Your namesake was a philosopher and yet his evaluations of the human condition were more empirical than anything else. It is an empirical issue whether or not organisms experience boredom, or suffer, or how they experience desire.

Schopenhauer was not alone in this kind of empirical-philosophical reasoning. Existential questions seem to be empirical - a point that IIRC Brassier pointedly advocates. It's just that empiricism is now dominated by science. And so these kinds of questions and answers must be undertaken by science. But I think the part that makes it philosophy is knowing where to look, i.e. identifying problems and having the gall to do so.



What strikes me as odd is that in modern philosophy you get philosophers who have carved their own little intellectual realm in which they get to study while everyone else waits outside, as if reality itself is actually structured this way as well. Lots of reactionary metaphysicians today are apt to call certain questions "ontologically metaphysical", or outside of the realm of empiricism and science, and only a priori intuitions can even attempt to solve these issues. Now I'm skeptical of science alone being able to answer these questions, as if it can operate without a rudimentary metaphysical structure, but what remains to be shown is why this is the case - that is to say, why some questions are empirical and other apparently not.

What would seem to be the case, then, is that many of these philosophical insights are produced through reasoning "shortcuts" rather than a specific methodology that you see in the special sciences.

Right, so pain is not equivalent to suffering.

So science has no epistemology? Gee, that's news to me. — apokrisis

If it is indeed the case that science has an epistemology, then this just further shows how philosophy is a separate and prior domain.

The good is not constrained by our abilities or the environment.

Really? — Sapientia

Indeed.

Can you please elaborate? — Sapientia

See here.

and no argument can rule out the possibility that there are other goods which we can affirm that have nothing to do with our lives. — The Great Whatever

Indeed, I have wondered about this myself. What if there is a non-agential good that really ought to be cultivated?

To everyone else who calls themselves a virtue ethicist or any non-consequentialist: I have problems with virtue ethics (or any other non-consequentialist ethics) as it makes it seem as though you need to have a person breathing down your neck for you to help them. As a consequentialist, it doesn't matter to me where or when something good or bad is happening. Whether it's down the street or in the savanna of Africa, there's no difference, it's still happening. In my opinion, if you care about something, and I mean legitimately care about something, then you'll do something about it. I can't understand how people can reasonably say they despise, say, suffering, and yet not do anything about it, as if recognizing that it exists is "good enough". If you don't do anything about suffering, you either don't care, or you don't actually consciously understand how important suffering is. Being a "nice person" in my opinion does not cut it for moral obligations, although perhaps it's the best we have for legal obligations.

essimism might be described as a negative emotional or presumptive reaction — VagabondSpectre

On the contrary, philosophical pessimism is a term meant to capture the realism of thinkers that others would label as pessimistic.

Minimum morals are the laws you have in your community. Laws pertaining to theft, murder, assault, etc. Typically they tell you what you cannot do, although they also tell you what you must do, like pay taxes, or go a certain speed limit.

Why this is the case is because humans are not perfect and cannot be expected to be moral saints.

The government should, in my opinion, make the laws that constitute the minimum moral expectations of a citizen. Even if being a moral saint is unattainable, there should be laws that lay out, within a reasonable limit, the minimal requirements.

The "problem" with pessimism (life is essentially bad) is, in my view, that it lives in a state of contradiction. If life is bad, then suicide looks like the only consistent and heroic move. — who

Indeed, it is, but this also falls into the Tu quoque fallacy. Life is problematic, and even Cioran himself wondered why he hadn't killed himself yet. But this is merely a problem of will, not a problem of doctrine.

Not officially but I've worked on some sketches.

I think naturalistic moral realism isn't very convincing. And I'm not a theist or mystic. So I'm not too sure about moral realism in general. But what I am leaning towards is aesthetic realism, or the reality of perfection. And I think morality shares some things with this aesthetic realism.

What led you to such a seemingly robust teleology? — Thorongil

Well, nothing else I could think of really made as much sense.

Although, you do say "would be." Does this mean you doubt it can be achieved? — Thorongil

Yes, I doubt it can be achieved. In fact I think aesthetically-authentic eudaimonia is impossible - a full understanding of the world is not compatible with eudaimonia. Whether this leads to suicide is something I'm not quite sure about, although some like Zapffe thought suicide was a natural death from spiritual causes.

