empty universe in sadness, knowing that it's incapable of producing consistently happy people, to value happiness for the sake of happiness.
So I don't deny that the satisfaction of desires is good, but it seems to only be good on the personal level and not when considering pre-natal conditions. Most experiences we see as positive are thus more akin to a resolution of a problem. It feels good to resolve these problems, but relief doesn't seem to be authentic goodness. It's desperation-in-disguise.
Nietzsche touched on a similar point when he observed that religions, like Christianity, have an idea of sorts that it is good to create people to help them once they are alive; it is good to make problems for no reason other than so we can fix these problems. Similarly, is it good to make people just so they can satisfy a desire? My initial thought is no, but after reflection becomes a "modal-dependent yes". In the world we live in, our desires are accompanied by a level of discomfort. But if we had desires that didn't have unwanted enslavement-like discomfort, but only led to more and more pleasure (with the other problems also resolved of course), then I suspect I would see birth in a much more accepting way.
I was first exposed to this view via Schopenhauer, but I don't think it's an accurate conception of pleasure. True, pleasure includes the cessation of pain. But when I first fell in love (and it was reciprocated), this earth became a paradise for me. (It's still good and still her, but there's nothing like the beginning. Things become warm and comfortable.)Then of course there is the combination of friends, drugs, music. I've been so "blissed-out" that I didn't even want to speak. Words were cups too small. Paintings of Christ making that hand-sign come to mind. There's just no way I could begin to describe this as mere cessation of pain. And then there are especially good sexual encounters that again one wouldn't dream of reducing to cessation of pain. True, we need some hunger to enjoy food and some lust to enjoy sex, but even this hunger/lust is mixed (if life is going well) with the anticipation of its joyous consummation. Finally there are philosophical pleasures. Great new ideas are like love affairs of the mind. Conceptual revolutions are like falling in love. You assimilate them, take them for granted, and then find a new revolution. These are peak experiences, hardly available upon demand or without risk. But they help me make my case that pleasure is not just relief. I can't know what intensities you've had access to. But I insist that 'spirituality' is largely a matter of the heart and therefore of experience which alters the sense of what is possible. ( I must admit that I have been lucky. I wasn't born to a rich or educated family, but I was given (by 'the gods' or chance) decent looks, great health, talent. I really can't know the pain/pleasure ratio of others. I just know that I got better at finding pleasure and dodging pain, and that much of this was an adjustment of ideology, slowly and painfully achieved. )
Where in that quote did I mention these views? What views on deprivation do you refer?
Felix culpa? Thrownness. It's hard to imagine a better drama. If the protagonist had some tiny guarantee of justice or success, it would be a smaller tale. I checked out your blog and found a link to some guy whose theory was that irony was maximized in the creation of the world. I like that. There's a humor in Dostoevsky that surpasses just about everything mortal. I call it the laughter of the gods. It haunts all human earnestness. Hesse explores it in Steppenwolf.
Maybe we have a purity myth versus a completeness myth here. Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. In Hesse's Siddartha the future Buddha sees in the ferryman/sage all human faces, including murderers and prostitutes. That's what I like in Hegel, too. We have increasing complexity, not a whittling down. The higher evolves from the lower and depends on it for contrast. I suppose I sacrificed the good to the true, thinking as I abandoned religion that the good was a candy-coating. It's not so simple, of course, but I see the philosopher as a man of the darkness as much as of the light. Under-standing. There's that fruit of the tree of knowledge as sin. Catholic upbringing backfired. The serpent turned out to be my guy. And yet: "Be wise as as serpent and gentle as a dove."
In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground.
[/quote]
Depressive states are perhaps sustained in a mind seduced by such an image. (This is not to say that there is something other than seduction by images when it comes to grand judgments about life as a whole.)
[quote=Zappfe]
It performs, to extend a settled phrase, a more or less self-conscious repression of its damaging surplus of consciousness. This process is virtually constant during our waking and active hours, and is a requirement of social adaptability and of everything commonly referred to as healthy and normal living.
