Humanism gives way to misanthropy

Go back a step, then: Misanthropy is the moral condemnation of humanity.

Not the hatred of humanity, but the recognition of their moral culpability. The cited article seeks to "recognise the moral awfulness of humanity without drifting into hatred, violence, or despair".

...the real philosophical task isn’t about living out a single misanthropic stance; it’s about dealing with the emotionally and morally difficult oscillation between stances. Coping with this is the heart of the misanthropic predicament.

Reply to Banno Thanks for the article. I think it helps to recognise the broader potential of humanity: both the tendency towards ignorance, isolation and exclusion, as well as our capacity for awareness, connection and collaboration. I think this is partly why I, too, find myself vacillating between the Activist and the Quietist. It’s hope, I guess: a quiet confidence that genuine and stable leaps forward have occurred as a minority movement - a barely noticeable yet progressive creep, not a bloody revolution.

Reply to Possibility Cheers. I'd read the article a month ago, and was intending to post something, but bypassed it in a bunch of other threads. Recent events brought me back to it.

Quoting Banno

The take-home is that half of eligible voters wanted to put their trust in a liar.

The tick is to be exasperated, but not to despair. Things improve, in small steps. Perhaps.

Quoting Banno

Misanthropy, the desperate realisation that all we have to work with is each other.

"Hell is other people" ___Sartre

Reply to Gnomon
"Hell is other people" ___Sartre
You'd hypothesize that one of most history's most revered Existentialists would confer a greater value onto the material subject of his philosophy.

In the TS Humanism is given an explanation. Thats pretty bold IMHO. What humanism is, is up for the grabs even more than misantropy. Some fluffy benelovent feelings toward people in general. The wealthy left do have kind of kidnapped the term for the moment, but "work together" does not seem to cover that contemporary version. Or any version I have heard about.

But common for the two, Humanism and Misantropy seems both to want to construe a simplified, holistic view of the world, to escape from the messiness world have.

Quoting Banno

The [tr]ick is to be exasperated, but not to despair. Things improve, in small steps. Perhaps.

I'm reminded of
[quote=Antonio Gramsci]The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.[/quote]

My own 'misanthropy' is absurdist, rather than existential, in the similiar vein of a posthuman (posthumous?) conjecture à la
[quote=Freddy Zarathustra]Man is a rope [ ... ] he is a bridge and not an end.[/quote]
such that 'all we have is each other' to bring about a succcessor species or, more likely, prematurely our own extinction.

Quoting Aryamoy Mitra

"Hell is other people" ___Sartre
You'd hypothesize that one of most history's most revered Existentialists would confer a greater value onto the material subject of his philosophy.

Uh, no. I have no hypothesis. Just a tongue-in-cheek quote. :joke:

Reply to Gnomon
I entirely concur. I was merely conveying that given the character of the quote, one would hypothesize the above. 'You' was used interchangeably; I wasn't referring specifically to your quotation, but was rather inferring a conclusion from it.

Quoting Banno

The cited article seeks to "recognise the moral awfulness of humanity without drifting into hatred, violence, or despair".

There are only two ways to do that: acceptance or delusion.

Humanity shouldn't be judged as people are too different from each other. Really, any attempt to judge humanity will show the interests and interpretations of the intellect above anything else. Humans in the aggregate can be judged with sweeping generalisations but any one human is too complex for anyone to fully understand. Misanthropy may be emotionally satisfying but it's intellectually shallow and pointless.

Quoting Judaka

Humanity shouldn't be judged...

And yet you so judge.

Reply to Gnomon SO is heaven.

Reply to frank Delusions have their place.

Quoting Banno

?Gnomon
SO is heaven.

So Heaven also needs Humanism? :smile:

Reply to Banno
The classic banno response.

Quoting Banno

Delusions have their place.

Cant get through the day without one or two.