If it's not perfect enough to start, can it be enough to continue? What difference does it make?

Hmm, so what are you proposing eudaimonia as, if not an ethic? — Thorongil

Eudaimonia would be the only perfect experience, and thus the only perfectly good experience. The attainment of all goals, or the anticipation of doing so. The feeling of power over one's environment, instead of being controlled by it. It's the one experience that you can reflect upon and be able to say without a doubt that it is a positive experience, uncorrupted and pure.

What is nothing-ness in this case? Suicide or simply lack of any concern/pain? — schopenhauer1

Nothing-ness is the lack of experience, whether that be by the non-existence of agents, sleep, meditation, etc.

But I deem compassion, not happiness, as the basis of morality, and compassion can sometimes only occur when someone is suffering. Perhaps this makes me a suffering focused ethicist (though I am no utilitarian). — Thorongil

I wouldn't say you're a suffering-focused ethicist, more like a suffering-prioritizing ethicist. I agree that compassion is the source of morality, in addition to the fact that eudaimonic individuals are self-sufficient and therefore not in need of our assistance.

And what makes it better? Not suffering? Perhaps I missed it. If one is feeling pleasure, then one is by definition not suffering, so what, beyond pleasure, is necessary for eudaimonia? — Thorongil

When I said "pleasure by itself" I meant more like "look! there's pleasure, it must be a good state of affairs!" when this is clearly not correct since pleasure and pain can exist simultaneously.

If I remember correctly, Nietzsche never explicitly endorsed eternal recurrence. He merely used it as a thought experiment.

Yes, philosophy has had a major impact in my life. It has changed it radically and filled a gap that I had previously sensed was missing and could not be filled by science or irrational religious practices. It has made me appreciate how little I know, and even more so how much I depend on the actions of others before me.

Unfortunately many times I end up becoming obsessed with one specific topic and it's difficult to sense when I've stopped doing philosophy and have started an obsessive-compulsive cycle.

Some more thoughts on this:

Pleasures and pains seem to be connected to the resolution of problems. Of course, one can stimulate the brain and produce pleasurable experiences without resolving a problem per se, but the fact is that pleasures evolved to act as a reward-and-motivating system whereas pains evolved to act as a motivating system only.

Generally, when we have a problem, we experience some degree of pain, which notifies us to act. We then act, and, depending on the intensity of the pain, we act either because we wish to experience pleasure or because we wish to get rid of the pain. For example, I eat food primarily because I'm hungry, but I don't eat it in order to remove a bad feeling necessarily but also because I desire to experience the pleasurable food. In addition to being a necessity it's also an opportunity. But if I have a headache I act only to remove the bad feeling.

So in the sense that pleasure accompanies pain in the cycle of desire and need, pleasure becomes merely something that makes an act permissible, but does not act as a reason to do an action. The pleasure has to "make up" for the required pain, instead of actually being a reason in itself. But why? What is the motivating reason behind a suffering-prioritized ethics?

For if we were all super happy all the time, I suspect we might have a different perspective on all this: we would have immediate access to pleasure all the time, recognize it as a good, and wish to multiply the amount. It only seems repugnant or unworthwhile right now because we aren't currently able to conceptualize what this pleasure feels like.

Another idea is that we feel more compassion towards those who are suffering than those who are happy. This would seem to have come from evolution as well - attend to those in the clan who are in more need than others, because those who are happy can fend for themselves.

Generally it seems like we have the intuition that we ought to make people (who already exist) happy, but not make happy people (who do not exist). But this already puts a constraint upon ethics, in which the moral thing to do is "bring people up" rather than make more people who are already up.

Right, that's exactly why I mentioned originally how the desire-view was similar to nominalism - our desires don't make things pleasurable, things are pleasurable and therefore we desire them.

However the adverbialist theory as I understand it holds that there is already a subconscious "directed-ness" that approves of experiences without our control, which results in pleasure and pain.

But my account requires stasis as well as flux. It just says stasis emerges via a limitation on flux. Whereas you have the Parmidean puzzle of how stasis could ever allow change. — apokrisis

In my view, there is static, unchanging substance (or Being), and all of flux has Being, and flux results in the particles we're talking about.