[/quote]
Is the alternative of filtering and selection supposed to be truth rather than chaos? Much thinking is unconscious. I believe that. But how is this mass of unconscious thinking the truth rather than the background? Repression is used in a sly, pejorative way, as if there were something to recommend the alternative.
[quote=Zappfe]
The whole of living that we see before our eyes today is from inmost to outmost enmeshed in repressional mechanisms, social and individual; they can be traced right into the tritest formulas of everyday life.
[/quote]
This is structure itself, unequal forces in collision, temporary stability. These 'repressional mechanisms' are (in the human sphere) tools for the achievement of purpose. Don't lie. Don't steal. It's better for most of us if most of us don't. Don't text and drive. Focus. Etc.
[quote=Zappfe]
In everyday interaction, isolation is manifested in a general code of mutual silence: primarily toward children, so these are not at once scared senseless by the life they have just begun, but retain their illusions until they can afford to lose them. In return, children are not to bother the adults with untimely reminders of sex, toilet, or death. Among adults there are the rules of ‘tact,’ the mechanism being openly displayed when a man who weeps on the street is removed with police assistance.
[/quote]
So are adults living without illusions, or not? If so, what is Zappfe bringing? Is he not also trying to paint adults as such children?
[quote=Zappfe]
We love the anchorings for saving us, but also hate them for limiting our sense of freedom. Whenever we feel strong enough, we thus take pleasure in going together to bury an expired value in style.
[/quote]
Easy to agree here. And I find it easy to see Zappfe as the salesman of one more anchoring (pessimism), one that I began to resent and finally took pleasure in burying.
[quote=Zappfe]
Nothing finite satisfies at length, one is ever proceeding, gathering knowledge, making a career. The phenomenon is known as ‘yearning’ or ‘transcendental tendency.’ Whenever a goal is reached, the yearning moves on; hence its object is not the goal, but the very attainment of it – the gradient, not the absolute height, of the curve representing one’s life.
[/quote]
The object was the goal. Then a new object becomes the goal. So we can posit a goal archetype. But sometimes the goal is the sandwich we can make downstairs. We can also make living on this gradient a goal, aware that permanent satisfaction in a given object is not to be expected. No goal is central (all is vanity) but a life with many goals and attainments is good --or can be good.
[quote=Zappfe]
The fourth remedy against panic, sublimation, is a matter of transformation rather than repression. Through stylistic or artistic gifts can the very pain of living at times be converted into valuable experiences. Positive impulses engage the evil and put it to their own ends, fastening onto its pictorial, dramatic, heroic, lyric or even comic aspects.
The present essay is a typical attempt at sublimation. The author does not suffer, he is filling pages and is going to be published in a journal.
The ‘martyrdom’ of lonely ladies also shows a kind of sublimation – they gain in significance thereby.
Nevertheless, sublimation appears to be the rarest of the protective means mentioned here.
[/quote]
This is more than a 'remedy against panic' in my view. Indeed, I prefer to see panic in terms of a clash of hero myths. When aren't we posing as heroes in a drama? This "rareness" is maybe just Zappfe being oblivious to the fact that most are consumers of personalities largely constructed by others (like Zappfe, for instance). The anxiety of influence is rare, but that's because not everyone casts themselves as a truly original personality potentially worth imitating/assimilating. We heroisms of humility and altruism that often work against posing as unique or beyond the law or...etc.
[quote=Zappfe]
Then will appear the man who, as the first of all, has dared strip his soul naked and submit it alive to the outmost thought of the lineage, the very idea of doom. A man who has fathomed life and its cosmic ground, and whose pain is the Earth’s collective pain. With what furious screams shall not mobs of all nations cry out for his thousandfold death, when like a cloth his voice encloses the globe, and the strange message has resounded for the first and last time:
“– The life of the worlds is a roaring river, but Earth’s is a pond and a backwater.
– The sign of doom is written on your brows – how long will ye kick against the pin-pricks?
– But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution.
– Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.”
And when he has spoken, they will pour themselves over him, led by the pacifier makers and the midwives, and bury him in their fingernails.
He is the last Messiah. As son from father, he stems from the archer by the waterhole.