When we conceptualize flux, we imagine things like waves, wind, changing patterns, orbits, chaos, etc. But although this picture's contents are changing, the concept itself is not. What is being presented to us - the given-ness - is the same.

So when I say this substance or Being is static, I don't really mean in the temporal sense. I mean in the metaphysical sense, it is incapable of change. Similar to how Aristotle's Categories are incapable of change, or how the Four Causes cannot themselves change, or how the property-itself of red-ness is incapable of flux. It just is. That's what I've been referring to this whole time when I say it is static.

I do indeed have a puzzle of how this flux all started to begin with, as I suspect you do as well.

Another thing about pain and pleasure is that people can be instrumentalized when they suffer, but they cannot be instrumentalized when they experience pleasure. However, maybe it could be said that someone can be the focal point of pleasure, like a birthday party.

We generally have an intuition that pain is of ethical priority, almost of a totally different kind, than pleasure. What makes this so?

So yes, there is a duality here. But of bottom-up vs top-down modes of causality. And substantial objects are what arise inbetween as the causal actors (in a relatively a-causal void). — apokrisis

So there is a tension between the bottom-up causality of material and efficient causes and the top-down causality of formal and final causation.

I can see how a telos can emerge from a system - look at evolution for example. But what needs to still be explained is why the whole drama of evolution played out the way it did: why such-and-such happened and not something else, and not just by an appeal to material/efficient causation (i.e. science).

So the material cause is what you need for something to be/exist/occur, the efficient cause is the source of motion or change from history, the formal cause is what something is, which is ultimately shaped by final cause. Thus what I am seeing as final causes are not just tendencies or habits as a system evolves but as seemingly static "laws of nature" (mass attracts other mass - it's what it does, sugar dissolves in water, it's what it does); unless these are also evolving tendencies, in which case there needs to be an explanation as to how these tendencies came to be. These natural laws would then be like propositional counterfactual statements.

Which is why I don't think dynamicism can fully account for all of nature. The plant can wave in the wind but the roots keep it stuck in the ground as they are themselves static.

In the sense that A causes B, what makes it the case that A causes B? If it is not an internal power or disposition, but rather an external contextual feature from the surrounding properties, then what causes this external context to be the way it is.

I like Heil's version: properties are dual-nature, both a quality and a disposition. This would work somewhat well into Aristotle's vision of the Soul, in which the Soul is just simply the functional aspect of a living organism. So the mind would be the dispositional aspects of the brain, perhaps taking part in a web of causal relations.

Absolutely love this song and this entire album. So hypnotizing.

Pleasure might be able to be characterized as an attitude we have towards a certain experience, one in which we wish the experience to continue. Certainly all pleasurable experiences are experiences that we wish to continue to experience. The opposite can be said of pain.

Another thing, coming from Levinas, is that pleasure is the act of turning the Other into the Self. For example, eating food turns food (the Other) into something inside of you (the Self). All pleasure thus is the transformation of the Other to the Self.

But there is also the immanent metaphysics of Aristotle where form and purpose are developmentally emergent and self-organising regularities. So the world itself must develop intelligible order. And having done so, that order is imposed locally everywhere to create substantial being. — apokrisis

Did Aristotle argue for self-generalizing habits? I thought that was Peirce's addition - after all, Aristotle did think the universe was eternal if I remember correctly, and that there were distinct natural kinds, something that would have come into conflict with evolution and general cosmological findings but Peirce managed to fill with his idea of habits.

Formal and final cause are better understood as contextual properties or powers rather than intrinsic ones. Material and efficient cause are rightfully located within substantial objects. But the shaping and directing of matter is something that comes from without. — apokrisis

Yes, I can agree to this, especially because final causation can be frustrated by external contextual properties. A mother can abort a baby, thus frustrating the telos of the fetus.

But if these powers exist outside of a substantial form, how do they exist? The mother that aborts the baby still has powers herself, namely, to abort the baby.

Another thing to point out here is that philosophical pessimists generally don't consider themselves "pessimistic", they consider themselves first-and-foremost "realistic" and pessimistic only-in-relation to everyone else's worldview. Hence why I don't think it's a very commonly-used term.

This is what Chalmers calls don't-have-a-clue-materialism:

"I don’t have a clue about consciousness. It seems utterly mysterious to me. But it must be physical, as materialism must be true"

Christoph Fehige argues:

Orexigenic cases are those in which a preference exists and is satisfied.

Prophylactic cases are those in which a preference does not exist (and therefore nothing is satisfied).

Fehige spends a very long time in his paper (A Pareto Principle [...]) discussing why the Orexigenic case is equal to the prophylactic case in value. However, he makes sure to note that the prophylactic case can never be better than the orexigenic case by itself - such would require the addition of additional frustrated preferences.

Personally I have to question why preferences are seen as the basis of morality here. For instance, why is it that a satisfied preference is good? And why is it that we have preferences in the first place?

The reason we have preferences is because we enjoy something - the process of enjoyment is not in-itself strictly a preference. Our preferences are guided in virtue of our ability to enjoy something. This is also why a satisfied preference is good - because it makes the person feel good.

During his essay, Fehige says the following:

"[...]we have obligations to make preferrers satisfied, but no obligations to make satisfied preferrers."

However, this strikes me as saying one thing and then negating it right afterwards. By making preferrers satisfied, you are making satisfied preferrers.

So I don't know if preference-based ethics can stand independently from hedonism. All of our preferences can be traced back to whether or not they make us feel pleasure or pain - the advice of the sage to avoid acquiring new preferences is not because these preferences aren't going to make you any better off, but because of the empirical fact that these preferences are oftentimes accompanied by disappointment and pain, which are independent notions of preferences per se.

The question, though, is whether or not the satisfaction of a desire is always equally valuable as the lack of any desire in the first place. I think this is only true is the satisfaction of a desire does not somehow play a part in the overall well-being or "happiness" of a person like eudaimonia. So eudaimonia would, in virtue of its definition, requires the satisfaction of certain desires. And eudaimonia seems to be a good thing.

The problem with the Romantic model of human psychology is that it is pathological rather than scientifically valid. The argument starts and stops with the facts. — apokrisis

I don't know what this means.

It's kind of like the Buddhist's 2nd Noble Truth, right? — schopenhauer1

Yeah. Desires cause stress.

I think all desires are under the first type you described. Some might lead to some sort of tranquility, but usually even these long-term goals of balance and harmony are instrumental in nature. Striving for nothing always. Actually, long-term goals for balance are the height of absurd because of the instrumental nature of any endeavor, noble or otherwise. — schopenhauer1

The problem I see with this view is that it basically means all pleasure is bad, because pleasure is inherently tied to desires, and desires are all bad. Which I think is a bit absurd. I mean I legitimately have fun when I play a video game, or read a book, or go for a walk, read philosophy, etc. I desire to do these things, and I have fun doing them.

Would I be worse off if I didn't have these desires? Perhaps not. But certainly we can at least accept a basic notion that, given two options, a world with satisfied desirers is better than a world with no desirers at all. I say satisfied desirers because I still think that there is a difference between certain desires - some desire satisfactions make you happy, whereas others just eliminate a discomfort.

So my desire for ice cream is more of a disease-desire, since it's not going to really make me happier in the long run. But my desire to, say, understand Nietzsche, will make me happier in the long run.

Sure, I agree in a way about your story of an ever-escalating capacity for "concerns". But that is also baking in the very helplessness that you claim to derive as the conclusion of your argument. — apokrisis

This is the big difference. We both agree that reality can't be controlled in a cosmic sense. But the pessimist then fetishises that as an open-ended source of agony. The pragmatist says that is the way things are - and it really doesn't matter. The whole point of widening the scope of concern is to take control of what can be controlled. So focusing on what can be done, rather than what cannot be done, is the psychologically healthy and natural approach. — apokrisis

Concerns and abilities go hand in hand. We have abilities to satisfy concerns. Most of our concerns can be relatively easily met - food, drink, shelter, community, etc. However, these abilities are not perfect either, and we often screw up. If we look objectively at how much control we have in the cosmic sense, we'll be crushed at how little we actually have - and how easily everything can be taken away from us. We're desperately trying to maintain control over our environment, and somehow we keep fucking up.

We also have a concern that no other animal seems to need: meaning. Zapffe picked up on this, so did Becker, Freud, and the other various existentialists.

Unfortunately, our need for meaning cannot be accommodated by our environment, because our environment is meaningless. So we have to make do with a pseudo-solution, such as heroism, culture, pragmatic Stoicism, religion, politics, self help books, you name it.