[/quote]
This guy is the anti-Nietzsche, isn't he? This is the same mania of Thus Spake Zarathustra. It's (to me) nakedly a grandiose religious conception. It's the sort of thing Nietzsche suspected was hiding in the "great sages," but here it is proclaimed boldly, the religion of anti-life, anti-earth, and not in the name of some better place or better principle. In the name of nothingness, right? And yet it takes a pleasure in speaking itself, a pleasure in the existence of midwives to offend. It needs the very 'problem' it wants to diagnose and cure. Zappfe climbed his mountains. Schop. played his flute. They wore their dark views like a smart new jacket from the local H & M. I won't hypocritically curse them for this. That's just the way it is. It's fun to play dress-up. Life as endless play, however edgy and grim...
[quote=Bukowski]
Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.
[/quote]
Bukowski omitted "writing" or being-Bukowski because (perhaps) 'illusion' is just the the other guy's (more or less stable ) solution. My solution frames the solutions of others. Do we not always look through such a frame? Does this game have an outside?
Remind me never to go in battle with you.. I guess this is a segue for dueling antinatalism? Interesting place to put it after I was defending a more general argument we both agree on.
Anyways, I don't deny that there are happy moments, simply that it is usually short-lived and the need for more quantity, novelty, etc. usually persists. If you can sustain happy time periods for long periods, or forever, then I'm all for it. Usually, rather we look at it the other way- that it is foolish to expect or chase this, but rather that we need to quell our inner churning so that it doesn't want and need so much and, similar to the negative utilitarian approach, thwart off that which is bothersome, as joy cannot be as joyful when there is a lot of bad going on alongside it. The priority is to get rid of that which annoys, and then to pursue that which gives utility.
What I emphasize is that life brings us to a state of instrumentality where we are doing to do to do. The absurdity of repetitive acts can sort of be an analogy to this, but just generalize it to the absurdity of any act. But instead of free form absurdity ala Camus, it is more like very predictable absurdity due to the constraints brought upon by the condition we are in (throwness perhaps?) which are the outer boundaries of human motivations and mainly include survival (in cultural/linguistic contexts) and boredom (also in cultural/linguistic contexts) as the two poles.
Well I mean this thread went exactly as I hoped it wouldn't (veered off topic) so like, what the hell, why not talk about something totally off topic? :s
Quoting schopenhauer1
Okay, then I misunderstood your position. I was under the impression that you believed that needs and desires were always bad regardless of what impact they have on the individual. The aesthetic of insufficiency.
This aesthetic component, though, is only really helpful when you aren't suffering.
The idea of a Stoic sage sounds sublime and amazing - but we would actually rather just not feel bad in the first place. What doesn't kill you will sometimes make you wish it had.
Quoting Hoo
I can see how it may come across this way. As if Zapffe thinks he is superior by acknowledging the repression. I see two interpretations, neither are mutually exclusive: Zapffe wishes to live existentially authentic (and thus would have a bit of pride for doing so, possibly one of the only things keeping him going), or Zapffe is merely pointing out a facet of life, just as he would be if he said that humans breathe oxygen.
Quoting Hoo
I'll be honest with you because I think you are being honest, and I think this is a very important point. Pessimists argue their point because of two (conscious) reasons: they want someone to prove them wrong, or they're extremely discontent with the system and want things to change.
Again these are not mutually exclusive. I'm not content with the system. I think it is a useless, ironic and senseless machination. And yet, pace Nietzsche's dialogue on Schopenhauer, I have an acute desire to affirm existence once again. Just as Nietzsche praised Schopenhauer while simultaneously having a heart that cried out for something more, I tend to be a reluctant pessimist. I don't like being a pessimist. I don't think anyone worthy of being called a pessimist should like being one (i.e. like the fact that the world is shitty): that would go against the entire idea of pessimism. And yet I feel compelled to consider myself a pessimist because all the other positions fall short.