The point being made here is that the very fact you have to tell yourself that "it really doesn't matter" means that it actually does matter - it's not obvious, and thus it is a problem that must be fixed. You have constrained your psyche and found a suitable means of escaping the panic of meaninglessness, by pretending that it really doesn't matter. It's a second-rate pseudo-poetic solution: a tragedy.

So the life-long process of limiting the contents of human consciousness (for reassurance and comfort to avoid panic overload) is natural and "healthy"...what does that say about our state of affairs?

The pessimist can be viewed as an explorer into the furthest reaches of the human psyche, the deepest, darkest pits of consciousness, the one that brings to light what everyone else has repressed. The pessimists aren't wrong in their statements...it's just that most people don't like what they have to say.

Such thinking is based totally on hedonism, i.e. 'pleasure=good, pain=bad'. — Wayfarer

I accept this.

But from there, adopting a position of cosmic helplessness is bad analysis. If the game is wrong in your opinion, get involved in changing it. And be prepared that the thing that needs to change most is yourself - because the issues aren't cosmic at all, merely local and social. — apokrisis

Why are you assuming I'm not active? I'm extremely active. I care about suffering, and I do things to care for those who are suffering as a result. I don't know about the other pessimists here, and that's actually one major point that I diverge from the "classical" pessimists on: if you care about suffering, you won't retreat from it, you'll do something about it.

Once again.......I'm not specifically arguing a "cosmic" metaphysical principle here. The local and social issues of Life are what are problematic. So Schopenhauer and co. are likely incorrect with their metaphysics, as they try to apply a localized phenomenon to the rest of reality, when the rest of reality should be used to explain the localized phenomenon (holism). However, that does not change the fact that they were damn accurate on their analysis of the human condition - the localized phenomenon.

If you want a tentative metaphysical principle, then I'd offer mine to be that the universe evolves surrounding constraints that emerge from Scarcity and the subsequent Fatigue (or Entropy). And, as Zapffe pointed out, as we scale "up" in awareness, so do we scale up in Concerns. So the unconscious rock has no Concerns, the lizard has a few Concerns occupying its day-to-day life, and the human being has a surplus of awareness that allows him to hold a surplus of Concerns, notably that of meaning.

According to Zapffe, the utter lack of meaning, means that we have to find ways to deal with this void of Concern. So we isolate, distract, attach, or sublimate ourselves to avoid panic. Suicide, then, is a natural death from spiritual causes.

Do you think chimps and dolphins feel pessimism? Is that an abstraction that might rule their waking lives? — apokrisis

No, but I think they can suffer, and that's what matters.

Your foundational view of reality is that existence must be based on some solid ground of some kind - something that is the opposite of the dynamism or contingency we see in the world itself. — apokrisis

This isn't this kind of debate apo. I'm saying that the structure of life as we know it has components that nevertheless make the organism suffer. I don't need to postulate that suffering is some grand metaphysical scheme to argue that suffering is a necessary component of organic existence.

That's just rubbish. I've already said that panglossian optimism is just as fake as your universalised pessimism.

Equanimity is a natural goal because the balancing of dynamics is the only real way for existence to achieve stability and solidity of any kind.

So your response here - to protest against being expected to contribute to your own balancing by claiming cosmic helplessness - is childish. Except even children don't believe they are actually helpless. — apokrisis

Except it's not childish, since the balancing act requires the human organism to artificial limit the contents of their consciousness to avoid panic. It's certainly "possible" to achieve a certain stability (although death is the ultimate achievement of stability), it's just that this is quite difficult to do and doesn't come naturally.

Nice ad hominem, I continue to wonder why those opposed to pessimism get all bent out of shape if pessimism really is as silly as they claim.

As usual, one doesn't claim to "know things" in some sceptic-proof absolute way. One simply has made the pragmatic effort to minimise one's uncertainty about a claim. So yes, comparative psychology, and even the neuropsychology of pain responses, is something that has been closely studied. — apokrisis

And given these studies we can come to realize that animals are much closer to us behaviorally than we might have expected.

This entire discussion reminds of the hydrostatic equilibrium of a star - expanding and contracting over and over again until running out of fuel or exploding in a supernova.