The previous examples show how pessimism can be seen as right and contradict one's own expectations, desires, hopes, dreams, etc. But there's another facet of pessimism that has been growing steadily inside me recently, that of not just discontent but legitimate concern and outrage at the state of the world. I'm becoming more and more angry at the instrumentality of the world. I'm not only saddened by the suffering of others but am also indignant. You could say that I'm becoming a bit more radical in my views, especially in terms of ethics. Things need to change, and they need to change now.
The third step in this pessimistic process, if there is one, seems to be the final disillusionment with the world by means of a complete de-attachment with the previous mournfully comfortable illusions. Perhaps my current state of indignation is merely another illusion. Maybe altruism and humanitarianism is also another illusion, but I kind of doubt it. Certainly it seems that many of the classic pessimistic writers "gave up" on the world. They wanted no part in it, they had no play in politics, altruism or anything like that. The final step is the final smashing of our illusions which can either result in suicide or isolation, assuming there is another step after the second. The gradual, Nietzschean descent into madness.
Quoting Hoo
This is not as elegant as not having problems to begin with. Do we really have to have problems just so they can be solved?
Quoting Hoo
Practically never. We are all our own white knights in shining armor.
Quoting Hoo
Yes, Zapffe is heavily indebted to Nietzsche.
Quoting Hoo
I think you're right when you say it's a religious conception. I mean it is called The Last Messiah after all. But religion speaks more clear to our emotions than other alternatives. His Last Messiah is a mythic prophecy, a way of imaging how humanity might end (by its own hand, thus fulfilling the naturalistic prophecy of survival-of-the-fittest).
Quoting Hoo
I think that's the legacy of psychoanalytic theory and existentialism. There is no outside that we can reach. But we can glimpse parts and pieces of it, and build an idea of what it's actually like. I suspect that the dread we experience when considering the human condition (in the aesthetic sense) has more to do with confronting the unknown, the void, the infinite limitless possibilities, than any legitimately metaphysically-horrific idea. The only horrific idea is the idea that there are horrific ideas, in the metaphysical sense. Thus aesthetic-led pessimism leads to apathetic nihilism, since dread is only maintained by the presence of illusions that are threatened by whatever is the source of dread. But there's more reasons than just aesthetics to call oneself a pessimist. Indeed the aesthetics of a metaphysical principle seem to completely independent of the nature of the principle itself - thus imo the only defensible pessimism is the one that puts human welfare at front-and-center, because horrifying ideas are inherently self-centered (as they are perceived as a threat to the self), whereas ideas about other people are distinctly less-metaphysically-dependent and more based on basic empathy and duty.
I think I've been about a low as one can go. I would not have been lifted up by my own words. I already "knew" all that. Last time I was hit was about 5 years ago, after watching The Killing, getting sick, and living near the disgusting, throbbing noise of some bars nearby. It was like the return of an old "friend" that I thought I had left behind in my 20s. I had great things in my life, but I couldn't love anything or anyone but the idea of death. So life was just horror and noise and futility. I call it the "black dragon." It was eating me alive in my depths. I met some new people about this time and probably came across as Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon, drinking etc., with a recklessness that is nothing like me. I escaped somehow and fell back in love with life. But not long ago, one of the most beloved and talented people in my peer group committed suicide in a very dramatic and brutal way. I've known junkies quite who've overdosed. That we could see coming. But this other guy...his suicide was something you might see in a movie. He had talent, a good job, local fame, a beautiful wife. I think I know what got him. Anyway, I'm just stressing that it's not (imv) primarily an intellectual problem, because I have the same beliefs that I did in the dark. The heart fails. Maybe it's internalized violence. One tries to live virtuously and represses the predator, who appears on the inside.
Quoting darthbarracuda
I do love the Stoics, but for me there's a more radical image. The Stoics are still quite solemn and defensive. I do think we have to "stop the bleeding" and buy ourselves time to think or some minimum space for dignity. Frankly, I relate to a subversive reading of Christ (via Blake). I use reason, but "transrational" metaphors/myths are (to me) more important. I don't believe I can "prove" that life is worth living. It is a leap of faith. But, yeah, it exposes one to disaster. There's always the temptation to get disaster over with once and for all.
Quoting darthbarracuda
I relate to the quest for authenticity. But for me this involves acknowledging the "evil" in the soul. We do have empathy that's genuine, but our desire to be superior is every bit as genuine. And 'sacred' altruism would be the superiority-quest masked as empathy. Just to be clear, I'm a "nice guy." I'd be ashamed to steal, lie, humiliate, etc. My devil is the light-bringer.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Thanks. I am. And I respect your sincerity and directness. And I respect that you bother to address my criticisms or objections or questions. "Opposition is true friendship." (Blake)
Quoting darthbarracuda
Life's a bitch, really. I've been through the Bukowski phase in a now-golden relationship (terrible, terrible fights and tender reconciliations.) Life is a woman. That's a good metaphor. I've pined for a woman I couldn't have before and asked myself if I wanted to just switch off the "love" I felt. I had to answer "no." Because the death of that love would be the death of her beauty (for me). The beauty of the world itself was concentrated there. I think life is irrationality affirmed. It's like Nietzsche's critique of Socrates. Reason steps in with the instincts fall out of harmony. Do you read much literature? Tropic of Cancer, Ham On Rye, Catch 22 IMV, there's something trans-propositional to be had from books. There's a piety toward reason in philosophy that traps it. Pessimism is a strong position. I loved Rust in True Detective Season 1. There's also Wolcott in Deadwood, whose more Dostoevskian. I guess I got this image of Shakespeare as a symbol from Harold Bloom. I'm glad that I contain the grimly beautiful pessimist. Quoting darthbarracuda
I've been there. There's no simple answer. The world is a meat grinder. History is a slaughter-bench. I won't being to deny it. Yet I affirm it. Maybe I'm more selfish or complacent than others, or maybe my sense of responsibility fell away in the critique of what I call 'sacred' altruism. I didn't make this world. I contribute my part to its suffering, of course, but it's bigger than me. My self-destruction would possibly add as much misery as it might remove. So I just look to what is in my power. I also reason that someone should manage to enjoy this place. Eventually man will be probably be wiped out. I used to fear Hellfire as a child. At least we're pretty sure that all suffering is temporary. And, finally, there's the question of how much repressed cruelty may play a part in this. I believe that part of us all wants to kill, destroy, humiliate. We just have to harmonize the entire self so that our behavior is decent. Quoting darthbarracuda
My honest opinion (judging from my own experience) is that its a mixture of genuine empathy and 'sacred' altruism = repressed elitism. But I can only guess from my own strange life experience (which has not been all that ordinary, though I've learned to project that
Quoting darthbarracuda
I hear you, but we can rephrase this in terms of "do we really have erections only so that we can have sex?" I wrestle with math proofs. It is such a joy to get that key insight. We are wired for this, I'd say. Even your sense of elegance is founded on solving all of the problems of life in one fell swoop. I really do see the beauty in that. Suicide is a diamond. If I get a terrible disease, I may indeed euthanize myself with a proud smile.
Quoting darthbarracuda
This is it, man. This is the authenticity in an 'enlightened' egoism. The master wants to recognize and and be recognized by another master. Kings saluting kings. Let them be kind kings, because it feels good to be kind. Let them selfishly be kind. Aristotle's magnanimous man. If this "white knight" structure is truly ineluctable, then there's nothing wrong with it. It's just how things are. So criticisms of narcissism can only really make sense as criticism of a sh*tty particular vision of the white knight. For me philosophy as wisdom is largely about comparing and contrasting constructions of the heroic image, completely self-consciously. In fact, my white knight is a hero of self-consciousness and authenticity. The game recognizes itself for what it has always been. So runs the narrative of progress --which is of course recognized as such. This is why I really feel at something like an end of (personal) ideological history. I've been here for years now, working on details, the core untouched, untroubled. Quoting darthbarracuda
Still, it hard to sincerely love others without loving one's self. "Sacred" love or mere duty is alienation and self-mutilation. And material comforts aren't enough to guarantee welfare anyway, so maybe there's a place at the center for the man who knows how to love life. Blake saw the artist as someone who had an ecstasy to communicate, a gift to spread around. I think it has to start at the very center of a person, with self-love, and friend love, and outward....